We recently went on a magical vacation with our family to Disney World. After the vacation we were talking to some of our friends about the experience and they asked, “How did you do it?”
I was puzzled until they continued, “Your pictures looked so great… Did your kids ever melt down?”
This is what happens on social media. There are the vacation pictures we share and then there are the experiences that were not “Instagram-worthy.” I only shared the pictures of my family that were perfectly captured and had all the right filters. But I left the meltdown pictures on my camera roll. Because no one wants to see my son melting down when he didn’t get to ride the Monorail one last time.
This is the unwritten law of social media: show the best version of yourself and hide the messy reality of your life.
This pressure is bound to destroy.
We face a pressure to live up to the Facebook profile we envision for ourselves, and a pressure to create the right brand for our Twitter followers. We fall under the weight of a pressure that compares our real, broken lives to somebody else’s tidy, fabricated virtual life.