Saturday 24 December 2011

She's perfect!


I've just started using Facebook's Timeline and it has been interesting looking at posts I've made from way back in 2007.

Most of them are pretty mundane "I'm going to the gym", "I'm hungry" kind of stuff. But there were some not too pleasant whinging about people or life as well.

One of the thing that Timeline does when you start using it is give you a seven-day grace to go through your old posts and decide what you want to show and what you want to delete. So I ended up deleting all the negative not-so-nice posts.

But it got me thinking about our online persona. If you're anything like me, things that are online never accidentally land there. There is a specific reason why they're there. And the sad, nasty or truly private stuff will never see the light of day.

It's the mundane, the amusing or the "perfect" that we tend to see. How we treat our Facebook pages/blogs are exactly like how photos of models get airbrushed before they get published in magazines. It's not . . . real.

And yet, it has a tendency for us to feel inadequate or imperfect when we look at other people's lives, when we stalk their Facebook pages, to see them so happy, so content, having so much fun. But it's not real and all it does is give us this feeling of inaptness and dissatisfaction.

I'm not saying social media's bad. I still like stalking my Facebook friends (tee hee!). I'm just trying to remind myself that I really have no need to compare it to others or desire what I feel I don't have.

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