Currently, I have 143 Facebook friends. I’m fairly confident that most of them don’t “like” me – at least the Facebook me. I haven’t updated my Facebook profile picture in more than a year and my last post was in October, when I put up a few photos from my daughter’s first homecoming dance. I did get about 50 “likes” for that, but only because I tagged people in the pictures who are way more popular than me on Facebook.
I irregularly and infrequently like other people’s posts – if I see them. And don’t even get me started on the new emojis. I need an emoji cheatsheet before I can appropriately attach one of these to a post.
I do have a few “surrogate” Facebookers who kindly tag me in posts if they grab a photo with my kids. Otherwise, my feed is pretty lame – no vacation photos, no braces-off photos, nothing.
Silly enough, I got on Facebook initially because they were offering an IQ test and I wanted to take it. Quickly realizing I didn’t actually want to take an IQ test, I still didn’t delete my account because I had quickly been “friended” by a few real friends from my past, people who were meaningful in my life through their friendship and our mutually shared experiences.
Great, I thought, this is going to be fun. But along the way of spreading useful information, congratulating hard-earned success and encouraging those who are struggling, which is all well and good, sometimes Facebook accounts can seem a little unreal and inauthentic.
A new ally of mine, 16-year-old Australian model Essena O’Neill, created a social media firestorm when she quit Instagram, stating that social media is not “real life.”
She left behind hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, not to mention all of the future earnings from promoting products on her social media accounts.
In her effort to portray “real life,” O’Neill either deleted carefully constructed photos or added the unflattering “back story” on what it took to get the “perfect photo.”
While O’Neill and I can’t be “Facebook friends” since she is off social media, we are sisters-in-arms at taking a hard look at what is real and unreal.
Sometimes on social media, it seems we are less likely to project our real selves. It is a unique gift to be able to lay out your whole life on social media – the good, bad and sometimes ugly – without throwing everyone you deal with on a day-to-day basis under a bus. Just like you would do were you to tell it like it is in real life.
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Marc Browning, clinical director of Linden Oaks Medical Group Counseling Services, told me I wasn’t wrong in thinking most people present a skewed view of their lives online. Most people don’t tend to post the details of their worst days on social media, he said. More likely, their posts tend to be about vacations, gifts from their spouses and how well the kids are doing in school.
“It purports an image that everything is fabulous, and it’s not,” Browning said. “But it is difficult to put out on social media your challenges when everyone else is sending out this image that everything is fantastic. It is human nature to want to be favorably looked upon.”
Tom Dewese, a therapist with TriCity Family Services, says being authentic is somewhat of an issue for all of us.
“Until we get to know someone, we tend to wear a facade,” he said.
In today’s world, there is no greater barrier to authenticity than a screen we can hide behind courtesy of our phone or computer. It gives us the ability to brag ridiculously or be horribly rude, both of which are far less likely to occur in real life – or at least not to such an extent. No one carries around their kids’ school awards in their purse to show people they run into in the grocery store – at least I hope not. And few people have enough guts to say to someone’s face the snarky, obnoxious comments they so easily leave on social media – or at least I hope not!
The bottom line is real life is not meant to be lived online. Being frank, genuine, earnest and authentic are things people crave and need, and which we can only get from interacting one-on-one, face-to-face with other people, Browning said.
“We then have access to our whole person and (can) be a whole and complete person – something we are constructed to be,” he said.
Now I’m going to post this column on Facebook and Twitter, and ask my girls to post it on their Instagram and Snap Chat accounts, too. Happy face, angry face, emoji, emoji, emoji.
Cathy Janek is a freelance writer who lives in Naperville.
Twitter @CathyJanek