The Cocktail Party Contrarian: To Experience More, Share Less

If a girl goes on vacation and doesn’t post about it on social media, did it ever really happen? I recently caught up with a friend over lunch who asked me about my winter break. “Were you home?” she asked. “No,” I replied. “We went to Mexico.” She looked surprised because she hadn’t seen pictures on my Instagram feed. Considering how rarely I post about where I am or who I’m with, I wonder if I appear desperately boring to all those who scroll through my “story.” With no daily update about my comings and goings, I realize that some may actually think I neither come nor go. In order for certain things to seem real, some people need them to be virtual.Yet we all know that what we put online is hardly what is real. The real moments on vacation and in life — both good and bad — happen when you are so fully present in them that you don’t stop to pose and take photos. The more people post photos of themselves laughing uncontrollably on a beach with a glass of wine in hand, the more manufactured it all seems. The posing is the funniest part. Everyone seems to have gone to the same modeling school where they teach the perfect head tilt and optimal camera angle. Twelve-year-olds are master-posers at this point. Then there are the filters: Not only do people look like they are always doing something fabulous, they look supernaturally fabulous doing it.To soften the reality, we have cleverly dubbed all this social media posting “sharing,” but we all understand that “sharing” your vacation, your expensive meal, or your size zero-body online is really just showing off with a halo on its head. Social media isn’t for sharing your life, it is for sharing a curated version of it you want others to see.We used to have some social guardrails against this. Fifteen years ago, no one brought her 8-year-old’s chess trophy to dinner and stuck it on the table next to the breadbasket. There was a word for that kind of behavior: gauche. Today, there is no compunction about posting that trophy on Facebook, along with attention-garnering hashtags such as #proudmama. People have always loved to boast, but having to face people as you did it acted as a restraining mechanism. Social media solved that particular obstacle, and “sharing” has become something of a pandemic of self-promotion. I think we all need to learn to share less.First of all, if the goal of this “sharing” is to convince our audiences that life is just that grand, it might be time to consider that it may not be producing the desired effect. Everyone understands what a snapshot of a moment in time is, and what it isn’t. It is also worth noting that many of our 2,000 followers aren’t really that happy to see us “living our best life.” If bad juju is a thing that concerns you, it is probably not a great idea to share cloud shots from the window of your private flight to Aspen, even if you are just sharing the beauty of nature. All those people who are staycationing this year likely aren’t cheering you on, or admiring the view. “Share less” makes strategic sense as well. If you want to make your ex-boyfriend jealous of your happy existence without him, don’t show him what you are doing. Let him imagine you doing something way better than anything you can possibly post. Not having any information about you leaves him wondering, which is much more difficult to take. Sharing less might even shave a bit off the profit margins of the big tech companies that buy and sell our attention and leverage our need to seek others’ approval. That might be incentive enough to cut back. Perhaps even greater motivation to share less is found in the realization that behind all those “likes” are lots of eye-rolls. We may be promoting ourselves, but not in the way we had hoped. Share your business ventures, your fun dog videos, and your birth announcements, but when it comes to your perfect yoga pose on the balcony of your perfect oceanfront villa, just share less.

The Cocktail Party Contrarian: To Experience More, Share Less

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