Facebook and You

Too much fun

Interesting discussion on Facebook this morning.

Ever wonder why everyone else is having a kick-ass life except you? They aren’t. They just want you to think that. People have become their own online PR brand managers and are quite successful at selling you a load of half-truths and downright cow shit. Online, everyone is witty, well-photographed, and successful. They are also gentle liars, just like offline. We may enjoy being a part of the online reality show at first, but soon we begin to feel something replacing the euphoria. The pangs of jealousy and annoyance. Is their life really so kick-ass that I can’t compete? They never seem to mention Debt, Premature Ejaculation, or their Slow, Ugly Kid Who Embarrasses Them. They want you to believe the image. And here’s the weird thing. You do. Maybe not intellectually, but emotionally.

The allure of glamorizing one’s life through the carefully groomed Facebook persona is catnip to our humdrum lives. We are always padding our resume. Always dressing up our CV. Why? Because somewhere along the line we absorbed the message that having a decent, middle of the road life, isn’t good enough. We need glamour. Thank Madison Avenue. Thank your hard-driving parents. Thank the Devil.

Another aspect of Facebook is the frequent and dangerous reconnection with old flames. As I said this morning. This is powerful magic. To a girl whose high school boyfriend dumped her, he is unfinished business that’s now only a click away. A few ambiguous semi-flirty messages can test his temperature and give you butterflies that you thought were long dead. Next thing you know, you’re going out for lunch, innocently. But the old flame represents something else. It is a connection to your younger, glorified self. With your old flame, you are still smooth-skinned, hopeful, and energetic. You are not what you have become. This is the true dangerous magic. Your old flame represents the “What You Could Be Again: Alive.”

Facebook is merely a tool. I don’t hate it. At all. I don’t really love it either. And I certainly don’t think anyone is superior for eschewing it. By the way, Twitter is another tool for Living Out Loud that can be just as annoying. But you get the point.

I don’t want to repeat all of my points on the matter, but I do want to share one email from P1 Gen X Brett. I thought it was pretty insightful and well-put.

Gordo,

You mentioned the ‘unfinished business’ appeal of facebook, as well as the ’17 again’ feeling that it cultivates, I think both of those are true, but I also think there is a deeper feeling that is more insidious… that being, that hooking back up with an old flame somehow isn’t as bad a form of cheating as a random hookup or office romance is. When speaking with the old love, one’s mind is indeed transported back in time, but also apparently one’s sense of right and wrong. I think in some ways the old flame is seen as a justified vice for the simple fact that they were there first.

The mundane day to day reality of a marriage can never live up to the imagined happy life that one might experience with another person, and the matter is further complicated if the reality of our 30s or 40s must compete against the memory of what our carefree teenage or college years were like. Normal life contains many regrets, and our imagination’s ability to consider the “what might have been” factor was a complication prior to facebook… now we actually can see into this other person’s life, and consider how well they’ve held up. If we are so bold we can even talk to them, and if we’re “lucky” they too will have regrets.

As you all said, Facebook is like a perpetual high school reunion… but a reunion is a moment in time, whereas facebook provides us with perpetual access to this other time in life. Recent generations have had to suffer at the hands of our culture’s glorification of youth. So instead of the old people growing wise, we now have the absurdity of old people using contemporary slang, getting tattoos, and embracing the pop music of the moment, all in an endless effort to chase after lost youth. The movie ‘Old School’ was funny, but it was a huge hit b/c spoke to the almost universal desire to throw off the conventions of adulthood and return to adolescence, in the end a compromise with adolescence is reached… and that really is what so much of our current culture is about … finding ways to preserve adolescence for as long as possible. Let’s play xbox now.

The song ‘Same Old Lang Syne’ offers an older generation’s contrast to facebook. I remember this song from when I was a kid, but clearly one cannot really understand it until one is at least 30. Dan Folgelberg said that when we see the old love we are supposed to drink a toast to innocence, a toast to now, and a toast to time… so it seems that we should be able to celebrate these things, to celebrate the past. Now, as he says this will transport us and “just for a moment” we’ll be “back at school”, which will cause us to feel “that old familiar pain”. But at the end of the encounter we return to the present as whole adult persons, not as adolescent chimeras.

Gen-X Brett