I thought this morning might be a good moment to confess, in the most virtuous way possible, that I’m not living up to my own expectations and hopes on social media. Consider this, if you will, a head-cold-addled self-justifying lament–I am not as I wish I could be, but also, there’s probably no way I can actually be better at this.
First of all, I should acknowledge that I am the kind of person, like vast swaths of the rest of humanity, who prefers the strictures of the law to the fancies of freedom. As soon as I discover something that I like or that I think is good, I immediately build regulations around it. So, for instance, I like a clean house. And honestly, I basically like housekeeping. Therefore, instead of just cleaning my house and enjoying it, I elevate the cleanness of the house to be an outward and visible measure of my competence as a person, the sign of my holiness before God. I Must keep it clean, all the time. That’s the law. But of course, I can’t keep the law, because I have some children. So I am always guilty. Always.
I do this with lists, and letter writing, and book reading, and painting my toe nails, and gardening, and, of course, social media. Instagram is fun! So fun that I am constantly trying to regiment my picture sharing. ‘I should post one picture a day,’ I think. But that’s ridiculous and I can’t possibly, so at the end of every day I feel vaguely guilty that I didn’t take a picture. Because, you know, it says it right there in Exodus, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me, and thou shalt share no less than one picture a day on Instagram you pathetic failure of a human being. More also, you shall like everyone else’s pictures, because otherwise they will not know that you like them, which you do.’
I’m carrying around a lot of, if not full blown guilt, at least irritation that I can’t keep up, that I’m not reading enough and retweeting and sharing enough of the people that I know I would like to read because whenever I do read them, I am always happy.
My biggest source of guilt, though, is that I would like to be free and unburdened enough to actually push ‘share’ on Facebook more than three times a month. I don’t know what my hangup is. Facebook is for sharing (hahahahahahahahaha–it’s actually for other people to make money off my original content, but whatevs), or, at least it’s for the dissemination of interesting ideas before they’re imagined to be too dangerous for right thinking people to come into contact with. I should share things on Facebook. But somehow, I am too overburdened to actually touch the share icon with my keyboard calloused finger. I pause, finger in the air, and consider the cost to my own self. Will I be able to chat about this with people I like as the day goes on? Will I worry about it? What if I want to put my phone down and just walk away? In the moment of hesitation, I usually always find I have moved on to some other reality.
Then I go over to Twitter and the pace is so fast. By the time I’ve read one paragraph of something interesting my feed is full again and I am back to decision overload–should I click and read that? Or that? Or this? Can I say something interesting about this? No, I don’t think I can. I can’t think of anything clever enough to say. And so the long day wears on.
Add to this that I am being constantly encouraged to make a Separate Facebook Page for this blog and…well…I am fathoms deep in debt with the world, myself, and probably even God. At least once a week I imagine declaring social media bankruptcy. Indeed, I watch that clip at least every other week. And I wonder to myself what I was like as a person before Facebook. Was I a known being? Did God know me? Did I know myself? I can’t remember.
Nevertheless, I am not actually giving up. And I’m hoping to get to a point where I am robust enough in myself that I don’t feel stressed and guilty, and therefore both addicted and avoidant, about engaging online. What I really really want, what I really really really want (cough) is a personal assistant who curates the internet for me, who tweets and Facebooks on my behalf. ‘I tweeted this for you,’ this young competent person might say, and then I would have complete deniability when I got in trouble. ‘It wasn’t me,’ I would tap out later, ‘It was my assistant.’ I don’t need someone to come in and clean my house, I need someone to manage the staggering weight of information and conversations that I wish I could integrate into my person. But also, maybe that person could just run the vacuum every now and then.
Ah well, woe is me. Is there anything else in the Bible besides the law? I think I heard something from that person, what’s his name? It was longer than 140 characters, something about what to do if you’re weary and heavy laden and needing rest. Can’t remember it, maybe Google knows.
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