It’s 11:43 and I have like 17 minutes to write this, but it’s World Mental Health day, I had an amazing walk today with a bunch of bomb-ass lovely people (including one member of royalty pls don’t arrest me for lese majeste LOL) but I digress.
If there’s one single thought I want to communicate and one thing I want you to remember before I end the night, it’s this:
Social media is not real.
Look, maybe you’re looking at this from Instagram, a Facebook story, or something else. Chances are, it’s like the stories you’ve seen cascading one after another onto your feed every time you tap a little to the left or a little to the right, but if there’s one thing I hope, it’s this:
I hope you’re not imagining that you think the world is transparent just because you have social media and you can see how people curate their lives, the moments, the thoughts that they put out.
Sure, certain things happen, and the fact that certain pictures exist is proof – This person took a picture with that person. These two people appeared in an Instagram story. A photo opportunity happened here… Or something like that.
But the moment it gets into interpretation, that’s where people go haywire – Were these people in love? Were they not in love? Have they been friends for a long time, or a short time? Perhaps they are colleagues.
The possibilities are endless and really, you just don’t know, even on this small scale…
So why should you be able to tell about what “society” is like from looking at large scale behaviors?
