A Beer Faced Culture

What follows is a response to this Facebook status: 

"What do you post to Facebook? Pictures of yourself yelling at your kids, or having a hard time at work? No, you post smiling photos of a hiking trip with friends. You build a fake life — or at least an incomplete one — and share it. Furthermore, you consume almost exclusively the fake lives of your social media “friends.” Unless you are extraordinarily self-aware, how could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?"

Life comes with its ups and downs... Everyone's life, without exception.

The consideration of the appearance that it might be otherwise is wishful thinking at best and self defeating at worst.

Though we may find in retrospect we have been mistaken in identifying which parts are which at any given time, life can be and is a beautiful thing. Even though what we endure may be very difficult and at times insurmountable, what is beautiful is truly worth enduring those difficulties. That said we don't generally come to the realization of life's beauty by focusing on the parts of it which seem to be far from beautiful. 

If people are to continue on living through one to find the other they need a couple of things. First they need a hope or faith in something greater than themselves.
They need the will to live.

Second they need to feel that they're loved and accepted simply as they are in order to reach the potential of what they might become.
They need the strength to live.

Talk to anyone who claims to believe in nothing long enough and you'll come to find eventually that they actually do believe in something whatever that something might be called.

Considering all of that, I think most people would like to think of their lives as primarily good things and emphasize or remind themselves of that by posting those good things on Facebook. Saving the bad bits for people who know them on a more intimate level and who can consequently help them without the need for lengthy explanations of histories and situations they'd rather not publicly go into.

Without a doubt however, it is generally known that public commentary also invites public criticism. In considering our criticisms, that we might immediately extend, we should also consider a few other things as well. 

First, what people do isn't always as important as why they do it. While the omission of certain realities might be considered deceitful in certain situations, in others (like Facebook) my guess is that it's probably more likely a means of self preservation.

Our culture is largely fear based. Any animal living that circumstance, even those with the best natures, will become defensive if not aggressive at the slightest sign of weakness, and so here we are too as people interacting one with another.

While presenting anything that invites public criticism and potentially unmerited and unfounded judgment, takes a certain level of honesty and strength, exposing one's weaknesses by sharing our problems involves a far greater depth of both because it makes one an easy target for attack at a vulnerable time.

In my experience we can't accurately assume to know quite what is in our own hearts, much less that which may be in another's simply by appearances. There is far more to most people than the glimpses they may show to even those that may be close to them. 

It really didn't take much living for me to figure out that what people really meant when they referred to their desire for me to be normal was actually their desire for me or anyone to suppress or hide their problems... their very normal problems. So to me the more normal anyone might seem, the more suspect I am about the depth of their potential depravity and just when and how it may manifest.

So I also learned early on in my years that basing the quality of one's own life by merit of contrasting it to another's... well doing that pretty much takes us right back to the beginning of this post.