Care to share?

My husband is not on Facebook. We were talking about this earlier today, and he wondered what that said about him. As GenXers, I think that our participation in social media isn’t mandatory, and we have that perspective of being too young for it to be irrelevant and too old to accept it without question. (Whoever just heard that line from “Slave to Love” in their head has a mind that works like mine.)

For all its faults, I like Facebook, which is my primary social media outlet. It can serve in so many different ways. It can be like a town square, a place to share information about what’s going on in your community. It closes the distance between friends and family. It re-establishes lost friendships and gives people an easy way to keep up with each other. It enables people to connect regardless of geography, time constraints, life circumstances and the pesky inconvenience of having never actually met.

We all know, though, that it can make us feel bad about ourselves and our choices. Who hasn’t felt that twinge of envy or insult scrolling through their feed? I am fortunate to have a collection of Facebook friends whose social media behavior is outstanding, but when my life isn’t measuring up to my own expectations, a forced absence from Facebook occasionally has been an effective remedy.

My husband, remember — not a Facebook user, brought up an interesting point, which I call “sharestentialism.” It’s so easy to curate a life through a Facebook feed. Will some succumb to the temptation to do so? I can see that this is a slippery slope. You don’t necessarily need to be feeling underwhelmed by your own life to add a little zest here and there. Some people take it even further, leaving a distorted trail of their lives through manipulation of their timeline.

(By the way, due to the fact that a google search produced no results on “sharestentialism”, I am going to take credit for this phrase until proven otherwise. Frankly, I am quite surprised at this. This one was a lay-up. We’ll see how optimized this blog is after I post and search this term again.)

I had my own sharestentialist crisis the other day. My daughter and I visited a local nail salon for her first pedicure. She chose two day-glo colors that were painted in an alternating pattern on her toes and took full advantage of the massage chair. Super Nails is a favorite spot among many of the ladies in my neighborhood, and when I took a photo of my daughter’s feet, my first thought was how cool this would be to post on Facebook.

And it was there that I paused. This was a moment between my daughter and me. This outing was actually quite special. Would either of us gain much by posting this on Facebook? Sure, it wouldn’t hurt, and it was fun “news” with a nice visual. But when I start thinking about my life the way I do about my clients’ marketing, I need to check myself. The essence of this event was what was happening at that moment — a mom introducing her daughter to one of life’s simple pleasures.

I think we already do this to a certain extent with photos. Several years back I was taking pictures of one of my children’s preschool performances. These things provide so many opportunities for adorable shots. But I was spending so much time dealing with the logistics of getting a good photo that I didn’t give the performance my full attention. When did capturing the moment become more important than enjoying the moment?

Now I wonder how often our balance is tipped toward sharing the moment versus living it.