Oscar Wilde once said that a true friend is someone who stabs you in the front. I’d like to update that. These days, a true friend is one who doesn’t post a picture of your double chin on Facebook. She always “likes” your status updates, even when they’re annoying. She re-tweets your tweets to her thousands of Twitter followers, so your Klout score doesn’t fall.
We’d all love a pal like that, wouldn’t we? But who has time to think of others when we’ve got our own online personas to curate?
Happy and successful people have always made the miserable feel more miserable. But the upbeat used to have fewer platforms. They struck mainly in person, and could only deflate one victim at a time.
You were in the most danger at weddings or reunions, where the happy would make you feel lousy about your kitchen or children or lackluster volunteer activities. But before social media — at least you had time to prepare. You could diet. Inflate your own resume. Not go.
Sure, we could step away from our screens. But we just can’t. So we carry our phones with us and check in constantly, lest we miss the news of someone’s promotion or Nantucket vacation. And every update makes us feel worse. It’s like a morphine drip, only in reverse. Gimme another hit.
So what can we do? I propose a Fairness in Personal Branding Act: For example: Every time you post a photo of your family enjoying themselves on a posh island, you must include a disclaimer — “paying for the hotel has caused marital discord,” perhaps, “or this is the only time little Jaydon wasn’t pouting.”
But until we all agree to disarm, I’m going to go on the offensive. Tomorrow I’m going to bake organic cookies with my Harvard-bound children, which we’re going to eat on our sun-dappled porch after we’ve saved a wounded bird, cured a disease and donated money to people in a struggling nation.
All while tweeting and uploading photos, of course. Friends — consider yourselves warned.
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