Toxic social media, or: yoga on horseback

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CandleLight

Well-Known Member
#1
Some of you know I am having a really hard time feeling like Facebook friends don't care about me at all, and I am mourning the loss of some formerly important friendships I once had. I spent a little time here in San Francisco yesterday with two friends back to visit California, after they moved to North Carolina about 3 years ago.

I still have a lot to say about this upsetting experience, which I will write about later in my Diary by CandLight. But I need to start this thread to laugh a little. Because I really need to laugh about this.

When my friends/ former friends picked me up in the car, within a few moments we were driving down a steep San Francisco hill and my friend, naturally, took out her phone to get a pic of the road. We didn't spend a lot of time together, which was both a relief and very hard and sad. But in that time, she managed to get pics of almost everywhere we went, from the mechanical museum (mini arcade) to a small beach cove area. We didn't spend a lot of time talking. It was very awkward. But she sure took pictures! Various selfies and snapshots of "cool stuff".

It's like, why are photos so important? What about the actual experiences you have in life? There is a joke online when someone describes something incredible, and people respond with "pic or it didn't happen!" I think some people take that to heart. It's like they don't feel they exist fully if they aren't documenting every moment.

Which leads me to my other former/ lost friend, a person I first brought out to the barn to help me with my horse. We used to hang out together, I've gone to her place a few times and we usually got Starbucks before the barn. It was nice. Then we drifted apart pretty fast, and while I understand what I think the reason was, it still hurt a lot. It still hurts even now.

So this person got her own horse, and she did a very good job training it. It was truly impressive, and it makes sense she wanted to show off a little online. This person has not just Facebook going, but Instagram, Snapchat and I imagine a few other sites she regularly uses. She gets a lot of likes for her many pictures, always beautiful and perfectly filtered. But now I can kind of laugh about how hard she must be trying. I'm not laughing *at* her, just at the absurdity of taking so many pics of things that you are more concerned with setting up a great shot than actually just LIVING LIFE.

I think a lot of people kind of chuckle when they see concert footage and there are a million people watching the concert they were lucky to get seats at, entirely through the screens of their cell phones. A tiny screen is absolutely not the same as sitting back and enjoying a great concert. Who cares if you want everyone to see the fun time you had? Why don't you ACTUALLY try to have a good time and make memories. Not pictures to prove that you were there.

Anyway, my former/ lost friend began practicing yoga regularly, and she got quite good at it. And, as I said, she's great with horses. So now she posts a ton of photos of her doing yoga on her horse. Really cool stuff like scorpions, various poses, the horse calm underneath her and the light bouncing off the field below so beautifully. The photos are nice, yes.

But you have to wonder: how much are you documenting your experiences, instead of living them, if you make a point to show everyone that you can do yoga on a horse?
 

ThePhantomLady

Safety and Support
SF Supporter
#2
Often the people who appear to be the happiest and have the coolest lives on facebook often don't. People have a lot to prove, and as you said, they live their life through that screen. Don't feel bad because people seem to have it all together... I learned to see through it.

When I was in 'secretary school' my co-students were all mothers with children and husbands and we were all 'friends' on facebook because it made it easier to communicate about school...
I often had to laugh at how one woman posted something to brag about her kids... 30 minutes after another one would make posts of her kids doing something even cooler... it was such a war of 'my kids are better than yours and I'm the perfect mother!" It was way too obvious. No one lives such perfect lives.
 
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