The Upside to Social Media?

I’m not sure any other generation had the privilege to see what exactly happened to the people they went to school with after they graduated. With social media, it’s a lot easier to keep up with other peoples’ lives if they choose to share them. 

Some people spiral out of control, hopefully for a short period of time, but who knows? Others seem to have it all together, with secure jobs, grad school opportunities, or steady relationships.

It’s hard to know how accurately people portray their lives on social media, though. We probably all lie to some degree. Or maybe we hide the less flattering details. 

I’m interested to see how these trajectories change in the future. Maybe someone who has fallen into drug addiction for the beginning of their 20s will suddenly turn their life around, ending up in a better position than someone who went to an ivy league school for college? Maybe someone who got married at 22 will get divorced next year and live the rest of their life with a bunch of cats in a studio apartment in downtown Chicago. 

The paths we’re taking right now may not lead us to the futures we’re projecting. Good or bad fortune can change quickly and maybe without us even knowing that it’s happening. 

I hold onto hope that the people who are struggling right now will eventually find their way. Nobody deserves to embark on a dead end path.

As much as social media is the bane of our existence and a complete waste of time, it does allow us to follow the stories of others who are not main characters in our own lives. 

I wonder how my own story fits into this. 

There’s only so much we can truly know. These superficial details paint a picture mimicking reality, but how much do the paintings resemble real life? They could be abstract, forcing us to derive our own meaning, perhaps unfairly assigning value judgements onto how others choose to live their lives. 

But if our lives are abstract, then we each have the ability to decide our own meaning, regardless of whether or not true meaning lies beneath the surface. 

Maybe splattered paint on a canvas symbolizes nothing at all. We can look deeper to find the hidden patterns, but they won’t become clear until the painting is finished. So does it really matter?