Is Nothing Sacred Anymore?
We are tied to our smart devices and electronic cubes as if they will go out of style anytime soon. Constantly sharing pictures, videos, and announcements. We rarely keep anything to ourselves or within our own circles. They are posted for our 100, 250, 550, 1000 + followers to see. Before you can break the news to your friends that you visited a new restaurant or hung out with a coworker on Saturday night, they’ve already seen it on your feed.
So I ask the question, what is sacred anymore? Nothing feels completely ours. Experiences we can hold just to ourselves with the people whom we are experiencing it with, or even just solo. The uniqueness felt between two people sharing an experience is now not solely theirs, but rather, their followers as well. A bit unique when it comes to this idea and maybe even unnecessary and far fetched but I’m asking to see if there are any other unicorns out there. The idea that we overshare our lives and leave little to the imagination by constantly posting pictures and lending access to our inner relationships.
We all have our perspectives and differences. Mine is this: I don’t feel comfortable sharing every little thing about my life, specifically not on social media. I think nowadays, we are giving one another more permission to stay away from social media. To not be in the know, or even in the cool of having multiple mediums for sharing your life.
When we go out for coffee with a friend, a date with someone new, hang out with family spontaneously for Saturday night dinner — why are we so pressed to share instantly? Are we that eager to display our existence? Hanging onto comments and likes more than we hang onto the conversation being had at the dinner table? And when we invite other friends through a screen and a medium, and most likely some strangers too, does it take away from the sanctity of what that experience was? Before it was shared on a platform and simply known only by the people physically there to experience it.
There’s this running joke within social circles amongst women. Before meeting a potential new partner, more times than not, you’ll look up their Facebook or Instagram account and fall down the rabbit hole of ending up on their ex-partners best friend’s page. Then when you meet them in person, you ask questions to answers you’ve already found out prior. Searching someone up for safety purposes is something I applaud and encourage. Anything beyond that threshold though, takes away the opportunity for someone to tell you about themselves first hand and share information. But then again, is this not the price we pay for having social media to begin with? The dark side of the coin.
Maybe it’s something to think about next time we go running to gain followers, or follow people we don’t know intimately only to then feel like we are real life “friends”. Or the next time we want to search for answers on our own, rather than just ask someone directly.
And certainly, we can do better and think of these things next time we are sharing an experience with a loved one, and even dare click the icon to open our accounts.
