For those of us in our twenties, we've had the pleasure of being some of the first people to grow up using social media. Ever since we were thirteen (or younger if you were one of those bad a**es who lied about your age so you could get a Myspace early) most of us have had a public diary, updating the world about our life and whereabouts since we were in middle school.
Now let's think about this for a second...when was the most awkward phase of your life? Probably right around the age of thirteen. And yet this is when most of us got social media. And once Facebook invented that fancy little timeline feature, it became very easy for us to look back on what we said or did five years ago. Which, if you're anything like me, was horrifying. My posts were filled with to-be-honests, woe-is-me quotes, weird punctuations, and pathetic attempts at trying to be funny. Don't even get me started with my pictures which made sure to document the point in my life when I had glasses, braces, and a back brace all at the same time.
While it's great to be able to look back and see what you were doing a few years ago, it's also rather unfortunate when you realize that it wasn't exactly how you remember it. I said things that I would never say now and yet I can't deny that any of it happened because it's all there in writing. Fortunately, along with the timeline feature also came the delete button so while looking through my posts to write this article I was able to make myself look a little less crazy by deleting the worst of the statuses I wrote in 2010.
Besides coming to the realization that I was nowhere near as cool as I thought I was, I also realized that if I decide to keep my Facebook (or Instagram, Twitter, etc.) for the next few years, what will I be embarrassed about that I posted this year? Or next year?
This made me think about what the point of having social media is. While yes, it is used to talk to people and share information, I think it's also used to help us remember. We can look back and see who we were close friends with a couple of years ago, we are reminded of people's birthdays and we can relive some of our biggest life events.
I actually think that sometimes we get so wrapped up in trying to remember everything that we forget that we're not supposed to remember everything. If we were, that's how how brain would function. While I definitely don't think that the solution to all of this is to delete your social media accounts or never post anything that you could possibly regret some time in the future, I do think that it's important to remember that we shouldn't waste time trying to document everything. That, instead, we should make sure to enjoy the present as it is happening.
