Put your best foot forward. You only get one chance to make a first impression. Don’t lead with your flaws.
Most of life is boring. Your friends’ time is valuable. Per Vonnegut: Use the time of [a friend] in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
So you put up the most exciting snapshots from your life. You only upload the pics with the best lighting. You skip the boring parts.
You post your best ideas, your spiciest takes, your wittiest bangers. You skip all the dead-end meanderings and clunky drafts.
But a human life isn’t a movie, or a novel. A human life has boring parts, and lines that fall flat, and sometimes really awful lighting that makes you look old and tired. And hell… sometimes I am tired. Sometimes I really can’t keep up with my persona.
(Yes, that’s right, I’m You too sometimes. And vice versa.)
Our online existence is so delicately curated — to make a good impression, to not waste our friend’s time, to be the person we most want to be — that we’re afraid of what will happen when people see who we really are in between the camera flashes. So maybe we don’t go out so much, and maybe we don’t see other people as much, because we can’t stand to be compared to who we aspire to be. As our curated self grows ever brighter, our real self grows ever smaller.
Every now and then, though… the real self peeks out. Pay attention to who is around when it feels safe enough to peek out and say hello. These are the people that will change your life. They changed mine.