The Wrong Impression

If you judge the value of a person's life based on the contents of their trash can you'd be forgiven for thinking their life is nothing but waste. Most people know not to do this because there's a general consensus and convention agreed upon that a trash can is for, trash. When it comes to things that have many different use-cases however, your own use-case informs your judgement of others whether they use it the same way or not.

If you judge others lives by what they post on social media, you'll form an impression of their life that most of the time isn't accurate. Part of the reason for the inaccuracy is because of that lack of convention, there is no collective agreement as yet reached by humanity as to what social media should actually be used for, and ironically despite it's name it often ends up being antisocial and divisive more often than it unites.

Personally I tend to use most platforms online for one of two things, either creative output or arguably destructive output. The first is self-explanatory and easy to understand, I am a creative person, I like to write and I publish what I write online through this blog, others, and through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. Destructive output on the other hand tends to be reserved for social media, and I would generally define it as anything I need to vent, everyday frustrations if you will.

If you judged my life based on that output, you'd probably develop an image of me that's far removed from reality. My life has ups and downs as anyone else does, and I have good days and bad days, it just so happens that I tend not to feel the need to post every little detail of my life, so all the little moments of happiness go undocumented in those feeds but the moments of immense frustration feature prominently.

I'm not alone in this behaviour, from what I observe most peoples' use-case of social media falls into one of two camps, either an idealised and subsequently unrealistic depiction of their lives, or a frustrated and sanguinary flow of frustration and despair. The moments in the middle don't take much prominence because most people think their lives in those moments are interesting - although I wrote a post a while ago titled 'A Boring Life' about how this self-critical view can be wildly inaccurate.

This entire post was inspired by the recent launch of video capability on Bluesky and the trend of voice reveal videos that people posted which popped a bubble of preconceptions I had built up around many of the people I follow. Reflecting on the gap between the images I held in my mind and the reality made me step back and consider what other people might think about me based on what I post - something which I don't often do, if you've been following this blog for a while you'll know my general ethos with anything online is that I treat posting like self-therapy and releasing things into a void, I post for myself first and foremost and if someone reads it and connect with it that's great but I'd still do it even if it got zero views.

If you do happen to have a Bluesky account and want to follow me you can here - fair warning, my content on there is occasionally NSFW and intended for anyone 18+ only. As for the trend of voice reveal videos, I won't be making one of those because I generally hate cameras and have no desire to record myself. There is a recording I made a while ago discussing Duolingo's obsession with CEFR Certification if you're really that curious to know what I sound like you can listen to it here.