Some of you may remember the famed Christmas Letters, usually sent with a Christmas card, which highlighted events from the past year in the life of a family or individual.
I loved Christmas letters because it was the only way I learned about what was going on with people I seldom connected with otherwise. In fact, I still send one out every December but I try to “keep it real.”
However, many detested these epistles, viewing them as “brag sheets” and nothing more. And they had a point. Most people only included the happy stuff: graduations, weddings, vacations, job promotions, notes about kids who were “doing really well.”
Well, of course that’s what they wrote about! The Christmas Letter was never intended to be an expose of the totality of your life – or at least most people didn’t have the courage to use them that way. As a result, they often annoyed people: “”Well, didn’t the Dunbar’s have another super-duper special year.”
However, the Christmas Letter was tame stuff next to the media blitz that is a daily occurrence, attacking our self-esteem with a full-frontal assault.
“Reality” TV, news from every part of the world 24/7, the celebrity culture invading so many parts of our lives. It makes Christmas Letters – or looking out the window to see the neighbor’s new couch being delivered — seem pretty tame.
Sometimes the comparisons make us humble, grateful. Shootings in other parts of town (at least not in my neighborhood —yet), earthquakes in China, the horror that is the Middle East. Thank heaven, we pray, I have the life I have.
But it this was completely true, we’d all be walking around feeling dandy about ourselves, and we all know this is not the case. We feel insecure about some thing or other, inadequate by some standard or other, and self-critical much of the time. At least, I do.
One of the contributors to this avalanche of information that falls on us each day is social media. Actually, I enjoy Facebook some of the time. It pulls me like a magnet to check it a couple of times a day at least. Curiosity is a part of it. Maybe loneliness, I don’t know. However, this statement from a recent New York Times, gave me pause:
“Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, UTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astoundingly- efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy
It makes sense. What do you post to Facebook? Pictures of yourself yelling at your kids, or having a hard time at work? No, you post smiling photos of a hiking trip with friends. You build a fake life–or at least an incomplete one—and share it. Furthermore, you consume almost exclusively the fake lives of your social media ‘friends.” Unless you are extraordinarily self-aware, how could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are and the other part of our time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?”
(“Love People, Not Pleasure,” by Arthur C. Brooks, New York Times, July 20, 2014)
There’s a Commandment against “coveting.” I can see why, because the spiritual damage it inflicts can be considerable. An important balance are these words from a Greek philosopher which have now become encased in pop culture:
“Be kind because everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
Remember that next time you log in. It will help.
See you in church.
Barbara
