What Celebrities Can Teach Us About Social Media Perfection
We all know that people mostly only share the good parts of their lives. Flip through anyone’s old photo albums and you’ll see that this predates social media, but these days people can inflict their happiness on more people with less effort.
This is why your school chums post first day of school photos of their kids, but no pictures of their kids the next morning as they ignore parental pleas to put on their shoes. But it’s easy to forget that. We see pix of families all dressed up and posed in front of the house and assume that there isn’t a big mess in the house, that it didn’t take hours to get to that photo, or that they’re outdoors because there’s no good natural light in the house but will be just as soon as they get around to those renovations they’ve been talking about for a decade.
Our friends post about how proud they are of their kid who’s graduating high school this year. At no point do these parents say that their kids are perfect. But we automatically assume that the parents are proud because their kid gets good grades while keeping their room clean and filling their free time with volunteer work. In reality, those parents are proud of their kid for doing well in school despite their messy room, interpersonal drama, and excessive TikTokking.
We’re comparing ourselves to these nonexistent ideals that no one is actually meeting.
So how do we stop thinking that way?
It may help to look behind the curtain of celebrity culture since they’re much more practiced at crafting a public image than the rest of us.
Have you ever seen a post announcing that a certain movie star is getting divorced and asking for privacy at this difficult time? And then the next week, that same movie star is spotted canoodling with their latest co-star?
Our automatic reaction is that it’s a rebound thing, or they’re moving on way too quickly, or their marriage wasn’t a loving one. It never occurs to us that the movie star and spouse actually broke up a year earlier, have already finalized the divorce, and only made the announcement when one of them was ready to date someone publicly.
But which is more likely? That a celebrity with an agent, a manager, a publicist, and so on trusts the media to give them privacy when they ask for it? Or that the celeb and their team protects their privacy by not telling people stuff until they’re ready to share it (if ever)?
We all take that second approach without even thinking about it. Even those of us who post that we need cheering up so please share pix of your pets tend not to share the details of why we need cheering up.
Your friends and relatives aren’t trying to make you feel inferior because your life aren’t as perfect as theirs. In fact, they probably think your life is perfect based on the limited information they know about you.