Random thoughts on social media

That heart warming feeling when you realize that you’re as much a part of someone’s life that you’ve met travelling as the people who have known that person since they were young teenagers. We may think that they have so many memories with their friends from their home country, as their social media photos show, but we can mean more to them and have a better connection with them even if we’ve only known them for a few months travelling or living somewhere other than our home country. It’s because, we forget that maybe they don’t speak to those people “back home” anymore, maybe those photos and memories from before we met this said person are solely great memories and will always remain that way. We assume, or at least I usually assume, that we can never be as close to someone as all of their friends from the past. We can never go back in time and experience those memories with them, we can merely browse through their photos and take a brief peak at what their life used to be like. We forget also that those friends from their past may be thinking the same thing as I, but the opposite. They may be thinking that all they have with this person are memories, all they have is the past together and now their friend is in a different country meeting new people and they’re not there with them to experience all of the wonderful different cultures. All they can do, unless they decide to take a leap into the unknown and explore the world with their old friend, is to look at the photos posted on their friend’s social media page and wish that they could be there with them whilst also wondering if these new people in their friend’s life mean more and have a better friendship than the old friends from their home country.

I don’t know how, when or why friendships started becoming more determined by how much history people share with each other on social media, but I personally do not like the way it all seems to be going with technology and the internet. Don’t get me wrong, social media is a great way to keep in contact with friends and family who are no longer in our everyday lives, and I myself enjoy taking pictures with my loved ones around me and sharing them with friends and family; it brings me joy to look back on them and remember lovely and wonderful moments in my life, even if they’re major happenings or mere drunken photos from one Friday night amongst many. My only desire right now is to confess that I am guilty of assuming two people are better friends if they share more photos together on their social media accounts. I do realize that this thought is absurd, but sometimes it’s difficult to see things from the right perspective, or better yet, from a different perspective. Even if we know that what we are thinking is untrue and illogical, it still doesn’t make it any easier to eliminate those thoughts. Due to the observation that my friend has more photos on their social media account with another friend and not with me, I’d start to assume that they are better friends with this other person than with me because they share more photos, they share more memories, they’ve spent and they spend more time together, therefore, they mean more to my friend that I do. This particular thought is not a good one because we start to regret past decisions, we start to question “Why did I decide to stay at home on this day? Why didn’t I go to this event? What if I had gone, would I be in this photo too? Maybe. Maybe if I’d have gone then I’d be in this amazing photo...” And then we begin to regret, we begin to hate our past choices because we know that we could have made a better one, one which we now know would have resulted in this photo, in this memory shared amongst friends to see, one where everyone would know that I am friends with this person because we’re in a photo together and we shared this moment together, and this one, and that one, and people will think that we’re good friends because we have a couple of shared memories. That type of thinking is probably how this tool of friendship measurement came about. I understand better now that I’m older and now that I’ve matured a bit more that there’s no need for those glimpses of evidence to prove that the friendship exists, to prove that it’s not just in our minds and we’ve made the whole thing up.

To sum it all up, a friend of mine can have a few photos on their social media account that they share with a certain person, but that does not result in the obvious conclusion that they have and have had a better relationship than my friend and I where we share not even one photo together on social media.

This heart warming feeling brings me hope, it brings me comfort, and it brings me the confidence and motivation to just enjoy the time I have with the people I meet all over the world. We may not know how much time we have together to share special moments and memories, but we should make them nevertheless. This gives me the ease to try and skip those awkward initial shy moments where we’re not quite sure if we’re good enough friends yet to hug each other or say certain things or message each other on social media. It makes me wonder, if I want to hug this friend of mine that I’ve only known a few months, then why am I stopping myself simply because maybe our friendship hasn’t reached that level yet?

I simply wish to share my life with the people that I love, I wish to be surrounded and engulfed in it all so that there’s so much love and emotion being passed through a group of friends that it starts pouring out onto the streets where it will eventually spread all through the towns and cities like a rapid river carrying a virus known as happiness and love; a virus that will hopefully spread all over the world until it’s no longer called a virus and it is present from one side of the world to the other; cleansing the Earth of all that is toxic so that we can breathe once more just as deep and pure as the trees breathe the wind through their leaves on a calm yet windy day.

Written by Sofia Tartaglia on the 19th of June 2016