The caricature trap of Facebook – as in a greatly exaggerated version of real life, that often imparts the wrong take-aways.

Facebook is an awesome tool for connecting and I am a fan.  However, I have lately been confronted by two dynamics that are just wrong.  They are wrong for adults and they are wrong for my oldest daughter who just turned thirteen and recently set up a Facebook account.

Don’t compare your real life to someone else’s Facebook life.  Looking at my page or my wife’s page one might assume our life is all sun, beaches and margaritas.  We receive comments from people all the time about “living in paradise every day.”  In reality, we live minutes away from pretty bad poverty, we struggle with language barriers daily, we struggle through homework with four kids every evening and we usually go to bed exhausted.  There are ups and downs like everyone else.

Facebook only shows a few snapshots of an otherwise long movie and most of us (myself included) tend to show nice pictures from nice experiences.  In a similar fashion ESPN highlights show perhaps 5 plays out of ~130 from a typical football game.  They don’t show the plays that produced no tangible results yet took the same effort and energy.

I love this quote from Jim Collins – “Comparison is the cardinal sin of modern life.  It traps us in a game we can’t win.  Once we define ourselves in terms of others, we lose the freedom to shape our own lives.”  How much more is this true when we are comparing apples (our real life) to oranges (someone else’s Facebook life)?  And with 10% of Facebook accounts believed to be fake, the comparisons can be even more outrageous.

Don’t seek worth or approval from “comments” and/or “likes”.  A day after my daughter put up pictures on her new Facebook account she was a bit miffed that neither my wife nor I had “liked” her pictures.  She actually felt unappreciated because we had not “liked” her pictures.  I suspect this one instance is a microcosm of what happens with lots of people – I.e., feeling upset, disrespected or unappreciated because of not receiving “likes” or “comments” after posting a message or picture.

“Unexpressed gratitude expresses ingratitude” (from Andy Stanley) exists in real life.  If my wife continually goes out of her way to do something nice for our family (she always does) and no one ever takes the time to recognize it, her likely inference would be that no one really cares. Somehow this dynamic gets incorrectly applied in the online world where the lack of a “comment” or “like” is viewed as a personal affront.   This situation reminds me of a funny line (“people like-button me, they really like-button me!”) in a very funny song some friends wrote and performed – So Many Friends (That I Broke Facebook.)

My counsel to my thirteen year old (and to myself at times) is to not be so fragile in spirit or desperate for an approval that really doesn’t matter or have any bearing on your self-worth.

At the end of the day, Facebook (or any other social media platform) can be a great tool.  Beyond simply staying connected, it highlights the above lessons (and many others) and can lead to some great parent-child conversations in your household.  What lessons have you gleaned from Facebook and how have you applied them in your life?

[By the way, some “nice” new pictures are in the picture gallery]