Your Cool Life

I just read this article that nailed on the head something that Facebook does to our brains (and blogs too, I'd say). It said that "university students consistently believed that other people were leading lives filled with far more joy and fun than their own." Why? Because the Facebook and blog updates we're constantly looking at are “showcasing the most witty, joyful, bullet-pointed versions of people’s lives, and inviting constant comparisons in which we tend to see ourselves as the losers." So basically, we wake up and do something completely ordinary with ourselves like sit in traffic on our way to a boring day at work or class, have a pb&j for lunch, do some homework, grocery shop, watch t.v., whatever, and then we check our Facebook page. And there we find an album of pictures Sam just posted of his weekend road trip to the beach. We learn that Mike, Sarah, and Emma got engaged, married, and pregnant, respectively. Ben posted a shot of the amazing sunrise he saw this morning from the top of a volcano he hiked while on field study in Nicaragua. Megan was admitted to a prestigious law school on the east coast. Emma, the master of all DIY enthusiasts, just re-upholstered and/or painted every piece of furniture in her apartment and sewed herself an entire new spring wardrobe (and it was "super easy"). Will got a new dog, Brad completed his 5th triathlon, and Jane is taking up back country skiing . Dan is listening to something cool, Anna is wearing something cool, Ryan just ate something cool, Alice just went somewhere cool and Taylor just, well, is cool. By the end of your 20 minutes of Facebook browsing, maybe without even realizing it, you feel like you live a completely lame, uneventful, unsuccessful and downright boring life. This, obviously, is the bad thing about viewing other people's lives in this showcase-style of "the most witty, joyful, bullet-pointed versions of people’s lives." (I think especially if they are people you don't ever actually talk to or see and therefore know about their problems, their lame days, and that their hair doesn't always look as good as it does in the pictures they post of themselves). However, I was thinking about this and realized that this is precisely the reason I have always been so obsessed with and loved my notebooks (call them journals if you must)--of course I write about my problems and negative things in my life, but I try not to give that too much page space if I can help it. What I do instead is fill my notebooks with highlights. The good moments, the funny stories, the "bullet points"--the joyful, fun, most interesting things that go on in my life, the noteworthy things that happen between the traffic, boring days at work, and the peanut butter sandwiches. And when I read back through my notebooks, instead of the good parts getting lost in the mundane, they are the only thing that's there--making my life seem awesome.