I'm Judging You (25 page)

There's a difference between owning your awesome and whatever this inflated-title thing that's happening is. I am not saying that people should be overhumble and downplay their talents. Own your dopeness. However, that dopeness does not need to be spelled out as a tattoo on your forehead or in a fake title on your LinkedIn bio. Let your work speak for you, and someday people might call you the Highborn Leader of All Things in your industry.

All that said, I will call myself an expert at the art of side-eye. I'm also a guru of rice eating. I think I want to add “Grand Wizard of Everything” to my About Me page. I am the CEO, president, grand goon, and executive director of Awesomely Luvvie. Over there, I'm an expert at writing in random slang and the maharishi of wig snatching. You will deal.

 

19. Real Gs Move in Silence

The nature of social media is to encourage us to share our lives. This is true. The World Wide Web is a series of wires that connects us all to each other, no matter where we are in the world. And part of the beauty of being together even when we're apart is that we can keep up with everyone's lives. You may not have seen me since high school graduation, but you still know what I'm doing for a living, what my days are like, and who I am sharing them with—well, you'll have an idea, based on what I'm sharing. We get to paint our lives and curate them for those who meet us in our digital spaces, and it is up to us to decide how much of the total experience of our days we pass on for public consumption.

Some of us share everything. Every single thing. We wake up and share a pic of the sun coming up outside our window. We take a shower and we post a mirror selfie. We tweet that we just took an amazing dump. We Snapchat ourselves putting on clothes; the actual process of putting legs in pants is now post-worthy. We are Generation Overshare, hear us roar and then post a Facebook status about it. I know what you did last summer. And last night. And two minutes ago. I know how you felt through all of it. I know when you're heartbroken (see chapter 15), and I probably found out three minutes after it happened. I know every single thing about your life, because you've kept me updated about all of it.

There are certain types of oversharers online:

1. The Everything Sucks Oversharer

This person might be going through a rough patch in their life. Or maybe you've known them for years and you understand that their life is like the TV show
Good Times
, where they didn't have good times until the show was ending. That show should have been called
Downtrodden and Out
.

Anywho, the Everything Sucks Oversharer is Eeyore. Nothing is ever going well, and you really do start to wonder what life has against them. It sucks, truly, because you wish you could help them. Even on days when nothing of note happens in their lives, they will pour out feelings of worthlessness, and it gets to the point where their posts start to stress you out. You've run out of helpful words for them, and now all you can muster is “You're in my thoughts” and “HUGS.” Then you run fresh outta encouraging comments and you just drop an emoticon for support.

This person might be going through a depressive episode. Or just a shitty (entire) year. You know your limits as a Facebook friend or Twitter fan, and you realize that this is cathartic for them, but you also wonder if they have close friends they can go to. Or a therapist, because you're no longer just a listening audience, you're a concerned acquaintance. Is social media their only respite? If so, will they recognize when they've hit a limit where even 2,500 of their closest digital acquaintances cannot help? If ten of your most recent Facebook posts are basically you wall-sliding about life being shitty, your eFriends are probably stressed out on your behalf. They are probably reading your posts and feeling terrible for you. But here's the sad part: if you're a digital version of Eeyore 365 days in a year, they will eventually lose the will to try to help.

At least you feel for the Everything Sucks Oversharer who is going through serious problems. But there are some who will post endless complaints about the most ordinary things and how those things messed up their day. We all complain about first-world problems and really petty things sometimes, but this person not only does it all the time, they are also highly disturbed by these everyday annoyances. Every problem is a crisis. You wonder why their parents never taught them coping skills, and how they even made it this far.

2. The Mundane Oversharer

This person just needs to pass on the minute details of the mundane things that make up their day. They are the ones tweeting, “Good morning. Just waking up.” Three and a half minutes later, there will be an “Out of bed and brushing my teeth” Facebook status. At this point, you can chart their day: if you wanted to rob them, you'd know they're out the house and in their car and at the Starbucks drive-thru they love so much at precisely 8:43 a.m. Sometimes, they'll even make your burglary research easier by geotagging their morning mirror selfie so you can also pinpoint their house. They share anything and everything, and none of it is interesting. “I just ate.” CONGRATULATIONS! No one cares!

They happen to be obsessed with Snapchat now, too, so if you don't see them tweet, it's because they're in their car posting video of them at a red light. You want to tell them that their life bores you to tears and you wish they'd stop. But then you realize that they make you feel like the Most Interesting Person in the World. Unfortunately, most oversharers are this person, so when you go to their account on Twitter and see that they've accumulated six hundred thousand tweets in two years, it's because they are constantly posting trite rubbish. You know how you can turn mundane into interesting? Relate it to
other people's lives
. Tell us you just ate at the best sandwich restaurant ever, and then ask us if we've had it. Turn your overshare into a moment for input. But no. You don't want to. You just want to drop your autobiography into our laps, 140 characters at a time.

3. The Relationship Oversharer

See
: chapter 15. Enough said.

4. The Bodily Fluids Oversharer

This person loves to talk about the details of their every bodily excretion. They will write about the time they were on their period and their entire house smelled and they couldn't figure out why. When they were sick and vomited, we learned that it was green and that there were chunks of the steak they just ate. They had food poisoning, and the play-by-play of their ordeal in the bathroom made me want to scrub my brain. DAMBIT. I know these are all natural functions, but must we get such descriptive updates about them all the time? Am I a prude? I probably am, but I don't even like dealing with my own vomit, so I certainly don't want to have to deal, albeit from afar, with someone else's.

5. The Work Oversharer

This is the person who must tell all their social-media friends every single thing about their workday and their business dealings. You know what time they had that conference call, and if they're particularly bored as it's happening, they might even drop some quotes from the people on it. You know everyone they work with because they share stories about them all the time, especially that annoying coworker whose breath smells like garbage and corn chips. They will complain about their boss, who yelled at them over a report, so they vent online about how said employer is a tool. This person thinks because their privacy options are set to “friends” that they can use Facebook to just drop all their work complaints. You just watch it all and wonder if the day will come when one of their 620 Facebook friends (at least one of whom has added them to their shit list) will screenshot the post and send it to their boss.

You'd never hire this person if the opportunity arose, because you could be at the other end of their loose lips one day. You wonder if they realize they come across so poorly, and if they know it's the reason why the day they posted that they're looking for a new job, only one person commented to say they would help. I'm not putting my name on the line for you.

5. The New Parent Oversharer

This person is a new mom or dad, and they cannot contain their excitement about the baby. Now, they are excused to a point, because creating new life deserves extreme giddiness, and we will all deal with these pictures. I actually enjoy seeing their joy, even though I might have winced because the first picture of the baby was of him covered in gelatinous afterbirth. I've been in the hospital room and watched three babies being born. I mean, I would have preferred they toweled off little Jessica before she made her social-media debut, but it's kinda cool. I don't even mind that most new babies look like baked potatoes with noses. They're so little and cute! But they definitely resemble naked mole rats at birth. It takes like two weeks for them to develop faces.

Many new parents will share every single milestone, from the second they pop out to baby's first coo. It
is
really cool to watch these kids grow up in front of our eyes, too. We feel like aunties and uncles because we remember when they were first wrinkly, and then we see the pics of them sitting up and our hearts jump for joy. When they start walking, you realize you're getting old. This is my favorite overshare, but there are limits. When they're babies, we might share our kids' days. But as they grow older, we should be cognizant of making them social-media stars. We are sharing them with the world, and it can make observers feel overfamiliar with them.

One of my social-media friends, who I know online but have never met, has an adorable kid. She posts her son's picture a lot, and I cannot help but press “Like.” Seriously. The kid is
so
freaking cute. Once I was walking down the street and I recognized him, but he wasn't with her, and I almost went up to be like, “Hey, little friend! OMG, you're so cute!” But then I realized that the person with the baby would have no idea who I was, and that I really didn't know this kid. I paused and had the epiphany that this baby was now a character online. How many other people will recognize him and think they can go up to him and ruffle his hair and fuss over him? I stepped back and thought about the effect of parents oversharing the lives of their kids, who don't have a choice in the matter.

*   *   *

We ALL overshare sometimes. But at what point do we draw a line? Is there a line to draw, or is it all part of community building? When does sharing our lives go past vulnerability to being a spectacle and a crutch?

For me, I draw the line with my personal relationships and my bodily functions. One is sacred, and the other is gross. The sacred one is kept out of the grasp of people I would not invite into my home, because that is my heart house. I protect it fiercely. The gross one is omitted because I don't think I am adding any value to anything by describing the precise texture of my vomit.

We are entrusting thousands of strangers with our innermost thoughts and feelings, and then we're expecting them to be careful with those feelings. As much as we want it to be, the Internet is not a safe space. It is not a place where we can lay our burdens down and heal. Why? Because there are too many people there who do not give an ounce of a shit about our well-being. They do not deserve our rawness, and they will not treat it with care.

Who are we sharing for, anyway? What are we trying to accomplish by living out some of our most intimate moments in front of everyone we do not know? Social media and the Internet have allowed us to share the mundane details of our lives with people who don't give a damb. We throw things at the wall, hoping something eventually sticks. We do ordinary things and attempt to get to extraordinary through public validation, likes, and page views. I believe it has lessened our ability to be secure, nonperforming human beings. All the world's a stage, and the Internet is our audience. Generation Overshare has got to stop performing our lives, because we are now actors in our own invisible films. It is not healthy.

Being a part of a larger community of people online is great because we can share struggles, lessons, triumphs, and our lives. However, the phrase “familiarity breeds contempt” comes to mind as we go through our days narrating every single detail, no matter how intimate. The whole Internet has become everyone's journal. Our Facebook statuses sometimes read like the diary you hid under your bed when you were sixteen. “Dear Diary, Today, I lost my virginity.” Now it's, “Hey, everyone! I just lost my virginity!” And multiple people comment to tell you congrats. And their friends see that someone lost his/her big V. And so on and so forth.

Sometimes I want us all to go back to being prudes in public and freaks in the dark. You know? Back to the days when only the people closest to you knew your entire business. And back when only the person you were with knew how you wanted him/her to give it to you. I don't need to know that you Nair your face, your love pocket smells like hate, and you're a forty-six-year-old virgin who loves to watch dolphin porn. I feel like everyone needs to go back to just sharing some of this stuff with their diaries, their best friends, their doctors, their cats, and whatever deity they pray to.

Generation Overshare is too anxious to share any and everything happening in our world. People are talking about jobs they
might
get, and people they
might
marry one day, and too many of those mights never come to pass. So many opportunities fall through, so boasting about something that isn't already in your pocket is premature. Just be quiet and wait instead of counting unhatched chickens in public.

Real Gs move in silence like gnats, and I often feel like we need to keep things closer to our chests. It seems like in our perpetual thirst for validation, and with “likes” being currency, we do anything we can to be congratulated for any little old thing.

Maybe I'm just a weird, superstitious Nigerian, but I believe that telling people about something you have brewing jinxes it. Until I sign on a dotted line, I usually keep mum. Some people find joy in your failures. Don't give those folks satisfaction. If you do wanna share your failures, share a lesson too. Not just “OMG, I'm so sad. I didn't get it.” Don't mistake your audience for being only well-wishers and friends. Everyone who is connected to you, on your friends list, or as your fan is not necessarily a genuine cheerleader. So pull back a bit. We are opening up our private lives for public consumption, and most of us aren't even getting paid for it.