Social media leads you to believe that everyone lives a perfect life except for you. There are no bumps, ridges, edges, or obstacles that ever impede. Everyone, not you, has a smooth line in to be at 6-figure salaries at age 25, 7-8 figure business sales in your 30’s, and accumulating multi-million dollar assets in your 40’s. Objective measures of success in the West are all benchmarked by perceptions of your lifestyle, your level of comfort, and the opportunities afforded by your merit and wealth. Social media accounts are largely heavily manicured fictions designed to impress, please, and inspire. Social media’s ideal star is a beautiful fit person in gorgeous destinations with stunning companions and strong life-long relationships. An altered, filtered, and cropped picture becomes a source of truth, believing the narrative of a perfect life is easier than accepting that only a few people are capable of such a lifestyle. On the world wide web, everyone is an angel, no one is tainted, they’re either your friends or your followers. When everyone is your friend it’s as if no one is. To the outer world, you exist only in the photographs and the image of you you choose to present. You can pretend to be whoever you choose on social media and use it to extract value from gullible people. What struck me immediately about Martina’s Instagram, was she had no posts. A green flag as far as flags go.
Between Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Linkedin I am on social media for hours of my day, every day, each day. Online interactions are materially different than when one is within striking distance from their conversation partner. Something about the anonymity of the internet and its accessibility leads people to think they exist in a vacuum. They dump their unfiltered and mean opinions onto an online persona, from one persona to another. One of the benefits of in-person interactions is people think twice about what they say to you. When they’re behind a keyboard they’re thoughtless, whomever they’re typing to is an image on a screen. Forgetting that behind it is a person with experiences different than theirs, dreams, goals, ambitions, pains, and hopes.
I believe that each person alive or dead has something of value to impart to you. It’s a beautifully chaotic theory. In the vacuousness of the social media landscape, some threads pull on this theme of humanism. Subconsciously social media’s existence is proof that people do see value in connectivity with each other and desire a community. Community of like-minded people who share culture, history, preferences, and values. Given its isolation from the rest of the world, maybe it was a natural evolution that the advent of social media began in America as early as the 1990s. It’s best to think of social media as a tool over its utility as a collective thought experiment. It’s unmatched as a marketing platform, information and data are commodities sold to advertisers and companies. Beyond that, you can stay connected to memories, people, places, and moments in time.
Using Instagram Martina and I talked every day to start 2023. Its video call feature was how we called each other. Without Instagram, I’m not sure how I would’ve maintained that level of connectivity. From where I’m situated in North Carolina and where she is in Rome, there is a 6-hour time difference. Before the telegraph in the mid-19th century staying in daily contact with her would have been impossible. Genuinely when it comes to barriers and obstacles, distance, even with all our transportation, technology, and infrastructure, is tough.
I’ve had a long-distance relationship before. Years ago I had an ex-girlfriend and we did it for about 8 months before I ultimately decided to move in with her and be together. It was a good decision for my heart, but a bad one for my career and financial position. I moved away from a metropolitan area to a small town in my alma mater with limited white-collar career opportunities outside of the university and hospital there. I delayed my earning potential by about at least 4 years. The relationship lasted almost 3 years and I ended up staying in the town for maybe another year and a half after our romantic relationship dissolved.
My partner at the time and I were aligned on a few things personality and lifestyle-wise. Where the major disconnect was, were our career and life aspirations. I always wanted to do something larger than life with mine. She was comfortable living in trailers and living in towns with less than 50,000 people in them. One of the best things about her was she was the farthest thing from a gold digger or user as possible. Her egalitarian perspective on people was one of her best qualities. She suffered from manic depression throughout most of the relationship and it was difficult at times to support her. She struggled heavily with identity issues, with gender, and with all the things that happened in her past.
It took me years to understand that what formed the foundation of my relationship with my ex-girlfriend was the key to attraction in general. Our conversations were effortless. We didn’t have to measure every word or rehearse lines. Everything flowed naturally. Sometimes, you meet someone and experience that immediately. In my serious relationship, that ease of communication developed over time, and being around her always felt like being around an old friend. We were ultimately incompatible and you only have so much space in your life to be an outstanding companion and friend to maybe two dozen people. Everyone else you have to keep at a distance. To meaningfully and thoughtfully respond and interact with more than that number daily is a challenge. And there are only a few relationships worth maintaining, developing, and retaining. If life is a revolving door of people and experiences, then speaking with Martina is a revolving door that I hope to keep spinning for a long time.
The decision to go to Rome and see her again was an easy one. I’m financially stable, with a flexible remote career with plenty of PTO and time off. I had asked many friends, and family if they had an interest in going. It turns out an expensive 10-day overseas excursion in the dead of summer is a tough sell. I was going on this trip. There was nothing that was going to stop me, there were so many challenges that would’ve stopped a less motivated person. I put in the time off months ahead. When I was leaving was maybe the worst time to go on the trip, however, even the senior managers and directors at my company acknowledged and told me, that no matter when you choose to take a trip, there will always be some reason to not go. But do it. Do it because work will always be there. So I did, coupled with a motivation that I didn’t want to be at the end, running out of time, looking back on my life, and thinking that I spent all this time safe in the center of the cube and never explored the dark outer ridges of the sphere.