Keeping Up with the Joneses in Our Friends’ Feed
Two sharp and thought-provoking observations
from Kevin Williamson:
Two things are going on here related to American unhappiness: The first
is that as our economy becomes less physical and more intellectual, success in
life is less like war and more like chess, and extraordinary success in life —
i.e., being part of the founding of a successful new company — is a lot like
being a grandmaster: It is an avenue that simply is not open to everyone. It
requires talents that are not distributed with any sense of fairness and that
are not earnable: Hard work is not enough. Peter Thiel is both a successful
entrepreneur and a ranked chess master — and these facts are not merely
coincidental. You can blame Thiel a little bit for the second factor in American
unhappiness: Facebook. Facebook and other social-media communities are a kind of
ongoing high-school reunion, the real and unstated purpose of which is to
dramatize the socioeconomic gulf between those who have made it in life and
those who have not. We simply know more about how our more successful friends
and neighbors live than our ancestors knew about John D. Rockefeller, about whom
they thought seldom if at all. Our contemporary tycoons have reality shows (some
of which blossom into presidencies, oddly enough), but social media is itself a
kind of reality show for everybody else.
Of course, Facebook does not present to our friends the way our lives
really are. It presents what we choose to share, which in most cases is the best
moments, the triumphs, the joy and the humble-brags. It’s not hard to look at
Facebook pages and think other people’s lives consist of nothing but good times,
happy families, thrilling vacations, adorable children, birthday thanks,
spectacular-looking food…
No comments:
Post a Comment