Dear A&E,
A friend of mine has quite a high profile on social media. She’s been very successful and carried on despite all of the teasing and, if I’m honest, judgment about the way that she puts her life online. But lately she has started to tell lies about her marriage (they’re miserable), her money struggles (they’re extremely solvent) and her mental health (she’s pretty robust). I find I’m really annoyed. It is getting her lots of attention, but other friends have been asking me what’s going on and I am having to support her version of the truth. It’s very uncomfortable. Should I confront her? And why do I care?
– Irked
Dear Irked,
We’ve all got friends who are basically intolerable on social media. Let’s face it: Facebook, Instagram and TikTok have the ability to turn even the most noble of us into mean-spirited little monsters. We’ve all been guilty of rolling our eyes at people’s status updates and privately sharing with others our exasperation/envy at those who flood the internet with their perfectly “curated” narratives. In theory – and mostly practice – we love to cheerlead our friends through life, but there can be something frustrating/boring/depressing about the constant exposure to people’s posts, particularly when you know that, out of frame, there’s probably a shrieking child refusing to eat their peas or a sulky Instagram husband who has had to take 1,000 “candid” #perfectholiday #ihaveathingaboutviews #iwokeuplikethis shots.
We are all old enough to know by now that almost any social media presence has some kind of filter over it, a digital veil over the part that people don’t want you to see, whether its body shape, age, money, happiness.
And if we’re honest, it can be uncomfortably hard, despite the above cheerleading, when friends get a lot of attention. Just as it can be hard when friends suddenly acquire more wealth, new relationships, smarter careers – any shift in the perceived order of things. As much as we try, and as much as it has been drummed into us that comparison is the thief of joy, we’ve all felt just a little narked, a little less than, when others have got more of something than us.
So it can be quite easy, oddly instinctive, to look at ways in which they’re undeserving of that attention, dear Irked. Your friend, you feel, is being dishonest and therefore you desire to take the moral high ground, with the subconscious bonus that it might deoxygenate the attention that she is getting. This sounds like a win-win for your ego, but actually we think it’s probably a lose-lose in almost every way.
For a start, the moral high ground makes simply no difference here, to you, to the world, to anything. By drawing aside her digital veil, what would you be doing? Setting the record straight for the sake of empiric truth and humanity? You might find you are left there, veil in hand, looking very much like it’s a case of sour grapes.
Despite all our carping about hashtags and status updates, we genuinely want the world for our most beloved pals. So perhaps it might be worth having a long night of the soul and think about whether she falls in your closest friend category and whether you genuinely want the best for her. Perhaps if you are really honest with yourself, you felt validated by the proximity to her glamour and success but are now resentful of it. It is possible to feel both of these things; to hope that the glamour will rub off while also begrudging it. Perhaps this is an opportunity to step back and just let her bounce along without you.
Because there is a difference, isn’t there, between being a good enough friend of someone’s to know the truth, and being a good enough friend to protect the untruths? If your ride-or-die was having an affair, would you march up to her husband and expose the truth like Woodward and Bernstein? Or would you just quietly be there for her, whatever you felt about it?
It’s one thing if she is unreliable to the world, but it only matters if she’s unreliable to you. Perhaps if you have thoroughly reflected, and you have sifted through your feelings of outrage and found a kernel of real concern, then maybe, just maybe you could say something to her like, “There seems to be a disconnect between what’s happening and what you’re saying, and I’m worried that somehow there will be a price to pay for that later. I just wanted to check if you are OK with that, because the longer you go on, the wider that chasm could become, and the more dangerous a crevasse it becomes for you to tumble into.”
But mostly we suggest you do what everyone else does and quietly “mute” your friend, so you don’t have to be confronted with the daily Insta-sham. And remember you are not alone: a good pal of ours decided to cull everyone on her feed who sparked envy, not joy. She was left with National Geographic.
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