Rituparna Ghosh, The Friendly Neighbourhood Coach

If like me you’ve come from a household that used idioms and phrases to practise writing, you’d have heard this phrase. 

‘All that glitters is not gold.’ 

Yeah, you kind of know where I am going with this, don’t you? 

In the early 2000s social media started as a space to connect and interact, to say and share things with a larger group of people, without having to physically meet them. It opened the world, sitting in India, with a relatively dodgy internet, we could talk to people, see people all over the world. We could ‘poke’ them, play games with them, know what they liked, what they ate, how they lived. We could connect with long lost friends, message people who moved overseas and weren’t accessible. There was no fear of a painstakingly written letter being lost. Talents were showcased, new learnings happened, businesses flourished. Through the tiny screen of our laptop or mobile, we could get a view of the whole world.  It was all very exciting until it wasn’t. 

Suddenly we were wide open to judgements, anything that was written was subjected to scrutiny to the minutest details. Everything that we said was hashed, rehashed and opinions formed. Camps were made, groups shaped and there was no place for expression. There was treachery, lewdness, obscenity, and worst-case, even a threat to life. But that’s not what this article is about. It is about another issue, that’s become more prevalent with the advent of social media – ‘Comparititis’.  

Comparing our perfectly normal, routine lives with others and always falling short. Of course, you are stuck in the house doing laundry, while your colleague is out at the fancy restaurant with her husband and a bunch of other cool friends.  Or you are looking at your school nemesis’s 2-year-old baby reciting alphabets and numbers while your 4-year-old can barely speak. There is a video being shared and reshared of your cousin proposing to her ‘would-be’ while sky diving, but all you got was ‘It’s been a while and let’s get married’. What you don’t see out there are their insecurities, the cracks in the relationships, the high-pressure hours, the lack of sleep. The carefully curated, perfectly cultivated moments on social media depict a life that even though, subconsciously, we all know is made up, makes us want it. So, we do it, drag our husbands to the restaurant, probably go sky-diving on a holiday, stay up late reading up on why your perfectly intelligent child won’t speak. Spend our bank balance trying to get to that elusive sense of joy that seems to radiate from their posts, chase after that magical feeling of content doing activities after activities. 

But do you? Feel happy I mean? 

You’d probably answer yes, but then let me ask you another question, how long does this happiness last? Very soon reality sets in, the pile of laundry still waits, the countless meetings don’t magically vanish, the normal routine boring life is still there.  And then what follows is delusion, the feeling of being empty, something missing, not fulfilled. Because you see, that deconstructed Pomme Anna was nothing compared to Aloo- Bhaja that you covet, the entire holiday was spent in you trying to calculate how much this luxury will put you off from early retirement. Or maybe you’ve run yourself down wondering why won’t your son speak, completely ignoring that he comes from a multilingual household? 

Most importantly, where does this end?  Cause in the meantime, your picture of a happy smile is causing ripples somewhere else. 

Long before Ashton Kutcher became what he is today (hey! No judgements please ;-)) he did a movie with Brittany Murphy called ‘Just Married (2003)’. Tom (Ashton’s character) wonders as he sees his parents’ photographs that they seemed happy, to which his dad responds, 

‘You never see the hard days in a photo album, but those are the ones that get you from one happy snapshot to the next.’ 

This quote is my mantra to this date, just because the album looks happy doesn’t mean that there are no hard days and just because there are no happy albums, there is nothing to be grateful about.  

Oh! what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive – Sir Walter Scott. 

So, take your head out of that bloody web of social media and look around, the elusive joy you seek might be next to you.