Gosh I've excelled myself at grumpiness this morning, and mainly caused by social media!
Last night I wrote a long post about a friend who has started using Instagram to tell the world how great she is. I am used to this on Facebook but had hoped I had escaped the behaviour on Instagram, by keeping my "friends" to a low number of people who I thought are real friends who may simply want to share photos. As my real friends, I also thought they would be sensitive enough to know how their posts make other people feel.
It's lovely when good things happen to us, but our posts are read by people who are not always having good thing happen and who may be made to feel worse by such proud posts - you can almost hear people thinking "her life is perfect, mine is rubbish". I'm aware that the friend in question may have waited a very long time for the good thing to happen of course, but reads differently - it reads that she is so very successful... And not everyone who reads it needs that on their phones when they have escaped from it on Facebook deliberately!
Social media can be so useful in making people feel wanted and appreciated, and yes, it's a very fine line between sharing and crowing. But we all know it when we see it.
The second grumpy making thing is that the post vanished! Not even in drafts this morning.
My thoughts went something like "what's the point of having this facility on my phone if it doesn't even save it at all?"
Then I realised that it really doesn't matter. We can un-follow very easily and the person in question won't even know.
I had time to re-write this post it in a kinder way so the people that read this know I'm not talking about them. Which hopefully I've done!
Keep posting your photos - it's up to me to skip the posts that I don't enjoy reading.
It's up to us all to follow people who make us feel uplifted and to un-follow those who have the opposite effect.
Un-following can become one of the joys of social media!