You flip open LinkedIn. Maybe this person has a ton of followers. Maybe this person became an overnight expert in cryptocurrency and now gets to be a sought after “influencer.” Maybe this person has a gorgeous, seemingly successful linear career path from summa cum laude in college to a top ranked consulting firm to a top ranked business school to a top ranked company with sexy brands. Maybe this person is you.
You flip open Instagram. Maybe this person is a food blogger with perfect yummy pictures. Maybe this person is a full time traveler with drool-worthy photos from different parts of the world every other day. Maybe this person is a twenty-something female with perfect hair and a muscular body, standing with a group of friends in their bathing suits on some Southeast Asian beach. Maybe THIS person is you.
The internet likes to point out the fact that everyone puts their highlight reels on social media, leaving the behind-the-scenes failures on the cutting room floor. We know this. But generally speaking, that knowledge isn’t enough. Viewers or followers or lurkers are still left to judge themselves against these seemingly perfect ideals. It generates mad jealousy. Even when we know that the low points, the hard work, the determination, and the mundane parts of life generally don’t make it to anyone’s internet branding, we still generate mad jealousy.
Here’s a reframe for that phenomenon: when you’re jealous of someone’s online persona, you’re not jealous of that person. You’re jealous of that story.
Photo by Lacie Slezak on Unsplash
A story cherry picks facts, images, and ideas and weaves them together into a cohesive, attractive narrative.
Storytelling is a skill – in business, that’s how you get promoted, get sales, get into graduate school, get around politics, or just generally get whatever it is that you want. No storytelling, no getting what you want, and certainly no getting other people what they want.
In management consulting, at every promotion milestone, you had to be ready to “tell your story” with your “value proposition”. No compelling story, no promotion.
And whether they have actual metrics/revenue/profit or not, any internet personality or business owner who has successfully courted a lot of online attention knows how to tell the right stories at the right times. No story, no attention for online personas.
When we see others’ online personas – or even when we see the image they portray to us in person – we’re usually just getting a story. Sometimes it’s a story they’re purposefully portraying. But more often, it’s a story about them that we ourselves are generating.
The story a person portrays is different from the person.
A person obviously has more than just their words, pictures, resumes, and profiles – these are just storytelling slivers.
A person has a past – they have a family. They have grandparents whose choices have trickled down to parental figures who have directly influenced that person’s upbringing and mindsets both consciously and unconsciously.
A person has a hometown, or many hometowns, that – in conjunction with their parental figures – generate childhood memories, ideas, core feelings, and core wounds.
A person has happy memories and negative moments which may have adversely or positively programmed their mindset. Happy moments may have influenced their dreams and their preferences to be picky or open-minded; adverse events may have instilled them with grit or negative mental habits.
A person has some experience of education, formal or informal, with a plethora of people and teachers who generate more events, more preferences, more dislikes, more sources of happiness.
A person has goals and talents, some that they use fully, others that are untapped. They develop skills and ideas. They have fears and doubts, and they have coping mechanisms to hide or overcompensate for these fears and doubts. They have tendencies and habits. All of these things change.
A person has relationships, friendships, colleagues, and family members. All of these relationships have both conscious and unconscious impacts on the person, both positive and negative. All of these things change.
A person has a soul. A person is complex, multifaceted, and dynamic. You’re getting less than 1% of a person when you see or hear the story they present in the form of a persona.
You’ll never know what it’s like to be another person; we will probably never develop the technology to jump into another person’s life via transplanting your psyche into their mind, body, spirit, and awareness.
But let’s pretend that we did create that ability – you might jump into the life of someone who looks super successful on LinkedIn and realize how horrible they feel relative to how you feel in your own life.
You might transplant into the psyche of someone who looks gorgeous on Instagram and realize how secretly tired and scared they feel.
Or, you might wake up in the body of someone who’s seemingly normal, living a middle class life in a country where you don’t even speak the language, and you may realize that they are happier than you would have ever been in your own life.
For all this talk of the stories that people present about themselves, you’re never going to get to hear the stories that people tell themselves in their own minds every minute of every day.
Let’s remember, though, that feelings aren’t linear, life is multidimensional, and each experience in one’s existence is just another thread in a tapestry of interconnected events that will never be woven again. You’ll never, ever be able to measure your experience against that of another. You’ll never know exactly what it’s like to be another person– you can only approximate by witnessing their story or creating a story of your own.
Next time you’re on social media or hearing a story from someone else about their life, use any potential feelings of jealousy as a tuning device for inquiry – you’re not jealous of a person because that’s impossible. What stories are you envious of? Where can you detach from those stories and see them as thin membranes overlaying a person’s ethereal life? And where can you dive into more opportunities to experience other people for who they truly are?
Taking in information about another person isn’t the same as truly experiencing another person. You experience a person when you get to connect with them authentically and deeply. Nothing replaces the personal bonds that make you feel compelled to root for another human. They become a team member in this game of life with its highs and lows and in-betweens. Most of the time, these connections happen in real life with friends, family, and other loved ones. If you’re really skilled at nurturing these bonds, you’re able to root for everyone, regardless of who they are.
You can, of course, also experience a person via the internet. There are scores of bloggers, YouTubers, influencers, thought leaders, celebrities, and “ordinary” people who create content and online presences that allow you to experience them as they share something real. There are online business owners who transform their unique talents to create real value for their fans and followers, and in the process, they connect deeply. You just know when these folks create something authentic that truly allows you to experience a genuine connection with them. By contrast, you just know when they’re simply looking for cheap validation. You just know when they’re generating jealousy through portraying a story.
You just know because you’re a person, too.
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