In today’s day and age, it’s easier to share our everyday lives with our friends. We share every aspect of our lives, even though we don’t need to do that every second of every day. Don’t get me wrong, I share things with friends that I find important and worth celebrating, but believe it or not, there are some things I have kept private from even my friends.
I haven’t shared big parts of my life in recent years because it’s too personal and private and I don’t want to share it every day. It’s still emotionally raw for me to talk about and I am trying to process what’s going on in my life. If I don’t want to broadcast it to the whole world I am not going to. That’s a boundary I put in place with my friends. If I want to share this with a selective group of people, I can.
I think when we share every detail of our lives with friends, we lose our privacy and the ability to set a boundary when necessary because we feel like you have to share every detail of our life at all times. After all, if you have done it before, you often feel obligated to do so now; if you don’t you’re made to feel guilty about not sharing your news. You may receive comments like, “Oh my God, what happened?” etc. when you didn’t want to share your news in the first place. Maybe it was a bad breakup, maybe you lost a job, or something else. I was recently on social media and my best friend’s brother posted something that my best friend had not told me. I thought they certainly would have shared it with me but didn’t. Initially I was upset that they hadn’t told me about it. After 15+ years of friendship, we have always told each other everything. So, was I hurt that I wasn’t told about it? Absolutely. Once we talked about it, and I understood where they were coming from, everything was fine. We are still best friends.
I personally believe that social media has made us feel entitled to know what’s happening in our friends’ lives at all times. If people don’t share every detail of their lives, people are angry for not being included. I get that, but I also think privacy and setting boundaries are necessary and important. Not just for us but, for those you’re carving the details from. We need to allow people in our lives some privacy and allow them to share what they feel like sharing without being made to feel bad about it.
I think it’s important to remember we all have some things in our lives that we rather keep to ourselves before you push to know more. It is important to try and understand and respect people’s privacy and boundaries. There is a reason they are not sharing it with you. It’s okay for us to be quiet about specific aspects of our lives. Before social media, we didn’t have this need and entitlement issue to know everything personal in our friends’ lives. Just because they don’t share everything with you, doesn’t mean they don’t care about you. That is what I think we all need to realize. Someone not sharing every detail about their day-to-day is not about you; it’s about their comfortability, and the need to be private about some things is necessary. We have to understand that it has nothing to do with your friends not caring about you. I think if we realized this, we would see how intrusive it can be. We wouldn’t want it done to us, so why do that to others?
Photo by Annemarie Grudën on Unsplash
