Dear Facebook, my day was pretty boring

Dear Facebook,

My day was pretty boring today.

I didn’t go anywhere fun or see anything interesting, so I don’t have any new photos to post.

I don’t have any fun stories or interesting points to make about the news or pop culture.

I didn’t meet up with any friends, maybe they are off doing something with my other friends …without me.

My kids didn’t do anything cute or impressive today. I mean, of course every moment with them is precious, except some of the moments don’t feel quite precious enough to share with my friends.  And sometimes I have precious little patience with them, but I wouldn’t want to post that on Facebook.

I can see lots of fun stuff happening on my friends’ timelines.  They all seem so funny and clever and popular and boy are they having a great time without me.  So many good times.  I like good times.  I wonder why I’m not having good times right now.

Oh sure, I’ve been places and done things before and I’ll go places and do things later, but today I’m just sort of here.

So why am I posting this on Facebook?

Maybe because I know a lot of people suffer from FOMO (fear of missing out) and I know that Facebook can be a great enabler of FOMO. We get wrapped up into thinking that everyone on our wall is having so much fun, with their perfect kids and perfect spouses and their perfect lives, that our own situation looks positively normal.  Our world looks plain vanilla while the world is enjoying 31 flavors of awesome.

What we forget in those moments is that everyone has boring days. Everyone has days that we don’t think of as Facebook-worthy, which means we don’t see those days talked about on Facebook.

There’s nothing wrong with that and there’s nothing wrong with Facebook in itself.  It is fun to post pics of family and tag friends and keep connected with acquaintances.

However, I think it is a really good idea to take a step back once in a while and remember not to compare our own lives with the best 1% moments of all of our friends’ lives.

So yeah, I had a boring day today.  And that’s OK.