OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE FARTHER THAN THEY APPEAR

Does Social Media Make You Less Intimate With Your Friends?

Too much posting is never enough

One of my best friends from high school lives a charmed life, on the outside.

I can’t tell you about his internal landscape. It’s invisible.

He’s a beautiful man with beautiful girlfriends, lives abroad, and posts everything. His life is Dwell Magazine, GQ, Vogue, House Beautiful, Architectural Digest, and W. Does W still exist? God, those pages were so big.

My friend’s father was a famous musician. He is an amazing artist. He is the subject of his own art. His ability to make his beautiful world even more spellbinding, however, can be off-putting.

Sometimes, I’ll see his social media post and mutter, “Aw fuck you,” and close my phone.

It would be a very good way to wean myself off of social media. If I only looked at the magnificent images of his perfect life and nothing else for a week, I’d quit social media for good. Too much residual longing and resentment.

His pictures make me feel like I’m friends with a movie star. He is not a movie star. But, his luminous filtered photos make it look like he lives next to George Clooney in Lake Como.

I wonder if this is how George Clooney’s middle-class friends feel. He probably doesn’t have any. What regular person would want to be Clooney’s Facebook friend? His vacations alone would make anyone’s drive to the Wisconsin Dells feel like a road trip to a gulag.

Because I know my fancy friend’s demons, I give him a pass. I have no choice if I want to keep being friends with him. This is who he is now. I am either for him or against him.

Is this how people feel who have different politics than their families? They open up their social media, bombarded by revolting politics.

They must ask themselves, “Do I unfriend my family?”

This is how it feels with my fancy friend. Look or leave.

He’s always been this way, albeit in moderation. Who he is now is merely a magnification of when I met him 40 years ago. He was always a version of this person. He wore scarves in non-winter seasons. He listened to cooler more European music than the rest of us. He traveled constantly. He put coffee beans in his beer in high school.

Last week, when I got sucked into his images, I read a comment from a mutual friend. This mutual friend was a woman who had led a hard life. She’s killing it now, but damn, if the roads she took to get there weren’t jagged and twisted. Unlike with him, nothing was given to her.

Regarding a photo of him diving into his infinity pool, she wrote, “Looks like some people’s lives are better than others.”

She was having one of those “Aw, fuck you days.” I knew them well. I wondered if he’d get it, or just attach a heart to it.

But he’s an artist and he is his art. Compliments, Criticisms. Waning sales. He is who he is.

I can't imagine growing up in the shadow of someone famous, as he did. He is writing a story where he is the main character.

Who knows how many posts it will take until he believes his existence matters?

Then, will he stop? Or will he need to keep feeding it?

What confuses me the most is who is taking all these pictures. There are ones of him walking along a cliff, drinking in cafes from a distance, diving off a big rock into the sea. Is he always handing someone a camera?

Who?

The strangest part of his online posts was when I recently saw him. I felt less close to him. I had become so accustomed to his created self that his real one felt like seeing someone famous — someone I felt I knew, but didn’t.

I had no idea how to crawl into his feed.