Stop Instagramming Your Perfect Life.

It's Friday night and I don't have plans... The people-person side of me is bummed because "Who stays home on a Friday night?" But the practical, busy side of me keeps trying to convince myself, "This is a good thing... you always say you could use a night at home. Soak it up." So, here I am. It's 5:30 on Friday night. I'm laying on my bed, soaking up the beautiful light that's coming through my windows, and trying not to focus on the fact that I don't have plans tonight.

I did what all normal 25-year-old girls do in this situation... I got on my laptop. I did a quick run over Facebook (My facebook stalking just isn't what it used to be. A quick 2 or 3 minute glance over my news feed and I'm done.) I thought I'd check out a couple of blogs that I frequent then I'd head over to Pinterest for a little Friday night pinspiration. (You like that? Pinspiration. I guarantee I'm not the first person who has ever said that and probably not the last.) One of the baking blogs I read, Brown Eyed Baker, had a link to another article about how social media is skewing our perception of real life. The title piqued my interest so I thought I'd read it. It's 5:30 on a Friday night. What else do I have to do, right?

The article: Stop Instragramming Your Perfect Life.

This article was really good. I would recommend taking the time to read it. A couple of quotes that I thought were good:

"The danger of the internet is that it's very very easy to tell partial truths - to show the fabulous meal but not the mess to clean up afterward. To display the smiling couple-shot, but not the fight you had three days ago. To offer up the sparkly milestones but not the spiraling meltdowns."

"Community - the rich kind, the transforming kind, the valuable and difficult kind - doesn't happen in partial truths and well-edited photo collections on Instagram."

"Our envy buttons also gets pushed because we rarely check Facebook when we're having our own peak experiences. We check it when we're bored and when we're lonely, and it intensifies that boredom and loneliness."

"Let's choose community. Let's stop comparing. Let's start connecting."

"Instead of scrolling through someone else's carefully curated images, I use those few seconds to send a text to a person I really know and really love and really want to be connected to."

Ok, those are a few of the quotes. I thought this article had a lot to say - especially to me tonight. I was bored and lonely and started looking at blogs. I was tempted to become envious over people's perfect looking lives. But I stopped reading blogs and did what the article said - connected. I texted my friend Becca to ask her to hang out tomorrow night. And we're doing it!