Editing your life
Opinions matter.
This statement is a very dangerous one to make, especially in this day and age — obsessed with people’s ‘likes’ and ‘responses’ — when our health and sanity virtually depend on being able to detach from opinions and ratings.
Still, there must be a reason why we go to such lengths to impress our peers and why we have this innate impulse to care.
Yes, we can more or less become whatever we want if we work long and hard enough, but we are also very much shaped by the world outside of us. Our first attitudes towards ourselves, other people, and everything else are initially shaped by how our parents treated us as children.
Caveat: I am not here to blame it all on the parents!
After all, as a kid, you interact with many people, both interpreting and misinterpreting their intentions to come to various conclusions. Later in life you have your classmates… And then there’s college, work and all the interactions you will ever have with people for the rest of your life.
And the way all those people treat you affects your life a great deal.
There is a reason why high-profile companies have a dress code. There is a reason why celebrities take such care of their ‘brand’… In order to communicate with people on a daily basis we (regrettably) cannot rely on each one of them knowing us as closely and compassionately as our loved ones. More often than not we are even required to earn being given the benefit of the doubt. Not many things truly come for free.
Caring so much about other people’s opinions (especially on social media) might reflect a deep feeling of being misunderstood and misrepresented in the eyes of the majority who simply don’t have enough time, energy and mental space to get to know each and every one of us like friends. Social media is particularly tricky since it gives us the impression of being free to craft the image of ourselves to our liking; to edit our image to perfection.
My father once told me that being a parent is tricky because of one very particular task: you have to teach your child to think for themselves, while at the same time teaching them to adapt to society. A wilful, but maladaptive individual is just as unhappy as someone who blindly follows whatever everyone else is doing, failing to take care of their own needs and wishes.
In a way, we are REQUIRED to edit our lives to fit our audience in a similar fashion as we are required to edit our writing. To run this metaphor even deeper, I would dare to say that our ‘self’ can truly be likened to written text because just as we can discern clickbait stories from original ideas (albeit edited for the purposes of publication) we can also distinguish between people who approach us with honesty (albeit decorated with courtesy) from those who simply pretend to bring something valuable to our life for their own gains.
Basically, the notion of ‘editing’ our lives is neither as good or as bad as it is currently asserted in the wake of all the social platforms that make exposure so accessible.
With or without it, we would still spend a great deal of our lives learning how to adapt to the society we live in. It is okay to want to be liked. The problems arise only once we forget the other side of the coin — our own face, our own self.
The same goes for writing. It is necessary to edit in order to make your point clearer or more enjoyable to read — to have people listen to you — but it is mainly for the purposes of your content! The value of a written piece lies in the message that leaves an impression on the reader.
Editing makes us and our work more palatable. It is a tool, like any other, and can turn into anything, depending on how you use it.
I hope we learn to use it well!
