If you know me, you’d say that I am a loved person, a person people like to get around with, even an interesting one they might say.

But when I look at any social feed I know I don’t belong there.
I was reminded by this when I read today a post by jason fried. In that post he wrote a passage that resonated quite a bit with me.

It said “These days it seems every announcement begins with a “Today we’re super excited to…” preamble. Whether it’s opening yet another bank branch, launching a 10% off promotion, restocking a t-shirt in size medium, announcing a mega-merger, breaking a new record, or introducing a new colorway of an old shoe, everyone sounds super excited! We’re bathed in it.”

This is it. All the feeds are full and fed of stories like that. Only stories like that.
I get it, maybe we don’t want pessimism, maybe we should aim to ignite some optimism and vision for the future.
I get it. But is this really something that helps us moving forward?

I don’t belong to this kind of communication. I don’t belong to the fact that we obnoxiously share only successes that might not be even that much enthusiastic to begin with.
I think feeds like this miss a key element: Honesty and struggle.

Life’s that way. We fail. We fail a lot and then we try again and after countless times we succeed. We create something beautiful, a flower to nurture. That flower is so beautiful we want to share it to the world so that the world will see it.

Those struggle, where are they? We all hear the Edison story, of how he failed 10000 times before getting it right. When are we going to settle this and start telling our failures? The things that didn’t work out?

Not as a way to spread pessimism, but as a way to teach that every failure can be reverted, that after a failure we can almost always try another time. Few failures are fatal, they _seem_ fatal because of the emotional story we attach to them. They _seem_ fatal because of our reaction to that story.
But they’re not.

That’s why I consider myself a strange social animal. I like being with people, but all I see on the social media is something that seems to me outside of my world and I keep wondering: Where’s the place I should belong?