CARING. NOT SHARING

As more of us post the details of our lives online, it's easy to find ourselves at odds with friends over images they might not have wanted the whole world to see,

- Olivia Petter

Nobody likes to argue with friends - especially not when the issue on the table is something as inane as social media. Surely it's below all of us to get into a spat over likes, tagged pics, and DM slides. It's just Instagram: a filtered vessel through which we post a curated version of our lives that, outside of our smartphones, means almost nothing. Well, in today's overly documented and overly online culture, where anyone can go instantly viral, it's a little more complicated than that.

May*, 52, discovered this firsthand after a recent night out with her 18-year-old daughter and 37-year-old sister. “It had been really hot, so we were super sweaty and all of our makeup had basically disappeared,” she recalls. “We decided to have one last drink at our hotel, and my sister wanted a photo. I reluctantly agreed but asked her not to post it anywhere as I looked awful.” The next morning, May’s sister had posted the photo to her Instagram Stories. “I couldn’t believe it. She had been behind the lens, so there was no tired, sweaty image of her. Just me looking worse for wear. I told her to take it down; she shrugged and said it was no big deal.”

This is a surprisingly common disagreement, and it’s one I’ve found myself in more than once. There have been times when I’ve spotted photos of me I’ve hated, only to feel too embarrassed to ask friends to delete them; is anything less cool than caring about your social media presence? Often, the gripes are minor and bound up in my own insipid insecurities that I resent giving any airtime to: a bit of lighting hitting my nose awkwardly here, the way my arm appears to be bulging there. Silly stuff, mostly. Over the years I’ve developed a tactic: friends can post whatever they like of me on their platforms; if I don’t like it, I won’t share it on mine.