Price of Privacy

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I’ve been fasting from Facebook for Lent and let me just tell you, I think I’m much happier without it. But I don’t know if I could ever get myself to delete it. Besides, Facebook makes it way too hard to delete your account. You can deactivate it, sure, but to delete it entirely is a process of steps, clicks, links, Captcha codes, social security number, waivers signing your crap away, etc.

Plus, I can’t compete with my friends in Bejeweled Blitz if I delete my Facebook. Gee, first world problems.

Anyway, it got me thinking — the social media world has grown so huge that if one person in London tweets that they just saw Adele riding a bicycle, seconds later, thousands of people can be retweeting that from Tokyo to Peru. More and more employers are now shoving your name into Google Searches, Facebook searches and Twitters searches to find out if you are truly as awesome as you say you are on your resume.

I have a confession to make: I stalk people. Not really though, not in a way where people need to put a restraining order on me. Basically, if you have an online profile somewhere, anybody can access it. This is why privacy settings are so important.

Frank the Goat -- LiveJournal's mascot

Back in the day, before the world of Facebook and even MySpace, there was a little blogging community called LiveJournal that I was obsessed with. It was blogging before blogging became cool (I guess that makes me hipster). Users could add friends, friends could comment, comments could become threads, and so forth. It became so big (for me, at least) that I even had someone recognize me in public and call me by my username. There were privacy settings, but being 16-years-old at the time, I really wanted my life to be way too public.

I had a friend tell me that everything I posted on my LiveJournal was like I was yelling it on a bullhorn in front of millions of people — not that millions of people were reading it, but that it’s easily accessible to throngs and throngs of people. Do I really want to be posting about my menstrual cycle, my love life, my girl friend drama?

The bullhorn theory is still true today: do you know how many random ass people I have access to on the Internet? On Instagram alone, I can see tons and tons of pictures belonging to unsuspecting young teenagers who think if they post one more in-the-mirror photo, they can get more followers. But why? Why do we want so many followers? What ever happened to privacy?

Desperate for followers?

At the end of the day, the root of the problem of oversharing, of gathering followers, of creating online personas is that we really are social beings that need to be affirmed. We want to know how many people “like” the fact that at 3:21pm we are currently eating a burrito. We relish in the comments on our newest profile picture and we somehow think that 124 profile pictures of ourselves in pretty much the same pose is still not enough.

When I return to Facebook after Lent, I think I’m going to go on a deleting frenzy. Erase the albums, erase the status updates, erase the notes. I can’t get myself to delete Facebook (honestly, my score on Bejeweled Blitz is like over 600,000) but I do want my privacy. I don’t want people finding out about how I am through social media alone. I want genuine friendships where people ask me, “Hey, have you tried out that new burrito place?” instead of merely giving me a virtual thumbs-up for posting a picture of a half-eaten burrito.

How InterVarsity Ruined My Life

I am a social worker. I seek social justice and I dream of changing lives, freeing the oppressed and riding in on some white horse to rescue the less fortunate. I wasn’t always this way though.

At some point in my life, I had other interests. I was a dancer, I was a singer, I was a makeup artist, I was a writer. Scratch that — I am still those things. But, when you reach your twenties, you are not your dreams or your hobbies or your skills. You are your occupation.

When I joined InterVarsity my freshman year of college, I was the classic church girl with a passion for all things church. I didn’t swear, I didn’t drink and God forbid if I ever partied! I was your average dorm goody goody who stepped over the drunken body on the stairwell and posted Bible study fliers on my dorm door, thinking that somehow the clip art and fancy typology would entice people to follow Jesus.

But the further into InterVarsity culture I dove, the more I discovered that this God I worshiped cared a whole lot about the disenfranchised, the impoverished, the oppressed, the underdogs of society. This sexy Jesus who sounded more like a radical socialist who wanted freedom and equality for all was not the one I remembered learning about in youth group. I was sold. This would be my dream.

Goodbye writing, painting, music, dancing…

Don’t get me wrong: I am not about to complete my master’s in social work for nothing. I am not having a quarter life crisis about my career choices and blaming it on my college Christian fellowship culture. (I had my quarter life crisis last year, thank you.)

But what I didn’t learn from InterVarsity that I wish I had was that this incarnational selfless sacrificial loving of the forgotten souls of society is not enough to keep you going. It looked so glamorous to be one of those InterVarsity alumni who sold all her things to help the poor, to live among the low-income neighbors, to feel the pain of the oppressed populations of our society. It was sexy for a summer in the inner city, feeding homeless people and having Bible study with alcoholics and drug addicts.

But it’s not life.

I confess that I probably sound like a burnt out social worker and I will definitely agree that I am, but the reality is that there is a missing piece of that puzzle. Saving the world may be glitz and glam but if the psychotic breakdown of Jason Russell has taught me anything, it is that there are always missing pieces.

I’m thankful for the idealistic dreamer that InterVarsity fostered in me, but I quickly realized that they developed a “me” that can’t thrive outside of their culture. How much more fulfilling would my career be if I had debrief sessions with my staff worker afterwards or was assigned reading and workshops on seeking shalom in the city!

But the real world doesn’t have the support of an extremely extroverted staff worker calling you 24/7, dragging you into the freshman dorms so you too can spread the Gospel.

And the lesson of the day was: embrace suffering.

I’d hate to break it to you, but if you embrace suffering 40 hours a week, you’ll most likely develop secondary PTSD. I get really good medical benefits for a reason — the job is hard.

So, what I wished they had taught me when I was a young impressionable college student was this: you can glorify God in your arts, you can glorify God in profitable businesses, you can glorify God in the fashion industry, you can glorify God in a career of dancing, performing, even Hollywood. You don’t have to live dirt poor and breathe ashes to be a child of God.

Because what happens is one’s attempt to live and act humbly just looks like a pompous act of holier-than-thou-because-I-can-embrace-suffering. The reality is…we are human. And there shouldn’t be guilt tied to wanting some comfort in life, some stability, and some relaxation.

Alas, I still think my years with InterVarsity were the best years ever. Because I wasn’t disillusioned and I was a part of a passionate cause. I just wish the transition into the real world weren’t so jarring.

 

 

*disclaimer: the title of this entry is considered a hyperbole (for my English nerds out there)

Twenty Somethings

I recently caught myself saying, “That’s so millennial” about someone who isn’t in their mid-twenties but is apparently stuck in a place where they don’t know what to do with their life, they cannot finish a project they started and they are trying to pursue ten thousands of dreams all at once.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Millenial.

mil·lenni·al (-l) adj. referring to people born in the 80s, also known as Generation Y or the Facebook Generation.

The Millennials are those who happened to graduate from college when the economy was sucking, thus they are stuck at home with their parents. They spend most of their time on some form of social media, be it Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, you name it. They think in hashtags, haven’t really figured out what to do with their life and for the most part, dream of traveling aimlessly and living the life of a successful blogger.

Times are changing.

We are not settling down at 22 years of age, having our first baby at 25, making six figures and buying homes. We’re moving overseas, documenting most of our lives in iPhone photos, and spending countless hours pinning things on Pinterest.

In fact, we look more like this:

• They are the most ethnically and racially diverse cohort of youth in the nation’s history. Among those ages 13 to 29: 18.5% are Hispanic; 14.2% are black; 4.3% are Asian; 3.2% are mixed race or other; and 59.8%, a record low, are white.
• They are starting out as the most politically progressive age group in modern history. In the 2008 election, Millennials voted for Barack Obama over John McCain by 66%-32%, while adults ages 30 and over split their votes 50%-49%. In the four decades since the development of Election Day exit polling, this is the largest gap ever seen in a presidential election between the votes of those under and over age 30.
• They are the first generation in human history who regard behaviors like tweeting and texting, along with websites like Facebook, YouTube, Google and Wikipedia, not as astonishing innovations of the digital era, but as everyday parts of their social lives and their search for understanding.
• They are the least religiously observant youths since survey research began charting religious behavior.
• They are more inclined toward trust in institutions than were either of their two predecessor generations — Gen Xers (who are now ages 30 to 45) and Baby Boomers (now ages 46 to 64) when they were coming of age.

(source: pewresearch.org)

So, cheers to the Millennials, there is nothing wrong with you. You might still be figuring out how the hell you’re going to make it in this world, when you will actually leave your parents’ home or quit renting and buy a home. But the reality is, you are young. So here is your anthem: