Royal

After the contract work gets sent to the editor, it's easy to feel jobless. Here I am, on a Wednesday, sitting on the couch with the cat napping beside, not making a cent. I'm 27 and have more grey hairs than retirement dollars. I think I feel my ovaries withering.

So it's easy to fire up the laptop, and instead of writing anything of substance, simply open up my social media platform du jour, and take a consensual peek at the lives of others. Girls from high school are now women with husbands and children. They are teaching or have important jobs in the private sector. Friends from school are creating more art then you or I while curating impossibly clean offbeat homes full of meaningful treasure gleaned from trips to little known locales on faraway continents. 

But my life looks pretty good up there, too. The flattering photos, the clever updates. We love reality TV, but we're not letting anyone in that far. We lionize artists like Nan Goldin and Charles Bukowski, who wrench brutal and intimate work from their cracked existences, but despite the publishing technology at our fingertips, we seem to be saying "screw art or anything approaching honesty" and advertising instead. Why?

Lorde enjoys top-of the-charts popularity for singing that “we’ll never be royals/It’s not in our blood,” because enough people identify and sing along. But it isn’t hard for any of us to generate the illusion of a following with social media and blogging's DIY tabloid platforms. With unemployment through the roof, is control over our internet profile avatars filling that void of self-determination?

There's nothing wrong with projecting what you'd like to see. But could that be interfering with realistic expectations that we have for our lives?