No Instagram, No Privacy

Summary

I somehow escaped having an Instagram account. This means that I am oblivious to all of my friends’ fun broadcasted on Instagram. I don’t feel pressured either to update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online, on where I am, what I am doing or who I am hanging out with. I feel very blessed. Still, Instagram hasn’t completely escaped me. And it bugs me. My wife and I live a pretty social life. My wife’s job required us to temporarily move to a place far away from home. Luckily the culture of the place we moved to is very friendly to foreigners and there is a big bunch of people like us who are also new to this place and eager to make new friends for the time that they are there. This makes the lines of our friend circles blurred and our social life very dynamic. To illustrate: old friends leave and new friends arrive with such regularity, that the guest list of a birthday party this year will look vastly different from the one we threw last year. Over the past few months, it has struck me multiple times how people know more about my life than I tell them or likely hear from others. Like: where we travelled last weekend and with whom. How can they know? Instagram. A post from someone else on that trip about that trip. Of course. You don’t have to be on Instagram, to be on instagram. It’s not the worst problem to have, I know. It’s great that I participate in happenings that are fun enough for other people to post about. And without social media, people also talk about common friends or friends of friends. Yet sometimes I am not sure about how I feel about other people hearing about my weekend adventures through social media of other people. Not that there is anything to hide, I just hope the message came across well. Real life interactions usually offer the possibility to be mindful of sensitivities around a certain subject, as can be the case if the topic of discussion is about who is hanging out with whom. The goal of social interactions (off...