Comment by teleclimber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teleclimber | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article about something we should definitely be having a conversation about.

But i want to point out an anecdote: we have a newborn and we share pics of her privately with fam. All the pics are of her good moments: her first smiles, her just being cute, etc... We don't share pics or videos of her screaming her lungs out, or of her diaper explosions, which intuitively woul be weird.

Reading this article it sounds like we are doing ourselves a disservice by not sharing the bad. Like we're not being honest with ourselves or our family. But are we? isn't the point of memories to preserve the good ones? The printed photo albums my parents have of my childhood don't have any pictures of me having a meltdown. There is a saying among mothers that you forget the pain of childbirth otherwise you'd never have a second child.

I'm sure social media makes things worse by being too present in people's self esteem but I am not sure memories have to preserve the downsides of reality.

You might well be doing yourselves a disservice by not sharing the bad, but that definitely doesn't mean that Facebook is the right place for it.

Going deeper, I don't think we can just look at memories either being good or bad here. They'll all have different emotions attached that you might use to evaluate the goodness of the memory, but that goodness is going to change as soon as your perspective shifts. And keeping the unpleasant memories entirely to yourself may do more harm than good.

For example, I have memories of some truly awful experiences that left me deeply emotionally scarred; traumatised. I don't enjoy recalling those at all, but they have allowed me to protect myself and better understand my boundaries. Eventually my grip on those memories will loosen up because my survival instinct no longer depends on avoiding that experience, because I will have learned how to deal with it.

There are other memories I have that I truly cherish, but not because I call them good. I cherish them because they also amount as evidence to help me move on. I could easily go into any of those and flip them into painful memories: maybe instead of connecting with my best friend I start to think about what else could have happened. And the same with finding positive interpretations of a painful memory.

At the end of it all, I wouldn't want to reflect on my life from my death-bed and have absolutely no memory of anything I struggled with. That's usually where the beauty begins.

Interesting point. But I believe the problem relies not in the sharing but in our perception of reality based on what others have shared. I understand that it's an inevitable consequence of the first but that has been the case for centuries. The new problem is that this misperceptions are now on a massive and unprecedented scale and our brain is constantly attacked by this misperceptions.

This is exactly right. The scope of social media is greater. It's a status show where your stuff isn't just in your living room but out there for you to “show off” to the world and compare it with others. This ultimately builds our story, our culture, that's when everybody believes a particular story and leads to the madness of crowds.

To make a fair comparison you’d need to put it so that you’d be checking happy family/friend album photos every day (perhaps several times per day) from different people.

Occasional photo album watching (e.g. during Xmas) is a different story.

I post screaming crying pictures and people love it. Just like you said, they appreciate the authentic. It reminds them of their years in the same position.

Heck, Facebook has a poll option. Poll your crowd and give them what they want.

> isn't the point of memories to preserve the good ones?

ugh, no. why would it ? sad memories make you go forward as a human being, too

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