What I learned hate reading blogs

I stay off social media for a lot of reasons, but the biggest one is that it makes me unhappy. I’m not good at refraining from judging my real life against the highlight reels of others.

But I will admit that I do read the occasional blog that pushes some of the same buttons (in me) that social media would – blogs by very successful people that write like they have it all figured out. At a certain point I was kind of “hate reading” those blogs, but eventually, as I tried to answer the question for myself of why I kept them in my RSS feed, I started engaging with them with curiosity. Surely I wasn’t just a straight up masochist. There must be a reason I was still following some of these people, even though their posts generally irritated me, or left me feeling wanting (usually both).

So I kept reading them, trying to remain curious as to why they rubbed me the wrong way. A lot of times I landed on their inability (or unwillingness) to incorporate their privilege into the narrative they were presenting. A couple bloggers would use the word every once in a while (usually in the personal finance skewed spaces) but it never felt meaningful, or enough. And I chalked that frustration with them in general to the absence of privilege recognition in their spaces, and my OWN guilt about my inability or unwillingness to tackle my own privilege regularly here. You know what they say, we hate the most in others that which we hate in ourselves (there is a more elegant way to say that), so I figured I was annoyed by them because I was really annoyed at myself. It didn’t help me to do much about it in my own space, so I should have just stopped reading, but I never did.

Now I think I had something more to learn from these bloggers, and I kept hate reading them because subconsciously I realized all the pertinent lessons had not been learned.

Because what I’m realizing now, all these years later, is that I don’t actually want the lives these people are living. I feel like I am SUPPOSED to want their lives. Their blog spaces certainly present their life as an ideal. You can have enough money no matter how much you make! You can do everything in every sphere of your life, and do it well! You can excel professionally and as a parent! You can lean in! TO EVERYTHING! You can always feel like you have enough time, and energy, and money, for everything you want to do in life. These are enticing claims, even when they are made only subtly (or not so subtly). I think I kept reading because it seemed like they were happier than I was, and I wanted some of that happiness too.

But I’m realizing that these women live lives that would never make me happy. I recognized early on that I didn’t want some of these women’s lives. But I did WANT to want them. I wanted to be the kind of person that could be happy in these scenarios, because if I could be then I would just be able to follow their advice and find myself where they are (and only my immense privilege would make that possible). I mean I was never going to make the money some of these people (or their husbands) made, but I knew I could make enough to have a version of their reality. And our culture definitely suggests (if not out right declares) that I SHOULD want their realities, so I guess it’s not surprising I thought I did.

What took me so long to recognize is that I don’t actually want what they have. I would not be happy optimizing every cent I make, or every minute of every day. I am just not that kind of person. Some people are happy doing that (this post is not meant to suggest that these women are not happy living their lives, only that I would not be happy living their lives), I just don’t have the disposition to enjoy that myself.

AND THAT IS OKAY!

And you know why I finally realized that?

For one, I think I’m finally pretty happy in my own life. It’s certainly not perfect and there are plenty of nights where I lie awake in bed and wonder what I was thinking. (So many nights when I lie awake in bed these days – curse you perimenopause!) But enough is working well that I can recognize that there isn’t much I could hope to be going better (minus, well, pretty much everything in the news, of course). I’m making enough money and I don’t hate my job. I’m happy enough in my marriage. I feel like I’m doing a decent enough job as a parent. I have friends! Who care about me! I’m relatively healthy (perimenopause problems aside) and injury free. My ADHD is effectively medicated. I’m doing pretty good.

So yeah, finding happiness in my own life definitely helped me realize I wouldn’t be happy living theirs. But it was something else that helped me actually recognize that.

What happened was, these bloggers started to show a little vulnerability. It has never been much, just a little one-off sentence here or there about feeling run down or overwhelmed. It was never the topic of a post, always just an aside to an otherwise positive diatribe. But I saw those little glimpses of authenticity. I perceived the possible exhaustion that might be lurking behind a relatively benign declaration of frustration. I admitted to myself a simple truth, that things really weren’t going as well as they made it seem, or at the very least, I would not think they were going all that well if I were living their lives.

And think that is the point of it. These women are probably very happy living their lives. I don’t actually think people can paint such a complete picture of success when they don’t actually feel successful (not for many, many years and hundreds of verbose blog posts). I just know that *I* would NOT be happy living their lives. That is not the kind of person I am.

Maybe I am just content enough to recognize what was obvious to others all along. Maybe they have been dropping tidbits of vulnerability the whole time and I just never noticed because I was so overwhelmed myself that those small suggestions of imperfection were too small for me to perceive. I mean I always knew that these women curate their lives to support a narrative, I guess I just didn’t understand what the discontent underneath might look like. Maybe I needed to be “happy” myself, and see how the daily frustrations of life can coexist with that happiness, for me to understand how it might in these bloggers lives.

So I maybe it is all about being happier myself. Or maybe they are offering a little more authenticity. Who knows. All I know is that I’m glad I kept reading them, because now I feel absolutely sure that striving for their lives would not make me happy. It would probably make me miserable.

So I can let that all go. And I keep reading them, and continue to bring curiosity to the experience. It really does take all kinds! And that’s okay.