What we can’t measure: a reminder about being authentic

Amanda's Approach

We don't have a measuring stick for being human, but sometimes we still try to size it all up. We unfold our yellow rulers to compare Friday night plans with Sunday brunches like inches with yards.

We try to make our lives look the best, cutest, most successful or filled with the wittiest conversations. We keep score and calculate the results. We search for more ways to measure ourselves and be better than the next girl or guy.

But, what we're really searching for - why we keep checking our inbox, why we post that photo, why we click and tweet and scroll - isn't something we can tally. Unlike the profiles and photos and snippets of ideas at our fingertips, real life isn't based on approval from an unnamed group of onlookers. Real life is three-dimensional. Real people are flawed and messy. Real friendships are developed over time, on a one-to-one basis, made with a dash of vulnerability.

This all hit me hard when I was out to dinner with a friend last week. We were waiting idly for our table, which is opportune time for phone-checking. Then, suddenly, both of our screens went blank. "Eeek" covered our faces. But once we let it go, this no-phone dinner turned into the best meal I've had in awhile. Mostly because no one knew about it. Our side of sweet potato fries was made that much sweeter when we didn't depend on Snapchat to show it off. Our chatter was beautifully and accidentally off-limits. And we loved it.

It worries me that this is a rare thing in our generation. I worry we will tell our grandchildren about the pivotal moment authenticity was fading fast and we didn't fight for it. We didn't even think twice, we just kept scrolling.

We are known for being connected, but we sometimes forget to look people in the eyes. We're known for our fast fingers, but have no sense of urgency when it comes to meaningful conversation. We're known for being attached to our screens, but we often close out of apps feeling detached and alone. That's not something I needed to research; I see it everyday. We give up authenticity for fake connectivity every single day. It happens when we keep looking down instead of looking up.

This can't be our generation's rallying cry. We can't be the ones who know all of the trending hashtags, but don't know their neighbor. We can't be the ones who judge each other by likes, favorites and mentions.

The danger of using social media as our measuring stick is that we don't see it all. We see the greatest possible, unrealistic, half-truth version of other peoples' lives; we see their ski trips and their favorite outfit and their fancy dinners. We don't see the fight over dishes, the pile of clothes on the floor. I like what Shauna Niequist, one of my favorite writers, says about this.

"Our envy buttons also get pushed because we rarely check Facebook when we're having our own peak experiences. We check it when we're bored and when we're lonely, and it intensifies that boredom and loneliness," she says.

Sound familiar? When we track our worth by what we see on our phones, we don't seem to measure up. But ah, when we go offline, we can be our ourselves. We can be human, not just images and we can embrace our flaws without filtering. And we don't have to submit daily anecdotes to the numeric approval of our followers.

We don't have a measuring stick for being human, but if we did, we would all need conversion calculators. Because there's no universal metric, no combination of notifications to solve for x to find what makes real human interaction so great. And that's the beauty of it. The beauty of our most authentic moments, the thing that keeps them sacred, is we can't tangibly compare one to another. Sure, we can swap shoe sizes, salaries, GPAs, exercise habits and relationship statuses. We can compare how many likes our Throwback Thursday photos get. But we can't compare or rank the wholeness of one human's story as easily. And why would you want to?

I'd like to hide some things from the measuring stick. Like the look of full attention on another person's face at the end of a long day. The check is paid, but no one's leaving. That night with the belly laughs and made-up board games and too many shots of bourbon. When we said the same word at the same time. There's eye contact and just-because smiles that we don't have to label using punctuation marks or tiny yellow emojis. This is what we crave, isn't it? This is being human without serving it up to highest amount of likes. There's no finite rubric for these moments, which means no one gets a perfect score and, for at least a little while, no one needs to keep track.

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