In an effort to avoid my adult responsibilities of laundry and dishes and all the life things, I scrolled. Tossing my life into the vortex time suck that is oh so normal. I sat on my bathroom floor, admiring my clean toilet and scrolled through my social media feed mindlessly. Then I stopped mid upward swipe. A dear friend had posted a “prayers to the X family…my heart is broken” post. 

I’m not generally super nosy but I was avoiding writing and justifying it by telling myself I wasn’t yet inspired. The name of the family wasn’t familiar to me so I did a quick search for it. 

When I clicked on the man’s profile, I wasn’t prepared to feel. I mean, I really wasn’t prepared to be slammed in the chest with the massive weight of his last social media post. 

I’ve never met this man. I don’t know him and his life doesn’t outwardly entwine with mine. As I stared at his last post, a photo of him and a toddler, beaming huge lit up smiles, I got a throat lump. The little boy was his son. The post was his last. The last piece of him alive in the digital world. It was four hours old. 

The comments were alive with people posting farewells to him. Rather than watch the live heartbreak I decided to scroll a bit. 

His previous post a day before was a quote about letting go, change and moving on. 

I’ve thought about this subject more than I can relay. I even dedicated a chapter to it in my book. It taps at the back of my mind in a muffled but constant reminder. We love fragile lives without really acknowledging the preciousness much. We are so plugged in these days that we don’t think of the impact of what we post or share or do online. 

We scroll and type and comment with no thought to the impression all of that activity leaves in our absence. We’re plastering our thoughts and food and photos about life as if no one will ever scroll through our wall or page or blog when we’re gone. 

If what you last posted to social media were to be your last mark on the world, would you still post it? Would you write that opinion or share that meme? Not to pull this to the land of heavy and dark, but would you lash out in a comments section or troll a stranger? If all that was ever left of you was your digital footprint, would you still take the steps you take daily? 

I share a lot on social media. I have a daily digital dilly dally of sorts. It’s not always purposeful or meaningful, and it’s not always something I’d like to be known for all time. I like to share. I like to write. It’s like an open journal for me. A way to store bits of myself in some everlasting cloud. A form of immortality. Maybe, just maybe, my children will be able to scroll through my thoughts someday. Maybe, even I will, to remember all the things I felt were important enough to put on blast. 

The young man who passed away will forever have his last words be that he loved his son. I’m not so obsessed with death as to consider everything I write or share may be my last interaction with the world. But, I do think about it before I take a quiz to see what kind of potato I am. I think about it before I write a rant about an unpleasant interaction. I think about it when I have had my phone to my face for way longer than I would allow my kids to have screen time. 

It’s not grandiose to offer that we are building a legacy with each digital interaction. Each word, share and post is a tiny piece of a social self we save for the long haul. 

Our social mask becomes an indelible identity when we’re no longer around to tend and cultivate it. Are we curating the selves we really want to be remembered as?