Is social currency exhausting?

Twitter, oh the things I learn on Twitter.

I learn that many think it’s time higher education embrace Snapchat, I learn how to make beautiful images for social media, and I learn that my daughter, who’s in grade 11, wonders if there’ll ever be a day when she is not tired.

Girl, you have no idea. This is only the beginning. You will be tired for the rest of your life. This tiredness you feel, right now, is nothing compared to the tired that will settle upon your weary self in the coming years.

Grade 11 is hard. Two H’s fill your life: homework and hormones – they battle for your waning energy resources.

Grade 12 will be a new tired as you face the 3 Hs: homework, hormones, and higher education choices. The struggle will be real, more real than you think the struggle is today.

Then you’ll be a university student. You won’t remember how to spell the word, tired. Four years of uninterrupted papers, mid-terms, and finals. The demands placed upon you will be many.

You’ll think back to those high school days when you had a spare in first period, when you could sleep in on weekends, when your mom still scheduled your dentist appointments.

Then you’ll graduate with a degree and you’ll get yourself a job. Hopefully. And you’ll think back to that day in grade 11 when you told your mom, I don’t wanna spend my whole summer working. And you’ll wonder what that even meant! Imagine, not working a 40-hour week!

As an employed individual, you’ll think back to your university days, those lazy days when you had soooo much time, because as long as you got your papers in on time, and passed your exams, your life was your own. Your parents helped pay for you to live in your own place, they even helped buy groceries. Your responsibilities were to pass. Full stop.

Then you might get married.  The first little while will be idyllic – there will be two of you, two of you contributing to your subsistence, two of you to get sh*t done. And it will be so lovely, you’ll think, we should have a baby.

You never knew a tired like this tired.

Your nights will fuse into days, you won’t know if it’s 3am or 3pm.

And one day you’ll wake up and wonder where the time went.  The thing is, you’ll wake up at 2:30am – the action of your daughter sneaking into the house past her curfew woke you.

Enter new tired.

And the cycle continues.

Twenty One Pilots says it like it is:

“wish we could turn back time to the good ole’ days when our momma sang us to sleep, but now we’re stressed out.”

Here’s my point. I do have one. This isn’t just about proving to my daughter that she has no idea what level of tired she’ll reach. Being a teenager in 2016 is tough, way tougher than it was in 1986.

On top of everything we dealt with, they have the additional stress of social currency.

social currency (sōSHəl kərənsē) n.  a common term that can be understood as the entirety of actual and potential resources which arise from the presence in social networks and communities.

In other words, the number of likes, retweets, shares, reblogs, and comments on social media represent your currency, your social currency. The more you have the ‘richer’ you are.

The pressure to look amazing, do amazing things, go amazing places, eat amazing food, buy amazing shoes, and know amazing people – and document it – is omnipresent. The pressure is in their every day life. It exists in the number of likes they get on their Instagram post, the number of retweets they glean, the number of people who viewed their Snapchat story, and the number of group chats they’re in.

So yeah, it’s exhausting. Imagine the pressure to be amazing 100% of the time?

I’m an advocate of our kids on social media. Maybe they share things you wouldn’t share. But knowing what they share can only help you help them; help them navigate their way through this labyrinth they call grade 11.

Add another H to their grade 11 soup: homework, hormones, and help.