Did some thinking this morning about what I want to do here, in my morning pages writing (a practice I’ve found to be valuable; I should write about that sometime). I was trying to understand a justification, a why, for this urge to write more personally and at more length. And the old “who cares what you had for lunch?” question came to mind.

One effect of that attitude was to dismissively discourage people from sharing anything mundane or non-fabulous. And another, further effect is the tendency to only post the good stuff, the living-my-best-life stuff. The artfully composed and beautifully filtered Instagram pictures of an amazing lunch. Now you’ve answered the question of who cares about what you had for lunch, because look at it, it’s a masterpiece!

But then people do look at it, among the dozens of other jealousy-inducing pictures of fantastic meals in their feed. And maybe they start feeling a little bad about their own plain, non-amazing meals. Which they’re certainly not going to share on social media now, it would be embarrassing. Next week, on vacation in Hawaii, there might be an Instagram-worthy lunch, but not today.

So the tendency drives what’s published to ever more rarified heights, while also keeping people from sharing their more genuine lives. But on the other hand, would I follow a random person who posted boring pictures of uninteresting lunches? No, probably not. It’s no strategy to increase social media “engagement” or grow followers or go viral, that’s for sure. But why do those have to always be everyone’s goals?

Because what I realized is that I would like to see my friends, the people I actually know, post more about their lives. Not every meal, not even every lunch, but the occasional boring, mundane glimpse would be great.