Transcript

The 'Like' Generation | Mikela Fenech Pace | TEDxUniversityofMalta

I'd like to start by asking you to raise your hands to the following question. How many of you in this room are on social media? So on Facebook, Instagram, Etsy. Well, practically all of us. I could possibly ask you to go home and follow it on the internet, but we, you know, you're probably more comfortable sitting at your seats. Now, you know, Facebook is an interesting phenomenon and social media is an interesting phenomenon. And for me, the hardest part is choosing one's Facebook profile picture. In fact, hilariously enough, my husband only decided a week ago to open his Facebook account. And I didn't know he had so many friends. He got about 365 friend requests in a week. But he made one mistake. he didn't choose his profile picture. And so, you know, his friends concluded two things. One, it's a fake profile because he would never be on social media. And secondly, they started posting photos of him for people to know it's actually him, right? But it does take us quite a while. No, it took me quite a while. You know, which side is best? My nose looks good on this side. It doesn't look good on that side, etc. And then you post your Facebook profile picture or any other social media app and all of a sudden you wait and you wait and you wait for those likes and those little notifications that come up and you go, "Oh, I have one like and two likes and five likes and seven likes." We all like likes, don't we? And this is the beauty of social media. It's instantaneous. It's immediate. You immediately know when someone likes a picture and even when someone doesn't because they haven't liked it. Or is even worse they comment and usually it's very nice pick. This pick is great in a frame and then the one I could never understand is xxx. So there you have it. I commented I saw it. I commented but it's just xxx whatever that means. Right? So you probably you know throughout this evening you probably have at one stage reached for your phones because you know our hands have a bit of a life of their own. you know, you're sitting in a lecture or you're sitting in Mars and you just slide down and pick up your phone to check and many of you probably have indicated to all your friends that, you know, we're here at TEDex, we're at university and you probably liked the posts on Facebook. We all do it. I do it, right? It's a bit, you know, and so one wonders when I look at this, how did we used to communicate? So, by now you've probably made out that I'm probably the eldest of all of the speakers. I'm 40. So, the big 40 hit them last year. And I didn't grow up in the social media revolution. We were we just wrote. And what did we used to do? So recently I was clearing my mother's house. She called me. She's moving house. And I have all these, you know, books and papers and my rubbish from when I was younger, which I never took with me. And it was a pile and a pile of letters, lots of letters that we used to write amongst friends because in my days life was very, very compartmentalized. Now I sound very old, but it's true. school was school and your friends remained at school and you never really communicated with them unless you snuck up to your parents' bedroom and you was the only phone in the house and then your father's hollering downstairs and saying get off the phone because you know occupying the phone and then you would talk to them very very briefly but you would write and we would write letters so we'd write two or three a night pages and pages of analysis but you had one person who was an audience not the whole world not all your friends right and then what else did we used to do we used to write diaries and then we used to have pen friends. And not only that, but we spend hours lying on our bed with our little cassette recorder going play, stop, right, play, stop, write, rewind. I mean, the rewind button doesn't even exist today. You just jump songs and we would transcribe songs and that's exactly what we used to do for days on end, right? And then we would exchange songs. So your music trip 21 in my days is today Spotify, right? So this is exactly what we used to do. And social media has always fascinated me. It's fascinated me because people are connected, you know. But what's fascinated me even more is how much people put off their lives on social media. And if we ever stop to think that besides funeral announcements and deaths, you don't really find anything else. Okay, apart from the news and, you know, sharing enduring stories, etc., but people's lives, they don't put anything but positive things. you know, it's how much I love my husband because he got me flowers and how great my kids are and we've just had Mother's Day and it's I love mom and I love mom and my mom is great, etc. So, it's all positive, positive, positive. So, I've come to conclude and I see it all the time, even in my job now as an HR manager, that we're living in a world of validation. It's what I like to call we're the like generation. And you know my generation is also the like generation although we came in a little bit late because ironically the roles of parents and children have kind of flipped. Our children know more about social media than we do. They teach us. So my kids know more about social media than I do but I have to in some sense parent them about social media. It's quite a strange situation to be in. And if you look at work for example I meet many of the younger generation they need constant validation. So when we used to work, we knew we were doing a good job somehow because nobody told us we were doing a bad job. But today, the younger generation expect to be told, "You're doing a good job." The client said, you know, great, well done. That email was good. The report was fine, right? And so unfortunately, what happens is that it creates a sense of neediness, a constant need to be liked, a constant need to be told that you're doing good, right? And I this reminds me of a a little story. So when I was pregnant with my first child, I visited mother care one Saturday afternoon and sort of packed picked up a couple of baby grows and I was with my sister who had a young child and on our way out this, you know, mother with a young two-year-old and the two-year-old literally threw the mother of all tantrums, shouting, screaming, pulling down clothes, etc. Now for any mother, that's a practically normal scene, you know, daily if not weekly. That's fine. But as happens and not just in Malta but everywhere, you know, the crowd created a semicircle around the scene. You know, it's like a dog fight. The mother was mortified. She went completely green. Didn't know what to do. What does she do? Give in to the child? Well, can you imagine if she gave in to the child or leave the child alone? Either way, she was going to get some criticism, right? And my sister turned around to me and said, "You know what? Walk away. In a couple of months, you're going to be that mother." And it's true. I was that mother in a few months time. Because the truth is, no matter how great we think our children are and no matter how fantastic we would like them to be, they all throw tantrums and they all answer back and they're all rude at times and they're all naughty at times and you can't really control that, can you? So, the biggest issue is, and the reason why I'm telling you this is because ultimately we're all human and the humans that we see or perceive to see on social media are just a slice of reality. It's just a snapshot. And you know, even if you go to the most boring party, you can make it look fun on social media. So, you know, for all the FOMOs out there, every time you look at a picture of social media of people really having a great time at a party, the chances are they didn't have as much as a great time as you're thinking, you know, but you can like their picture if you like because it's the thing to do. They get offended if you don't. And so, really and truly, this is exactly what my message is to you today. That slice of reality that we're pitting ourselves towards is really just a piece of reality. And behind that, we're all 100% human. And we have our highs and we have our lows. We have our disappointments. We have our difficult moments. And those difficult moments, those tantrums, you don't see them on social media. So, I'm hardly going to write that my husband really upset me because he forgot my birthday or he didn't get me the present that I wanted or that my child is driving me completely nuts and I want to disappear for 5 days so I don't hear, "Ma, ma, ma, mommy, ma, ma." You know, because that's what children do. And it's true, you know. So, it's always amazed me how some mothers say, "Oh my god, my child went to school and you know what? I'm really missing them." And I think, "Am I normal?" Because actually, I can't wait for them to wake up. And you know, when summer comes, it's like, "Ah, oh god, three months of absolute hell because you know they're with you all the time." And you have no idea when you're going to get rid of them next. And you're thinking normal. I mean, that's normal, right? And so all of a sudden you know slowly slowly you realize and there were many many times in my life that I have you know questioned myself as a wife as a mother you know as as a career woman can I find a balance and a balance is very very difficult in fact I don't think the word balance in life really actually exists because you cannot do everything right and you cannot really ever find that balance so you're always thinking ah I could do more here yes but then you know these suffer and I could do more there and you know then my mother calls my children orphans and it's okay you know and on and on and on and on and the truth is many people have asked me you know how do you cope and the truth is I don't cope and it's okay not to cope it's just very okay not to cope and you get to the end of your day and you think ah another day gone by and it's okay I got to the end of the day the sun rises tomorrow morning and then the next day you do exactly the same thing and you know the most frustrating things about school is that you have to go to school and see mothers talking to their children very very very sweetly okay my dear okay my dear and I'm thinking to myself is it very normal because you know after the 20th ma I want this and ma I want that you just want to scream you know so ultimately this is exactly what social media gives us like we're trying to be people we're not and maybe it's just subconscious the tragedy is that very often the facade we misinterpret to be an actual reality which is in fact not a 100% % reality and our reality checks come a little bit later. You know when you do experience difficulties in life that actually bring you down to earth with a thump and say ah now that's reality and the truth is you don't find your reality on Facebook or on Instagram or on Snapchat. That's a piece of it which is great and it's fun and it's amusing but it also can make us feel very very inadequate. And therefore it's important at some stage in our life to find those reality checks. And you know my real I've had various reality checks over the course of of my life. And probably the worst reality check I had was last year when my father passed away with cancer. Now that's a big reality check. The last thing you feel like doing is looking at social media. And so you're in a little box and you think okay this is life. You know the pain is raw and it hurts. It physically physically hurts. And then also, you know, throughout my career, the Libya crisis. The Libya crisis I'm passionate about because it was just an amazing year and a half of our lives. We were completely locked away from the world. Maybe possibly in the first two weeks, we evacuated 21,000 people racing for their lives. Literally, they couldn't come by air. They had to come by sea. They left everything behind. And that's when you realize, and one of the TED talks that we heard earlier on, know that relationships really matter at the end of the day. And this is it. relationships do matter and not relationships that you build up just on Facebook on just on Instagram but real true physical relationships, people relationships and you know when you see a little Libyan child at the age of 13 with a rocket propelled grenades blown up in her chest and you know fighting for her life coming to Malta very far from Tripoli and passing away or a plane full of you know Libyan fighters coming to Malta and they weren't going to make the night and then that's a big reality check. So my big message to you is one, dig deep and find your passions. Everything in life happens for a reason. Everything. Sometimes when you're going through it, it doesn't really make sense. So the Libby crisis were like a whirlwind. But I met Jackie and out of Jackie came a book. So I never thought I was going to be an author. Far from it. I don't think I consider myself an author to today. But it just created a story and that story had to be written. And she asked me to write it. And then I did it. And so like the speakers before me, you dig deep and find your passions. And yes, enjoy social media, enjoy tagging, enjoy poking fun at people, enjoy commenting. Yes, but always remember one thing that ultimately behind that photo there's a real human being. And actually the most important like of your life is your like. The rest will come later. Thank you.