Now and Then

The challenges of aging: On Facebook and beyond

Over the past several weeks, months, and years, I’ve checked Facebook with annoying frequency to see how much fun other people –- friends, acquaintances, and faux-friends I don’t even know –- are having. While I know that surfing Facebook, constantly checking my email, or revisiting the latest bad news out of Washington, DC are merely ways of distracting myself from my own boredom, ennui, or sadness, I haven’t been able to wean myself from my iPhone and laptop, and the various forms of escape they provide.

Back in 2018, a new trend popped up, the “Facebook aging challenge.” This involved posting one’s first profile picture, or another photo from 2008, and then following it up with one from 2018; a view of what the poster looked like then and now. As I scrolled through my feed more and more of my friends seemed to be playing along. Conveniently, many had headshots, which featured them in ’08 and ’18 in similar poses –- smiling, upbeat, and blissed out, as if they’d just figured out the meaning of life, had really good sex, or both.

Most of the posters –- including several real-life, as opposed to Facebook-only friends, had barely aged over the past decade. Perhaps it helped that they were already bald, so that viewers couldn’t trace a receding hairline on their scalps, as they could on mine. Still, I felt a twinge of jealousy at my friends who seemed to have mastered the aging process, and who were successfully holding their own.

As I considered their pictures vs my own, I realized that these men were a decade younger than me; I’d seen their passage from 40 to 50, while my Facebook pics went from 50 to 60, when one is definitely on life’s downhill ride.

Looking at my friends’ postings struck a nerve, because I’d been going through old photos, searching for pictures to include in a memoir that came out in late 2019. As I scanned photos from 20 or 25 years earlier, when I was a “child” of 35 or 40, I was struck by my youthfulness, my full head of hair, my unlined face. Jumping forward, I came across pictures from 2004, when I was a young-ish 47. Then there…

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