“The internet doesn’t have the patience for unhappiness”

“When You Can’t Be the Person The Internet Wants You to Be,” Felicia Sullivan in her Love.Life.Eat blog (2/19/16):

Online, you can’t be a trainwreck but you can’t project perfection either — lest you be deemed inauthentic, a “fake”. You can’t be too sad or too happy. You can reveal a little about your personal life but not too much, and know that people like the comeback story rather than watching you wade helplessly through the dark. They want your dark in past tense because no one wants to deal with your present or future tense sadness. They want that storyline to be played out behind the scenes, but they’ll stick around for the post-mortem. Over the past few months, a few friends have reached out to me privately to acknowledge that their sadness has also been shamed into silence — that the Internet doesn’t have the patience for unhappiness.