Until the next like

It’s time for some boredom, sweaters and coffees with hearts in the feed. In our day we used to laugh at the cologne ads on TV at Christmas, but that was a Russian slipper compared to today’s saturation on the net. I know I’m being an old fuddy-duddy, but that’s not how summers used to be. We went back to school, to class or to work, almost always more tanned and with the mystery of our destiny during the summer months. And that arrival was exciting, and somehow compensated for the sadness of that time enjoyed but now almost forgotten. The excitement of telling each other where we had been and what we had done. The beach, the grandparents’ village, the campsite… and lots of anecdotes. There weren’t even photos on the cell phone to prove that it had been real. There wasn’t even a cell phone. But our smiles said it all. When I was a kid, a few days after returning from vacation we would put the slide projector in the living room and sit down to look at all the pictures from the trip. It was the icing on the cake. For a while we would go back to those places, remember the smells, the sensations, the anecdotes… and that was the end of our trip. Sharing it in our intimacy. There is a very trite phrase that, paradoxically, infuencers love to post on Instagram with emoticons of rainbows and hearts: “Life is what happens while you are making plans”. Well, summer is what happens while you are choosing selfies.
But I think it was Pablo Iglesias who also said a few years ago: if you’re not in the picture, you’re not there. We started with influencers showing us their jumps from their rented boat, their noisy dinners at Beso, their legs covered in suntan oil… Well, that’s their job. They’re products that work to sell other products. It doesn’t even shock me anymore. What’s horrifying is our need to emulate them, without realizing that all we get out of it is overexposure, wasting real and valuable time, putting our children at risk and begging for likes to feel complete. The limits of the aspirational have been diluted in such a way that even people who find it difficult to save during the year, and there are more and more of them, are ‘forced’ to show a more than perfect vacation, better than the neighbor’s, more upscale than those of the parents of their children’s friends. Is it really worth losing time so valuable and so desired by those who cannot have it to give it to Pepito or Menganito? Stick your feet in the warm sand, enjoy your portion of calamari, listen to your new Spotify playlist, tickle your children, drink a freshly squeezed orange juice, refresh yourself in a natural spring, take advantage of the air conditioning in the museum you’ve been dying to see, make love at nap time, remember the greatest hits of Boom 8 at the town festivities, teach your nephews to make bracelets with daisies. Do whatever the hell you want. But don’t tell me about it on social media. Don’t spend the day taking pictures and putting filters and discussing which one you look better in. Summer is too short. Life is too short.