Congratulations, Publicly

You can't just be happy for someone anymore.

“Life is a dramatically enacted thing.” - Erving Goffman

One of the worst things about the internet becoming ‘real life’ is that it’s a place where you perform conversations instead of just having them.

Not long ago I found myself explaining this to my mom. We were sitting in the car after just arriving at the grocery store in suburban Texas; she waited patiently while I texted a friend who was launching a big project that day.

I congratulated him in iMessage—heartfelt wishes, inside jokes, the whole thing. But I felt the impulse to reopen the celebration in public. I opened Twitter, found his post, hit ‘quote tweet,’ and sat there thinking about how best to perform the praise—to get the tone right, to keep it about him but still reflect well on me.

I explained all of this to my mom. That the tweet would be redundant but just as important, if not more. That supporting friends doesn’t just mean supporting them in private now.

Private praise isn’t enough anymore—it has to be followed by pe…