Future Tense

Please, Like My Shame

Why do we feel compelled to tweet about our most embarrassing moments?

woman phone shame.
You did WHAT and then tweeted about it!?

Wavebreakmedia Ltd/Thinkstock

I recently washed my mattress pad and began the laborious process of trying to reattach it to my bed. For the next half-hour or so, the mattress’ four corners, one of which would infallibly shrug off the fabric just as I tugged its thin white penumbra over the opposite corner, defined my world. (In my defense, I think the pad may be too small for the bed.) I was aiming for godlike mastery. Instead, muttering oaths in my cramped, un-air-conditioned sleeping quarters, I felt like the unloved bastard child of Martha Stewart and Sisyphus. When the ordeal was over, I was sweaty, breathless. I mopped my brow, pulled out my iPhone, and composed a tweet.

“There is literally nothing,” I wrote, sucking in air, “that makes me feel as incompetent as changing a mattress pad. Mattress pads are impossible. #mattresspad.”

And then I posted it. Before I did, though (and I subsequently deleted the tweet, in case you’re wondering why such brilliance isn’t available for posterity), I pondered with a kind of bovine detachment why I wanted to humiliate myself in front of the largest audience I could find. Wrestling with the mattress pad had made me feel stupid. Meanwhile, social media is a bon mot factory where you go to flaunt your coruscant wit, impeccable taste, and airbrushed confidence—it’s instagram envy and FOMO and sunsets for miles. What gave?

Do something dumb, immediately post about it: Anecdata suggest that I’m not alone in this perplexing impulse. A friend who made a cringe-y misstep involving urine (use your imagination) reported that her first instinct was to shout it all over Twitter. (She forbore.) A Slate colleague, after volunteering unbidden that she had puked midair while parasailing, agreed: “Whenever I do something embarrassing, I feel obligated to tell everyone about it,” she said, her abashed tone perhaps a function of her awareness that she was freely disclosing this chagrining habit so that I could publish it in a national magazine.

Why? Why do we compulsively expose our soft underbellies to the lacerating judgment of strangers, the pitying scorn of frenemies? “I think I’m eager to tell people my flaws because I want to make it clear that I know how lame I am—that I’m self-aware,” suggested my co-worker. Consciousness of imperfection mitigates imperfection.

But there’s another motivation here, I think, and it relates to our desire to believe that a given act of stupidity constitutes a forgivable, even charming lapse, not a social or existential disqualification. “I screwed up, I tweet about it, I want someone to reassure me I’m not an idiot,” explained the urine malefactor. We are hoping for absolution, for someone out there in the internet wilds to see our error and like or fave it, to commiserate, to decree: You are still one of us. Kathleen Smith, a therapist and mental health journalist, believes the phenomenon makes most sense in the framework of relations systems theory, which posits that people have two selves: a solid, non-negotiable inner self and a reactive self that adapts to external stimuli. The more fluid, susceptible self thrills to praise, approval, and acceptance. “Soliciting reactions, looking at other people and making adjustments to our behavior, is an automatic thing” that self does, Smith said.

I told Smith that self must be a big dodo if it believes its surest path to validation lies in presenting its every unflattering angle to the world. But she corrected me: “It’s more that sharing on social media, getting that feedback, is a way to manage anxiety.” In other words, regardless of how others respond, the act of checking in is a hardwired coping behavior, a way to steer your self-presentation after an error so that you don’t get kicked out of the pack.

We blare our failings across the web for ecological as well as psychological reasons. On social media, self-deprecation is promoted and encouraged, like overeating on a cruise ship. What’s idiotic in everyday life may—fingers crossed—register in one’s Twitter feed as human, relatable, alluring. Facebook posts about boneheaded foibles get showered in appreciative likes. Accounts like so sad today and Common White Girl have earned thousands of followers by leading with the mess.

When I first started looking into this apparently self-sabotaging behavior, I assumed it would break down along gender lines—that women would prove intimately familiar with the impulse to tar and feather themselves on social media, while men would scratch their heads and perhaps throw a banana at the wall. But it is I who must throw the shame banana, because an exactly equal number of men and women I spoke to both reported that they did this and that they did not do this. Wrote Matt Miller, a Slate science fellow, “I tweet the really embarrassing things … to just acknowledge [they] happened, so I can move on. It’s millennial confessional.” He added that posting “turns a bad experience into positive feelings (in the form of likes/favorites/retweets),” a sentiment echoed by senior editor Gabriel Roth: “I do this every time … as a form of sublimation. At least I can turn this idiotic thing into a good tweet that will earn faves and hence spin the straw of my idiocy into the solid gold of approval from strangers on the internet.”

How did we function before Twitter allowed us to hurl our sorry selves into the consolations of the digital herd like Scrooge McDuck into a swimming pool full of doubloons? Slate writer and historian Rebecca Onion once entrusted her personal ignominies to emails she’d circulate among her close friends. Heather Schwedel, a writer and editor at the magazine, said she might package minor abasements into funny anecdotes for parties but was likelier to just forget about them. (These days, Schwedel confided, it’s different. “I remember almost choking on a piece of candy and tweeting that it would have been a very dumb way to die.”) Miller, too, suggested that social media’s existence has remade his response to humiliation. In the wake of a mortifying moment, he said, he used to wrap himself in “outright denial—no, I did not just deliver my lines in the school play with my pants unzipped!”

Now, the whole world’s invited to attend the performance.

This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter.