PERFECTION AND PINTEREST

My imperfect photo of our vacation.
Not portfolio quality, but it brings back happy memories.

    I like Pinterest as much as the next person. It has a lot of good ideas and a lot of neat tricks. It has also introduced me to a lot of great blogs that I otherwise would not have discovered. But like so many other things in our culture, I also think it's partially successful because it preys on our insecurities.

   Pinterest  posts mostly fall in two broad categories. First are do it yourself pictures. These feature a lot of cute tricks, such a 101 uses of coconut oil. Common tags are along the lines of, "Why didn't I think of that?" or "I feel dumb not realizing this all this time." There are also a lot of homemade alternatives to store bought items, and the comments run along the same lines.

Now, while I appreciate saving money and making things homemade, I really don't have time to make board games at home and make all my furniture from refurbished items at a yard sale. Most of my toys are store bought as is my furniture.

Another type of picture found on Pinterest are pictures of people's dream homes, dream vacations, dream clothes, hair, and husbands. This type of visual exploitation is similar to ones found in a lot of advertising and catalog
s. The coffee commercial in the immaculate quiet house, the plain white dishes in a charming country home.

These graphics showcase a level of lifestyle perfection that is unrealistic as the airbrushed cover model we criticize so often.

I don't mean to pick on the site. I actually do like it a lot. But we have to constantly remind ourselves that we are being manipulated into wanting our lifestyle to be so unrealistically perfect. It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact. We can fight against this buy educating ourselves and our kids using on visual literacy.

Part of this is limiting what we are exposed to, such as tossing all those catalogs we get in the mail :) And part of it actively telling ourselves that the images we see are being used to get us to buy products.

When I started this blog (which I am so bad at updating), I want to focus on constant improvements in my life, but I think I was focusing too much getting to some unrealistic domestic utopia. I do want to make sure I raise healthy happy successful kids, but does doing that mean my house needs to be a manifestation of Mother Jones meets Southern Living? Probably not.

I am not throwing in the towel on my goals, but I am going to change how I approach these goals. My new approach is simplicity and contentment. And I'll try to share any tips I get on how to do that.