You Were an Awful Person On Facebook Five Years Ago, And That’s Okay

If you’re young and tech-savvy, I have horrible and excellent news: five years ago, you were probably an awful person.

And you can check (you may well have already). Thanks to Facebook, every fleeting thought that graced the green pastures of your adolescent brain and danced across your keyboard is immortalised. Usually with no likes. Each poorly thought out, politically illiterate tweet you hamfistedly hammered out at Twitter’s inception sits like a slowly festering sore on the vast body of human correspondence. They are laid bare in their thousands.

This kind of begrudging retrospective is well-known for being cringe-inducing. When I initially pitched the story, Junkee’s Editor-in-Chief Steph Harmon loved the idea, on the condition that I didn’t use examples of hers. It’s an appreciable sentiment, which is why I used examples from Junkee’s Assistant Editor, Alex McKinnon, instead.

This brilliant, extensive digital archive raises all sorts of terrifying questions about how far back people can look if you enter politics. Or (as in Steph and Alex’s case) journalism. Or just dating.

It’s as true of me as anyone else — though don’t bother looking, I deleted 2008 me as quickly as Facebook and Twitter could rebuild him. And I regret that. It’s certainly not because the content was precious; my feeds were embarrasingly shallow, grossly offensive and reeked of privilege.

I very stupidly dressed as a Nazi and posted regularly to an obnoxious, basic blog. I lauded Dexter as the world’s finest television. I too-generously idolised Stephen Fry. And while few people obnoxiously demonstrate critical oversight to the extent that I did, the effect is always similar looking back.

I regret deleting my old self because it is part of a broader fabric of old selves. The people whom I admire, and have on Facebook, were saying the same vapid rubbish at eighteen that I was. Five years ago, everybody sucked.

Everyone has posted something dumb and snarky about Facebook, everyone has posted something dumb and snarky about the weather, and everyone has posted something dumb and snarky about their high school results. Everyone has a favourite pop culture artefact for no-context quotations — my go-to was David Bowie, occasionally Inception, as well as every fucking play or musical I was ever in ever and even that awful Will Smith film, Hitch, once.

At times, you’ll want to kick yourself for saying you were in love, and you’ll want to kick yourself even harder for saying you were alone. There will be at least one pun to be ashamed of. You probably riffed on emergent memes, or trashed Twilight.

It is always unpleasant to watch someone grow their hair out, and I’m now convinced that everyone is constantly lying when they claim they can dress themselves. Very few people have devised a worthwhile use for the Facebook “notes” function. Everyone has moaned about holidays. Everyone did that solipsistic thing where they’d treat their Facebook name like the start of the sentence and write in the third person. Everyone has butchered Descartes and existentially posted a solitary “is”.

Adolescence has always been ugly. And because a very special generation has come stumbling into adulthood at approximately the same time that technology did, social media means, for we happy few, that we can watch it unfold again, and again, in excruciatingly slow motion.

One of the most thoughtful feminists I know, in 2008, made light of a friend’s “rape face”. The man now deploring hipster beard-dom sported an off-trend 2009 moustache. Staunch greenies flaunted conservative politics.

And it’s okay.

If you ever see a self-righteous seventeen-year-old shouting a badly spelled defence of the Beatles, fully believing that they are the final bastion of good taste in music of their generation, have patience. To look back at yourself, five years in the past, is to be made vulnerable, and to feel more than a little human.

It’s why arguments about what Joe Hockey said during his career in student politics are uncompelling – if you haven’t changed your mind or how you act in decades, then you’ve probably wasted your time. That’s not to say that it’s always change for the good, but if looking back hurts, it’s because you know better.

Tentatively look. And please don’t doctor your previous self. Though I say so fully in the comfort of knowing that the worst of shitty past-me is gone, and that you may well be vanishing shitty past-you as we speak.

Don’t be so hard on yourself.

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Patrick Morrow is the President of the Sydney University Dramatic Society, a director of the 2014 Arts Revue, and nominally studies Media and Communications. He wields a crude and mostly illiterate opinion on many things.