Leaving a Legacy Via Facebook

With social media so prevalent these days, people are always telling you to be careful about which pictures you post online. It's reasonable advice. If you’re applying for a job, the employer might visit your page and see all of the hijinks you’ve been up to. Hey, they need to cover their bases. That doesn't worry me though.

What really worries me is that if you die, Facebook is the place from which people are going to gather pictures of you for all sorts of things after you're gone. Just pretend for a second that you die in a way that’s newsworthy to some degree. Where are they going for pictures of you to put on the news or put to put in the paper? Journalists aren’t calling up your family to see if they have any rolls of film laying around that they can run over to CVS and get developed, or maybe your they could save them some time and just fork over a couple of duplicates (Remember that? Remember how we used to have pictures developed and we’d get duplicates in case, God forbid, someone’s kid smudged them up with cookie hands? Man, I miss getting dupes). Nope, it's the second decade of the 21st-Century, they're hitting the interwebs my friend, and Facebook is stop numero uno (that's "number one" for you gringos).

I’m not saying you’ve got to be a saint, but maybe you don’t want to be remembered by the picture of you at your friend’s party where you're funneling a beer and giving the finger in a Hooters t-shirt while your buddy lights an illegal firework off of his cigarette in the background. That’s why you want to have some decent pictures on your social media accounts. Find a dog and take a picture with it. Stand atop a cliff with your arms crossed and your back to the camera, staring off at the horizon.  Throw on a suit for once in your life and just wander through someone’s wedding pictures. I don’t care how you go about doing it, but just get some pictures that you would be okay with at a memorial, on television, or if worse comes to worst, a wanted poster. If you wind up on one of those, things are clearly not going great, so a good picture will be a welcomed bright spot.

That’s why you need to be careful about what you post online. Sure, posting the wrong photo could cost you a job, but jobs are only temporary. I’m talking long term. I’m talking about your legacy. I doubt you want crazy keg-stands or massive bong rips to be your legacy.

Or maybe you do, in which case disregard everything I just said. 

You do you, bro.