This morning I took the time to create an album on my Facebook site. As usual, it was not an easy process. Through the course of the 90 minutes it took me to achieve some semblance of success, I inadvertently tagged family members, littering their pages with entirely too much of a good thing, I twice lost my work in progress by some unintended swipe of the screen and I ultimately realized that I had already posted half of the photos in this group over a month ago within a different album.

Even with that latter memory misstep, I might have walked away from today’s endeavor giving little thought to my aging place in the world. After all, I have heard the complaints of many younger than I about the challenges of social media. No one seems to have an easy time navigating this virtual world, a world hobbled by the unchecked proliferation, planned obsolescence and proprietary obstacles underpinning all that is IT. Users are at a disadvantage and should feel proud for engaging at all. This has been my mantra.

But today’s encounter offered up something different and personal. Today’s encounter brought my advancing maturity into full relief. Today, as I carefully and diligently loaded precious images of me with mine, Facebook’s facial recognition tool wrongly identified me, and preemptively tagged me in several pics, as... my mother. Ouch.

Now I am proud that my mother, at her age, even maintains a presence in the arena of social networking. And I am the first to admit the woman sports a youthful profile pic for someone in her 90s. But my mother is also someone with whom, insensitive as this may sound, I would prefer not to be confused by any vehicle, human or otherwise, given she is 35 years my senior. “Maybe they go on facial structure,” one of my friends offered by way of solace. Maybe.

In any case, the experience gave me pause for reflection. It started me thinking about aging and identity and purpose. About how our interface with social media may shape all of these in some way, a way previous generations were spared. What are we coming to believe about ourselves as we blitz the internet? Why is the data suggesting that this frenetic connecting leaves many of us feeling more, not less, isolated? Less, not more, adequate? How do I understand my own intentions of engagement, tiny as my footprint may be, let alone offer guidance to my patients?

My mother is currently a resident in an assisted living facility in California. She moved into the place, as likely most of us will when our time comes, with grief and doubt and a hint of rage directed toward her offspring. But New Year’s marks her first anniversary in her new home and I am amazed by how well she has dug in. She is president of the resident’s association. She never misses the Monday afternoon knitting group. And she strolls through the dining room at mealtime greeting, without exception, every soul in the place, staff and diners alike. As you might guess, not all gathered are a fan of this ritual, most especially her visiting children who move right along and grab a chair to minimize the collateral damage to their sense of decorum and the triggering of their childhood memories. But, she forges on and her resilience impresses me.

It is an act of patience to engage with the other residents seated at her table. You are dealing with a population that is hard of hearing but frequently eschews their hearing aids; a population that appears relatively content in their surroundings but perseverates about how they ended up in the facility in the first place (Tales that frequently paint adult children as an ungrateful lot.); a population that has minimal recall of what and to whom they have already detailed their opinions or sufferings but who plow ahead with the telling anyway, even when enlightened to the fact; a population that is as hungry to be heard as any of us; but a population that is not, as a majority, feeding this hunger online.

When I first started joining mom for meals, I found myself only half listening to the other residents sitting at our table. Why was I dismissive? Their age? Their redundancy? The absence of editing and photo-shopping that likely falsifies the stories we’ve come to tell about ourselves on the web? Here, in this community dining room, were human beings unplugged. Stories unpolished. Faces unpainted. Here was raw and spontaneous and rambling and genuine. Greater interpersonal risk? Maybe.

I did get over my resistance. Through the visits I’ve managed the past year I’ve heard remarkable tales. A woman who survived four years in a Japanese internment camp in China. A woman who hobnobbed with local celebrities. A woman who influenced the fashion industry on two continents.(A determined and finely dressed woman who has tried her best to instill in me a sense of wardrobe and style, but to no avail.) I’ve been surprised and entertained; enlightened and humbled. In some incremental way, I’ve grown. And I’ve always walked away from these encounters feeling, well, fed.

Have I experienced any of that when logged on Facebook? On LinkedIn? On my own website? If I have, what has prompted growth, expanded my perspective, has been the clips and quotes that draw universal appeal, the clips and quotes that we like and share and post again and again. Like best-selling fiction, the images or the stories that ‘go viral’ touch something universal within us. A good film can provide that as well.

But universal and intimate are different. Public and personal are sometimes at odds. And reflecting on this dichotomy as I write now, I do not believe I’ve ever closed out of my social networking tools feeling the same depth and quality of connection that I have at times experienced with my mother’s co-residents over a shared meal. People significantly my senior. People who I barely know.

Questions of how to preserve our personal relevancy while joining in the ever expanding public domain of social media are not unique to me, or to any age group. This American Life recently aired an episode entitled, “Status Update.” Act One features three teens “describing the complex social map that is constantly changing in their phone.” Actively posting photos of themselves, and monitoring for ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ throughout the interview, these young woman explain that selfies, and the potential validation units they carry, are the primary measure they use to assess their ever-evolving place in the social hierarchy. The word they use frequently, the word that I have employed for this blog, is “relevant.” Is my face relevant? Is my status relevant? Am I relevant? Where do I stand on the ladder of popularity now? And now? And now?

How will this generation, with their escalating preoccupation with face and form and standing, cope with aging?

While it would be tempting to conclude these three are the exception, Ira Glass reminds us, and I’m paraphrasing here, that this need for external validation, and the propensity to compare, is keenly present in us all. We send out signals and then lie in wait with our radar on full power. Was my post worthy? Was my photo unique? Was my comment on point? Am I being seen? Am I being heard? Am I relevant?

Naturally we are constantly returning the favor, proportionally, I surmise, to the time we spend logged on. And when an individual maintains hundreds, even, still unbelievable to me, thousands, of contacts on a single networking tool, maintaining this never-ending validation stream can easily become a full time job. And how genuine, how reassuring, are these ‘like’ blips showing up on our screens? Am I relevant? Yes you are. Yes you are. Yes, indeed, you are.

Mental health requires a certain behavioral flexibility and emotional adaptability. And no question social media offers many benefits, or these sites simply would not have, could not have, commandeered their current place, centered, in our activities of daily living. Yet I suspect that our desire to be recognized, to count, may be proportionally denied in these venues. The larger the stage on which we yearn to be seen, the lesser visible we are likely to be. And the more our core sense of self becomes tethered to the tail of this continually morphing social networking tiger, the more opportunities for self-doubt are spawned.

For me to suggest that there are psychological risks to social networking is not news. Much research has been done, and many conclusions have been drawn, on the topic. But my purpose here is more basic. An invitation really. As we age, which all of us are busily doing no matter the decade we currently find ourselves, I encourage us all to plant the seeds of our identity, our sense of relevance, less in the mixed furrows of social media and more in the rich soils of direct and intimate contact with our fellow human beings. Perhaps we can simply learn to ‘like’ ourselves... for holding open a door, for making room in traffic, for offering a shoulder to cry on, for listening, truly listening, even when we doubt the individual in front of us is, well, relevant.

In the end, might we discover that this unplanned and unpolished exchange is far more validating of who we are as people than all those ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ waiting for us online? Maybe.

Linda J. Rohan, ARNP