I had this same conversation with my Mother a few weeks ago.
My father passed a few years back, and now I have two daughters which she does not get to spend as much time with as she had made out in her mind prior. My grandparents raised me, same with my wife, as both of our parents worked fulltime jobs to make ends meet (the obvious American life of parents). However I'm proud to say that I am successful enough that I can work from home and my wife can stay home as well to raise our kids. This was a reality check for my mom and it's added up since then.
The other day she called me on how upset she was, as she always sees friends having so much fun on Facebook and how she feels more an more lonely. In comparison, I noticed how my wife would post a photo of my girls on Facebook and my mom would (typically) Like it within minutes. It seemed that she was literally sitting on Facebook all day trying to find out what was going on with the world rather than enjoying it herself as she's now retired. It was starting to make sense to me.
When I talked to her, I asked when the last time she saw people talking about how they had no money to go out and eat, had to work overtime, had to pay bills, were doing laundry, etc. queue the Lightbulb.
A few days later, she called me happier than I'd heard her in a while, explaining how she'll check Facebook in the morning and at night but the rest of the day she leaves the computer off and she felt worlds better already. Once I could explain that Facebook wants it's users to be engaged & sucked in for more, she realized how she got trapped.
It seemed that she was literally sitting on Facebook all day trying to find out what was going on with the world rather than enjoying it herself as she's now retired.
== This is just what getting old its like. Its a bit of a shocker seing this happen to your parents.
It's no longer a case of "keeping up with the Joneses" - you now have to keep
up with everyone you've ever met, no matter what the cost!
I don't understand why so many people don't seem to get that you don't have to be "friends" on Facebook with everyone you've ever met. And you don't have to stay "friends" with them forever.
Also, I see lots of stuff on Facebook that isn't upbeat bragging. Prominent examples just from the past week include death of a family member and a friend starting chemo. Possibly this is an age thing, or a consequence of the fact that I prune superficial relationships from my Facebook, but I have a hard time relating to the experience this writer describes. (Also, while I don't want to diagnose over the internet, it's possible that FB makes the author depressed because he's already prone to depression.)
OP here. I don't think I'm depressed - but suddenly seeing a flurry of "Jetting off on holiday" and "Just got a jetpack for xmas" made me a bit grumpy. The feeling took me by surprise - until I realised that I was getting a distorted view and, luckily, I'm off to Vegas in the new year.
You're quite right about adding everyone you ever knew - thankfully I grew out of that phase fairly quickly.
I believe I read a summary of a study once that found the happier people try to look on Facebook, the more miserable they actually are. I don't remember the details well enough to describe them here, but basically somebody who is having tons of fun isn't going to bother telling Facebook about it- they are too busy having fun. The people who spend a lot of time telling Facebook about all the fun they are having are actually trying to put on a front.
So, when I detect that on Facebook, I have learned to dismiss it and perhaps pity them just a tiny bit.
Clues: People who seem to be super happy 24/7/365- not many people actually are! Also, people prone to bragging OR "humble bragging"
There are people who are obviously just trying to have fun by posting whatever they can think of to Facebook, incessantly. I would agree that the more someone is posting, the less fun they're actually having... unless you consider posting stuff to be fun, in and of itself.
Nothing wrong with incessant posting... it might indeed be fun... but I think Facebook is not the best outlet for it. This will only become apparent years from now when these folks look at their friends who have little to no posting history, with envy.
I have friends who still have not joined Facebook. I admire them; and I expect to envy them in due course. They will be blissfully free from the annoyances every Facebook user wil be facing.
Yeah, I actually think keeping up with the downbeat stuff is a bigger drain of Facebook than the upbeat stuff. Sometimes it's welcome, as I'm able to keep up with people who I don't talk to as much as I'd like, and know what's going on in their lives (I keep up more with my Greek cousins than I would ever do if I had to phone them). But sometimes there is emotional/family/etc. turbulence from acquaintances that I see on Facebook who I'm not really close to, and then it makes it sort of awkward: should I send this person condolences? do I know them well enough? do they think they know me well enough that they would expect me to (or at least appreciate it)? etc. etc.
Seconded. My Facebook friends list is comprised of ~20 people that I would consider placing a phone call to (or would not be surprised if I received one from).
This is the most elegantly concise summary I've seen of the topic.
It also reminds me of a humorous video from the MySpace era about what was called the "MySpace angle" — people use the best possible view of themselves for their profile picture, which potentially means obscuring some less desirable aspects. This can easily be extended to any other aspect of today's digital self-presentation.
This is a horribly self-pitying blog post. It's typical of a lot of people I've met these days where they are so self-centered, they can't bother to feel happy for someone else.
"I just got a bonus at work because I worked my ass off!"
"I got nothing, thanks for making me feel like a pile of shit!"
Why not be happy for your friends? If I see that my friends are on vacation, or enjoying their lives, I feel genuinely happy for them. I don't feel jealous. And they certainly aren't posting on Facebook to make their friends feel jealous.
The author should come to grips with the fact that the world doesn't revolve around him, and that if he doesn't post anything no one will notice or even care. This whole "keeping up with the Joneses" is a phenomenon he has created himself, and if he can't handle the fact that other people are actually enjoying successes in their lives, then he should definitely log off from Facebook.
I feel more sad for my friends than happy. I just see so many people buying happiness and living for themselves. Sushi dinners and sky diving adventures don't impress me. I just wonder what they're living for, money and pleasure? What impresses me is the expression of humility, meekness and modesty. I believe there's a real famine of this on Facebook.
I'm sat here, in my dressing gown. My fingers are greasy from eating crisps all morning. My back aches because I spent all night playing a stupid video game. The gin hangover isn't helping either. My week off work has been a wash out. I didn't write any code, I didn't cook anything other than pizza, and I'm beginning to smell of used dish water.
I'd reserve judgment on anything before having a good shower, dressing in fresh clothes, and eating some real food. Plus lots of water and a nap or workout, if necessary. Biology > Internet ;).
> It's just that perhaps we, as a species, aren't yet used to dealing with a constant flood of our friends' successes. It can make even a little failure feel like you're letting down your entire social circle.
I really don't like implications of this. On one hand, we have all of media bombarding us with sad, tragic or stupid stories every single moment. Many people (myself included) stop reading general news and/or watching TV, because the only thing they get from it is feeling that everything is bad and about to fall apart. But on the other hand, if we can't handle the success stories - because we get jealous or depressed - then what kind of news can we actually process without harming ourselves?
Recently I have gone from posting nearly nothing on Facebook, to posting daily. I have been spending 1 year abroad, and have gotten into a gimmicky habit: I'm keeping a friends-only travel diary on my Facebook wall. Everyday, at around the same time, I write my "daily recap". I am living in London, and also travelling extensively all over Europe, and am showing this off to my friends. I'm one of the worst offenders of an asshole friend on Facebook, as I literally am jetting off somewhere exotic every weekend. And, I spend a great deal of time thinking about what I'm going to post, so I'm a case of someone obsessively preoccupied with Facebook. I also care a lot about likes and comments. However, I generally seem to be adding value to the lives of me and my friends. I strive for honesty, astuteness, eloquence and humor. The tone ranges from triumphant to hysterical. I get constant feedback about my status updates, both in real life and online. People seem to appreciate them. Several have recommended that I publish. A number of fiends have mentioned they are envious, but only one depressingly so. A few have mentioned that they look forward to reading them everyday. I feel leashed to doing this, at this point, and am not going to stop until my year is over. Am I making people miserable with this? I would love to know. Do I have an unhealthy obsession? Am I being narcissistic? Possibly. Sometimes I think I have twisted Facebook on its head, and have discovered how it really should be used: by putting all my effort into writing high-quality posts.
Would you still travel if you couldn't update your friends about it in near real time?
Don't you feel that the time spent on writing/contemplating what to write on the facebook pages would be better spent enjoying yourself in your new destination, making contact with people there rather than keeping score?
If it's just a weekend that's barely time enough to take in a new place (for me).
I worry that I'm not writing enough. One day, my life is going to become jarringly mundane again. I'm going to have nothing from my trip but my memories, photos, and my travel diary. And my memories will fade quickly. A travel buddy of mine captures detailed stories in his notebook, while I just write short-to-medium length quips for Facebook. The entire social media layer I have added to my diary complicates things. I think the feedback actually helps me hone my writing, and I love the conversations and validation it generates, but I'm also concerned about my desire to entertain people. It makes me hold back my true feelings a bit, as sometimes my most honest posts are also the least liked.
How long does it take to write up a funny story that happened over the past weekend? Five minutes? What other more awesome things are you going to be doing on the train back from the airport?
Facebook is a really strange and scary phenomenon. The idea was to keep in touch with those acquaintances you lost contact with for one reason or another. Yet, it turned into a huge attention whoring platform because it slowly chipped away at any real-world interaction people ever had prior. So, what do you do when you do something cool or interesting? You let your Facebook "friends" know about it. It makes you feel better that someone read about the shit you did today. You feel like you're cool now. It's unbelievably sad what an immense psychological effect Facebook has on its users. I didn't even realize how addicted i was to Facebook until i closed my account and had frequent urges to reopen just to update my "friends" with something i did. Everyone on it is just feeding off of each other. It's a perpetual pat on the back that makes you feel cozy that you have 300 friends and hides the fact it's making you socially inept. It's been 4 months and i never looked back. Even had 2 of my close friends follow my lead. Get away from this shit and get your social interactions back.
I attended a 10 day silent meditation retreat a while ago. One of the most important instructions was: "Do not look around to see what the other folks are doing. Everybody will sit still as a Buddha and you will feel bad".
In this case you get a moments view during which in all likelihood nobody will fuzz.
In this article we see a moments view chosen by the authors friends to be post-worthy.
Maybe it's just due to a lack of experience spending hours on Facebook, but it seems like people respond differently to such stimulus. Some people see others doing amazing things and it inspires them; others respond by despairing that they will never be able to do all of that.
I don't know about being overwhelmed by the awesome; facebook tends to depress me. It keeps recommending that I "add friend" a friend of my friends who died in an accident a few months back, which is always a bit of a buzz-kill.
And that's when it's not just irritating me with the out-of-order feed. I mean, seriously, I'm a CS person and I understand getting performance gains by delivering potentially-wrong results, but given that I only get about 10 posts a week, seeing things off by 3-5 days in the sort order seems almost malicious.
Problem solved - temporarily. On Android and the web, my preference for most recent stories changes itself back to top stories on a not infrequent basis.
I don't think that the non-chronological feed is an attempt to achieve performance gains. Instead Facebook is trying to sort things by interestingness (or in some cases, how much a user has paid to promote their post). I agree, though, that it's terribly annoying.
I always find it funny that the people I don't want to become friends with stay in my recommendation column. So I have to stare at their picture. I see other people here have a solution to this problem.
I find it shocking to hear that people get depressed by watching their friends have good times. How about enjoying it and feeling happy for their accomplishments and success?
For all I thought Svtble ridiculous at first (and I do still consider it a tiny bit wanky) - and for all I cheered on those who created knock-off themes based on it, and watched the ensuing drama with licked lips - I have to say that I get a real jarring discomfort when I see a Svbtle-style blog that isn't part of the network. It just doesn't look right... the fonts are off, or the spacing, or it's just not quite right.
You're probably just used to Svbtle blogs, there are many of them, after all. The only thing that's different with this one is that it uses Helvetica instead of the font Svbtle uses - Freight Sans.
Why are you using that theme? It's shitty to use someone else's design without their permission. (on the off chance that you've never heard of the Svbtle network (https://svbtle.com) it is a design that was created for an invite only network of bloggers, it's meant to establish a brand)
Regardless of wether you think svbtle is a bunch of elitist wankers, there is no valid reason for appropriating their style. Furthermore, regardless of ethics, it is a distraction from your words. To the extent that the svbtle brand is built up, your choice in theme becomes more and more a statement instead of presentation. "Does the author dislike the svbtle network and is trying to drive them into obscurity, or does this person really like the network and wants to be associated with them even without permission"
With so much buzz covering the whole "facebook depression" phenomenon and studies both proving and disproving it to some extent, I think the article is pretty apt.
I, personally feel the same way. Enough to have deleted my account. And somehow, not witnessing a constant flux of achievements and instagrammed food is keeping me rather calm so far.
Speak for yourself. Facebook doesn't make me feel depressed. I meet my friends there. (I don't know how Facebook will ever monetize enough to satisfy its investors, but using it at the current per-user price is satisfying to me as a channel for grouping together people whose only commonality is that they are all my friends.) I have several friends who have figured out ways to share tough problems on Facebook and to get a lot of help from our mutual Facebook friend networks. I've been in various online networks since 1992, and Facebook is just like any other online network in that some of its characteristics derive from how you use it. I gain support and encouragement and information through Facebook, perhaps because I attempt to share support and encouragement and information through Facebook.
You just read the title and didn't read the article didn't you? The article is fully written in the first person and he only speaks for himself. The post subject is misleading and should be corrected.
Did you read beyond the first couple of paragraphs?
He starts out all "I this, I that", but soon moves on to "our mental health", "your friends", "you now have to keep up with everyone you've ever met", etc., and for grand generalization, "it's just that perhaps we, as a species, aren't yet used to dealing with a constant flood of our friends' successes".
I suspect the friendship paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox) may have something to do with it as well. It looks like you're failing to keep up with your friends in terms of an active social life, because most people have fewer friends than their friends do!
The fact that Facebook now displays "friend of friend" things probably only exacerbates the issue: a large proportion of your updates are likely to come from people with anomalously busy social lives, who are friends of many people and make it into many other people's feeds. And the ones you take note of, likely even more so: the person who did nothing and didn't post about it doesn't really register.
Life isn't about having amazing experiences.
It's about making mediocre experiences look amazing on Facebook.
I've taken to hiding most updates ("only important" or none) of people who constantly try to show how cool they are, where they travel, and who they know. A little of that is ok - I do it sometimes - but if someone repeatedly makes me feel like I'm missing out, they're hidden. I feel much better about Facebook since then. It takes discipline, because you feel like you'll be missing out on something, but in the end you're realize you notice more interesting posts instead.
I'm sure some people hide me. That's ok. I travel constantly and always look like I'm having fun. I do try to keep it to a dull roar on facebook though.
The NY Times had a fairly good article on this issue, which I happened to bookmark in April 2011. The article is called "Feel Like a Wallflower? Maybe It’s Your Facebook Wall" [1], and the phenomena is described in the article as FOMO (fear of missing out) which "refers to the blend of anxiety, inadequacy and irritation that can flare up while skimming social media like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram."
The OP seems like a manifestation of one aspect of this.
Facebook makes me depressed for another reason. It's dull and boring, and filled with "meme" images my friends have like that have no bearing on my life whatsoever.
An important idea to remember is "don't compare your insides to other people's outsides."
Of course we don't see the negatives. Nobody's going to post that they're depressed or their life is a mess, or post pictures where they look bad. Remember that it's not the whole picture.
I use Facebook and it isn't making me depressed -at all-. If Facebook seriously is making you depressed then perhaps you really should simply use it to "keep up with the Joneses" or just deactivate your account entirely.
My father passed a few years back, and now I have two daughters which she does not get to spend as much time with as she had made out in her mind prior. My grandparents raised me, same with my wife, as both of our parents worked fulltime jobs to make ends meet (the obvious American life of parents). However I'm proud to say that I am successful enough that I can work from home and my wife can stay home as well to raise our kids. This was a reality check for my mom and it's added up since then.
The other day she called me on how upset she was, as she always sees friends having so much fun on Facebook and how she feels more an more lonely. In comparison, I noticed how my wife would post a photo of my girls on Facebook and my mom would (typically) Like it within minutes. It seemed that she was literally sitting on Facebook all day trying to find out what was going on with the world rather than enjoying it herself as she's now retired. It was starting to make sense to me.
When I talked to her, I asked when the last time she saw people talking about how they had no money to go out and eat, had to work overtime, had to pay bills, were doing laundry, etc. queue the Lightbulb.
A few days later, she called me happier than I'd heard her in a while, explaining how she'll check Facebook in the morning and at night but the rest of the day she leaves the computer off and she felt worlds better already. Once I could explain that Facebook wants it's users to be engaged & sucked in for more, she realized how she got trapped.