
Why people believe others' social lives are richer than their own - lainon
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29189037
======
bufferoverflow
A lot of it is just so fake. Pretty much everyone I know does the fake smile
for the selfie, and then they immediately stop smiling.

Many people I know, when traveling, have a check list of the selfies they want
to make to show everyone else how great their life is, when I know it isn't.
And they miss the actual fun of experiencing traveling - to them it's just a
series of selfies.

This was 99% of my Facebook, and that's why I quit. There was only one guy who
was regularly posting interesting articles (tech, space, futurism). I ended up
deciding a diamond in a pile of sh#t wasn't worth it, and HN/Reddit are
better.

As for the social aspect, most people's lives are boring, and most people are
boring, they only look at what's happening today, worry about what other
people think of them, and other boring drivel.

/Rant over

~~~
qrbLPHiKpiux
Let me add to your rant. Regarding my children, and school functions such as
plays and recitals - the number of parents watching their kids through their
smart phones recording video [1] instead of just watching it naturally and
taking the moment in.

[1] video that is horribly underexposed, un-viewable, that they'll never
likely watch again.

~~~
jwally
I went to my first Christmas recital this year (2 yr old) and remember
thinking what a favor the school would have done everyone to film the
performance themselves and sell the video.

Instead everyone was rushing for better filming positions whenever a new group
got on stage. Miserable.

~~~
georgeecollins
It seems like most schools in Los Angeles do this for plays and recitals. What
is strange is that people still film stuff. I think it gives them something to
do.

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omarforgotpwd
“Well it may seem like others are going to more parties and having more sex
than I am, but actually I read a study on hacker news that said I’m just
imagining it!”

------
Lxr
On average, people actually do have fewer friends than their friends have
(also works for sexual partners).

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox)

~~~
jwilk
Non-mobile link:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox)

------
ljm
On an anecdotal level, I've felt that a lot of this can manifest as mild envy,
if not otherwise that pervasive fear of missing out. As an example, you're at
home reading your favourite book and all your friends are out partying, yet
even though you were happy with the decision to read, and to not join them if
you had the offer, you still feel a bit envious of all of the others going out
partying (and hearing about it too).

I'm curious why it's so easy to see your own life as boring as compared to
others, and while it's absolutely true that you only see their highlights
(good and bad), you've got yourself 24/7, along with every single unfiltered
thought and feeling that comes along with it.

One activity of mine is to basically reflect on the recent past (say, the last
6 or 12 months, maybe even longer if I need to hammer the point home) and make
a list of everything I did that was interesting, brave, adventurous, exciting,
dangerous, difficult... no matter how insignificant some of it might seem.

Once you have what is essentially an itemised list of your achievements in the
last year or two, it's easy to put your own experiences into perspective, and
you are no longer dismissing them because you're not lumping in all of those
quiet moments where you needed downtime or binged something on Netflix, or
whatever. And in a lot of cases it's far more interesting than what you'd be
doing if all your weekends were parties and hangovers, and such like.

And no one else needs to see that list you make, it's just bringing the
attention back to yourself. It's incredibly powerful and a great reminder in
those low moments.

------
brenschluss
Because: 1) people post positive news, but not negative ones; 2) you follow
many people.

Imagine you have 365 friends. Let’s say each friend has about 5 amazing days
per year, but the rest 360 days are pretty dismal. If we assume that each
friend will only post about amazing days, that means that your social media
feed, on average, every single day of the year, will look like a non-stop
barrage of 5 posts describing 1 amazing thing that happened to a friend.

------
devit
It's because when you read about other people you just read about the
"highlights" of their life, and if you also read about many other people, it
"feels" like amazing thing happen at the frequency you read about them (i.e.
once every 1-5 minutes) rather than at the frequency they actually happen.

~~~
qznc
This. I don't believe my brain divides by the number of contacts. So I
subconsciously compare my personal highlights with the highlights of all my
friends combined. No wonder my life feels boring.

------
mark_l_watson
Values that help make us happier are internal values, things that we have
immediate control over (honesty, creativity, respect for ourself and others,
etc.). External values, often comparing ourselves to others, don’t really make
us happy.

------
make3
by definition, people with more active social lives are more visible than
people without very active social lives

~~~
mistaken
This is what I've thought about too. Could the article's observations
attributed to the friendship paradox?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox)

~~~
smallnamespace
People with impostor syndrome might find a lot of help in understanding the
logic behind it, since it applies not just to friendship, but to _any_
activity where visibility is positively correlated to ability.

Most popular GitHub projects are by top coders. Most musicians are in a tiny
fraction of the skill distribution. The people that one might respect and
measures oneself by almost certainly are better than the average, so if one
feels inferior to them, that is a statistical quirk and not a strong signal
that one is below average.

------
lafar6502
Because nobody can have less than zero social life?

~~~
DoreenMichele
I guess that depends on how you think of it. If all your social contacts are
users, not actual friends, I think you can have a net negative social life
where zero friends would be a step up.

------
mangix
If a social life is not present, this is true.

------
ringaroundthetx
Purchase pdf

Anyone able to read the study?

~~~
Vinnl
If you don't want to use a source of questionable legality like Sci-Hub [1]
then you can try sending a request to the authors to make use of their right
to share a copy through the Open Access Button [2] or Unpaywall [3].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-
Hub)

[2]
[https://openaccessbutton.org/request/zsLh3M7ozGvLwD67v](https://openaccessbutton.org/request/zsLh3M7ozGvLwD67v)

[3] [http://unpaywall.org/](http://unpaywall.org/)

~~~
ringaroundthetx
It has never on been the consumer to know who has a license to someone else’s
copyrighted work

So, no I dont have any qualms about sci-hub

I have qualms about convenience, I rarely download torrents because Netflix
has provided the convenience Ive enjoyed since 2002

Do what you need to do to help the monetization model of academics, not my
problem

------
ghughes
> We show that this bias holds across multiple populations (college students,
> MTurk respondents, shoppers at a local mall, and participants from a large,
> income-stratified online panel)

MTurk workers are incentivized to answer quickly, not truthfully.

Internet polls are bullshit.

~~~
frereubu
I get really tired of this knee-jerk "X is bullshit" response without even
bothering to see whether researchers are aware of potential issues. A simple
search on Google Scholar would have shown that they are, and want to figure
out what the methodological implications are.
[https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=mechanical+turk](https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=mechanical+turk)

It's just as easy to argue - when you're not citing any evidence - that online
respondents are more likely to be truthful because they're anonymous, and
therefore their answer doesn't have an impact on their social reputation.

------
bluepirate
Have to pay to read :(

~~~
Pica_soO
Money = More richer intellectual life => More richer HN-Life

~~~
coldtea
Not even close.

