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Comment by jgaxn | Hacker News Reader

I once received a Facebook notification on my phone when my ex-girlfriend got engaged. If this had been in place then I might have been able to avoid that temporary kick in the gut.

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I worry about this population-wide.

Safe spaces. Kicks in the gut. The right to not be offended. It seems like we're engineering people to be terrible at handling the complexities of interpersonal relationships.

Being alive is hard (and sometimes, it should be).

EDIT: Sorry OP/comment above, this wasn't meant to call you out specifically.

Except before Facebook, we wouldn't have known this unless we went out of our way to find out, or just ran into our ex in the street.

Or found out from someone in your social circles? Before Facebook, you'd hear it from a friend.

But unless your friend was an asshole, he/she wouldn't announce it like a big event you should be excited about.

Your friend would tell you the same way Facebook would tell you: in passing (either in your feed or your facebook notifications).

In fairness, for things like "engaged" or "married" Facebook promotes the heck out of those events making them very much a "big event you should be excited about".

If you're a decent human being, you should be happy for a past partner celebrating an important moment in their life. If they're happy, would you not be happy for them?

Can't edit this post, and I know its against the rules to mention downvotes (sorry dang!), but y'all be some bitter people. That makes me sad.

Exactly.

Phone notification: "HELLO, THIS IS THE OMNISCIENT COMPUTER NETWORK 'FACEBOOK' AGAIN. MOMENTS AGO, A MALE COMPANION PROPOSED A LIFETIME OF WEDDED BLISS TO YOUR FORMER GIRLFRIEND. SHE SAID YES. ATTACHED IS A PHOTO SHE SELECTED OF BOTH OF THEM LOOKING ATTRACTIVE."

> Except before Facebook, we wouldn't have known this unless we went out of our way to find out, or just ran into our ex in the street.

Or had any common acquaintances. Or read newspapers (publishing engagement notices in them used to be a thing).

For most of human history, if someone you used to be involved with was engaged to be married, it wasn't particularly unlikely that you'd hear about it, and in many cases be either socially expected to participate in celebration related to it or be pointedly excluded from them.

While I think you may be over reacting a bit, I agree with you. Folks centuries before us figured out that suffering is what makes enjoyable things enjoyable. Without hurt and pain you have no appreciation for the finer things. I worry about the younger generation of adults who are trying to have the entire world cater to their every need, and succeeding far too much at it. What will they do when when it's THEIR world?

> I worry about the younger generation of adults who are trying to have the entire world cater to their every need, and succeeding far too much at it. What will they do when when it's THEIR world?

While I disagree with the title, WaitButWhy nails this.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-u...

Life's unpleasantries build character and grit. Should someone needlessly suffer? No! But should one be exposed to forces that help you understand the human condition? I would say so.

EDIT: I'm reminded of a quote from "Ready Player One" (the protagonist's passphrase to Oasis): "No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful."

Oh god, this again. I don't actually have to post a rebuttal to the WaitButWhy post because the comments on the post do such a good job of it. Go read them. That post is off base and incredibly condescending.

Your quote of Ready Player One is ironic considering the protagonist, in the end, gets everything he wants.

Why are people flipping their shit over this new feature? In the old days of 2004, when you broke up with somebody you got to avoid them for a while without having to delete them from your phone. What's wrong with wanting to stop seeing pictures of them getting drunk with their new friends and traveling to Europe without you, just for a little bit, while the wounds heal? For goodness sake this is not some sign of generational decline.

> For goodness sake this is not some sign of generational decline.

I'd love to spend money on research to see if this is true or not. I wouldn't call it a decline. I'd call it "The Appification Of Societal Relationships".

What you want, when you want it, and nothing else. (or attempting to obtain that ideal)

You're right, and I think it's hilarious. Some folks seem so ready to jump to a hyper-judgmental space that everything's a sign of a generational decline. And they get so, so, SO edgy when others tell them to calm down or chill out. Hey, maybe they need a safe space of their own!

I already don't use Facebook, but if your comment is to suggest we ask ourselves to do unpleasant things (that still aren't social interaction) in the name of handling the complexities of social interaction -- why would be specifically obligated to use Facebook, fakest of the fake, in that unpleasant way? If I don't use Facebook in general am I obligated to subscribe to upsetting-gossip.rss? N.b. I still heard about an ex getting engaged without technology while being on a different continent. The supposition that Facebook is the sine qua non of life events is bizarre.

This does not fit into the "right not to be offended" issues going on today. Being exposed to pictures/videos/comments of exes getting married is not an issue that many people had to deal with 20 years ago. If the same technology that has done such a good job of connecting us with other people could be smart enough to know when not to connect us, we should absolutely take advantage of it.

In other situations, I'd agree with you. Not this one.

> Being exposed to pictures/videos/comments of exes getting married is not an issue that many people had to deal with 20 years ago.

Then be an adult FFS. Either stay friended to the person and realize that they've got their own life to live, or unfriend the person and say "Hey, I'm really sorry, I can't handle this emotionally. I wish you the best." Neither option makes you a lesser person.

The purpose of technology is to make things easier for people, not harder. I personally haven't had problems with this and am fine using your strategy, but I still think Facebook is smart for trying to tackle an issue that clearly a lot of people have.

We can get into the debate of whether or not technology is making us worse as people (which I completely disagree with), but that's a rabbit hole. Also, I don't think technology is causing the problems you're talking about. Safe space issues, I think, are happening for two reasons:

1) This generation is very aware of inequalities between different groups of people, and wants it to stop

2) This generation was raised by parents who were too controlling of their environments

But it's not like there aren't ways around this.

There are some exes who I don't have any feelings for whom I'm still friends on Facebook with. They posts happy pictures. I'm happy for them. I have no qualms about them moving on with their life (marrying, having children). In fact, I've attended some of their weddings.

For the ones which still hurt, I'm not friends with on Facebook. By no means was it easy to cut off all contact, whether it's Facebook, Whatsapp or Instagram, but I had to be honest with my feelings and recognize that yes, it'd make me sad if I saw them happy moving on.

And if for whatever reason I need to contact them, there's always e-mail or phone.

Why should people have to deal with something unpleasant when a tool could be created to avoid it?

Do you refuse to use any form of powered transportation because it makes people terrible at handling the complexities of walking?

I'm against technology abstracting away the difficulties of social interaction, for its own benefit (to get you to spend more time on Facebook), to the detriment of social skills.

Is it necessarily to the detriment of social skills, though, or is it just a reflection of the evolution of what social skills are relevant to modern life?

People have made similar arguments against the use of internet social communications because of its negative impact of its negative impact on language, but such fears are unfounded and prescriptivist. [1]

Social norms evolve all the time. Just because new norms are unfamiliar doesn't mean that they're inherently "wrong."

[1]: http://www.vnews.com/news/nation/world/18662871-95/internet-...

> It seems like we're engineering people to be terrible at handling the complexities of interpersonal relationships.

To me, this seems more like "engineering Facebook to be better at handling the complexities of interpersonal relationships." Now we're massively more connected, there's more opportunities for unexpected pain. Features like this can help redress the balance.

In the days before Facebook you knew that unless you were going to your ex's favourite places or hanging out with mutual friends, you weren't likely to run into them or hear about them. But now it's wherever you check Facebook – and even if you're not a heavy Facebook user, millions of people are. As soon as you wake up? Over breakfast? During a slow meeting at work? Waiting for your coffee? There's lots of times when I'd rather not wrestle with those emotions.

It's not about enabling a safe space, or the right not to be offended. It's about giving users more control over the content they see, and giving Facebook more information about whether a breakup was amicable or emotionally devastating (which, in turn, lets Facebook make better decisions about content that should show up in your feed).

Having a realtime feed of your friends' and acquaintances' lives pushed to you 24/7 is a completely new thing in the history of human social interaction.

We are not, as you say, "engineering people to be terrible at handling the complexities of interpersonal relationships." Rather, we are completely overloading people with social data. It's not surprising that this should be emotionally taxing in ways humans have never before had to deal with.

I initially upvoted the GP, then I read your post.

Very well put.

I knew a couple that when they split were attempting to one-up eachother with their FB posts about who they slept with or how much they were partying etc... and they had kids together and were "professionals" -- it was terrible.

I would concede that Facebook doesn't help if you're not an adult to begin with.

When you combine a social exhibitionist platform with emotionally or socially stunted humans, what did we expect to happen?

Given how absolutely widespread this kind of emotional mismanagement is, is it fair to call these people stunted? If a lot of people are like that, isn't that just normal?

Maybe it's not ideal, but maybe that's just life, and it'd make sense to adjust one's expectations a bit and work from where we are, instead of that elusive ideal.

> Being alive is hard (and sometimes, it should be).

Says the comparatively rich guy with first world problems.

Go spend some time in the poor areas of Somali or India and see whether you think we should deliberately make life hard for people just to build character.

I was in no way comparing genuine strife of those in third world countries to the hilariously mundane social interaction issues of first world citizens.

Not being able to stand to see your ex on Facebook? That is exactly what I would call a First World Problem.

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