Hacker News Reader

Comment by lrossi | Hacker News Reader

The article is mentioning Instagram as an amplifier of this need to fake being happy. But I think Facebook is responsible for it as well.

I was once talking to a colleague who was showing me some old vacation pictures. Some tropical area. I commented that they were looking amazing. He said that actually there was a pile of garbage next to them, but they only put the good looking photos on Facebook.

Everybody wants to look perfect online, so much of the appearances are faked. It makes sense, since everything is public, so we feel pressured to make ourselves look good. Repeated, I am not surprised that it can cause harmful psychological effects.

View on HN

> He said that actually there was a pile of garbage next to them, but they only put the good looking photos on Facebook.

when your friends used a slide projector to show you their vacation photos, they left the bad slides out of the projector.

i'm on board with facebook being a problem, but it's in more subtle ways than folks not showing you their bad photos.

Sure, but I think film made each photograph a bit more dear, making it less likely that somebody'll take a dozen just to pick the best one.

I don't think the public nature of social media is driving this. After all people's private photo albums and slideshows back in the day were also heavily curated collections of "fake" happiness. I think the difference is thanks to the internet and the proliferation of smart phones, we are able to consume a much larger volume of these collections.

Not to downplay the mental harm discussed in the article, but the more mundane issue you touch on here is what gets to me.

With this constant demonstration of happiness / positivity, it's extremely difficult to get a real, honest read on something. Not everything you ate was incredible, not everywhere you went was perfect. In fact, 50% of them were below average! I wish more people would quit performing and give the real scoop. But that tends to only happen in pretty tight circles now. I noticed this effect even in a group chat of close friends once it grew from 5 to 8.

its the same in small teams at work. having worked in a small, close knit team which was in constant discussion and "conflict" with each other because people in the team where very passionate about the work. its far note liberating to a have work environment where everyone can critique freely instead of taking up appearances just to be "nice".

Just wait until you're older, and Facebook devolves into nothing but rich parents humble-bragging and outright bragging about their kids. Yeah, Spring Break in Paris must have been wonderful, too bad your kid only got into 9 AP courses this semester.

It certainly hasn't made dating any more easier. Online dating is filled with sugar babies, catfishes, or doctored up photos beyond belief. Also it instigates a relationship to be solely through text. I mean jesus dating is about vetting and days or weeks of texting before actually meeting one another nowadays. Nobody wants to do anything physically anymore unless they've actually met you. It's to the point that it's almost a waste of time. COVID restrictions certainly haven't helped either.

I wonder if US culture will ever revert. I think it's gone down a very dangerous path for the middle class. It will be only a matter of a few decades before we adopt the Japanese strategy of paying women to retire and have families instead of advancing their careers because of major population decline.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com