Why Facebook Makes You Feel Bad About Yourself | Hacker News Reader

Why Facebook Makes You Feel Bad About Yourself

healthland.time.com

43 pointsFlopsy32 comments

Doesn't make me feel bad. I'm happy when I see my friends having fun. I couldn't care less if a friend posts a humblebrag. If he feels good about something, good for him. Friends on exotic vacations? Can't wait to ask them about it in person.

I don't see how any of these things should make us depressed.

EDIT: Yes my friends' lives seem more interesting than mine. Good for them if it's true, and good for them even if it isn't true, if it made them feel better to post it.

This comment made me feel bad, because it sounds like you have cool friends. :) :(

Yeah, it's a little different when you're poor.

When you're poor, and you see others doing things that you can't do because you can't afford them, you're directly reminded that you're poor. This results in negative emotions.

The most enviable posts from my friends are from those who make less than I do.

I'm assuming you manage to make more than 50k. It's when you're making below 30k (which a lot of Americans do) that life becomes hard and you see yourself get demoralized easily. Software engineers et al. (the userbase of HN) are paid well -- the larger majority of Americans have professions that don't pay as well. Sensitivity to financial health is a lot heightened to folks in lower end of the pay spectrum.

I would say a vibrant social life with creative fun friends is way more important the money you make. I was working two minimum wage jobs, around 60 hours per week in order to save money and had a happier life than now when I'm making much more on one software engineering job. Location, social opportunities, family, friends, and culture trump money most of the time. Great advice I heard is make a list of your favorite possessions, then make a list of your most expensive possessions, check for overlap.

Having a vibrant social life costs money, if you have none spare it's hard to keep up with people even just in terms of transport to get to see them.

Also my car is at the top of both lists :)

That's why I put location in there. One of my number one goals right now is to be able to live within walking distance of friends and families. It's currently ranked way above income. I bike to work during the warm months and use public transportation during the cold ones. It does have the disadvantage that I won't take jobs that aren't within range of public transportation or biking, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

Maybe if you replaced "you're" with "I'm" and "you" with "I".

Seeing people with more money than me doesn't depress me. It might give me something aspire to. Or maybe I've just watched too much sponge bob and don't need money to be happy.

The statistics in the article trumps your anecdote. Yes, only a minority (large minority) feel jealous, so it is certainly possible not to.

> I don't see how any of these things should make us depressed.

Of course, they SHOULDn't make us depressed, but the sad reality is that being constantly exposed to fun things you're not a part of can actually make people depressed.

This post could be also be titled and written:

Why Facebook Makes You Feel Good About Yourself

One of the reasons I would hesitate in letting my children near Facebook until they're ~15+ is the enormous pressure it places on them to maintain a front that is completely free of any errors or embarrassments. This article talks about adults and how they struggle reconciling their online identity with their real sincere identity -- think how teenagers have struggles with their identity, and how precariously one mistake made risks being bombarded by ridicule by similarly aged peers. This is one of the reasons anonymity is so important -- we humans need a chance to explore and play with our identities without fear of failing and tarring our reputation. It's how we develop.

this is why you separate your online persona with your real life persona. Anything you do online is not tracible back to you, except by your very close friends (who should, if they are really your friends, not be judging you in any case).

I don't understand why all these people who use their real names on facebook, and/or twitter. I can understand linkedIn (i myself am hesitant to put anything real on linkedIn).

Because why not?

Anything I post to facebook is of such little consequence that I honestly don't care if it's traced back to me or if the whole world knows. Sure I'd prefer to keep what I say on there to the friends I say it to, but I don't care that much and it's such mindless, esoteric fluff that it's really not an issue.

On the other hand, maybe when you are a kid is the time to learn to curate that online presence. It doesn't seem like total anonymity is coming back any time soon.

I'm currently on vacation posting photos that I know are somewhat misrepresentative of the vacation and especially of my overall life.

But I honestly can't help myself--I feel like I have to have something good in my feed, sort of as a defensive portfolio of fun times against my friends future vacation photos.

An escalating arms race towards maximum apparent relaxation. That sounds like an excellent short story or Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic.

The Reuter's link is a bit better: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/01/22/us-facebook-envy-id...

Link to the actual paper: http://warhol.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/~hkrasnova/Ongoing_Research_...

Facebook making you sad?

It's a radical solution : stop using it.

Ultimately, if you want to take umbrage at someone, somewhere enjoying themselves, then you will get depressed, because there is always someone having a better time than you.

What is more important is developing a balanced feeling of self, and knowing and taking full responsibility for wherever you are in life. This means releasing feelings of envy and regret.

stop using it.

Fair enough, but that's only Step 1. Step 2 is getting all sorts of websites to stop forcing everybody to use Facebook to use their functionality, and/or comment..

then stop using those

That's the point, I'd like to start using them. Well, not really, I usually move on... but still, that's how facebook manages to sometimes annoy me, without me coming anywhere close to it.

you can use those even if you don't check your fb stream every f# day

No thanks.. I'm fine with being tracked by Facebook while I use it (not that I really do that much), not so keen on it otherwise. It's just not the kind of habit I want to get into.

Facebook doesn't make me feel bad about myself. Just today I used Facebook to communicate with two classmates from elementary school about a meet-up. They have lived in this same sprawling metropolitan area that I live in for most of our joint lives, but we haven't seen one another in person for forty years. For the last year or so, we've been regaining acquaintance through Facebook. That's cool. Seeing them in person will be even better, but I wouldn't be seeing them in person soon at all, most likely, but for Facebook.

I find it strange that this is as high up as it is. Articles like this have been circulating for several years now.

You don't even have to stop using it, you just need to stop paying attention to it.

I think I read it on a Hacker News comment, but to put it simply, You feel bad reading facebook because you're comparing someone's highlight reel to your behind the scenes footage.

Once you realize that, you can just get over it.

I believe that's really the key point. It's not just about vacations and people showing off nice things.

It's the fact that while you're viewing pictures of someone's vacations, you are not reading about the 4-hour fight they had in the hotel room the night before, or the fact that the airline lost their luggage, or that wifey is in the bathroom puking her guts out from the tainted seafood at the midnight buffet. That stuff never makes it to the Facebook wall.

If this article is true, what positive reinforcement conditions people to keep visiting Facebook? Raw procrastination material outweighing envy?

ADD, hunger for constant stimulation (passive scanning of news feed while standing around).

This headline is pretty misleading. If you read time's article it concludes: "So far, it seems that the positive effects of being socially connected supersede the negative consequences of feeling inferior or left out by your circle of friends."

So assuming "socially connected" means connected on social networks, Facebook (on the whole) doesn't make you feel bad about yourself.

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