Facebook use linked to depressive symptoms
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
When I'm depressed and completely out of energy , I try and find something low effort just to shut out the negativity.
Most of the time that's scrolling through the newsfeed or aimlessly browsing porn. If Facebook didn't exist I might find something else. Facebook is the goto place to zone yourself out.
It's only a problem when life is so barren that likes on your FB post become the highlight of your day. As long as you have healthy relationships and meaningful activities it will never become a problem.
Through years of A/B testing they've trained us like rats to scroll through the newsfeed. Sometimes I'll find myself or someone else simply scrolling aimlessly , not even knowing why , just a tired brain looking for the next dopamine hit. Finally, I installed an extension that removes the newsfeed on my work computer and there's already a big improvement. I never thought such a stupid hack could make a difference , since I could always override it.
But turns out that your brain is lazy and stupid , which you can use to your advantage by making wasteful activities just a wee bit more difficult. Making new habits is easiest when you rearrange your environment.
Want to become fit. Try moving into an apartment with a cross fit freak and watch yourself change automatically.
Want to become a better developer. Get a better job on a team that uses best practices and watch yourself strive to keep up.
Ofcourse , out of all of this self improvement thinking comes the sort of existential angst that is caused by browsing FB,HN and Reddit and seeing how your life is just 1 % of what it could be and what your friends are having. This I think is separate and isn't restricted to Facebook. This has always and will continue to exist.
So yeah sometimes you just can't win :D .
These days everytime I feel depressed I have some chocolate. And also go for a vigorous walk. It sort of works but not nearly as well as it should ;) .
If someone subjectively perceives this statement to be true about her/his life - then s/he is not suffering from depression - pretty much by definition.
> The problem might not even /have/ a solution. But you aren't necessarily looking for solutions. You're maybe just looking for someone to say "sorry about how dead your fish are" or "wow, those are super dead. I still like you, though."
I wonder if in the past society used to be more accepting of personality differences. Nowadays everyone makes a point of being so tolerant and accomodating but it's all based on the extraverted always-on always-happy norm. Anything else is fine so long as you acknowledge it's a disorder or a condition; otherwise ostracism. Feels like when I read about olden times there's more "oh, that's just how Fred is" but Fred's also an accepted part of the community.
Some years ago I had a Facebook account. I finally had to close it, because it made me feel bad. Not because I didn't measure up to other peoples' lives, like in the article, but because the parts I saw were so vacuous.
Note, I'm not at all disagreeing with FB as a way to improve your depression, or with the value people find in FB generally. Just we're all different.
Also, to anyone struggling with depression (even if you don't realize it), I recently got help with depression explicitly, and on purpose, and it's improved my life immensely. If life sucks and you can't quite see why, talk to a professional and explore your options. Because even when you have problems and obstacles (which I do), life is great when it doesn't suck.
You go to Facebook to self-medicate your depression, but Facebook contributes towards your depression.
It's the same with alcohol - to which I compare this situation.
People with depression think that alcohol helps because it gives them a fast dopamine hit, but alcohol is a potent depressant.
Couldn't it just be that, uh, Facebook is kinda boring? Or, as the article mentions, that "depressed feelings and lots of time on Facebook [...] go hand in hand," in other words, lonely/isolated people habitually look for connection on social media, but the kinds of communication that happen there are not very interesting or loneliness-assuaging.
David Foster Wallace's 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram" describes a similar tendency but with television as the substituting technology:
"Every lonely human I know watches way more than the average U.S. six hours a day. The lonely, like the fictional, love one-way watching. For lonely people are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness—in fact there exist today social and support groups for persons with precisely these features. Lonely people tend rather to be lonely because they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. Let's call the average U.S. lonely person Joe Briefcase. Joe Briefcase just loathes the strain of the self-consciousness which so oddly seems to appear only when other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear to watchers. He sits out the stressful U.S. game of appearance poker.
"But lonely people, home, alone, still crave sights and scenes. Hence television. Joe can stare at Them, on the screen; They remain blind to Joe. It's almost like voyeurism."
That's called social anxiety, just FYI.
And yeah, it's plausible that people which have social anxiety are more prone to overusing social media etc.
It's pretty explicit that they're not claiming causality.
It's tough, but what actually works for me now, is giving other people the respect and privacy they need, by not thinking about how they think. You'd be surprised how much extra thinking time you have for everything else just by cutting your thoughts off at that line.
Still, there are no rules yet for empathy, and my mind can still get panicky in crowds, and there is the belief that I will be perpetually socially naive and subject to social manipulation. But I think it's better than hiding in the corner of a room, staring at the floor, maybe.
I do not really like social media. I like interesting conversations that stimulate me intellectually.
What works is to pick a path, any path, and look in the direction of that path. That is a sufficient signal for all parties to self-organize and avoid collision, even at high speeds and density of people. In other words, leading lowers the cost of following.
Even if one could mind-read, one may not like what one perceives. But humans are adaptable and can often reciprocate. If one's actions assume/imply positive intent, one can motivate positive reciprocity and reduce/avoid the cost of perceiving intent.
I like my desk and being socially awkward.
I've had a lot of conversations about Facebook, because I think the phenomenon there is really interesting. A few things for me:
- I find it makes me think poorly of some of my best friends. The "humble brag" is kind of non-stop and in so many cases I know it isn't a real reflection of how those people feel. Yet sharing your amazing life is the "Facebook way" and is hard to escape.
- Crazy enough, because I am lucky enough to live a pretty great life, I would often get feelings of envy or dissatisfaction from browsing it. This may be a personal failing of mine, but when comparing the best moments of my "closest" 500 friends, sometimes I come up short and for whatever reason I find it hard to separate that.
I do really enjoy the ability to connect with old friends on Facebook and for that I love it, but ya, for me at least, I'm happier using it only when I need to reach out to those friends.
[1] I do still have an account and perhaps browse a few minutes once a week, but that's coming from usually looking at it several times a day.
1. Clicking the occasional link from my best friend (one of the only people who posts interesting things)
2. Being invited to events and looking up the address
3. Posting cat/baby pictures from Instagram
And, of course, Facebook Messenger (the only reliable, functional cross-platform messaging system I've found)
(well, it's not really a clean separation since you still need a Facebook account and all that entails, but I still don't see how separating the two apps is anything other than a good thing)
When I looked at my battery usage stats, the top offenders were facebook and the like, despite not even being used for days at a time. Now I use facebook through the mobile-web interface, and haven't looked back. The only apps I regularly use on my phone are the browser, mail, maps and hangouts. I don't have many others even installed (lastpass, authy), and my phone now makes it a full 24hrs+ before power goes off. (just got a new phone yesterday, so that profile may be different now).
My fit wasn't separating messenger out... it was having another app soaking up cpu/battery usage.
What does that mean?
Hangouts has been losing messages recently for lots of people. That's bad no matter who's using them.
I feel great about it. This might come across as somewhat misanthropic, but Facebook made it too easy for people I don't really like to interact with me. As it is, I stay in touch with the people I see in my daily life in my daily life, and for the handful of people who I live far away from and used Facebook to stay in touch with I just use email, text messages, and phone calls.
I would often get feelings of envy or
dissatisfaction from browsing it...
...comparing the best moments of my "closest"
500 friends, sometimes I come up short
It's totally sensible. How could a person possibly avoid comparing themselves to others, even subconsciously, and how could a single person's life ever compare favorably to the aggregated "highlights" of multiple other people? logically we know it's about as realistic as comparing ourselves to sports highlights on TV, but we still do it because it's a human thing to do.
For me the answer involved not really spending time browsing FB; I don't really read my "feed" much. I mainly use it to contact people.
I guess you could say I use it a bit selfishly: I post things on there more than I read others' posts. I don't think it's selfish in the same way that talking only about myself during a "real" conversation would be selfish, though, because nobody is forced to read what I say on FB. They can pick and choose...
Then I tell myself that they probably haven't saved as many lives as I have.
Then I have to tell myself that this doesn't pay the bills, dammit.
HN/slashdot/FB in moderation, kids! Now you know and knowing is half the battle.
But yeah, I know that feeling.
https://medium.com/matter/the-shut-in-economy-ec3ec1294816
I suspect these people your age making a lot more money lead lives similar to what's described in this article. These do not seem like happy lives to me!
If you're actively saving lives, that is more valuable than all the money in the world, and I thank you.
Also a lot of people just haven't found something that they truly love doing.
There's plenty of rich miserable people, and plenty of miserable poor people. If you have very little, you've got very little to worry about...
An attractive statement but totally wrong.
If you have very little - if you are poor, you have to worry about renting a roof for yourself, and food to eat, and clean-enough water, and having enough warmth, and healthcare, and then all of those things for each member of your family.
Every second of every day.
So much that you cannot manage anything else.
That contributes towards depression, sure.
Find something you truly love doing? This is usually something that rich people have the capacity and opportunity to do.
In my case I don't care that person X has more money than I do, since as long as I have enough for basic living money itself isn't something which I care deeply about.
I don't care too much about money. For me it's been more difficult to cope with the fact that there are so many people who are far more clever than I am. What's one's purpose if so many people can do it better?
(Before I sound too depressed: I am a happy person, I have come to appreciate that enjoying the craft you do is the most important thing. After family and friends.)
Regardless, I think that there is a large qualitative difference between e.g. Hackernews and Facebook. On Facebook people brag about their fortune (or bad luck), on Hackernews there are many genuinely interesting technical discussions where one can learn a lot.
Sometimes I wonder, though, what's the purpose of associating oneself with advances in the world? If you knew other people could do it better, would you still want your solution to win? I guess the answer is that we don't know other solutions are definitely better, when everyone is developing theirs, and betteris a relative term.
Perhaps it's more interesting to think in terms of Alan Watts' philosophy of growing and competing. Things just happen and there is no "ceramic theory" of good ideas.
One advice I hear often is: if you're not the quickest, just don't try to race anyone else for solving a problem (there are many people you could legitimately call 'genius' working on certain problems!). Work on things you know no one else is working with -- if you fail, it's only because the results aren't very useful (but for most things it's really hard to tell when they'll be useful anyway). I call this "work orthogonalization".
And there's my favorite, and probably most often said: be guided by beauty. If you feel what you're solving is "just right", it most likely will work and will work well.
Common sense stuff, so it has exceptions of course. Engineering for instance has a whole extra layer where we have to deal with physics, resource constraints and follow more closely the needs and demands of our users.
I have heard that too. I was talking with a noted probabilist, who co-authored a well-regarded book, about some work that Michel Talagrand (a very accomplished mathematician) was starting to publish.
He said, "just have to get out of the way," and when I gave a quizzical look, continued, "That guy is a bulldozer." Basically, you might sweat for a year and end up being a special case of a more general result that Talagrand just proved.
Thurston's essay is another consideration of this question (http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1994-30-02/S0273-0979-1994-...).
Who said man's purpose is to "do" things?
Life's purpose is to just be here, have fun, be kind to others, and read a good book from time to time. And raise some kids if you want to see humanity continue onwards.
Anything else is like saying that all these people who did just that and didn't cure cancer or sold their startup for 10B are not worthy humans.
Indeed. But personally, I'm aware that we don't have a self-sustaining system that would allow everyone to do just that - hence I find meaning in helping to enable that (and as a corollary, I find work (as in, jobs) that don't serve to further or maintain this goal meaningless and depressing).
Indeed... This reminds me of a dialogue in Iain Banks' Use of Weapons, between a stranger and a woman from the Culture, a society technologically advanced to the point that machines do everything better than the humans:
“Can’t machines build these faster?” he asked the woman,
looking around the starship shell.
“Why, of course!” she laughed.
“Then why do you do it?”
“It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out
those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three
hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite
happy, and you think; I helped build that. The fact a machine
could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact that it was
you who actually did it.”
“Hmm,” he said.
(Learn woodwork; metalwork; they will not make you a
carpenter or a blacksmith any more than mastering writing will
make you a clerk.)
“Well, you may ‘hmm’ as you wish,” the woman said,
approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship,
where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing
inside the model and talking. “But have you ever been gliding,
or swum underwater?”
“Yes,” he agreed.
The woman shrugged. “Yet birds fly better than we do,
and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because
of this?”
He smiled. “I suppose not.”
“You suppose correctly,” the woman said. “And why?” she
looked at him, grinning. “Because it’s fun.”
But yes, I always manually add the line breaks when quoting text. It's annoying and it would be nice if there were a real quote feature.
It might be a good feature, yes.
Locality! Your neighbors need your help!
Still, same thing, locality is important. I wish it was stressed more often in this increasingly globalized world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGWDw9ZGXEk
It's an inspirational perspective, thank you for the recommendation.
A side note:I'm reading Jacob Soll's history of accounting "The Reckoning" & renaissance Florence (+Venice) figures big there as well.
It says something about human nature that perhaps we need to fix, rather than just suppressing the symptoms by avoiding things like facebook.
I'm certainly not getting depressed from this - but I find this trend fairly annoying as well. There is fairly dominant sub-community on HN who try to communicate as often as possible how extremely smart they are and humblebrag about some start-up or how they declined an offer from Google.
But I think this sub-population is actually minority. The majority of HN readers is just curious about the subjects itself - those contribute the highest value on here in my experience.
My issue with something like HN isn't that other people are making money, are smarter or doing cool projects. My issue is that so many people are doing stupid things (in my mind), and making a ton of money from VC funding.
Someone who can create and make a living of product or service that's useful to others is wonderful. If you can't get by without funding and you don't seem to have a viable business plan, that's really infuriating. I don't think it's okay to just burn other people money until a business plan materialises. We wouldn't have Twitter, Facebook and a ton of other companies, I understand that, but I'm also okay with it.
Why does that have anything to do with you, or, more specifically, any impact on your own subjective sense of well-being?
More seriously, depression is linked to compulsive purchases.
Now I'm not saying that they're intentionally adopting features and styles that depress their users, but should they stumble into one by chance fixing will hurt revenues. What outcome should we expect?
Fear powerful optimization processes. Harm to mankind from inhuman intelligences doesn't require fancy AI: in the halls of the corporate Chinese room surprising behavior can arise just as well from complexity systems which are ultimately made of meat.
I think in the case of Facebook it's that you are the product, more specifically: your emotions are the product. You get other stereotypes but by-and-large the most well known stereotype on Facebook is someone who shares all their emotions. Facebook even encourages it: now in a relationship, married, divorced, broke up, etc. Relationships aren't "official" until they are "Facebook official."
Your emotional drama is what shows up on your friends' feeds (as does theirs on yours). Your drama is why your friends show up to read Facebook. Whether or not they click the 'like' button determines how you feel and deal with your emotions.
When you are looking for approval for your emotions you are never dealing with your emotions. When you are never dealing with your emotions you are depressed.
Do you have by any chance a source/study for that? Would love to read up on that issue a bit more.
Unhealthy levels of facebook use, particularly apparent addiction to those annoying invite games are pretty obviously not the behavior of a happy person. When ever I get a slew of invites to Candy Crush or similar, it's always from someone a bit tragic.
I mean, who else has the time to sit at home playing Facebook games, but the lack of motivation to go and do something more worthwhile?
> I mean, who else has the time to sit at home playing Facebook games, but the lack of motivation to go and do something more worthwhile?
Is a bit more complicated. On a broader perspective, this pattern usage of Facebook is entertainment exactly like watching TV is (you even get the ads!).
Considering that, based on the first statistic I've found on Google [0], the average American spends hours every day in front of a TV (even if not 5, 3/4 would be alarming), then there is a social problem, more than an individual one.
Equally, I'll often put easy-watching TV on when I'm at home but doing something else - working on my laptop, text-chatting to friends on Skype/WhatsApp, browsing sites like Hacker News. Again, this would raise my average, but it's not quite the same as going "what am I doing tonight? Watching the TV and nothing else" if the TV is getting a small fraction of my attention.
I just wonder to what extent this sort of half-watching increases averages, or on the flip side to what extent high-sounding averages are genuinely worrying.
I find it nearly impossible to find a percentile graph of something like hours viewed along Y-axis and percentile population along the X. An excellent startup idea would be the very hard task of a search engine that can find graphs of a given X vs Y.
Anyway, based on what little I can find, TV watching is absolutely not a bell curve as "young people" average only 2 or so hours per day and the elderly average over a working day per day (in excess of 8 hours per day of TV over 60 years old).
My strong suspicion is TV viewership is strongly exponential vs percentile with "people in trouble" (medical problems, hospital patients, severely handicapped, addicts, prisoners) recording 24 hours/day or at least all 18 or so waking hours as viewing time, vs the majority the population in a declining exponential graph dropping to almost zero.
Given a population distribution like that, an average is fairly meaningless when trying to draw cultural conclusions. Its like using average income or average wealth to draw economic conclusions. Or doing ergonomic design based on the average number of heads being well above one (think of Siamese twins). What cultural conclusions can you make about my typical normal lifestyle based on the average number of space qualified astronauts in my country?
It is not a completely useless statistic, if the average TV draws a kilowatt then given a billion random people the electrical load due to TVs would be about 5 billion kilowatt-hours per day (5 TWh?). But the usefulness of the numbers break down when zoomed in.
Part of the practical problem seems to be the compulsion to read everything that's on your feed; I myself have felt the siren call of this, but it becomes easier to break once you realise that you are not seeing everything from all of your 'friends' anyway, it's all algorithmically curated and filtered.
She's the introverted type, socially anxious, and I can understand the draw of being able to look into others lives without having to actually interact with them. The problem, then, is just as the study describes. Face to face conversations give a better glimpse on what's really going on personally, the good and the bad, while the newsfeed is a stream of bragging or things to be judgmental about.
Top news is the feature of facebook I appreciate most. I would go crazy if I were only inundated with the stream of menial crap you see in real time. Facebook learns who I actually interact with and knows my family members, and shows me the "upvoted" stories so that when I get on facebook once daily for 3-5 mins, I'm caught up.
Now if you increase your friends to 100, 200, 500, or more than this perception is even worse!! You'll be seeing multiple friends travelling each week. And on the holidays it will be even worse. However individually each friend is about the same on average.
To make things even more skewed you will probably have a few friends that will indeed have a better highlight reel, and possibly a better life, so of course you'll compare yourself to them more than your average friends cause that's how humans work. And God forbid one is a prolific facebook poster!
Also another thing to remember is that the more a post is liked the more feeds it showed up in. In other words really cool news will appear in a lot more feeds and negative news dies fast. This further skews our perceptions of how great things are.
The key is that comparing in facebook is a bad thing. The data is all skewed and not really comparable, but we still do it because it's in our nature. The best advice is to try and appreciate and remember this and as a result avoid those kinds of comparisons. Well that and like everything else such as TV, etc., limit your time to something reasonable. Oh and if you have friends that are really just acquaintances that fall into these categories then don't be afraid to hide their feeds ;)
Online conversations have continued offline. Those were actual people I was talking to. Those conversations resume online, often enough. It's part of the fabric.
An invitation to an actual event with actual people received on facebook, because of activity or exposure there, is not fruitless activity.
But it is usually a bored, nervous activity. I can handily agree to that part.
Personally, I have many connections exclusively only on FB - I don't have their emails, phone numbers, etc - that I remain on FB only to be able to message them.
I wish I could automatically message them and easily collect their email/phone #s with minimal effort...probably a way but I haven't looked into it.
Have you considered asking for their email address? Could send them a private message on Facebook saying you're considering leaving Facebook but would still like to keep in touch. I imagine most people would be fine with sharing their email address if they've already linked up with you on Facebook.
One way would be to run a randomized controlled trial, where you show some people slightly happier or sadder Facebook streams and you see how they react. This experiment has, in fact been run, [2] and what they found was that seeing happy status updates seemed to make people happier, not sadder. [3]
[1] http://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/jscp.2014.33.8.7...
[2] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full
[3] Though what they actually measured was what people posted, not their happiness. Perhaps seeing happy things leads you to be sad but post happy things to fit in.
In other words, it's "a tool I use to contact people" and not "a place where I hang out."
I do not allow Facebook's various apps and operating system hooks to notify me ever unless I am directly messaged by somebody. Used this way, I find it really valuable and not distracting. There are tons of people I'd never be able to effectively keep in touch with without it.
I also unfollow all of my negative FB friends. This is FB's most underrated feature. Instead of unfriending a person and dealing with the possible fallout, you can quietly unfollow them so that they don't show up on your feed. You can still contact each other, and they don't know they've been unfollowed.
I'll always keep in touch with my closest friends, even if they move to a shack in the desert and I have to rent a camel to talk to them. But for the rest of the friends and family I maintain some level of contact with[1] - probably a hundred or so? - I don't know how I'd keep in touch with them anyway.
______________
[1] The threshold would probably be, "would I care if they got a new pet or not?"
On the other hand, the separation has made reunion/catching up that much more exciting for us. When we do get together, it is always an exhilarating time, with so much to talk about and share. Personally I think this model works just fine for me.
"Facebook Is Making Us Miserable" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3335947