Earlier this week I read this article on Huffington Post about Facebook making our lives miserable.
Hypersharing, author (the very-smart-and-Harvard-educated) Daniel Gulati argues, is “threatening our sense of happiness.” Mr. Gulati makes good points about those threats, and he shares thoughts about the ways Facebook fragments our time and threaten the decline of actual close, personal relationships.
But it’s the “den of comparison” that I’ve been considering for days. Facebook makes us accentuate the positive, say the author. That’s causing us to unnecessarily compare ourselves to one another. All of that comparison makes set impossible standards for our lives.
Online, laissez les bons temps rouler, I say. It’s usually my preference to share positive, happy news and lighthearted thoughts and images. My life, of course, has plenty of more sordid moments. Ill fitting pants. Bills. Uncertainty. Arguments, bitterness and my own (numerous, I should add) shortcomings. But it’s life’s peaks that I feel like sharing, not the valleys.
Friends’ beautiful pictures, congratulatory messages and carefully pruned walls shouldn’t be enough to convince you that anybody’s life is totally perfect. No one gets through life without trials and tests and moments that induce tears and rage.
The HuffPo post asks readers for tips. I guess if I had one, it would have to be for social media consumers to approach those platforms with reality in mind. Amidst all of life’s rubbish, maybe many of us would rather share the sunshine.
