This extract from a longish article by Arthur C. Brooks in the NYT caught my attention.
"What do you post to Facebook? Pictures of yourself yelling at your kids, or having a hard time at work? No, you post smiling photos of a hiking trip with friends. You build a fake life — or at least an incomplete one — and share it. Furthermore, you consume almost exclusively the fake lives of your social media “friends.” Unless you are extraordinarily self-aware, how could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?"
The author accurately depicts the relentlessly upbeat tone of Facebook 'where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day', and he is certainly right to point to the dangers of a "fake life", but I think he is wrong to read too much into it. We all tend to put on a brave face in our dealings with the outside world, and even with our friends and family. It is just that Facebook is not the platform of choice for anything other than the superficial, trivial currency of life.It is none the worse for that and I don't think you have to be "extraordinarily self-aware" to guard against the pitfalls.
"What do you post to Facebook? Pictures of yourself yelling at your kids, or having a hard time at work? No, you post smiling photos of a hiking trip with friends. You build a fake life — or at least an incomplete one — and share it. Furthermore, you consume almost exclusively the fake lives of your social media “friends.” Unless you are extraordinarily self-aware, how could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?"
The author accurately depicts the relentlessly upbeat tone of Facebook 'where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day', and he is certainly right to point to the dangers of a "fake life", but I think he is wrong to read too much into it. We all tend to put on a brave face in our dealings with the outside world, and even with our friends and family. It is just that Facebook is not the platform of choice for anything other than the superficial, trivial currency of life.It is none the worse for that and I don't think you have to be "extraordinarily self-aware" to guard against the pitfalls.
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