31–40 of 132 posts
This article makes me feel not so antisocial anymore, thank you! :D
100% confirm. I quit FB after being on it for a decade and I'm significantly happier. More productive at work. Significantly less angry. The big one is that I'm making much more of a point to spend time with people who actually live near me rather than chatting it up with my friends from college. I think people take for granted how much of a motivator a little bit of loneliness can be.
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html
"It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
It’s a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left.
The same often goes for old friends. In high school, I sat around playing hearts with the same four guys about five days a week. In four years, we probably racked up 700 group hangouts. Now, scattered around the country with totally different lives and schedules, the five of us are in the same room at the same time probably 10 days each decade. The group is in its final 7%.
So what do we do with this information?
Setting aside my secret hope that technological advances will let me live to 700, I see three takeaways here:
1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.
2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia.
3) Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious."
I'm curious: Which aspects of Facebook cause this? Do other social networks, like Insta or Twitter, exhibit this behavior? In a way, this and studies like it are damning to Facebook's core mission to connect everyone in the world.
Of course among those there are also people getting sick, divorced, fired, and so on, but they are not going to necessarily post on social media about it, so your view on what is "normal" becomes more and more skewed and makes you feel worse and worse about what's going on with you, despite the fact that objectively you might be doing just fine.
I came to the same conclusion a few years ago, when I delete my social accounts like Facebook. They only show you the best slices of individual lives, all day, every day. When compared to your life, it makes it look like you're doing nothing with your life. That it's completely boring, while all of these people are living these amazing adventures everyday. Combine that with all of the vitriol comments plaguing all of…
Deleted mine a few months ago, and I do think I feel better. Only regret is that I probably can't get hired by Facebook now... :-)
Haven't had an actual FB account in 4 or 5 years. I'm sure they were aware but to their credit no one ever asked me about it.
It's even worse when you're struggling through serious financial problems and/or a divorce, or some event like that. Nobody really wants to be your friend, and nobody wants to hear about it.
Online:
(a) One is more likely to find others in the same boat sooner or later, although those people are also more likely to have turned into embittered cranks/ideologues. But at least it's someone.
Divorce IRL is a very lonely experience; just when you are most psychologically vulnerable and could really use a friend, you become radioactive. Double if you're a bootstrapped entrepreneur, since your already existing problems have just leapt from "minor-league brush fire" to "apocalyptic conflagration seen from low orbit".
(b) While, one's not going to post much about these types of issues on social media in general, it allows you to keep conforming with your wider circle. You can keep on riding this carousel of wide-eyed, facile, optimistic communication on trivial or theoretical topics. It's much harder IRL, where it's harder to conceal that actually, real talk, things are really, really shitty.
There was a point I worried that one or both of them would become a mandatory authentication mechanism for other sites.
100% confirm. I quit FB after being on it for a decade and I'm significantly happier. More productive at work. Significantly less angry. The big one is that I'm making much more of a point to spend time with people who actually live near me rather than chatting it up with my friends from college. I think people take for granted how much of a motivator a little bit of loneliness can be.
I mean, I don't really understand the 'feeling inadequate because of my cousin's baby pictures' thing. I mean, I am happy for them, but that isn't the life I want, so I don't feel bad that I don't have it. Alternately, I could be less jealous than most people, but let's run with the more realistic first reason.
For me, the problem with social media is a fundamental lack of self control; I get into 'someone is wrong on the internet' discussions, and for me, those are the 'addictive but not pleasant' aspects of social media. For me, a conversation is not fun if we aren't arguing in good faith ; if we can't acknowledge one another's good points and rhetorical flourishes, it is just not fun, and I end up feeling frustrated and rejected. The unhealthy part is that I feel the discussion is unfinished, and walking away takes a tremendous act of will, and even then, my mind keeps coming back to the conversation.
I hope it is just a matter of practice; I mostly have left other mediums with these sorts of unfufilling conversations, or at least learned to restrain myself from participating in the most obviously unproductive conversations.
I think the big difference with social media is largely cultural; lots of people are there who lack a background in early internet culture or academic culture, and our shared vocabulary doesn't run much past "you are wrong " and there isn't the social pressure to be civil like we have here, or to be smart, like there was in the heyday of kuro5hin.