Facebook is making you unhappy
Facebook algorithms decide what to show you in your news feed and what not. Did you ever wonder why you’re seeing more cat videos than news from earthquakes in Japans even though you subscribed to New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian or Der Spiegel? Facebook wants you to stay as much as possible on their site, because the longer you watch videos of pandas eating bamboo or falling from trees, the more revenue they get from advertisement. Those videos are supposed to make you happy and feel good, that is why nobody shows you horrifying videos. And, you know, Apple doesn’t want to advertise their Health App next to a video of people dying in a car accident.
Even though the algorithms try to please you all the time, a recent study from University of Michigan argues that Facebook is making us unhappy. They found out that the more people used Facebook in the time between the two texts, the less happy they felt and the more their satisfaction declined from the beginning of the study until its end.
Another study by the Happiness Research Institute shows that people who deprived themselves of Facebook for a week reported higher levels of satisfaction than those continuing to use it. Facebook users were 39 percent more likely to feel unhappy. Those who boycotted Facebook reported having a richer social life and were able to concentrate better.
There are five things almost every user does on facebook which have been proven to lead to unhappiness according to research like: seeing the happiest moments of other people’s lives makes our lives feel shitty, posting our moments of triumph makes our friends hate us, friends requests rejected hurts just as much as real life rejections. In addition people on Facebook hate users who post their own triumphs or share negative news.
One of the major problems with Facebook is envy, though:
“Facebook distorts our perception of reality and of what other people’s lives really look like. We take in to account how we’re doing in life through comparisons to everyone else, and since most people only post positive things on Facebook, that gives us a very biased perception of reality,
“This constant flow of great news we see on Facebook only represents the top 10 per cent of things that happen to other people. It shouldn’t be used as the background for evaluating our own lives.
We cannot discriminate between real life and Facebook’s highlight - reel. When friends live-feed their holiday, their whole day seems wicked. And what are you doing at the moment? Sitting on the bus commuting to university and scrolling through Facebook on a shitty rainy afternoon and with no one to talk to. If you have 300 friends on your list, it is very likely that you see at least a handful awesome holiday fun each month. It seems that the whole world is having more fun than you. Because we just fill up our heads with these constructed images and do not realize that this is just a snapshot of someone’s life and forget that afterwards they probably have to deal with their shit as well. And imagine that probably everyone has this one momentum in a year but we do not realize that: for us, “them” becomes a person we compare our lives to. And this person has several big moments every day. That is how we work and this is sadly how Facebook works. So why don’t you shut down your account, leave your phone at thome and have a cup of coffee with your best friend?
