Over the last couple of years Facebook has somehow become an integral part of our lives. It has had both its share of benefits and evils covering everything from bringing people closer to serving as platform for new age cyber-bullies . And presently it holds a degree of significance, though varied, in all our lives.
Today some spend every waking moment of theirs logged in on their personal profiles, while the rest of us can’t even go a day without checking in on our pages at least once.
Of course we differ in the level of our involvement with the site and the purpose behind its use; some among us use it as a mode of staying connected with our friends or family members, some use it as a medium of self expression, some as a means of accelerating their careers while others for the simple recreational value. Thus even though most of us may not be glued to the page throughout the day every day, the majority still does utilize it from time to time, for whatever reasons.
However, no matter what the reason behind its use or the level of use, there is one pattern of behaviour which I find becoming increasingly evident among most users– the tendency to compare our lives with others- thanks to the regular updates on our newsfeeds.
In the recent past, I noticed that every time I had a conversation with some of my friends, we always hit a point where we discussed about the lives of our other friends, or people we mutually know, are related to etc. Although talking about others, even generally and not negatively, is a part of human nature, what started sticking to me was the tendency to continuously compare our lives to that of the others and consequently, expressing dissatisfaction with our own, whether intentionally or not .
Yes, most of us have been reared on a steady diet of comparison ever since we began to crawl, but with time it seemed like we were starting to settle in, in our own skins. At least that’s what I thought we were moving towards, but lately it does not feel so. The deluge of happy pictures and similar posts pouring on our newsfeed regularly, while on the one hand make us glad that our near and dear ones are doing spectacularly well for themselves, on the other hand makes our own insecurities seem glaring.
To ascertain that this feeling and tendency was not something limited to my personal group or a figment of my own imagination, I started reading up public chat boards, independent blogs with comments, informal public discussions etc. The more I read through these informal discussions and comments, the more I found the same feeling and tendency being conveyed everywhere.
It seems that apart from keeping us in touch with all our contacts, Facebook is also keeping us in touch with all our insecurities and fear of failure.
But who is to be blamed here? It is definitely not the technology’s fault, so who is the real culprit here?
Well, according to me it is our very own perception and interpretation of the reality which is at fault. Barring all those balanced, matured and at-peace-with-their-own-selves fortunate human beings, the rest of us are still struggling to accept ourselves even partially; and during this very difficult struggle our self-confidence is always the shakiest aspect of our personality (even if we may not always let on so). At such a juncture when we use such medium of connections as Facebook, we get only a skewed and superficial view of the lives of the numerous friends on our lists.
We put up only the positive side of our lives on social media, the darker side we keep wrapped up and personal, meant only to be shared with a choice few. Yet when we check the profiles of others, we forget about this truth and assume the aspects of their lives projected online are the only aspects. We forget they too are human and have their share of ups and downs, success and failures, qualities and flaws. Thus in our minds we have only the accumulated positive of others lives and as opposed to that, we have the tangled mess of all the positives and negatives of our own. To put it simply, we compare our whole to others’ parts – usually their best parts.
Such a comparison is mismatched, misunderstood, inherently flawed and will for sure lead to the misinterpretation of the reality. But as I said before, here it is not the problem of the technology; here the issue lies within us, so the resolution too has to come from within.
So the next time good news from a friend or an acquaintance crops up on our feed, let’s just make a concerted effort to keep it at that – a happy occurrence in a near one’s life and not a yardstick to judge our lives by. We must remember that what we see on Facebook is only a cursory glimpse into the lives of others, not the whole story. Nonetheless, if we still want to procrastinate meeting that challenge to a later day, we can take the easiest way out – turn off the notifications on our page.
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