#facebook depression

[ivorybones]

Facebook depression

All my friends are getting married and having kids. I'm 22, and I've got like nothing going for me.

[breedavies]

Writing for sale

I really miss LiveJournal. Yes, I know it still exists and yes I know there are many other platforms like it out there (this one included.) But I guess I miss LJ for the time and the place in my life when it existed to me. I miss the feeling of public privacy and the way my audience/community was a curated group of friends I knew in real life and total strangers I had become friends with on the internet. 

I deleted my Live Journal years ago in an act of virtual diary burning -- I didn’t want the evidence of my life from that time to exist to me anymore. It was mostly because a big portion of my LJ’s entries were about a psychologically abusive relationship I was in on and off for over half a decade, a relationship I passed off as a lot of things other than psychologically abusive. 

I was thinking recently about how I don’t journal anymore at all. Not even in a tangible notebook like I have done on and off since I was first able to write. This off period of the on and off has been longer than usual -- almost three years of not journaling at all. I tell myself it’s because I’m too busy writing for a living, but that’s a lie. I write daily for a living but there are hours each day when I could be writing for me. But I stopped writing for me. I stopped writing things that don’t get me the little bit of money I need to survive and I’ve stopped writing things that I can’t advertise as part of my social media “brand.” 

Because that’s what I have become as a writer now -- a brand. A person expected by the people who pay me to promote/advertise/sell my own work, even though that work doesn’t see me enough returns most of the time to live a regular life. It doesn’t see enough returns for the emotion it takes to go through the whole motion of pitching, writing, placing it in a blogging format, waiting for edits, seeing the finished product, promoting it on social media, engaging an audience on that social media in a conversation (and in the hopes that they read more of my words than just the headline, the part of the story I most likely didn’t write) and making it through the often difficult moderation I have to do as people begin to argue in the comments section of my own social media threads. The irony of that part is, I never read the comments on my own articles on the sites I work for, but I end up being the moderator on things like Facebook when friends and strangers bicker in the space I have created by asking people to read what I have written. I didn’t go to college to learn how to do that part of the writing process, and it is hard. 

It’s hard on my person. It’s hard on my emotional well-being. It’s hard on my soul. It’s hard to be the writer who is simultaneously looking for readers while trying to create a safe space for myself to be happy with what I write. People say really mean things to me and others within the threads I’ve created on social media. Over the past few days, I’ve tried to take a step back from interacting on my most dreaded platform -- Facebook. I’ve tried to take a voyeur’s seat, take a place at the table usually reserved for people who actually use social media for something other than selling their work. Many people like me are hustlers; we’re not ‘average users’ who use Facebook for its pretend purpose of “connecting with others.” We use it as an online marketplace for discussion and sale. Lately, I don’t have it in me to be a seller. I also have created a minefield for myself out of my Facebook by accepting friend requests from anyone, leading to strangers making outrageous statements in my threads that end up hurting me and the personal relationships I have with other people, people I actually know who also happen to be participating in those same threads. (I’ve also found myself having really terrible feelings towards friends based on the things they post and say. But that’s a different story for another day.)

The thing with me and writing is that when I start thinking about something I want to say, my brain just starts spitting it out, whether I have a way to capture it at that very moment or not. Often, I’m in the shower, in the car, in bed about to fall asleep (or my brain’s favorite time to start writing -- RIGHT when I first open my eyes.) It even begins when I’m mid-conversation with another human and often I don’t feel it is polite to say ‘excuse me, I have to leave this interaction right now so I can write down what I my brain is throwing at me instead of listening to you.’ 

I’d like to do more of that -- more writing as it comes to me. More writing that makes me feel good. More writing that involves a finished product I don’t feel like I have to sell once it’s done. Because the thing is, these expectations I feel as a writer to “sell” my own work after it’s done are really my own -- I get paid to write assignments whether I promote them on social media or not. Maybe I would feel better about selling my already sold pieces if I was writing other things that were not for sale? I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer is. All I know is that I’ve got to change something soon so that I don’t feel as dead on the inside as I do now. I want to create work that is art; right now, I am creating work that is commerce. Even if it is a topic I am passionate about and I feel like I’ve written from my heart -- if I have to immediately start sharing a link to that work on social media and engaging people and basically begging them to read it, it doesn’t feel like writing from the heart. Or maybe I would feel a lot better about this if I was making a living wage for those pieces I’m selling. I don’t know. I better put a clickable title on this entry so people read it. Or not.  I miss you, Live Journal. 

[uncooperativebrain]

I’m Coveting so Hard Right Now

A friend of mine from high school got into the school I wanted to get into.  He now has quite a bit of debt, but he’s graduated now and just posted on how he got to work with Bill Murray on some TV show or something.

...and I’m just sitting here in my parent’s basement trying to put something together that remotely resembles a career.  Yeah.

Kids, this is a thing called “Facebook depression.”

Imma go sleep off this inhuman self-loathing rage.

[androgynouswizarddaze]

How to get rid of facebook addiction

How to get rid of facebook addiction

Few years back, facebook was used only to connect with your friends but these days whole scenario has been changed. We know that most of our young generation waste a lot of their precious time on facebook. We surf a lot of time in liking, posting, sharing and adding friends. We keep scrolling down our news feed for no reason and several hours are passed with no net result. Whether we are in…

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[sonyoestavillo]

Social Media: Positive Reinforcement or Breeding Narcissism

Social Media: Positive Reinforcement or Breeding Narcissism

Social media has radically altered the way most of us communicate in the 21st century. The brief history of social mediagoes hand in hand with the start of the first major Internet service provider, CompuServe making its dial-up debut in 1969. As the Internet began to advance, the information age exploded. We can look up, research, dig, snoop, and pluck out anything we need because of the…

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[optimismhopedreams]

Declines in Happiness: Try less Facebook

There is an interesting article I came accross recently the proposes that an increased use in Facebook may be leading to negative emotions. There has been much debate recently as to whether face-to-face connections can be fully replaced by electronic ones. And in some respects yes they can, but this underlines a darker message. Facebook has been linked to things such as cyberbullying, and divorce filings, it's been the source of breakups, and other actions in this category. The researchers conducting this study noted that the more a person used Facebook the sadder the responses. They concluded that heavier Facebook usage over an entire two-week period led to lower life satisfaction.

In my experience and from another article I remember reading ages ago, one of the main sources of "Facebook depression" results from comparing your self to others. This reinforces in your mind a gap that you are not as good as the profiles you are comparing yourself against. It was noted that viewing profiles other than your own leads to lower happiness. I do think that there are social media platforms that can encourage the spread of happiness, I even detailed a couple of them in earlier posts, but the fact remains; sometimes too much social media exposure is not a good thing.

[daynasessa-blog]

Facebook, we're not friends...

It is no secret that I really, really dislike facebook.  Given full disclosure, I do 'troll' around from time to time, peeking in on people's lives, who under normal circumstances (read: pre-FB), wouldn't pop into my mind for years.  I always say that Zuckerberg created it to distract everyone else--- hung up on the mundane routine of acquaintances' daily lives and the social mores of high school--- while he goes on to take over the world.  Or maybe I watched too much 'Pinky and the Brain' as a kid and it is just an ancillary and unforeseen consequence of social networking.   Whatever the case, Facebook is something I try my best avoid like the plague, because inherently I see the social reverberation of 'status updates' and 'friend networks' as just that--- an incurable disease.  Yes, a blood-borne anxiety inducing disease, like malaria. 

There has been plenty of press lately about 'Facebook Depression'. I wouldn't doubt it.  Take the dynamics of high school sophomores with the perceived social hierarchy, have everyone of every age use those rules, stir in tough financial times and an anemic job market.  And there you have it, the experience of a catty high school reunion every day, on live feed.

I recently overheard an argument between a girl and her boyfriend about comments on her 'wall', the tone seemed as if their on-line lives were more relevant than their off-line relationship. A few weeks ago, over dinner, a friend updated me on the goings on of a third degree friend on her network, she compared their career accomplishments and potential salary discrepencies. A girl at a cocktail party told me that the photo 'commenting' and 'liking' got so arduous and political she quit FB cold turkey and now she has anxiety about going back on for a work assignment.  The environment plays to people's most baseful insecurities and weaknesses, where many market a 'profile' they want everyone else to believe (and envy). The ironic part is that those who work so hard to maintain and impose rule of order and promote their image are probably the same insecure social climbers from the good old days of adolescence.  As I've said before, I am extraordinarily private and completely averse to self-promotion.  Unavoidably, I see even 'sharing' the good that's going on in my life as not only unnecessarily bragging but also making myself a ripe target for an evil eye.  My childhood home was a superstitious one, where my baby crib was painted a deep candy apple red and most comments about good fortune were immediately followed by a 'Kanina Horah, poo, poo, poo'.  So I can't help it really, I don't like talking about myself unprompted, not even to my supposed 'friends'.  As I see it, very few people need to be updated on my daily trials, trivals and triumphs.  Averaged over years, the hope is that life experience will be positive.  It can't be healthy or natural for a near stranger to know the instantaneous events, positive or negative, of one's live.  Not for me at least. So where does someone like myself fit into the modern age--- this second-life-like world of perpetual updates?  A world, as I see it, where you are either a bombastic braggart or a self-concious braggee, or possibly both simultaneously.  Facebook, and people's use of it has created a zeitgeist of overexposure and insecurity, of personal uses for social media and search engine optimization, all that seems increasingly like an outgrowth of youthful social bullying and popularity contests. 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be'; I don't wish to share nor to envy.  So where do I fit in?  I had stopped asking that question a long time ago as an eccentric and self-assured teenager.  I am not about to start again now.  So, it seems there isn't a place for my kind--- not at this lunch table. And  I'm OK with that.