Why someone else’s happy share can make you sad

Creating this blog was really for me to talk about interesting stuff that people share that makes them happy.  But this week I was posed an interesting question.

“What happens when one person’s happy share makes another person sad?”

I undeniably love social networks.  I have been obsessed since I went on yahoo chat rooms when I was 16, I lived the cliché of re-discovering an old flame on Friends Reunited, I had my fair share of MySpace dates back in the early naughties, I re-connected with old school mates on Bebo, got very excited when Facebook all got a bit mass and most recently Twitter has given me a way to stay up-to-date about things that interest me, within my limited time and attention span constraints plus its helped me make lots of new, like minded friends.  There has undoubtedly been a lot of fun brought into my life through these networks, but to my friend’s question – there is a darker side to social media that is rarely talked about.   Through what these networks allow us to see and know, they can actually hurt us.

In the last few weeks I have had to deal with 3 separate friends who have all suffered trauma by Facebook.  Nights of tears and red wine because now we have the power to see things we once couldn’t.

Australia spends more time on social networks than anyone else in the world, but what are we really looking at and why are we looking?

Remember how strange it felt to have public conversations at first on each others’ walls?  Now it’s an accepted norm to comment and chat on public view to all your friends.  This behaviour of a desire to show off our own social habits has inadvertently also given us a way to find out more about the social circles of those we envy or are intrigued by.

It is a tribal instinct to compete against others in our social circles.  This post from Frontal Cortex even questions if the nature of social networks is akin to primate dominance hierarchy, we are now able to numerically track and measure our popularity through follower numbers and responses to status updates.

We do want to know what other people are doing, because, in a strange kind of a way, we want to know if their lives look better than ours.

Rachel Simmons, an educator and the author of “The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence”, said Facebook’s new live feed format had made the site particularly difficult to tear oneself away from.  “You’re getting a feed of everything everyone is doing and saying,”  “You’re literally watching the social landscape on the screen, and if you’re obsessed with your position in that landscape, it’s very hard to look away.”

As humans we also natural voyeurs.  Particularly women, who are psychologically wired to be interested in other people.  Read any Jane Austen novel, celebrity magazine or even listen to a group of girls chatting.  99% of the time it will be about people and especially guys.   Online, it is often joked about that we ‘Facebook stalk’ – but why do girls get so obsessed with guy’s online activity?  One theory is hormones. Females in lust filled relationships are subjected to intense releases of dopamine and oxytocins hormones in our brains.  These hormones are addictive.  When they are taken away, we seek ways of trying to get the feeling back, or failing that, simply try to get closer to the person who gave it to us.  Facebook can can give us the hit of him that we think we need, without anyone else knowing  and then let us judge if our lives are better than his.   While this may feel satisfying for a moment, it is ultimately where his happy shares will most probably become a sad thing for us.

This post from the Urban Detective brings this scenario to life and it leads me back to the need for red wine when we self inflict ourselves to content, that of course will inevitably fill us with envy or jealously. 

So, are social networks making us sadder people?

There have been a number of studies conducted on Facebook’s effect on human behaviour – and even the evolution of our behaviour questioned from the effects of having larger social networks and access to more information.   But is there really such a thing as Facebook depression?  This article which said “Researchers at Stony Brook University in New York have found that too much Facebook usage can leave you more prone to anxiety and depression.”, was quick to caveat  that it could actually be any form of communication that aids anxiety – particularly in the case of teenage girls who ‘can talk themselves to tears’.  Would they do it anyway without the help of Facebook?

We absolutely do have more access to information about people now than before.  I think it’s true having the ability to look can pro-long some fascinations with people, prevent us from moving on and essentially, it can make us feel bad when we see someone has something (or someone) better than us.  But, at the end of the day the social network is not the creator – it is simply allows us to access the information.  It is up to us to recognise when our behaviour on these networks is hurting us.  Remember, the block button is not always a bad thing.