Everybody has so much to share. You spend so much time on your social networking accounts. So, you obviously get less face time with your friends and more virtual time with almost everyone you are connected with. This further demotivates people from going out and the lesser you get out, the more you get depressed. After all, man is a social animal. We need to meet people in order to stay in touch and be a real part of the society. And then, you read everyone's happy status updates and see their happy pictures on your wall (of course, nobody really clicks sad pictures of themselves and puts them up on a social networking website). It makes you depressed wondering why is your life not as great as theirs and why are you not happy? Even, if not out of jealousy or self-contempt, you still feel bad for yourself for being left out when your friends are having so much fun. Then, if you read a sad update, it further subconsciously affects your own emotional rhythm and your brain starts thinking it is sad, worsening your emotional state. Were you expecting that reading sad updates would cheer you up? Somehow, we like to think of ourselves as being the only person with so many problems to deal with and that, everyone else gets to be happy while we drown under the burden of pain and misery. In our conscious minds, we only concentrate on how happy others are and how miserable we are. According to research, you are almost 50% more likely to feel distressed if you read a depressed status update by a friend who is close to. Then, you do the not so unexpected and you update your status with a really sad and depressing note. This further makes you think about how depressed you are. Even if you may not be as much, people comment on it to console you and then you self-pity yourself, playing the part of the victim well. See, it is a cycle! Unless, you stop logging in to your account and be less curious about what is going on in others' lives. Pay more attention to your life and talk less about the bad things happening around you. It may be hard, but it is not impossible. Typing this, my cheeks are red in shame and guilt. Changing subjects, have you heard of accusations citing Facebook as a reason of divorce? Sad, but it's true.
Do you often find yourself, consciously or subconsciously, checking the number of friends or followers your friend has on his/her list and comparing it to your statistics?
May be we let our kids be exposed to social networking too soon. After all, what would a prepubescent child or a teenager, with sky-high hormone levels, know better? In fact, we can't even control ourselves from indulging in excessive use of social networking. If you get hooked onto something and use it more than you should, do you expect anything 'cool' or productive to happen? No way. We have a 24X7 access to social networking sites through our cellphones. May be we should stop logging into our Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and now even Google+ accounts, all the time. I like to think that it drains out my Blackberry's battery that has all the applications for being signed in to my social networking accounts. Ironic.
Did you know? Farmville, the popular gaming application on the social networking site, Facebook, has been named by the TIME magazine as one of the 50 worst inventions, for being one of the top reasons of debts in American households. Another study in the UK, has given a similar title to Facebook and Twitter, claiming that they are among the top 10 worst inventions of the decade.
I told you, social networking causes depression. Don't bury your head in the sand. Let's face it. We spend so much time on social networking sites because we like avoiding doing other things like taking care of the to-do list, dealing with our problems such as weight issues, unemployment issues, relationship issues and so many other things. Once you log out, all your pending and unaddressed issues come right at you staring in your face. And then, you fall deeper into your depression. In fact, most of us use social networking sites like a tool to tune out the real world because it is so much easier being online when you don't really have to face people and you can ignore chatting with someone even if you are to be online. I am not saying that social networking sites are the bad guys because so many of us have been helped by them in our businesses to grow or to reconnect with long lost friends or be in sync with people around us. We just don't know it when we have had enough of our dose of online socializing in a day. Perhaps, it is the FOMO syndrome, the Feeling Of Missing Out, that is keeping us from deleting our social networking accounts. We think we are socializing more with people, but we are actually spending lesser time talking to our friends and family or meeting them. I wonder, if we have become more dramatic since the advent of social networking that lets us express our thoughts freely and publicly.
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