facebook making you miserable?

Very interesting article by Tim Challies.

"It seems clear that Facebook is exposing something, some ugly little corner of the human heart. Facebook is all about making life seem joyful—we “like” one another’s happy status updates, not the sad ones; we post photos of our parties, not our funerals; we use it to celebrate births and marriages and new relationships, not to mourn deaths or remember break-ups. Facebook is meant to be a happy place for people. But it doesn’t seem to work out so well. We all think everyone else is happy, but we don’t feel the joy.

And it strikes both ways—when we portray ourselves through social media we do so on our own terms. And of course this means that we present ourselves in the way we want to be perceived, whether or not this is an accurate portrayal. So even while we put only our best foot forward, we look at others and assume that their portrayal is more accurate than our own; we believe that we are the only pretenders, the only ones stretching and exaggerating, trying to keep up. We resent another person for being happy—“She has an amazing life and I don’t!” Or we resent her for being falsely happy—“I know her and I know that her life isn’t all that!”

Read the entire article here.