Want to Feel Isolated? Try Social Networking
On Facebook, “ladies night out” never ends with you getting cornered by a former Arizona State sorority girl who is two mojitos past dullard. On Facebook, the valet doesn’t lose your dirty Honda for twenty minutes while you calculate how much sleep you’ll get if there’s no traffic on the way home. On Facebook, it’s all sombreros and private jokes and close-ups of sushi and magnificent, unattainable Bourbon-hued camaraderie.
Your online “friends” have more community, more sisterhood, more fun than you do. Science can now prove it.
When it comes to parenthood, all the children on Facebook do adorable, precocious things with both pets and instruments. These angels wear stain-free sailor suits. They make sand castles, kiss puppies and giggle with rash free cheeks. That’s why every time you sign off, you feel just a little bit depressed by the vividness of their joie. Their brightness dampens you. This is something you’ve always known, but now science has an explanation.
Thanks to researchers at Stanford, we pretty much have proof that social networking is bumming us out.
Okay, I’m extrapolating here, but what they found (in a paper titled “Misery Has More Company Than People Think”) is that as human beings, we tend to overestimate how much fun our peers are having, while underestimating their negative experiences.
After perusing the photo album “Jordan Turns Two,” you will never know the cake wasn’t moist, the pizza made everyone gassy and Jordan had to be carried out like a surfboard when the pony peed on his shoes. You will never know most of the kids left sunburned and at least three viral infections were spread like cheap dip.
Personally, I don’t post much, but I lurk. I watch. I silently compare myself to these gleeful visions, especially to other moms, whose online family portraits have often been shot through a lens of manufactured, carefully produced joy and spiked with a dash of selective storytelling. No matter. It still sends me into a mood.
It’s not that I don’t have moments of transcendent joy, it’s that I don’t know how to share them.
No, not spiritually, I mean I literally can’t figure out how to make photo albums or upload images efficiently. Or, as I’m on the verge of mastering some major misrepresentation of the totality of my life with one kick-ass shot of my toddler’s dimples, he actually needs me to stop him from tumbling down the front stairs. I have neither the time nor the aptitude to fake you out.
I guess I don’t get the spiritual part either.
Last night, when my son got home from daycare, he pointed down the block, so I walked with him. He ran ahead. He ran four straight blocks, his hair flying up, little shoes smacking the pavement, going nowhere, just toward the flat-out euphoria of his body moving through space. I welled up and thought remember this remember this remember this.
Sure, he cried when I washed his face in the bath later, and left most of his rice on the floor, and whined when I put his arms in the sleeves of his pajamas, but I had that moment.
The thing is, that moment is boring. In fact, I’m sorry for boring you with it. If there’s a way of sharing the beauty without sounding braggy or hacky, I haven’t figured it out.
I do know this: I rarely feel happier or more connected after checking FB or Twitter.
There is often documentation of some social function from which I suddenly feel horribly excluded.
Intellectually, I know it’s just an illusion. Stanford proved it. No one is as happy as I think they are, and of course, I understand nobody posts a shot of their positive herpes test with a 
Armed with this new information, I can at least adjust for the human condition. I can assume your reunion was 33% less “awesome” than it looks, and that your kid probably crayons the wall after eating a frozen dinner you failed to chronicle for an album titled “Sodium won’t kill him.”
This column originally appeared on the Huffington Post.
(Sorry to put a non-related post, can’t find any way to send you a message directly?)
So stoked to hear you on The Film Vault. I will listen to anything you’re on. Super miss you on Ace and PE, but happy you’re still out there on PT.
Thanks, T!
e
Haha, love this posting! Totally sharing it on facebook so all my facebook friends know that I dont believe all the happiness they share! Of course, I am still going to check my facebook 10 times a day too…
I have such a Facebook phobia, it literally causes me gastrointestinal discomfort to log into my account. Yet I find it impossible to stay away! It shames me to admit the number of seemingly innocuous Facebook sessions that have culminated in an empty bottle of wine, bitterness and countless mini chocolate chip cookies from Trader Joe’s.
All that said, I am very much a lurker like you, so my friends have no idea how often I’m eating and drinking to their various exploits. They think I’m too busy and too “important” to check on Facebook, to which I typically nod my head in a wizened and serious way and respond with things like “I wish I had the time to Facebook, you’re sooo lucky” haha, it’ll be our little secret.
YES. “There is often documentation of some social function from which I suddenly feel horribly excluded.” YES.
Hey T,
How can I keep track of your writing? I used to follow you on Adam’s podcast but I had to stop listening to that because it turns out I have a finite tolerance for traffic signal and construction permit stories, but I really miss you. I check out this page often but it isn’t updated that often anymore and I see that the last couple were originally posted in the Huffington Post. I would like to somehow be made aware when you write something so that I can read it but I’m not interested in twitter. Is there some other avenue that I can use to follow your work? I there some way for me to “subscribe” to a Teresa Strasser updater? I “liked” your facebook page, but it doesn’t appear that you post links to your work there. Do I have any options here?
Thanks.
Okay, I actually have a good answer for this one.
I also tweet a link to new pieces, whether they end up on the “Today Show” blog or HuffPo. Please follow me on Twitter, despite 700 words on why I find social networking disquieting. It’s a decent way to track my writing if you’re into that sort of thing.
T
I was really hoping to die without ever having a twitter account but if that’s the only way that I can keep up with you, I’m in.
Here’s some depressing truth for you, my FB/Twitter status from just last night: “Shitty end to the nite, Teddy diarrhea-ed on the floor right before bath and tracked it thru 2 rooms, 41 distinct spots to clean, not happy.”
Don’t want to laugh at your misery … but I think most parents have felt that pain. Not sure what’s worse – the “trail of Poo”, or the toddler who wakes you up in the middle of the night with the tapping on your arm till consciousness happens and getting out half of the comment “Mommy, my tummy is …punctuated by barf landing all over your face, pillow, down comforter” …say no more little lady – message received.
Hope your little dude is feeling better !
Thanks, been there with the barf too, and yes, he’s doing just fine.
I think I commented on the same thing Maria mentioned about blahblahblog on the Fattest Toddler thread, since this wasn’t up yet. I loved the fact that every single person nailed it as you because of how well written it was. That said, the whole Facebook/social network thing has become this huge elephant in the panic room of my life. I have two kids who are now 21 and 16. They both live in a world of FBO or not FBO (facebook official or not facebook offiical) . Apparently … you can’t be happy or sad, having a root canal, popping a zit, dropping the pain in the ass boy/girlfriend or hooking up short or long term, and have it be “real” unless it says so, on Facebook. Recently my younger daughter started dating this darling boy and despite the fact that I KNEW they had really gone to dinner and a movie, the words “is this facebook official” or not came out of my 50-something mouth. I wanted to wash my mouth out with battery acid. I sadly discovered recently that other than a few conservative Mormon friends, I’m apparently the last parent on earth who doesn’t have a Facebook, LinkedIn or other account – I am constantly surprised when I get an email from a friend I thought as a mature sensible person asking me to “join them” on a social networking site. Even my freakin’ company (granted a major entertainment studio), is creating social network sites for the employees – and I actually heard someone use this phrase during a meeting about human resources policy “well, lets take the conclusions of this meeting and socialize the ideas in the larger employee group environment”. Great now ideas are going to have a better social life than I do. I’m a software engineer by profession, you’d think all this techno-inabled substitution for real communication or feelings would be my wheelhouse. But I find myself being left further and further in the silicone dust. My 21 year old daughter and I had a lengthy conversation over the weekend that she was going to create a new Facebook profile that she was only going to tell her friends about, because her “real” Facebook account is filled with family members and others who she might not want reading what she really wants to post on her page about a crazy night in West Hollywood. I said, why don’t you just “unfriend” the folks you don’t want reading your page. Her reaction to this was akin to me asking her to drown a basket of adorable kittens in a vat of acid. She said “Mom, you CAN’T do that ! It’s just not acceptable”. I said you know that your father is still your father, even if he’s not on your Facebook account right ? I got the look that all parents eventually learn that means “this conversation is over … if you keep talking, you will feel like an idiot in 10 minutes”. I just wonder what will happen the first time a bit of space junk takes out a dozen communication satellites and half the planet won’t know if they are happy or sad, working or vegging and whether or not they “LIKE” anything.
I love your replies.
I’m fairly certain you are one of the finest wordsmiths ever to grace a comments section.
Seriously.
t
I think the problem is your friends. Friend me for a dose of reality. Search for Ispeakkeener.
I hear ya…it does the opposite of what is promised.
It’s just more evidence, one more place, where I don’t have a place on the bench.
T! It was so funny to hear the first few lines of this entry as a question on “Blah Blah Blog” the other day. And even better when Adam and Bryan immediately sussed it out as being too well written to be anyone but you.
I agree–Facebook is beginning to bum me out too.