When Reality is Simply Too Oppressive

[osewalrus]

 I keep reading about the "Pressure To Be Perfect" that supposedly arises from social media -- particularly Facebook. The theory is that everyone keeps posting about how perfect and awesome their lives are, creating pressure for everyone else to do the same and thus contributing to all manner of social anxiety -- particularly among teenagers and particularly for teen age girls.

I always have a good laugh when I read this, since I have never in my entire life ever seen anything vaguely like this. Granted I am not a teenage girl. But my entire Facebook feed is about as overwhelmingly angry, depressed and generally miserable as it comes.

That's not trolls, btw. Maybe it is a function of the damn Facebook algorithm -- which as far as I can tell is designed to continually serve up the least relevant most annoying things in my feed. No matter how many times I tell it "I want chronological," FB insists on switching it to something it insists I will like better but in reality is what FB thinks will prompt me to be more engaged.

I can't tell if its the fact that I have an unusually large number of "friends" (I exist in a peculiar place of not "celebrity" level but way about the estimated 200 or so average connections), and many of them come from political walks of life. But I have noticed this trend wrt what FB shows me for the same person. I never get nice, happy posts. I get everyone's dead pets, political outrage, and enough existential life angst to fill an entire YA series.

So Facebook has driven me off FB once again. I simply cannot take the utterly relentless tide of negative awfulness. By contrast, my Twitter stream is totally awesome. It is filled with interesting tidbits, humorous comments -- and lots of political outrage and existential angst. But the character limit seems to screen out the dead pets. I will confine my hypergraphia to Dreamwidth for a bit.

Comments

[magid]

I continue to hate the FB algorithms as they curate my feed (I, too, am a fan of chronology), but remain there because so many other people are there. Luckily I do see some positive posts (not sure if that's due to friend-group differences, what I've commented on in the past, or the black box of their algorithms).

[cellio]

I'm glad to see more of you here, since I don't do FB either. And Twitter is always a crap-shoot; I *know* I see only a small slice of it and that's ok for *there*, but I really want to see everything from the people I follow here. And yes, chronologically. Even if it sometimes piles up and I come in a week late...