The Emotional Darkside of Facebook

If you aren’t on Facebook chances are you have deactivated it because of some negative emotions it has stirred within you. FB is an interesting phenomenon – it has brought back the good ole days of high school, or maybe not so good days of high school. The pettiness, the judgments, the comparing and competing which all leave you depleted and feeling less than.

Research Into the Darkside of Facebook

Stanford University did a study in the fall 2010 on the negative emotions that Facebook is bringing up for the masses. Imagine this scenario: its happy hour featuring coworkers Juan, Lisa, and Jen. Juan has been struggling recently with poor feedback from his boss, Lisa has been dealing with marital and financial difficulties, and Jen has been suffering restless nights because of loneliness. Yet surrounded now by pleasant company and good refreshments, they all wear smiles on their faces. When asked by the others how they’re doing, each of them, judging it inappropriate to express unhappiness at a happy hour, says that things are fine, and each is left thinking that only he or she is weathering rough times. This is what the Persian poet Jelalluddin Rumi called THE OPEN SECRET.

He says that each one of us is trying to hide a secret—not a big, bad secret, but a more subtle and pervasive one. It’s the kind of secret that people in the streets of Istanbul kept from each other in the 13th century, when Rumi was writing his poetry. And it’s the same kind of secret that you and I keep from each other every day. You meet an old acquaintance, and she asks:

“How are you?”
You say, “Fine!”
She asks, “How are the kids?”
You say, “Oh, they’re great.”
“The job?”
“Just fine. I’ve been there five years now.”
Then, you ask that person, “How are you?”
She says, “Fine!”
You ask, “Your new house?”
“I love it.”
“The new town?”
“We’re all settling in.”

“If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.” Charles de Montesquieu

It’s a perfectly innocent exchange of ordinary banter; each one of us has a similar kind every day. But it is probably not an accurate representation of our actual lives. We don’t want to say that one of the kids is failing in school, or that our work often feels meaningless, or that the move to the new town may have been a colossal mistake. It’s almost as if we are embarrassed by our most human traits.

We tell ourselves that we don’t have time to go into the gory details with everyone we meet; we don’t know each other well enough; we don’t want to appear sad, or confused, or weak, or self-absorbed. Better to keep under wraps our neurotic and nutty sides (not to mention our darker urges and shameful desires.) Why wallow publicly in the underbelly of our day-to-day stuff? Why wave the dirty laundry about, when all she asked was, “How are you?”

The irony of the open secret Rumi says that when we hide the secret underbelly from each other, then both people go away wondering, “How come she has it all together? How come her marriage/job/town/family works so well? What’s wrong with me?”

We feel vaguely diminished from this ordinary interaction, and from hundreds of similar interactions we have from month to month and year to year especially those we encounter on FB. When we don’t share the secret ache in our hearts—the normal bewilderment of being human—it turns into something else. Our pain, and fear, and longing, in the absence of company, become alienation, and envy, and competition. The site’s very design—the presence of a “Like” button, without a corresponding “Dislike” button—reinforces a kind of upbeat spin doctoring. (No one will “Like” your update that the new puppy died, but they may “Like” your report that the little guy was brave up until the end.)

Hiding Our Human Side

The irony of hiding the dark side of our humanness is that our secret is not really a secret at all. How can it be when we’re all safeguarding the very same story? That’s why Rumi calls it an Open Secret. It’s almost a joke—a laughable admission that each one of us has a shadow self—a bumbling, bad-tempered twin. Big surprise! Just like you, I can be a jerk sometimes. I do unkind, cowardly things, harbor unmerciful thoughts, and mope around when I should be doing something constructive. Just like you, I wonder if life has meaning; I worry and fret over things I can’t control; and I often feel overcome with a longing for something that I cannot even name. For all of my strengths and gifts, I am also a vulnerable and insecure person, in need of connection and reassurance. This is the secret I try to keep from you, and you from me, and in doing so, we do each other a grave disservice.

According to the Stanford study, it was noticed that people seemed to feel particularly crummy about themselves after logging onto FB and scrolling through others’ attractive photos, accomplished bios, and chipper status updates. “They were convinced that everyone else was leading a perfect life.” And women may be particularly susceptible to the Facebook illusion. For one thing, the site is inhabited by more women than men, and women users tend to be more active on the site, as Forbes has reported. According to a recent study out of the University of Texas at Austin, while men are more likely to use the site to share items related to the news or current events, women tend to use it to engage in personal communication (posting photos, sharing content “related to friends and family”). This may make it especially hard for women to avoid comparisons that make them miserable. (Last fall, for example, the Washington Post ran a piece about the difficulties of infertile women in shielding themselves from the Facebook pictures of pregnant friends.)

How To REALLY Look at A Facebook Profile

The author of the Stanford study suggests might do well to consider Facebook profiles as something akin to the airbrushed photos on the covers of women’s magazine. No, you will never have those thighs, because nobody has those thighs. You will never be as consistently happy as your Facebook friends, because nobody is that happy.

The human habit of overestimating other people’s happiness is nothing new, of course. Social networking may be making this tendency worse. Stanford’s research doesn’t look at Facebook explicitly, but if the conclusions are correct, it follows that the site would have a special power to make us sadder and lonelier. By showcasing the most witty, joyful, bullet-pointed versions of people’s lives, and inviting constant comparisons in which we tend to see ourselves as the losers, Facebook appears to exploit an Achilles’ heel of human nature. And women, may be especially vulnerable to keeping up with what they imagine is the happiness of the Jones’.

Anytime there is darkness the possibility for the light is always present. Facebook has many positive qualities, but in order to find them we must be intentional about what we are using the site for… is it to connect with friends (ones we actually know), family, business etc… or are we using it to be a voyeur looking into others lives and comparing with them or competing with them?

I encourage you to get quiet and ask yourself: “What is my intention for my FB profile?”

Each time you log in be mindful of what your purpose is and how long you will spend on the site. I have seen so many people deactivating their accounts because they aren’t mindful or intentional about the experience they are seeking, and end up feeling the negative effects of unintentional and unconscious behavior.

See what happens when you offer to another a glimpse of who you really are. Start slowly. Without getting dramatic, share the simple dignity of yourself in each moment—your triumphs and your failures, your satisfaction and your sorrow.

Face your embarrassment at being human, and you’ll uncover a deep well of passion and compassion. It’s a great power, your Open Secret. When your heart is undefended you make it safe for whomever you meet to put down his burden of hiding, and then you both can walk through the open door.

Blessings

Jana

(Open secret taken from the book: Broken Open, by Elizabeth Lessor)

click here for the entire Stanford Study