I still use Facebook, but less and less these days. Since I live abroad, it remains a good way to stay in touch with my friends and colleagues in the USA. But after the political circus that was the 2020 election and Facebook's huge (and unforgivable) failure to block fake news, I lost a lot of respect for them and for social media generally.
There is research that shows that social media makes people feel unhappy, but much of it that unhappiness has to do with your popularity on whatever medium you use most, according to this article: Social media makes people feel unhappy, less popular: Study | Business Standard News (business-standard.com). Perhaps the bigger problems in terms of creating unhappiness are how much time one wastes on social media when one could be using that time more productively, and how unhappy one can become if one sees that friends or colleagues seem to be having a better life than you have. One can be assuaged by the fact that most people using social media are probably in the same boat--happy at times, frustrated at others. No one's life is perfect, no matter how perfect it may seem on social media. So my guess is that the more time you waste on Facebook, the more your brain will believe that others are happier and better off than you are. Just remember that this is not true; in fact, it's nonsense. There is no perfect world.
I'm generally not hugely affected one way or another by what people post--if it's happy news I'm happy for the poster, if it's sad news, I'm sad for them. I usually remain on an even keel. Recently I found out, via Facebook, that one of my three bosses from my workplace at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center passed away; he was 84. His son posted a nice tribute to him on Facebook; that is one of the good things about Facebook, being able to find out such things and being able to leave a tribute of one's own. It makes paying your respects and sending condolences much easier, as I found out when my brother died in 2015. It was nice to hear from the people we grew up with, fellow Tarrytowners.
But still, I found this Pearls Before Swine comic strip from yesterday, quite funny, and probably true for a good many people. Stephan Pastis seems to be focusing on the perils of social media these days, and he's come up with quite a lot of humorous strips.
