My life is pretty darn good. I don’t have an iPhone or a personal chef, but my days are full of family, friends, interesting work, healthy children, and enough money to pay for a weekly date night. So it’s possible I have little understanding of what it feels like to be painfully jealous of others, because I can usually come back to the place of reminding myself that I have everything I need.
When I recorded this video, I had just read a few blog posts and comments elsewhere from people who described feeling so unhappy when they read about the successes and good times of their friends on Facebook, that they have to stop reading. I was feeling unsympathetic towards people who allowed a stream of enthusiastic status updates to tell them that everyone else’s life is better than theirs.
Despite what I said above, I can think of one particular thing that might drive me away from the constant stream of news and pictures from my friends. And that would be infertility.
Twice I struggled to conceive exactly when I wanted to. Though I was able to get pregnant about a year later in each case, I got a taste of the frustration and sadness that some women face for years. Since one of the main topics of conversation in my Facebook environment is children, their births, milestones, and silly moments, I really would understand if someone in my social circle who wished to have children but couldn’t decided that Facebook was giving her more bad feelings than good, and that it was better for her mental health to stay away.
What do you think? Does Facebook make you green with envy? Do other people’s vacation pictures bum you out? Or are there deeper issues surfacing that I haven’t considered?
