A few days ago on TIME.com’s Healthland page, there appeared an article by one Maia Szalavitz, having to do with how Facebook makes you feel shitty about yourself. In an act both altruistic and mischievously ironic, a former schoolmate of mine shared the article on Facebook. Nicely done, my friend!

Ms. Salavitz’s lead-in:

Have other people’s blithe Facebook updates ever made you feel like a total loser? Or have you ever felt that your best friend’s life is perfectly easy and joyful, while yours is nothing but struggle and anxiety? You’re not alone. Everybody has these experiences, finds an illuminating new study [PDF] from Stanford University, and they tend to exacerbate feelings of loneliness, isolation and dissatisfaction in an already alienating society.

I found this somewhat reassuring, since I definitely identify with the syndrome. I can’t even guess how many times I’ve perused my Facebook newsfeed and thought something like, “Look how all my friends are so happy, thriving and successful, looking great and raising adorable kids. I am so staying away from the reunion.”

The Stanford study is said to have been inspired by the “Facebook envy” experience, but it doesn’t address it specifically. It consisted (in part) of Stanford freshmen’s answers to questions about the relative proportion of their positive and negative experiences since arriving at college. More revealing, though, were the students’ estimates of their classmates’ experiences:

The students estimated that 54% their classmates had felt lonely or missed their friends and family back home in the last couple of weeks, though in reality 83% reported feeling that way. And while the freshmen thought that 62% of their peers had recently been to a fabulous party, only 41% had.

Hmm… If the students had realized that their answer implied only ≤ 38% of their classmates had recently been to a lame, boring party, they’d have got it much closer. Nevertheless, the point stands with regard to our overestimation of how great a time others are having.

On the other hand, now and then I see items on Facebook in which the poster inadvertently casts him or herself in a negative light. Almost always cases of excessive candor, these oh-no-look-away posts tend to subdivide into two categories:

1. Simple cases of too much information (“TMI”). Examples could include descriptions of the contents of your baby’s bodily expulsion, live-tweeting your vasectomy (haven’t actually seen this, but I bet it’s been done), or “Jack in the Box eggrolls look like fried uncircumcised penises. Crunchy, tasty, uncircumcised penises.” Thanks, because I log in to Facebook hoping to be disgusted. I mean… Jack in the Box?!?
2. Self-pitying or passive-aggressive appeals. Although literally everything posted on Facebook could be said to be fishing for a response, tone is all-important. Posts like “On my way to what’ll be either vindication or final confirmation of my failure,” “Even though nobody came to see my last one, I want to announce that my new show opens next weekend,” or a picture of a water-damaged ceiling with the text, “I always go out of my way to try to help people and do good, but whenever something like this happens that I don’t have the means to take care of, I’m answered with silence. I think the message is just ‘why bother?’”?¹ Pretty inviting stuff — if you really love angst.

With regard to the overly candid sharing of downbeat thoughts, Ms. Salavitz and/or the Stanford study suggest a few things which I find troubling:

Another portion of the study showed that the more people suppressed their negative emotions and created the false impression that they didn’t have them, the more their peers underestimated the prevalence of these feelings and the lonelier and more dissatisfied those peers felt. That suggests that your extra efforts at “image management” — whether in person or online — probably worsens[sic] feelings of isolation and distress in your friends, by adding to their impression that yours and others’ lives are happier and more successful than theirs.

Well, that’s great. So not only do I have to suffer whatever insecurity I had to begin with, but by not airing out those feelings online I am propagating a falsely cheerful image of my life, which depresses my friends by making them feel inadequate by comparison, which makes me feel guilty. Lest this reduce to an endless-loop, chicken-or-egg question of who made whom feel like a loser first, I submit that it doesn’t matter. This syndrome of Facebook envy is tolerable under the current conditions, and nothing needs to change.

Further, I’d like to declare the following for the record:

All I did was plug in text from this post and this post, and it was definitively confirmed…

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Hey, Dr. Karl Hufbauer – you and your C+ dismissal of my Freshman Billy Budd paper can kiss my baby tuckoo!

What can I say? I try to keep C&B more on the Dubliners/Portrait of the Artist end of things than going all Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake up in here. It’s gratifying to have the internet recognize the lyrical Irish genius of my prose. For a few moments there I was wondering what I’d do if the word was that I wrote like Dr. Suess, or (worse yet) Dan Brown or somebody. Phew! Get thee behind me, self-doubt.

Take it away, my internet-designated forebear in prose:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

The mindset represented by this sign is what I mean when I refer to the Orange County city of Irvine as a soulless, planned-community hellscape. If I hadn’t spent 90% of my waking hours at the area’s one oasis of culture, the UCI Fine Arts village, I’d never have stayed there for four years.

Full disclosure: I took this picture in 1993, a little bit before the advent of the cameraphone. Still, I think any reasonable person will agree that it qualifies as a folly. This little roadside want ad stayed up for at least a week or two, which gave me plenty of time to remember to throw my camera in my bag before the next time I drove by.

First of all, welcome to 2010. I don’t know about you, but I feel better already.

Late in the previous decade (i.e., about three weeks ago), at the end of a post about the University of Oregon football team and their Amazing Technicolor Uniforms, I wrote:

This coming New Year’s Day, Oregon will face Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. The questions abound in the minds of the Ducks faithful… will the “steel”-colored pants appear in Pasadena, or will it be one-and-done for the gray trousers? What if they combined those with the day-glo chartreuse jerseys and the yellow helmets, for a perfect storm of mismatching?

Well, now we know: straight-up green and white. Nice restraint. Certainly nothing like the possible train wreck I envisioned. Despite looking good, right now the Ducks would surely rather feel good, which seems unlikely in light of their just-completed 26-17 loss to Ohio State.

There you have it, ducklings: Phil Knight can provide 80 different possible outfits and all the amenities in the Northwest, but he can’t buy you the Roses. Think about that before you order up another uniform re-design.

When I was in college the ubiquitous drinking game at parties was quarters. These days, from what I hear, it’s all about beer pong—which brings us to number nine on my the top ten video clips of 2009, a little something called “Olivet Pong Shots.”

The video went viral back in early May. It was linked to by media outlets including The New York Times, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, popular bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, and to date has racked up more than half a million hits on YouTube.

I for one think there’s an ironic beauty to the way four guys equipped with imagination, a digital video camera, editing software, the typical undergraduate yen for procrastination, and mad beer pong skills ended up probably doing more to put tiny Olivet Nazarene University on the map than anyone in the school’s 102-year history. Probably not the kind of fame the Nazarene founders were hoping for, but I say don’t throw back your achievements because they weren’t what you wanted to catch.