Fun. Without you.

[mrissa]

Last weekend, when I was still processing the crazy that was June, the Strib ran an article about Facebook depression. The tl;dr version is that some teenagers are sad because they see pictures of their friends having fun without them. The adult suggestion for dealing with this was to remember that not everything was going on FB and other people are sad sometimes too. And this is good but completely insufficient, to my way of thinking.

One of the kids is quoted as saying, "If [friends] go to a party, it feels like, why wasn't I invited?" And...uh. Really? Really? This did not seem like time for a major life lesson? Because your friends: they will have friends who are not you. They will have friends who are not your friends. They will go to parties without you; sometimes they will have parties without you. Because not every event is infinitely flexible or infinitely large. Because not every event is for you. You do this to other people. They will do it to you. Life is like that.

No matter how bad your day is, someone somewhere will be having fun. Possibly even someone who cares about you.

No matter how personable you are, some of the world's fun will happen without you. Even some of the portion of the world's fun that has been assigned to your near and dear.

This is the key to having a happy convention, but it's also pretty key to the rest of your life. Imagine how awful it would be to live with someone whose life was a boring or painful slog whenever you weren't around. Imagine how dreary it would be to have coffee with someone whose only joy in their life was your coffee time.

I mean, yes, if you find that the people you think are your friends are never including you in anything and are always doing things that could include you and don't, it may be time to reevaluate your friendship with them. But if you have some friends who went to the movies without you? It happens. Ask them how the movie was. Converse. Tell them about what happened when you went swimming while they were at the movies. More to the point, go swimming while they're at the movies. Adults need to know this. Teenagers need to know it. Little kids need to learn it before they get to the point of being teenagers and thinking that friendship means always doing everything together. And adults who don't address that and who blame Facebook are doing the teens in their vicinity no favors.

Comments

[dsmoen.livejournal.com]

This is a great post.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We aim to please.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

There actually is a Facebook -- well, social media in general -- issue here, one that shouldn't be trivialized. People tend to write about good stuff on social media sites: milestones they've achieved, positive things they're thinking, and fun things they're doing. This is especially true as 1) postings get smaller, and 2) more people are reading the posts. This means that someone who is reading their friends list -- or whatever it's called on Facebook -- will face a constant stream of reminders that their friends are doing better, feeling better, and having more fun then they are. I've read some research on this (I'll try to find it later if I have time), and it's depressing. Sure, you can teach people that this reaction isn't correct, that Facebook reality isn't real reality, and that they shouldn't make too much over other peoples' happiness. But these feelings operate at a lower brain level, and are hard to counteract. People have dropped friends, and dropped Facebook, over this.

Again, I'll try to find references for you later if I have time.

B

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Do you think the Strib article did a good job of making this clear? Because among other things, they focused it on teenagers, that is, people who are not socially experienced in any sphere, and it sounds like what you're saying is that there's a broader human issue at work.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Didn't read it. I just read your post.

But yes, there is a broader issue at work, and it is definitely new to social media.

There seem to be a lot of these. As we gradually replace our evolved social systems with deliberately created socio-technical systems, our evolved social reactions fail in new and interesting ways.

B

[timprov.livejournal.com]

On a more basic level, though, being sad because people that you like are enjoying themselves is really bizarre and really counterproductive, and one would do a lot better to deal with that attitude than to worry about Facebook.

I wish this stuff were transferable, cause I would totally take all of my friends having a grand time if it would make others feel better if their friends got extra misery.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Understanding this intellectually came considerably before dealing with it particularly well emotionally for me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

All the more reason to introduce the concept early and often.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Absolutely.

Well, I'm not sure when there's the first slightest chance that a child might understand it. Maybe pretty early, since this is social behavior, more basic to primates than volumes and such.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

The article isn't loading for me. I'll check back later. Traditionally, it is a violation of etiquette to talk about a party in front of or to someone who wasn't invited. Because regardless of whether you have your own exciting social life or not, being excluded from a party to which many of your friends are invited hurts, and I have scars of my own from those days to prove it (those days when I had A group of friends, and did not have alternate friends on standby). Telling my friends how much fun I had going swimming, all by myself, while they were together partying is not likely to be a consolation.

Facebook makes that small social mercy an impossibility--at least if you are going to get on Facebook after the party and dish about it. A possible solution is to say, hey, Facebook is not the place for talking about how great the weekend's party was or for posting and tagging pictures. (I just recently learned a long time friend was gay because one of his friends posted a drunk party picture. I don't think that's how he wanted to tell me.) I have over 200 facebook "friends." Almost all of them are adults, but not all. Some are college students and teens. I almost never see party reports. The only kind of "I had fun" updates I tend to see are those involving vacations or family events--things which have a pretty clearly defined guest list and are unlikely to inspire feelings of exclusion.

My solution? People shouldn't be jerks on Facebook. If they go to an awesome exclusive party and people get drunk, they should save the debriefing session for Denny's the next morning and send the embarrassing pics to each other via text message, rather than posting them on Facebook for all to see. (Well, texting pics has its own problems, but, hey, I can't solve all of the world's problems in one sitting. :-)

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"My solution? People shouldn't be jerks on Facebook."

Hardly a solution. People are sometimes jerks, and they'll be jerks on whatever social system they're being nice, indifferent, helpful, and everything else on.

Related: Lorrie Cranor at Cernegie Mellon is doing a study on Facebook regrets: things people regret doing on Facebook. Her paper isn't online -- all I could find is this (http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/5845398714/) from the conference I heard her present her work at -- but her research shows that the most common reason people have for doing something on Facebook they regret later is anger. They were angry. People can be jerks when they're angry. And they'll regret it later. It's the way people work.

B

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

This is the reference:

Y. Wang, S. Komanduri, P.G. Leon, G. Norcie, A. Acquisti, L.F. Cranor. I regretted the minute I pressed share: A Qualitative Study of Regrets on Facebook. SOUPS 2011.

SOUPS is the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security. It'll be later this month, and I presume the paper will go public then.

B

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I think one distinction between what you're saying here and what I'm saying here is that we're focusing on different aspects of what you can control. You're talking about how we should treat others, and that's absolutely true. I don't post here or on my FB (or on my Google+ now that I have it!) if I'm having a party unless it's an open party--and we don't have open parties. I think that there are contexts in which it's rude to rub the fun you're having in someone else's nose.

But. Other people will do this; and even when you're not rubbing it in someone else's nose, sometimes keeping it secret would involve lying or other negative social behavior. And so the other part you can control is how you react to other people's behavior--and which of it you expose yourself to. Sometimes this means reminding yourself that it's great for other people to have fun without you. Other times it means defriending someone or not exposing yourself to a particular kind of social media. But you can't make people not be jerks on FB--you can only not be a jerk yourself, and limit the ways in which you respond to jerks.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

I appreciate the truth of the statement. At the same time, having been a child and teenager that was painfully shy and also sensitive to social exclusion and also without much in the way of options or resources for dealing with it, I don't think I would have been able to use this advice. I think for the person on the hurt feelings end of the interaction, the only thing you can do is unfriend the person, but even that requires a rather adult level of competency that the average person of 16 years old does not possess. So your feelings are hurt by the popular kids being popular, and the solution is to cut perhaps the ONLY connection you have with the popular kids that makes you feel included? Ouch!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I know, it's one of those things where only being able to control your end of things really sucks. On the other hand, figuring out your own boundaries and limits there is part of being a teenager--albeit the sucky un-fun part. I expect there will be people who look back and say, "Why did I un-friend so-and-so? That cut me off from them!" and people who look back and say, "Why did I stay friends with so-and-so? It exposed me to so much more pain for nothing!" I am amazed by people who think childhood or teen years are golden years. This experimentation and data set thing can really suck in the raw rough parts of it.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

The problem is that it isn't always practical to carefully isolate everything that happens at a party into a private file. Case in point, the party I reference in my response to Mris. A subgroup of the kids invented a new game. At the next full group gathering, a mom said maybe we should get them to play that game again. A mom who hadn't been at the party asked about it, was given the breakdown... and as a result discovered that the kids had been together at something she and her kids hadn't been invited to.

We could sneak around and not mention anything anyone did or said at the party, but frankly, that seems extreme. Nobody said, "And we had this AWESOME PARTY!" we just talked about something that our kids had done.

So I can't post to FB saying "had a great day at J's, the kids are wonderful together." And I can't say, "Let's have the kids play X" if anyone who wasn't there can hear. And I can't say, "I think B left his towel at your place, can you look?" where someone might hear. And...

Or HurtFeelings Mom can accept that there are private events and she's not invited to all of them. Which one is more fair?

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

Sometimes people are going to find out about social events they are not invited to. It's inevitable. However, etiquette requires that you be circumspect--not secretive. In the case of a new game the kids are playing, there's no need to mention that it was played at a private party previously. You can just say, "Oh, how about let's play this new game" and explain the rules to people who don't know it. In the case of towels or personal items left at another person's house, there's no reason at all to discuss this in front of people that are not involved. I'm saying this not to criticize you for how you handled things, but just to answer your question. (Sorry for the delay. A bunch of LJ replies ended up in my spam box.)

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

And see, that to me is a ridiculous extent. I can't ask S if my kid left his towel at her house in front of R because R's kids are 3 and 7 and 9 years younger than the birthday girl and my own son? At a certain point R is responsible for her share of the etiquette which is to a) not inquire too closely into the details of gatherings she wasn't at and b) to don some big girl panties and accept the possibility of "fun without her."

There is a wide range between not flaunting and hiding. I am perfectly willing to say that S should not invite us to the party in front of R. I'm willing to forgo conversations that start, "We had the best time at the party..." I'm not willing to wait until R leaves the room to clandestinely ask about my son's towel.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

Well, look at it another way. In a conversation involving 3, or more people, how interesting is a forgotten towel to anyone other than the two people involved with it? That particular example is really not a big deal. But the point is that if one is truly a gracious and artful conversationalist, there's really no need to bring up Last Weekend's Revels which did not involve all of This Weekend's Companions.

I have to admit I'm more than a bit put off by the harsh words for people who have done nothing wrong other than be sad that they were not included in your gathering. Is it really necessary to call a friend "HurtFeelings Mom" and suggest she "put on her big girl pants" because she's upset you left her out? She IS a friend, right? I don't know about you, but I am very fond of my friends and DO go out of my way to avoid hurting their feelings unnecessarily. Yes, some of my friends are oversensitive. Some of them are also rather blunt and insensitive. None of them are perfect.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry you choose to take "Hurtfeelingsmom" ans anything other than a shorthand for "the mother who has chosen to share her hurt feelings with the entire group." I am also sorry you feel a need to decalre me not a "gracious and artful conversationalist." I would submit that that sort of jab is neither gracious nor artful, but leave you to decide for yourself if it's an acceptable level of offense.

R is a friend of S, the mom who hosted. She is NOT a friend of the guest of honor. Her children are not especial friends of the guest of honor. That R has chosen to be snippy at those who attended with their children (we do all remember that this was a child's birthday party, parents were incidental) is pretty off putting to me. Should S really have invited HER friend with her much younger children to her daughter's party despite the daughter's wishes? The young lady was turning 14 and wanted "just the big kids." She wanted her peers, not every child of every family in the larger group and I think it would have been awful of her mother to insist that her party be about mom's friends and their potential for hurt feelings.

We meet weekly with children ranging from 1 to 18. We are not all friends. Many, even most are friends or at least friendly acquaintances but some people don't care for each other. If 10 of us are sitting in a circle there are at least 4 conversations going on. If I turn to speak to S, the entire group is not held hostage to our brief bit of chatter.

While I think it is important to avoid hurting feelings, I think there is a limit to how far one can go before one is treating the other person like a fragile child. That to me is far more offensive than asking S about a towel. At a certain point it diminishes the adult and treats them like they are incapable of being rational about the fact that we all have lives without each other and I would find that pretty disrespectful.

And yes, I think when one takes their hurt feelings and expresses them sulkily all over the social group, on has crossed a line between "being sad" and "being offensive" and that big girl panties are in order. Even if you want to declare that S and I should be subject to R's snippiness because we dared to make passing references to a gathering she wasn't invited to, the other 7 people in the circle? They definitely don't need to hear it. Which do you think bothers them more, the passive-agressive sulk or me asking S if we left a towel at her house?

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

You've honestly lost me with the details of this incident. Personally, I've never found it helpful, when someone has hurt feelings, to tell them they're being oversensitive and to get over it. Good luck with that.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

Well, as I've never found being quite so condescending at strangers to be helpful either, I think it's time to wish you well and move on.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

It's not technically feasible for me to create a Facebook group for exactly the people who were at the party (I'd have to have an accurate list, and know their facebook identities) so that I could limit discussion of the party to those. Well, those plus people out of town, plus people who were invited but chose not to go. Or for my snapshot album, or etc. (Technical feasibility is not relevant to social good, bad, or awkward; but it's relevant to the solution space.)

Ah; there's a technical solution within reach there. If the party invite was via Facebook, there could be (but isn't currently) an auto-created group so I could limit discussion of the party to those who could see the invite.

Which has its own problems, being dependent on one commercial service, even if they implemented that idea.

And actually I'd rather see the discussion of the parties I wasn't invited to than not. Sometimes I'm slightly unhappy not to be invited, but actually knowing is useful in evaluating my social position. I don't really think that further Balkanizing the world, dividing it into little separate bits, is good. Discussing things in front of people is always an issue, but sometimes (for example) you walk into the middle of a conversation.

[moiread]

Tangential but interesting: Google+ has that selective audience feature. I was intrigued to note it when ckd brought it to my attention.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Facebook has it too, it's called "groups". It's not widely used. (How they differ in detail I don't know, having never used "groups" on Facebook and not being on Google+).

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Groups are more like private message boards than anything else. Google+ makes context shifting much, much easier.

[redbird]

As far as I can tell, Facebook has used the term "groups" for at least two different things: one is a private message board (I'm in one for members of my high school graduating class, which was active during reunion planning) and the other looked like a way to sort people, so I could say "show me only recent posts from relatives" or "from these close friends" or "from people I have actually interacted with off-Facebook in the last decade." Which seemed like a good thing, and then I went away for a few weeks and when I came back it didn't work anymore.

As a net acquaintance of mine posted recently to a mailing list after trying Google+, nothing he has seen since lives up to the halcyon days of Usenet in terms of control of what you see.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Usenet is still there, of course. It's just that most of the users have moved on, sadly. Because I agree, that was a far superior reading experience (with any of several tools) than anything any online service offers.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have gotten that kind of thing as a FB message sent out to the group: "People, please RSVP!", or, "Remember that we changed the time to 5 instead of 4," or, "Was somebody bringing ice cream? Let me know."

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. I also find that when I do get those occasional pangs of, "Oh no! Everyone is having fun without me!", there's usually a much more specific dissatisfaction underlying that that I can actually productively address. Maybe it's that a whole bunch of people went hiking, and I'm just realizing that I'd like to go hiking with a bunch of friends; or maybe it's that X and Y were there, and I'm realizing that I'm missing hanging out with X and Y; or maybe it's that I wish I were more adept at striking up interesting conversations with strangers at science fiction conventions. But in any case, it's likely to be something that's at least partially within my power to do something about.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's it for me exactly: focusing on stuff that is within my power to do.

And sometimes it isn't, and I have to let it go. For example, I miss a lot of Late-Night Fandom Antics because I am not a late-night person. I stay up late at cons! Late for me means somewhere between 11 and 1. I believe I once stayed up until 2 at a con...but that was with a very small number of previously known friends, and it was a very special case. Mostly, though, if it is happening after midnight at a con, I miss it. And a lot of fun stuff happens after midnight at cons. And you know what? That's okay, because it has to be okay. It's no one else's fault that I'm an extreme morning person. It's not really my fault, either: there's nothing I could be doing but am not doing that would keep me up later. I could waste time being bitter over it, or I could enjoy the parts of cons I get. I know which is a better idea.

[janni.livejournal.com]

I think I can see this from both sides. I know that feeling of "everyone is having fun but me!" (though less so as I get older and have more perspective), and I also know the frustration of going out, having fun, and then having someone resent me for it when, really, it was never about then.

(When the latter happens in the context of a relationship? It's time to get out. Because being unhappy will not cure the other person's unhappiness; it will only add to yours.)

I don't think it's a facebook issue per se--these things were issues when I was in school and knew everyone was going to parties and such but me--but I can see how facebook might make it worse. Which doesn't mean getting rid of fb is the answer ... though maybe teens could benefit from learning the value of gafiating in an online context, or of time away in general?

I love facebook now, privacy issues aside. But as a teen, it would have been a pretty painful place for me in so many ways. Don't know the answer to that, either.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

What you're saying about facing reality and learning to live with it is excellent and true. But also, I think some people, especially kids, create a false image of how fun-filled and glamorous their lives are, and kids as well as adults need to remember too that the image is not the reality.

Some people (especially in places like LJ) are very open in their social media posts and share the downs as well as the ups, the lonely times as well as the parties. But I suspect that's not true of teens on FB. So the person who posts about her fabulous time at the party is definitely not sharing how miserable she felt seeing the guy she liked with somebody else, for example.

[akwilliams.livejournal.com]

Huh. That is a good Major Life Lesson. One I'm feeling slightly stupid for not knowing at 27, but they do say when the student is ready the teacher will appear so I will handwave over the details and say thanks for putting that into words for me.

It's never been something I've done with friends, but I think some of my relationships really suffered because I couldn't bear to not be joined at the hip at all times. This kinda helps. So cheers =)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Glad to be of service.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

The trick is remembering that feelings are fine, it's acting on them that can be bad. Feeling a little hurt at not being included is normal. It's when you get pissy and stomp around being wretched at people because you're hurt that it becomes problematic. :)

I think it's not so much about "learning not to feel this way" as "learning to accept that feeling this way happens and it's not anyone's fault."

[redbird]

Another thought on the "people are seeing only cheerful stuff" (so everyone else's life looks like a glorious cycle of song) is that we keep being told not to post anything we wouldn't want an actual or potential employer to see in five years, or the police tomorrow afternoon. That's often phrased as "don't post drunken photos," but some people are going to add "don't talk about your depression/asshole boss/job loss/illness" because you never know what someone will hold against you. But "I went to a party with X, Y, and Z and we had a great time" or how much you liked a movie will seem safe.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

This is a problem that actually comes up among the adults in my homeschooling circle. The kids range in age from 1 to 18. The moms you like best might not have kids the same age as yours.

J had a 14th birthday. She invited just the big kids. There are LOTS of events with everyone, J wanted her party to be just the teens. Reasonable, no?

Well, while nobody is flaunting their invites ala third grade, the fact is that it was a get together and things happened and those who were there mention those things in conversation and the non-invitees became aware that there had been a party.

One of the moms who is close to J's mom is hurt that she and her kids weren't invited. But... her kids are under 10. So it's her KIDS who weren't invited but it's mom whose feelings are hurt.

Life lesson indeed.