Is Facebook Making Us Cranky?

Last week I was thinking that every afternoon I spent cruising around Facebook, I walked away feeling really low and kind of cranky. A definite drop in consciousness (frequency) from my usual perky, excited, engaged, and curious self. What was causing it?

I concluded that it was the prevalence of bad-news stories that my conscientious, liberal-thinking friends have been posting. I include myself among the guilty. Even my sister, who spends a lot of her time out in the wilderness, has had bad news to share about life and politics in the wild, a place we like to think of as a respite from worldly gloom.

I did some deep thinking about this phenomenon, slept on it, and by morning came up with this:

 

We seem to be in a time of Revelation—revelation of all the previously hidden, underhanded, dirty rotten greedy tricksters in the world.

I look forward to the time of Inspiration—when we all reach within ourselves to find the Godspark, and set out to spread this Goodness in tiny, individual ways throughout the world.

Today I found among my email an NPR story about a social research project coming out of the University of Michigan. Researchers concluded that Facebook wasn’t making us happy. Their conclusions about why weren’t very concrete. They speculate that it has to do with social comparison, the old “keeping up with the Joneses” phenomenon. I disagree.

I think it’s because we’re in that time of Revelation. Like watching network news, Facebook has become an onslaught of scary, depressing slices of life. But we can’t fix the world until we uncover all the misdeeds that have gone on since forever.

So many more things are coming to light now, in every possible realm of endeavor. No one can hide their shenanigans like they once did. Nothing can be so easily swept under the rug. A bright Light of public inspection has begun to shine. And now we’re sharing this news at the speed of light, educating ourselves and each other. Painful and depressing, but perhaps necessary to wake us from delusion and/or apathy?

So I look forward to that time of Inspiration, when 9 billion human beings reach within to tap the Wisdom of their higher selves, igniting a Light so bright, it will obliterate all the evils we have jointly endeavored to expose.

Small doses, meanwhile, remembering always to dilute them in the power of introspection. And I’m going to hold my Spark-torch a little higher if I can. I might have to walk away from Facebook as often as I lurch toward it. There’s no going back now. We’ve begun the process. We have to see it through.