poptartsarecool:

This was a satirical quote from a friend from a couple nights back.

But it did get me to thinking.

Well, I already had been thinking about this for a while, but this just kind of reinforced it.

Do we like to make others jealous?

I guess.

Do we get some kick out of making it seem like were better than others?

Probably.

I was thinking about all this back when my friend Sarah made a post about facebook as a time sucker, and then quoted Relevant Magazine. One quote stood out to me:

Even more alarming, I can see how I shape my life to fit into a clever little status update, used most often to elicit jealousy (“drinking a French press, listening to Mumford & Sons and reading Kierkegaard!”) or sympathy (“baby sick, only got three hours of sleep last night. Blerg!”).

I used to make frequent status updates. Then I started to slow down and now rarely make any. I hadn’t really noticed until I read this quote, and then kind of realized what had happened subconsciously.

Somewhere along the line I noticed how tired I was of seeing others’ statuses and being jealous of what they had or of where they were. I also knew that I’ve done the same in the past. To stop this cycle of evil, I just kind of phased out status updated without thinking about it.

I’m not saying that everyone updates their status with such terrible intentions, and there are useful times for a status update. But after recent dealings with the terrible emotion known as jealousy, I started to notice how often it showed up in other places, one of them being facebook.

One of the things that just bugged me the most about people on facebook at times would be when they updated their status about activities they were doing. If you were in person and weren’t planning on inviting someone in your vicinity, then you wouldn’t start talking about your plans in front of them, right? Then why post a status saying “Going to some random place with Jack, Jill, Andy, and Sandy!!!”? 

I’m more inclined to think people get a kick out of knowing they are doing something cool, especially when others are left out. Something about being exclusive makes people feel better about themselves, especially when the exclusivity is made public.

Now I’m all for people having intimate gatherings with certain friends. I’ve done it before, and I understand the reason for it. Just don’t announce it to the public.

Or maybe I’m wrong and exclusivity is Biblical.

This doesn’t really just apply to facebook. I’ve seen it other places, such as Instagram (thus the quote above).

Like I said, I don’t believe this of every person I see updating their status or posting a picture. It’s just I’ve been on both ends where I’ve felt left out, jealous, angry, and sad, and then the other end where I wanted to elicit those feelings out of others. If I could, I would just remove the option entirely, but it has it’s uses so I guess it can’t be all bad.

Or maybe I’m just bitter from a few moments and the stupidity of others, and this post was born. You decide.