Does Facebook Depress You? Try Google!

That Facebook specifically and other social media generally make us feel somewhat downcast has been confirmed by social science scholars. Though we know others cannot be as happy, rich and successful as they appear to be on Facebook, we still end up comparing our dull lives to that of our friends. And so do they, so do they.

But here is the crux — the big difference in what people tell Google and the ‘curated lives’ they present on Facebook. The author’s five-year data aggregation has convinced him that Google is the digital ‘truth serum’ to Facebook’s artifice. On Google, people are brutally honest and tell things that they perhaps don’t say to anybody else. The author's dry examples are as revealing as they are funny. On Facebook, among the top adjectives wives use for their husbands are ‘amazing’ and ‘so cute’ while on Google the top five include ‘jerk’, ‘annoying’ and ‘gay’. Oh well.

On Facebook, Irritable Bowel Syndrome is not as fancy as migraine, though both affect a similar percentage of people; people spend more time doing dishes than playing golf (clearly), but if you go by tweets about golfing, you wouldn’t guess as much.

Learning about human beings' "strangest and darkest thoughts" made him feel less alone in his insecurities and struggles and more in kinship with the world at large, the author says. This knowledge, apart from providing deep insights into why we do what we do for future social scholars, will also help ‘take the bite out of social media envy’ that is affecting a worrying number of people nowadays.

Keeping up with the Joneses', showing off to friends and struggling with comparative happiness — these have long been fodder for self-help bestsellers. But today, if you are feeling miserable looking at your friends’ beautiful lives on Facebook, perhaps the smart thing to do would be to hop to Google.

But I have to add here, if she was around today, Miss Marple would have simply looked up from her knitting and murmured: ‘It is all human nature’.