Facebook was ruining my self esteem

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Facebook is okay in teaspoons... you just have to monitor your use of it. If you start obsessing on it, step away. My friend is taking a 1-month break from FB since he is having some mental issues and I think that's smart.

The "Hide" feature as someone else suggested is very useful. Certain people get annoying fast. If you don't hide them they are in your face all day long.

I remember reading an article about this, and it's easy to see how Facebook can destroy your self esteem. You're constantly being bombarded with posts / status updates / whatever by a few "friends" who are actually "living it up", while everyone else is just pretending to.

When you're able to pick and choose which information you decide to project to the world, the end result is a fake person living a fake life online.

One of the breaking points for me was when I started receiving friend requests from my old classmates in high school, and these were people that I never really interacted with. It would be one thing if they just wanted to kindle a friendship now (after all, we've all matured a bit since then), but I knew that wasn't the reason behind them adding me. Because they never contacted me afterwards. They were only interested in building up their friends list, and I was a mere stepping stone towards that goal.

I don't use Facebook anymore, and I feel a whole lot better now that I'm not inundated with fake posts. Lets not kid ourselves: if you want to form true relationships with others, face to face contact is the best way to go about that. But for those of you who are like me, and have trouble finding real life friends, online communities like Wrong Planet are a nice alternative. Because it's okay to be yourself here.

Facebook can easily become an addiction. A big waste of time.

If you know you are addicted, aggressively force yourself to stop.

I did not delete my account, but i did absolutely close my wall. It helps.

Facebook is now just an address book to me, with occasional messages.

I sort of hate facebook too. None of my friends contact me anymore, I'm the one to get a conversation started on chat, its pretty dead there nowadays.

I know where you're coming from. Sometimes I feel like my like is crap whenever other people post all the great things that are going on in their lives. One of my former friends (who I deleted) was ALWAYS posting pics and updating statuses about her doing fun stuff. It was getting on my nerves. Sometimes it feels like a competition on whose life is the best.

Me, I just delete people who I feel like are posting too much stuff for me to handle. I know it's not their fault, but I just can't take it.

I'm sorry you had such a negative experience. I know my fears about Facebook being exactly as you described kept me from joining until just last year. However, in my opinion, Facebook is what you make of it. Contrary to the Bowling for Soup song, high school does end, if you want it to. I've heard several people suggest that you try to friend only those who you know are not the fake, materialistic, perpetually-stuck-in-high-school people you described, and I agree that that might help. Still, I respect your decision, and I agree, having a Facebook account is not something to be proud of, really.

I joined facebook on october 20 in 2007. There were barely any people on FB that time.
I had lost my job and was damned bored sitting at home.
I joined FB and made some groups
And till date i have this account. With the many groups i made related to my favourite
painter, blood group, star sign etc.

In midst there were some classmates from school who added me but barely interacted
and there were many whom i tried to add but they never showed interest
and there were some who acted funny and asked me to meet them alone

After a while i blocked all the school connections...i knew they were superficial
in school they never even accepted by exsistence and now why they need me

After that some cousins started adding me, they were intruding on my privacy
in real life they never interacted with me neither contacted or informed me about
important life events
Their presence was again hurting they would party together and leave me out
So soon i blocked them off too.

My FB account has stood the test of time and the past 7 years i enjoy my time there
i have added people from wrongplanet, i have added myself into groups
like childhood abuse, narcissistic mothers and i interact and read post by those people
on daily basis and participate in their conversation.

Reading their experiences,the painful journey, helps me understand and heal myself.
i would have been a misfit if i would have added cousins, classmates and work colleagues
they would have snubbed me the way they snub in real life.

You know i think our government or who ever does "research" are a bunch of idiots. They just did a "study" and found that people (women don't know why they targeted women in the research) lie regularly about living it up on facebook. The news item I just heard sounds like it was announced by someone reading this thread . We could have saved who ever it was thousands and told them that without them having to do a "study"

I use Facebook, but I am not too deep into it. So I have got lots of old class comerades in my contact lists or people from the town I lived when I was younger and so on. But its nothing more for me than a contact list, so I am not regarding to them as friends, so I dont expect them to want personal contact. Its more like gratulating when someone got married or posting his first kids photographs and so on. Or you are linking if someone is looking for a new flat around an area you have some contacts on your own.

I think the important thing is to realize, that they are nothing more than contacts, not friends. So you can have a good time with a contact and post some jokes from now and then, but this does not mean that you are friends and want to spend all the time together. So sure there are also some friends in my contact list, but its obvious for me that not every contact is a friend.

I think another thing, why many contacts accept me to be in their contact list, is that I never insisted on other people to spend time with me, if they have no interest to do so. I always was more the kind of person you have to push on your own, to have some contact with a person I dont share interests with. So my contacts dont have to be afraid, of sharing links with me of their parties, doings, interests and so on, because most of them know that even if you invite me personally, I will rarely agree on meeting at a party.

So I know its called rude to say that someone doesnt want to spend time with you, but the thing is: I know how this feeling is. So there are people too, I wouldnt want to spend my time with them. I think everyone of you knows such people you dont want to spend your time with. But important is: It doesnt mean automatic that you hate this guys you dont want to spend time with. It simply means, that I dont have similar interests and activities, not that this person was bad or dumb or however negative. So most of the girlfriends of my male friends are really, really, really nice persons and there is absolutely nothing negative about them. But the thing is, when they are meeting they are talking about fashion, or hairstyle or shoes or make up, or cooking and so on, which simply bores me. On the other side they are bored as well from my interests. So I wouldnt take it personally, when people dont want to spend time with you, as long as they are not telling rude stuff about you and so on. It doesnt mean automatic that you suck, often it simply means that you dont have similar interests, nothing more.

And on the other side, I wouldnt depend myself so much on what other people do. So the last years I always forced myself to do something "typical" wiht my friends around my birhtday. Celebrating or inviting to a restaurant and so on. The thing is: It made my birthday a hell. When my birhtday was coming up I was getting depressions weeks before, because of me feeling forced to do as society expects me and so on... Last year I made a big pile of poo on societys expectations and simply had a "Battlefield 3" Lan night with my partners and two friends, and while playing Battlefield the whole evening we opened a bottle of sparkling whine and I simply made a small cake for the four of us. So according to society this must have been the poorest, sadest, lousiest birthday party on earth. But the thing is: For the first time since 10 years I had fun on my birthday. And I dont think that I am the only person who feels that way. The thing is: Social media tell us nowadays that our self esteem would depend on how much celebrations we join, and how many people visit our celebrations and so on. I think it is important to remind yourself, that its not important what society says, but how you feel yourself about something. So if you really have the need on your own to have more parties and meet more people, then you should work on it for your own sake. But there is no sense in getting depressed, only because other have so much parties, and society tells us that we suck in comparison to them.

Important: Facebook = Contact list /= friend list and people dont want to party with you /= people think you suck.

Let's call it what it is: Fakebook.com

No one on facebook will talk about the bad experiences in their lives. No one. It is hard to believe that, considering how awful life is, everyone on facebook seems to have found the holy grail of how to live a great life and stick to it. Parties, family meetings, lots of money. It is absolute BS.

I blocked all of the people I knew from high school because they kept using facebook to organize high school reunions. There were like three reunions from 2008 to 2012, and I loath parties.

Today, I use facebook to post funny pics, but no one pays attention to them, and I use it to keep track of what my chatroom friends are doing. Most family members and high school friends are out of it.

Fakebook is just a big love-in for attention seekers.

I gotta say, I never agreed into that "Family has to love each other." From my oppinion you have a bond as family that links you until death, so its logical better to treat your family with appreciation and respect. Because if not you will be linked until your death with a person, you will always have trouble with. But appreciation and respect doesnt mean for me, that I want to spend time with them. I really do like my sister, and if shed called for help I´d immediately drive the 600 km to her to help her, and if she would call and tell me she would need 5000 EUR because of an emergency I would go to the bank and take a debt. But one of the things, why I really like her is, that she accepts me the way I am. She accepts, that I dont have any similar interests, she respects that her interests bores me, and it really might seem weird to others, but the four times in the year she comes back to us to visit us, both of us are happy because of that, because I am not forced to spend 4 times in a row with her, when I dont share any interest with her anyway, and she is happy because she has more time to spend with her old friends she only gets to see 4 times a year, and with which she shares interests and hobbies. So we use Facebook to write us from now and then, sharing some photographs about stuff we do (Her doing party, me reading books or playing PC games.), mailing to plan her visits on christmas or to share for a present for my parents birthdays and so on or linking videos or photos about our only common interest: Pets. ^^

But one of the things, why I really do like her, and not only appreciate and respect her, is that she accepts my feeling that sharing time with her is completely boring for me, without taking it as an offend.

The thing is, what do you expect your cousins to do? They cannot simply change the way they feel. So whyever, it seems that they have negative feelings about sharing time with you. So the only option they have would be to lie to you about their feelings, and share time with you, acting as if they would like it, while in reality they are only wishing that the time you share will pass by as fast as possible, so they dont feel bad anymore and are additional forced to act in the opposite way. Personally, I dont see the point, why I should want to share time with a person, that has bad feelings about that and is forced to ignore them.

If it helps you, while my sister had her teenie/young adult phase (16-25) we also had much less contact, because she was really occupied by all that party- and girlstuff you normally do around that age. I think it was also some kind of embarassing to her, to present her weird sister to the many persons she knew about that time. I mean who wants to be as teenager, the girl with the ret*d sister? ^^ When she got older, it all become normal again, so if I meet her friends by accident she has no problem of introducing me to her friends or her partner now, and we are writing us from now and then again as I already told.

So maybe if your cousins are actually in teenager/young adult mode, it might change again when this time of life is over and they pass to become more experienced adults. The thing is, I think they actually cant think clear around that age. I remember my sister having a complete unfitting motorcycle helm around that age, that was far too large so if she had an accident it could have easily got off her head instead of protecting it. But the important thing was, that there is no use in styling your hair, when you wear afterwards an fitting motorcycle helm, that is ruining your hairstyle again. So from my oppinion, if they are around that age, you only can wait until they have passed that age.