If you ever feel pressured by what you see or read on social media, then you aren't fair to yourself. On social media everything is perfect (or horrible), even the most perilous situations are non-hazardous, the Titanic is not sinking, just bobbing on the waves, and the most rancorous relationships are nothing but classics of congeniality. As a matter of fact, Facebook is the favourite hub for sycophancy, hypocrisy, double standards, lies, rumours, fantasies, anxiety and depression. This is where they all meet to share a drink.
Sycophancy, in particular, has found a natural home on social media handles. Defined by Ambrose Bierce as the practice of approaching influential people on your belly, sycophancy turns a person of dignity into a grovelling, obsequious wimp. The sycophant, Bierce says, crawls on their stomach in order to fill it or just for fear of being kicked. Friends, let's all share in this prayer point before we proceed: O Lord, may we never have to lick someone's boots in order to secure our next meal.
Hypocrisy, similarly, luxuriates in the conducive environment provided by social media. Here on Facebook, for instance, we castigate others for the sins we habitually commit and excoriate people for their slightest failings. With make-believe stories and fabricated personas, we sit in judgement over people's lives, marriages, careers and relationships, deciding who is culpable and what their sentence should be.
Lies, let's not forget, also mingle here with rumours and fantasies. They fertilise unstable minds, sowing fervid nightmares and ghoulish hallucinations. The results are misery and despondency. Someone whose life is promising and who should be filled with optimism begins instead to surrender to melancholy and perhaps even entertains suicidal thoughts, simply because they've been told that others are doing better than them.
In the Internet age, people must learn to occasionally look away. Looking away means avoiding self-comparison. As early as 1954, social scientist Leon Festinger had propounded the social comparison theory, which postulates that media influence, social status and other forms of competitiveness can affect our self-esteem and mood. In other words, Festinger was simply telling us that keeping up with the Joneses is not such a good idea after all. As the Bible says, we brought nothing into this world and it is certain that we can take nothing out. So when next the pressure from social media becomes unbearable, simply console yourself with that familiar Nigerian cop-out: "I cannot come and kill myself."