The Facebook experiment

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A few days ago, I deleted Facebook from my phone. Already, I feel like a 10-pound weight is gone from my shoulders. Let me explain.

I’ve been struggling lately with things a woman in her mid-30s probably shouldn’t be struggling with. Things like insecurity, lack of confidence, worrying about appearances — things typically buried deep in the heart of a teenager, not someone firmly ensconced in the middle of a pretty darn good life.

I couldn’t put my finger on the origin of these feelings until I read an ABC News article. A new study shows the more a person uses Facebook, the less satisfied and happy he or she is with his or her life as a whole. A similar study found that when people look at the digitized version of their friends’ lives, they compare themselves to those ideals and feel their self-esteem plummeting.

Bells went off in my mind. Although the studies focused on a median age of 20, they probably could have focused it on me and gotten the same results. Yes, I can keep in touch with old friends and find out about weddings, babies and new jobs. But when I dug a little deeper, I realized it can be much more subversive than that.

The majority of my Facebook news feed consists of photos of smiling faces in normal, everyday life. Yet that “normal, everyday life” can sometimes make me feel like I’m not doing my own normal, everyday life as well as I should be.

I see new babies in angelic poses lying in fields of flowers and I think, “Why didn’t we have photos of Kate and Sela done like that?” I see first day of school photos and think, “I should have dressed Kate in a better (more ironed, less breakfast-stained) dress on her first day.”

I see an old friend, newly home from the hospital after having a baby. She has a relaxed smile, pearls around her neck, hair done just so, and I think, “How does she look so gorgeous after just leaving the hospital? I should probably see a dermatologist. Or maybe find a new hairdresser.”

Then I started thinking about my own Facebook photos. Do I post pictures of the kids’ 6 p.m. no-nap-day meltdowns? Shots of the house after three hours of inside playtime on a rainy day? Photos of me with exercise clothes, no makeup and three-day-old hair? No. Most of my photos are a sanitized version of real life. Just like everyone else’s.

No one sees the diaper explosion that happened right after that angelic pose in the flowers, or my friend getting up to nurse the new baby all night (although if you knew this particular friend, she likely still had her pearls on!). And no one sees the chaos that usually surrounds the photos I post.

On Facebook, everyone’s life looks perfect. In this light, it’s easy to see how constantly scanning the news feed can make a person, even a happy one, feel less confident about how her own life appears.

So, in an effort to halt the onslaught of perfect appearances, I’m quitting Facebook for a while. Instead, I’m focusing on God’s truth — about kindness and mercy, the deceptiveness of appearances, and what gives a woman true inner beauty. I will squeeze this truth into Kate and Sela’s minds as much as possible before they begin to face whatever forms of social media are prevalent as they grow up.

Lauren can be reached at LaurenKDenton@gmail.com.