5 Reasons Why You Would Be So Much Happier Without Your Friends List

Social media outlets have changed the way we live our lives – nearly all of us.

We get updates the minute something happens regardless of whether it happened to a city or country on the other side of the world or to one of your friends on one of your social networks.

When something happens, seemingly regardless of how important or unimportant, we get an update.

World War III is about to start, we get an update. Our friend had pancakes with smiley faces on them for breakfast, we get a picture, a description and enough hashtags to make the entirely trivial event seem important.

As with all things, the world of social media has its good and bad.

Staying up-to-date on important events and staying in touch with your friends: good. Staying up-to-date on completely trivial matters and being overwhelmed by a flow of pointless information: bad.

Your life may very well be a whole lot better without your friends list. Here’s why:

1. Your friend’s updates can be very depressing.

When things are going well for you, you’re bulletproof. On the other hand, when things aren’t going so great for you, you can be somewhat fragile.

When life is tough, the last thing you want to hear is how great it is going for everyone else.

At any given time on your FB feed, you’ll get several relationship status updates as well as promotion updates, usually sprinkled with vacation photos.

You’re barely able to make next month's rent, but everybody else you seem to know is living the life. Half of these updates are from people you’ve never met and the other half you feel guilty for not being happy for.

You know you should be excited for two of your friends deciding to get hitched, but you haven’t even gotten laid in a couple of months.

Thanks to social media, you get a constant update of how much your life is falling short of your expectations.

2. Worse yet, half the updates are entirely exaggerated or plain false.

Instagram has to be the fastest way to get you to hate your life.

All of your friends seem to be in great shape, driving widely-expensive cars, taking exotic trips, sipping margaritas on yachts and wearing widely-expensive clothing.

What no one bothers to mention is that their photos are photoshopped – they aren’t really that tan or thin. Their parents actually own the cars. The yacht belongs to their rich friend.

And that crazy expensive clothing still has tags on it so that they can return the clothing as soon as they post the photo.

Your friends are making their lives seem a whole lot better than yours only to make you – and themselves for that matter – feel that their lives are better than yours. The truth is that it isn’t.

3. Even if there is some truth to what they post, they’re only posting in order to show off.

People share things on social media because they believe these things are important to share – why would their new kicks or yacht trip be important to share unless it was important to them for you to know how much better they have it than you?

They are showing off, plain and simple. And you… you’re sitting there, wishing that you could be living the life that they seem to be living instead of working your way up to that lifestyle.

Instead of working toward your dreams, you’re drowning in the lives of others.

4. Those on your friends list are more of a distraction than anything else – they aren’t even really your friends.

They may not even be acquaintances, but nonetheless, you get to see updates on their lives regularly throughout your day. Do you honestly have no better way to spend your time than to scroll through that infinity-scroll all social media sites have.

They designed it that way so that you would spend hours and hours skimming down the page of their website. The more time you spend on the website, the more they can charge for advertising.

You are playing their game, by their rules and are getting entirely distracted from what’s really important: your own life.

5. Life is too short to spend living someone else’s life – you have more than enough to focus on and really do not need to know most of the information you’re consuming on social media.

You spend so much time-consuming information about others that you aren’t spending enough time living your own life.

If you have goals and dreams then remember that the only way to get from where you are now to where you want to be is to work your way over there.

You’re going to have to trudge through muck, quicksand and 10 feet of snow to make it out to the other side victorious. To be great requires a lot of hard work, a lot of focus and a lot of sacrifice.

What you are really sacrificing is time and energy, and what you can do with that time and energy.

The first thing on your list of sacrifices ought to be your friends list. It does you more harm than good.

Photo Courtesy: We Heart It

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