Facebook, make me pretty!

Facebook is a lot of fun. You can catch up with old friends and whatever, but Facebook is the ultimate enabler of the Delusional. I know I’m not the first one to say it. Everyone knows Facebook is just a never ending class reunion. The whole clichéd reunion-movie plot like who makes the most money, who got fat, who got skinny. The difference is that in the past, people got together every five years, put on pretenses, played games, rolled around in a big bucket of schadenfreude and then went back to their miserable lives. Five years later, they dieted, hit Lipo Express, got hair plugs, traded wives and went to the next reunion. In the interim, few people kept up with each other’s lives. A person had a five year respite before having to trot out their phony persona.  With the advent of Facebook, the class reunion pretense becomes the new norm. Everyone becomes their own publicist carefully crafting a persona for the consumption of their peers. It becomes the platform for the phony artifacts of their lives. Andy Warhol’s now-hackneyed line about fifteen minutes of fame has progressed and morphed. Everyone’s famous for at least part of the time, at least in their own mind.

Stewart hates you!

Delusional people caught up in Facebook’s power to mold impressions also use it to convince themselves that their lives aren’t nearly as crappy as they really are. Like Stewart Smalley’s mirror, a whole lot of people use Facebook in an attempt to boost their self-esteem, persuading themselves that their life is sunshine and rainbows instead of battery acid and bullshit. As is so often in magical thinking, they use it in the hope that they can will themselves to be the person they portray.  In the Secret, the Vision board, encapsulates the things people want their lives to be. Facebook is an electronic vision board. It’s an instrument of primitive magic whereby the wish becomes the real and temporality is no longer linear, just confused. Facebook becomes the embodiment of the mythical new persona and the yearned-for new life.Every day I wade through their Delusionals’ moronic dispatches from the edge of sanity, shaking my head at their self-affirming pronouncements. Most are posted via Twitter since the Delusional must appear too busy and important to post via the actual Facebook interface (another level of mediation.)  Their scattershot aphorisms fill the aether with fluffy tidbits of metaphysical marshmallow. Challenging nothing, affirming nothing, the words hang in space waiting for others to chime in with kudos and praise for sharing the insights of this carbonated philosophy.          

What a great Day!

Lookout world here I come!

I love being gluten/taste free!

My hubby is so Great (smiley face)

Gonna be a great day!

I’m craving Kale chips!

I have the best family/dog/honey badger in the world!

Kitty says: Fuck you!

You know the type. They issue their proclamations as if someone is listening, as if someone gives a shit - all the while their friends, who are listening, know this is absolute crap. They know that the person’s hubby that is so “great” is actually a philanderer who will fuck anything with a warm, wet orifice. A man so vile, that a P.I. recorded him with the other woman talking trash about his wife. Yet she hangs on, trying to convince herself and her equally delusional friends that her marriage and life are perfect. 


The phony Facebook persona is simply an extension her overall fraud. The breast enhancements, veneered teeth, and bleached hair perpetrate the external fraud, while Facebook perpetuates the internal. The cognitive dissonance is staggering.


Erving Goffman proposed that we all wear masks in differing situations as part of his theories on psychodrama. We have a front stage where we present ourselves to the world and back stage where we can be ourselves. With Facebook, the delineation between the stages blurs. The back stage shrinks as internal dialogues disappear, to be replaced by a dialogue with the audience as mediated by Facebook. This arrangement provides an endless feedback loop whereby people can modify their lives to suit their Facebook persona. Friends chime in and reinforce specific modes of behavior -- rivalries and arms races erupt between personas. Everything is phony, tainted by the stink of jealousy and rivalry. Friends don’t provide real feedback, simply “support” for whatever decision the Delusional are facing. It becomes the mediator of people’s lives and then begins to shape them. No longer satisfied with simply reporting the hyper-minutiae of their lives, the Delusional use Facebook to craft their lives. Everything they do is calculated to project an image. They make certain they check in and tag the right people. They make certain everyone knows how they are living their life every minute of the day. 

A friend asked me “who uses check in?” 

“People who want to get robbed” I answered. 

Too bad, I just read her last post.

The narcissistic drive seems worse in the Delusional, but is it narcissism or a need to overcome the fear that they are nothing special. The fear that others may be living their lives to a greater degree, even though we know the others  are lying as well. They need to be noticed and followed. They want the voyeurism, as if they crash their cars simply to gather a crowd. They don’t want you to meet them wherever they are, they just want you to know they are there and with whom.Connection is not part of the game plan of the Delusional, it’s affirmation. Affirmation that they indeed exist -- without the pesky personal interaction.