Facebook and Twitter have ruined your life. You may not admit it – you may not even realise it – but they have. There’s nothing you can do, save for deleting your accounts on both of the social networking sites, but what kind of lunatic does that?
No, I’m afraid you’re stuck with unwittingly allowing two websites to slowly, gradually and methodically make you feel worse about yourself. Here are 10 ways that Facebook and Twitter have damaged your self-esteem and made your world seem just that little bit bleaker.
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10 Ways Facebook/Twitter Have Ruined Your Life
You can never leave your past behind you.
Everything that's ever been posted by you or about you online is now a part of history. Your failed relationships, your lost friends and your poor fashion choices are ingrained on the internet forever, as if you are the artist, the World Wide Web is the canvas and your shit life is the paint.
You know where everyone is, all of the time.
"Jonathan has checked in to Starbucks". "Stacey has checked in to bed". "Keith has checked in to the toilet". Not only is your head now filled with the mundane musings of every single one of your friends and acquaintances whenever you log in to Facebook, it's also being infiltrated by their every movement, too.
You now compare yourself to other people on a daily basis.
Before Facebook and Twitter you'd pass someone on the street wearing a nice shirt and think "Huh, that's a nice shirt" before carrying on with your day. Now you scroll through status updates and tweets and photos of people trying their hardest to impress everyone with their supposedly better-than-average lifestyle, essentially turning everyone into that prick with a nice shirt.
You know everything about everyone, and everyone knows everything about you.
Now that you have the opportunity to have your innermost thoughts and feelings 'Liked' and 'Retweeted', you've forgotten how to exercise discretion. The old adage of "if you haven't got anything nice to say, don't say anything at all" is dramatically underutilised, as people instead choose to publicise their sociopathic thoughts in the form of status updates, tweets and lists on websites titled '10 Ways Facebook & Twitter Ruined Your Life'.
Your friends now take photographs of everything and anything.
Before everyone and his 5-year-old daughter owned phones with HD cameras jammed inside of them, photographs were saved solely for special occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, holidays and funerals. But now everyone is taking photographs of everything, and therefore everyone is busily trying to make every moment of their life a Kodak moment, feigning happiness in dismal clubs and taking selfies of them kissing their boyfriends in order to convince themselves that they aren't going to die alone.
You can't do anything embarrassing without everyone finding out.
Prior to Facebook and Twitter, if you publically humiliated yourself you would do so in the knowledge that only those in attendance and the people who they called immediately afterwards would know about it. Now the whole world is watching you, waiting for you to vomit down the cleavage of some fat girl so it can take a photo on its iPhone and tweet it to TheLADBible.
You're too busy trying to look like you're enjoying yourself rather than actually enjoying yourself.
If you have a good night out but no one has taken a photograph of you doing so, then it might aswell not have happened.
You're never truly alone.
There was a time when human beings could truly be left alone with their own thoughts, but now that every single one of us has a phone in our pockets, that's not really the case. Trying to sit still for a minute in a quiet room without checking Twitter or Facebook is an impossible task, because what's the alternative? Thinking? No, there's no need to do that in the 21st century. Just keep looking at photos of what your friends ate for dinner.
You alleviate your boredom by checking up on what other people are doing with their lives.
What did people do when they were bored before Facebook and Twitter? Is that why the Egyptians built the Pyramids? Because they didn't have anything else to keep them occupied? Thankfully, these days you can while away the hours by idly scrolling through blocks of text typed up by people equally as bored as you, so you needn't do anything meaningful with your spare time. You're part of a community now. A community of bored, unproductive people.
You spend most of your day procrastinating.
You clicked on this article after being linked to it on Facebook and Twitter when you really should've been doing something of much greater importance.