The underlying cause of Facebook feeling depressing is that the corpus of Facebook posts you see are not drawn from a random population of moments of your frien

The underlying cause of Facebook feeling depressing is that the corpus of Facebook posts you see are not drawn from a random population of moments of your friends' lives. There's an enormous sampling bias created by the sources self-selecting for interesting bits of activity. For every post you see from someone at a hot concert, there's ten other friends who didn't post about their mundane day at work or lazy weekend. If you have 52 friends who each go on vacation for one week out of the year, then every week Facebook will be showing you somebody's awesome vacation updates. This does not mean that you're missing out or living less life for not being on vacation that particular week. It's natural to compare our moods and experiences with others. But the self-selected nature of Facebook posts means you'll always be losing that comparison, since you see the highlights and outlying data points in relation to your own average. Once you consciously understand this and correct your mood for it, Facebook becomes a lot less of a downer.