This world is full of happy, original, funny, creative, artistic, joyous, active, wonderful people. They can all be found and enjoyed on Facebook. Together with their countless jolly friends, cat photos, movie and dinner reviews, likings, jokes and puns.
This is why to us, the depressed outcasts, Facebook is so very very very very depressing. We just don’t belong in this happy, sparkling, glamorous Facebook world anymore. We’ve become the misfits. We would only spoil the fun.
Every Facebook profile we happen to see painfully reminds us that we ourselves could never be that happy, original, funny, creative, artistic, joyous, active, merry or wonderful. And we also know that even if we tried, we could not even fake such a thing.
Which is, of course, what all those others do.
Centuries ago, French nobleman François de La Rochefoucauld already said: “To succeed in the world, we do everything we can to appear successful already.” That’s exactly what Facebook is for: it’s a Facadebook.
We, the already depressed, only get even more depressed by all this fun, success and happiness that appears to be the Facebook norm. Maybe it’s just our being jealous or spiteful, but still, there it is. Seeing all that polished perfection, all those friends, it reminds us of what we will never be. It makes happiness, something we’ve already trouble to believe in anyway, ring false even where it’s actually true.
And at least we get more depressed when we see how most people on Facebook manage to hide all common problems from sight: no dark secrets, no horrible worries, no nagging doubts, no incredible dullness or boredom. We’re supposed to believe it’s all success and enjoyment.
But depression doesn’t tolerate any kind of mask. Depression forces us into a deathly kind of honesty that kills not just our dreams and fantasies, but destroys masks and facades as well. And not just our own.
Once you see through it, Facebook becomes a cruel kind of joke. Like this:
Last week, I dynamited my own Facebook profile. First I excused myself with my handful of friends, said I hoped we would find other ways to keep in touch, and then: Whamm! I almost got hit by the debris from the blast. I won’t deny it gave me a sadistic, destructive kind of pleasure.
To my friends, of course I mentioned all the official reasons people have for leaving Facebook. Like the way Facebook ignores personal privacy more than ever; their moneymaking strategy based on selling your data; the irritation of ever more Facebook notifications that turn out to be poorly disguised advertisements; and so on.
Those are all true motives. But I left out the one reason I now confess here. Every time I looked at Facebook, I got a bad, hopeless, depressed feeling. The feeling that I simply couldn’t keep up with all others.
Well, now that I’ve made my confession, it’s time for a…
Music Facade
Here is Ilia Akselrod. I’m 100% sure you never heard of him. The song he sings is Facebook Life. I’m 99% sure you won’t understand any of the lyrics. Except for the last few words.
Click the green “Play” button – if it’s missing, install Flash.
For a full StayOnTop playlist, go to the Music page.
• footnote 1: Don’t you dare to Like this post!
• footnote 2: Stupid me! I almost forgot this link to Ilia Akselrod’s Facebook page!
But in harsh daily-life reality, a one-size-fits-all “truth about depression” simply does not exist. Even though you can find a thousand different “truths about depression” online, there will be no single ready-made “truth” among them that will happen to fit you perfectly. And this is why so many well-meaning self-help depression websites often prove, from our own personal perspective, inadequate or even useless. They’re simply too general. Like a pair of shoes too big or too narrow for our own uniquely shaped feet.
But this common definition is by necessity very general. In order to be applicable and shared by us all, it has to be flat.
So what you would need to do is collect an imaginary box full of loose Lego bricks, all sizes and shapes and colors, that represent all kinds of problems people can have. And next, you would need to use and combine those bricks to painstakingly – with trial and error – reconstruct the maze (the shapes and corners and dead ends and pathways) of your own individual depression truth: all on top of the flat general base definition.
Due to the utter primitiveness of some major internet search sites, I’ve been forced to change some content at StayOnTop.
The problem was, two pages here (
I surely hope that in ten years from now, we’ll no longer see this kind of silly glitches. For now, I hold my breath: let’s hope that our wonderfully smart search sites will not jump to the conclusion that StayOnTop is some kind of porn site because this post included the word “sex” more than once…
Sometimes the unbearable lightness – fluffiness, I should say – of the Internet as a whole is really irritating me. But it also demonstrates how depression can come with an incidental perk: being different! Our poor depressed brain may be far too susceptible to negative feelings, but at least we’re still trying to use it.
The 
Meet 
The main difference with the 1960s is that back then, most people still were consumers rather than producers. They were still mainly at the receiving end. Today, each Twitter or Facebook user is also constantly busy producing and spreading his own pseudo-events.
• Am I the only one feeling this way?
“I asked you to come and interview me because I want to state, once and for all, that all those rumors about Depri-Pharm being some kind of online scam are just mean, vile slander. So I want to be completely open with you. You’ve seen our great-looking and very reliable web shop, on this hired Canadian Depri-Pharm server? Yes that site is a very professional job. From there, we ship all well-known antidepressants, Prozac, Effexor, you name it, without the need for any prescription nonsense. At nearly half the price! And yes, it’s true that in spite of their brand names, our products contain nothing but plain old aspirin. But this is no scam! It just means we are in the placebo business!”
“I will explain that to you. But meanwhile, come along into my garden, I’d like you to see our humble beginnings. Yes, do take your glass with you. I’ll take the bottle. See this little old shed? This is where it all began. Based on a brilliant idea of my mother, and my own business instincts and perseverance. Unbelievable, isn’t it? No one here in Rutvakantskaya could have thought that from here, this stunning rebirth and revitalization of our whole village – what do I say, an economic boost for entire Boratchickzthan – would take such an amazing flight!”
“So here, inside this shed, is the improvised lab where I first developed my skills in mashing standard aspirin to powder, mixing it with a glucose coagulant, and pressing it into the form of lookalike antidepressant tablets again. Originally I used this small hand-press here, with primitive molds made for me by György Rasputin, our blacksmith. He now is the manager of our production line and shipping center near Grawltzky Airport. We nowadays work in a fully industrial way, providing meaningful jobs for many attractive Boratchi girls who otherwise would have remained destitute and unemployed. I really love those job interviews! Did you notice how the most beautiful girls in the world can be found right here along the main road in Rutvakantskaya?”
“To make all this possible, we’ve invested in a semi-automatic high-tech production line. Actually we now have two of them. One produces the capsule-format antidepressants, filled with aspirin powder and colored just like the real thing. The other one, a bit more simple, makes the pressed-pill kind using a great variety of all possible molds.”
“So I can maintain that on the whole, for nearly all our customers, the availability of our cheap placebos is a great and highly effective blessing. Depri-Pharm is a wonderful company: our product helps to bring out the best in most people. As for the few exceptions to that rule, let me tell you this wise old proverb we have here in Boratchickzthan: One cannot chop wood without losing some chips. That’s exactly how it is. I’m sorry, but I cannot help it.”
His formula weighs in some rather hard-to-combine factors such as average weather conditions, average monthly debt situation, time since last holiday and time until next holiday, time elapsed since having failed one’s New Year resolutions, motivational levels and feeling a need to take action. For a little more info, see the 
In fact, this whole Blue Monday thing is little more than a hoax. As many people in many places have pointed out, the formula may look impressive but it lacks any scientific method or foundation whatsoever.
June 18, 1924 –
