“A woman should wear fragrance wherever she expects to be kissed”-Coco Chanel
Laura Reynolds looks at some of the cheapest beauty products available
Coming home from university for the holidays is always a bit of a strain. There’s the sudden and somewhat unexpected return to the parental discipline we’d hoped to leave behind forever. Trivial demands on your time to perform tasks like emptying the dishwasher or going to visit your grandma, which would have been par for the course before you left home suddenly seem completely unreasonable. After all, we’re adults now, aren’t we? Nope, apparently not.
The second disconcerting effect of coming home (especially from York with our weird holidays) is that your social life gets a lot quieter. Suddenly a lot of your uni friends are fairly inaccessible, and having been thrown together with people for the last ten weeks very intensely, it’s a bit of a shock to find that they’re now far away and getting on with their lives. Because of differing term dates many friends from home are still at university, and there’s always a depressing amount of work which you know you should definitely start thinking about getting on with, but which you never quite get round to.
Which brings me (eventually) to the point of this blog. The combination of a loss of personal freedom, the desire to see how everyone else is doing and a desperate need to procrastinate as much as possible results, for me at least, in a huge increase in the amount of time I rack up on Facebook. In fact, I have it open right now and have checked it (at a conservative estimate) about seven times since beginning this paragraph. Wait…better make that eight.
Clearly I’m a hopeless social networking addict, but in the circumstances I can’t help but think that such excessive use is only making me, and presumably anyone similarly afflicted, miserable. Checking the homepage is perfectly acceptable, I tell myself. Maybe I have a message; maybe someone posted something on my wall. But ten minutes later I always find myself perusing the profile of a friend that I haven’t spoken to for years, or avidly flicking through the photos of someone I’ve never met.
This compulsion to examine other people’s lives can bring a Facebook stalker’s mood down in several ways. There’s a competitive element to Facebook which you, as the stalker, can never win. You can compare numbers of friends, and feel suddenly unpopular when you come across someone who has more than you. You can look at the photos of other people having what looks like an amazing night out or a fantastic holiday and start getting an inferiority complex - it’s tempting to presume that their lives are one big party in contrast to yours sitting at home on the internet.
Psychologist Seth Meyers, writing in Psychology Today, has even coined the term “Facebook OCD”, to describe the obsessive checking of the profiles of people we’re romantically interested in - something most of us indulge in. However, he calls the habit “self-destructive”, and warns that looking at people’s profiles without actually interacting with them only makes you feel more alone. To regain self-esteem and peace of mind he recommends (brace yourself) swearing off the site for a while.
Although as a self-confessed junkie I’m definitely unable to take this advice, I have decided to cut down the amount of time I spend on Facebook over the holidays. It’s always a nice feeling to come back onto the site after some time away and find a build-up of notifications, and refusing to linger over other people’s lives frees up so much time in the day to get on with other things, like actually emptying that dishwasher! Guess I'd better start looking for something else to procrastinate over...
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