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Comment by jazzychad | Hacker News Reader

None of the above. What I feel is a sense of deep personal sadness.

Most of my friends on FB are from college (when FB first launched), and most of them still live on the East Coast. Since I moved to SV, I have not added many new friends on FB (mostly because most SV-type people are not prone to use it that much).

So, when I launch my FB news feed, I am bombarded by news and stories and pictures from friends of old that I haven't kept up with, and I start to feel sadness and regret. I usually last about two minutes before I close the tab. I visit maybe once a week. =/

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That is exactly what happened to me after I moved from the east coast to the Midwest. Every login to Facebook was a reminder of the abundant (real-life) social network that I had left behind to be in a place where I knew virtually nobody. It eventually drove me to close my account. Much as I'd like to rationalize closing my account in terms of privacy or principles, it was really mostly this phenomenon.

Maybe you're feeling sad because you're using social-media more than you should. See the following article : http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/01/the_a...

No, it's not because of using social media too much. I have the exact same feeling. Most of my Facebook friends are people I met in grad school in Thailand. I dropped out and moved back to the USA. Thai people are about 20x more active on Facebook than the average American and they had the time of their lives after I left and the party is still going - and they document every second of it on Facebook. Deep regret/sadness is exactly how I feel every time I see their photos filling up my feed.

wait, what do you regret?!

Moving away from all his friends, I'd assume.

I regret losing contact with people who were once friends and drifting out of the network of people I spent a lot of time with in the past, but whom I have virtually no contact with (outside of Facebook) now. Most of the in-Facebook contact is not nearly deep or meaningful enough to rekindle old friendships and its tough when you've drifted so far apart. Hell, a lot of these people have moved away - some to other cities, some to other countries and some to other continents. When I log onto Facebook and see what these people are doing, I remember the times we had together in the past and I regret that I lost touch with them.

I mean, not so much that I'll jump on a plane and try to re-friend them in real life - I too have moved on and have great friends around me (new and old), just like they do. But sometimes I wonder what life would be like if I still hung out with that guy or girl in that photograph posted on their Facebook wall yesterday. Would I have been in it?

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