Is Facebook Envy Shattering Your Home-Buying Plans?

A research conducted by the University of Copenhagen in 2016 found that social media platform Facebook is making people unhappy. However, suffering more intensely are those users, who are affected by what the research terms as “Facebook envy”. Another study by the Indiana University in the same year found that users of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter often perceived themselves to be less popular than their peers, owing to a phenomenon known as “friendship paradox”. The knowledge of not being as popular as their peers makes people unhappy. Overall, these platforms, which are primarily used to connect with family members, friends and co-workers, cause a great deal of gloom to users. The more time you spend on these platforms, it appears, the unhappier you are!

"This analysis contributes to a growing body of evidence that social media may be harmful to users who "overindulge" in these services since it's nearly impossible to escape negative comparisons to their friends' popularity and happiness," says Johan Bollen of the Indiana University, succinctly putting across the larger point.

How does this concern a prospective homebuyer?

Social media can be used as an effective tool to look for homes and conclude the buying business faster. However, if you look differently, social media can also delay your home-buying plans.

How so?

The first thing a prospective homebuyer has to do is to save enough money to make the down-payment. But, oh, this buyer's Facebook friends have such a happy life! They frequent the best eateries in town; they wear and flaunt the best apparel brands; they go to all those exotic places to spend their holidays, and – Good Lord! – they get so many "likes" on the pictures they post!

On the contrary, this poor chap (our prospective homebuyer) is counting every single penny, abstaining from any splurge so that he can make the down-payment for a home-purchase deal.

We all know that this “Facebook envy” gets the better of us, most of the times. There would be a momentary lapse of reason, and we would be back on social media to show the world what a great time we had while dining at this upscale eating joint; how absolutely marvelous we seemed in our pricey new outfits bought from a uber-luxury brand; and what a great time we had while we stayed at a five-star hotel while visiting a foreign location. Satisfaction would be ours when we do a data analysis of the number of "likes" we received on the photos we posted on Facebook when compared to the number of "likes" a particular friend got for putting at display similar pictures of having a gala time.

Alas, the contentment, however, is not meant to be a long-lived one! It is certain that your “happiness” must have upset some of your friends, who would have pledged do go a notch higher to put you down. Amid all this turmoil, you would float between happiness and gloom with only one thing consistent ─ you will have to defer your home-buying plans because to script the having-a-great-time saga on social media, you seem to have exhausted all your monthly income. It would be wrong to imagine you could save anything at all. Or, could you?

I bought the house. Why should I be concerned?

Let us now assume that you have been successful in buying a house. You are also diligently paying off your home loan EMIs (equated monthly instalments). How possibly could social media interfere here? You do have an EMI to pay, and this does not leave you with an option to splurge. You have no choice but to shoulder all your monetary responsibilities.

However, this does not mean you are satisfied with denying yourself all the worldly pleasures while your friends seem to be having it all. Don't blame yourself if you are not able to pre-pay you home loan despite several hikes in your salary. You deserved a break, and so you did decide to go easy for a while. Those who know better about finances would advise you to pay more attention to a reduction in interest rates than watch with keen interest the attention your social media friends receive on Facebook. But, these advisors often do not get the point that in matters such as these, we want what we want; what we need is a thought often left unattended.

In the world of medical science, products invented to cure a particular disease often sow the seeds of a new breed of ailment among users. This particular medicine may be a breakthrough for researchers and a blessing for patients. However, that does not change the fact that there would be unavoidable side-effects of using the medicine. Information technology, too, seems to have inherited the same tendency. Who can dare to undermine the way IT has revolutionised our world? We are today more connected than we ever were. However, this revolution is not without its flaws.