Facebook users in Utah must make Dorothy Parker seem happy

A new British study confirms that living among happy people can drive people to suicide:

The research confirmed a little known and seemingly puzzling fact: many happy countries have unusually high rates of suicide. This observation has been made from time to time about individual nations, especially in the case of Denmark. This new research found that a range of nations — including: Canada, the United States, Iceland, Ireland and Switzerland, display relatively high happiness levels and yet also have high suicide rates....

Comparing U.S. states in this way produced the same result. States with people who are generally more satisfied with their lives tended to have higher suicide rates than those with lower average levels of life satisfaction. For example, the raw data showed that Utah is ranked first in life-satisfaction, but has the 9th highest suicide rate. Meanwhile, New York was ranked 45th in life satisfaction, yet had the lowest suicide rate in the country.

Perhaps living in New York, or in any big city, disabuses people of the notion that everyone else is living in paradise. All I have to do is walk around the block to see people with hard times etched on their faces. Or I can look out my window, across my building's courtyard, to see dirty dishes and unmade beds in other apartments.

Unfortunately, I also live on Facebook, and it's hard to shake the feeling that all my friends are having better times than I am. They're partying and vacationing and going to the hippest places in town! It's true that most of the research on "Facebook depression" involves teenage girls, but, well... let's just not go there.

Facebook does distort reality, and it's easy to forget that for every friend who posts a debauchery update, there are dozens sitting home in front of the TV. So I get the feeling that everyone is enjoying life without me, even though I mock my parents when they watch the 10 o'clock news and conclude from the headlines that people are being shot to death on every street corner in Boston.

Maybe more people should post mundane updates on Facebook: "It's sock-sorting night" or "Staying in to save money" or "Going to bed early because I have nothing else to do." The problem is that you can start to seem desperate if you do that too much, and nobody like to be around desperate people.

Can we get a new Facebook status befitting the New York attitude: "Unsatisfied but not ready to give up"?