Social media’s fake happiness always leaves me with a #sadface

Happiness used to be so much more simple. In days of yore, you could be quietly contented and not feel the instant need to broadcast it publicly. In a time before social media, you could go through life experiencing all sorts of emotions without needing other people to press a thumbs-up button in order to prove the validity of feeling a certain way.

There were no prehistoric people daubing images of newborn babies in the Lascaux caves complete with a Snapchat filter and cutesy bunny ears. The Ancient Egyptians never added hieroglyphic comments or winking faces of approval to their depictions of cats on the walls of the Pyramids.

These days, if you’re on Facebook or Instagram, the newsfeed of other people’s happiness can feel utterly relentless. On Father’s Day over the weekend, there was an endless succession of photographs depicting paternal affection, each one captioned with the claim that this or that guy was the best dad ever. Which, on one level, is lovely (albeit impossible).

But I couldn’t help but feel sorry for those people whose father was no longer alive, or who had difficult relationships with them or, indeed, no relationship at all.

There is no space on social media to be unhappy. Or just a little bit grumpy. The misanthrope has been totally excluded from the online space.

Until now. In America, a man called Dan Kurtz has developed a social networking app for those who prefer focusing on the cloud rather than the silver lining. This is great news for people like me, who get stopped by strangers in the street and told to “cheer up, love, it might never happen” (to which my response is always: you don’t know me, this is simply my face and anyway it might just have happened or be about to).

Mr Kurtz’s app is called Binky and all the posts of beautiful landscapes, photogenic babies or plates of food are randomly generated by an algorithm. The comments process is also automated. You start to type and a suitably meaningless statement pops up, complete with a rash of hashtags and emoticons. When a reporter from a national newspaper commented on a picture of a rainbow, it came up with: “YAS!!! Wow this is amazing #justsaying #winning #blessed” which is exactly the kind of rubbish everyone is spouting all the time.

Binky is arguably the word’s first anti-social network. It’s brilliant. I’d be excited about it were I not so nihilistic. It reminded me of my paper diary. Yes, I have a paper diary. Part of my misanthropy means that I eschew technology wherever I can, in order to maximise the inconvenience to myself and everyone else, thereby giving me a solid reason to be annoyed rather than just the usual generalised existential malaise.

My diary describes itself as a “Disappointments Diary”. It is published by Pan Macmillan and contains an uninspiring quote of the week such as “If ignorance is bliss, why are you so sad?”. There are also useful foreign phrases such as “I do not have health insurance” and “Bank Insecurity Questions” including “Why do dogs look at you like that?” and “Do the rumours going round lately concern you?”

I love my diary because it makes me laugh. It makes me feel OK to be not OK. It also means that I start every day with a healthy dose of scepticism and then, if something good happens, I am genuinely, happily surprised. #Justsaying.