I travel more than average so I am happy seeing friends going on trips. It's rare that their trip looks better than what I've just done or have planned next. But I could absolutely see how someone might spectate a feed full of holidays and feel from the aggregate like everyone else is constantly travelling, while they grind away at work.

Meanwhile my family's barely travelled the past three years due to Covid concerns, tighter budgets (wife's income got severely impacted from the pandemic for a while, while this year we had to unexpectedly pay a good vacation's worth of taxes), and having to use PTO for other unrelated things. Most I've done is a few weekend trips to neighboring states.

Since this is about the effect of social media on mood, I'll chime in to say that it's the opposite for me.

Seeing people conspicuously consume extravagant leisure travel – and the associated resources – brings to mind global warming and how few people actually give a damn about it in any meaningful way.

It also reminds me of what brazen liars many people are. In cases where I've known the people posting Facebook/Insta content about their amazing trips, in about half of those, the reality is that the trip was far less than amazing than their posts would suggest.

As an example, one woman I know took her family across the Pacific to Thailand on a two-week vacation. By their accounts, they had a pretty rotten time, even considering moving their return date forward. But, the Facebook narrative was glowing. Four years later, the woman's Facebook cover photo is of a Thai Buddhist temple from that trip. (She's not a Buddhist. The photo is purely for aesthetics and social signaling.)

It seems to me that this kind of behavior feeds into a loop that encourages other people to consume finite resources and then post about their "amazing" (though often non-amazing) trips. And so the cycle continues.

And that really gets me down. I don't go on Facebook very often.