[danhak]

Having a realtime feed of your friends' and acquaintances' lives pushed to you 24/7 is a completely new thing in the history of human social interaction.

We are not, as you say, "engineering people to be terrible at handling the complexities of interpersonal relationships." Rather, we are completely overloading people with social data. It's not surprising that this should be emotionally taxing in ways humans have never before had to deal with.

[samstave]

I initially upvoted the GP, then I read your post.

Very well put.

I knew a couple that when they split were attempting to one-up eachother with their FB posts about who they slept with or how much they were partying etc... and they had kids together and were "professionals" -- it was terrible.

[toomuchtodo]

I would concede that Facebook doesn't help if you're not an adult to begin with.

When you combine a social exhibitionist platform with emotionally or socially stunted humans, what did we expect to happen?

[Frondo]

Given how absolutely widespread this kind of emotional mismanagement is, is it fair to call these people stunted? If a lot of people are like that, isn't that just normal?

Maybe it's not ideal, but maybe that's just life, and it'd make sense to adjust one's expectations a bit and work from where we are, instead of that elusive ideal.