But going outside and doing actual human things is still really, really cool you guys.

It seems after a solid decade of warnings regarding not sharing every fleeting moment of our lives on social media, we’re finally learning the value of deleting shit immediately after it spews from our impulsive fingertips. Bad fingertips!

As it turns out, the library of phony lives that is Facebook is mind-numbingly depressing, and one of its in-the-moment-and-bail competitors, Snapchat, is good for the soul.

So says a group of researchers over at the University of Michigan anyways. In a newly released study titled, “Snap decisions: More happiness gained by using Snapchat than Facebook,” the team explains that using Facebook makes people feel worse than when they use Snapchat. And not just because of the ever-availability of sexts, although we’re guessing that’s probably part of it.

"On the surface, many people view Snapchat as the 'sexting app,’” says Joseph Bayer, the paper’s lead author. “But we found that Snapchat is typically being used to communicate spontaneously with close friends in a new and often more enjoyable way." 

Short-lived snaps being viewed and then forgotten mean people are probably more likely to be open with their actual lives, and don’t have to worry about mom or dad getting upset that you “liked” an article about finding dicks in the most unusual of places. It’s sort of like this thing we used to have called privacy and selectivity.

We’ve come full circle!

To come to the results, the research team recruited 154 college students who use smart phones. Throughout the day, subjects were texted a questionnaire about their current moods, and how it related to what form of social media they were using — a technique called “experience sampling.” The study finds that Snapchat interactions are more associated with positive feelings, whereas using the emotional suck called Facebook proliferates negative ones. Just as we've all probablythought a time or two in our own lives. 

The team feels that because Snapchat is so "in the now," and can’t be looked at later, more attention is paid to the immediate interaction. Bayer also says that one surprising facet of the findings is the subjects' views on the “conversation” being had with Snapchat, in that they feel it's more like a face-to-face activity because of how mundane and, like, totally of an inside joke everything is while snapping, as opposed to the more serious postings like births, weddings and dinner selections Facebook is filled with.

So it looks like Snapchat has moved away from its reputation as a pseudo-illegal teen pornography distribution app and heading into a health positive one. While this is all good news, we can't help but be stuck in our old fashioned ways of knowing that going outside and doing real human things with one another is still really, really cool though. 

– cover photo: Rclbeauty101