One thing that's fascinating about the "Social Media Isn't Real" category is that the category itself isn't entirely real. In the linked example, the video makes the poster's life look unglamorous--but unglamorous in a disarming and endearing way. Likewise, when someone posts a non-makeup video it's like okay ... but you are still an attractive person in good lighting, filming from a flattering angle. 

This reminds me of the bizarre cultural practice of the Instagram photo dump, where massive amounts of effort go into making each photo look casual and randomly chosen, but under the facade is hours of curating and subtle editing. 

In other words, the "Social Media Isn't Real" category isn't merely a category. It's also an aesthetic.

This sort of cultural filter probably enlarges the gulf between real history and on-paper recorded history.

Not wanting to worry the recipient of your letter. Omitting something you want to forget from your diary.

People writing their own auto-biographies are likely to express events in a way they're happy with, omitting their own ugliest motivations and emotions.
It is quite exceptional for a general who won a war to vocally express "we have fought on the wrong side."^[1]

1. ^{^}

   "Gentlemen, I have come this morning to the inexcusable conclusion that we have fought on the wrong side. This entire war we should have fought with the fascists against the communists, and not the other way around. I fear that perhaps in fifty years America will pay a dear price and become a land of corruption and degenerate morals." - General George S. Patton, 1945

I was surprised reading the title, because usually people don't seem very happy to me at all. But I was thinking of when I see them in the shopping center or the train station...

I was convinced that people have more problems than it seems. It is hard (for me?) to imagine what people might be struggling with, if they don't talk about it. 

But it isn't clear to me that this translates to my expectations of people's happiness. It seems to me that people's struggles effect their levels of satisfaction, which has to do with with their moments of happiness, which in turn effects their actual happiness, which hopefully effects how happy I perceive them to be.

The translation of struggles into satisfaction is not straight forward - it might depend on the degree to which you chose this challenge, on how much it injects uncertainty into your life, on what other things you have going on, on what the difference between your expectations and your reality is, among other factors. 

Then there is how satisfaction translates into moments of happiness. For me, I need to do something that is itself joyous, like playing with my daughter, or stop to "smell the flowers" - that is, to spend time being excited and happy that I succeeded at something.

But how do moments of happiness translate into an overall feeling of happiness? I aspire to spend some time at peace, and some time with the stress and effort of trying to do stuff. I aspire to be happy some of the time, and concentrated or paying genuine attention to other people at other times. I don't want to be happy all the time. But I do consider myself a happy person, at the moment.

Finally, my perception of a friend's happiness is has a lot to do with what their personality is like. People who give the impression of high agency, that they are the heroes in their life, or that they (also) have modest goals they care about and are succeeding at, give me the impression of happiness. People who are energetic give the impression of happiness. 

And impressions of people are kind of normalized - everybody has problems, most people are not talking about everything going on with them all the time, so you probably get a pretty good sense of how happy people are relative to each other. Sure, compare them to yourself without taking facades into account and you can have imposter syndrome. But I think people do get good impressions of the happiness levels of the people around them.