Last night my daughter spent an hour posting photos from her birthday party on to Facebook.

There they were, for the world to see – the fun laid bare for those who were invited and couldn’t come, and others who weren’t on the guest list to start with.

I don’t know how I would have coped with this sort of spectacle as a teenager. I was – and still am – a worrier, and if I was unable to go a party with my friends, I would fret and spend hours thinking of what they were doing and the laughs I could be having.

It was the same if some of my pals went shopping without me. I knew they’d be talking about it at school, and hated not being part of it.

Now young people not only have to deal with those mental pictures, but they have the entire outing rammed down their throats – the shops, the juice bar, the bus home, the giggles… For the one who missed out, it must be torture.

No wonder teenagers and young people feel pressured to go to everything – they want to be on Facebook the next morning, they want everyone to see that they were at so-and so nightclub, or screaming on the scariest rides at Flamingoland.

Now there’s an actual condition for people who constantly fret about what others are doing. They suffer from FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out. They live in dread of not being involved and take pains to be at the heart of the action.

My eldest daughter isn’t quite that bad, but she has displayed some signs, worrying about events her friends have attended, but she hasn’t. I’ve tried to curtail the time she spends on Facebook. “You don’t need to know when Chloe or Emma are having tea or walking the dog, and they don’t need to know what you’re watching on TV,” I’ve told her.

Had social networking sites been around when I was young, I’d have developed a serious inferiority disorder.

It’s not just parties and social outings that people display – it extends to holidays and possessions. Photos of my best friend sunning herself on the beach in Antigua – where they went every year – wouldn’t have sat well alongside my own snaps of driving rain at Portland Bill.

As FOMO spreads, billions of people worldwide, particularly the young, beat themselves up as they compare their lives with those of others.

I could make them feel better: if I set up my own Facebook site – no parties, no shopping trips other than Asda, no foreign holidays, stacks of washing-up, piles of ironing and plenty of loo cleaning – they’d think their lives were fabulous.