The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  Our brave faces are draining us. We’re losing sight of our authentic selves.

  WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THIS BOOK

  When I set out to talk to college students about social media, I had no idea I’d end up writing so extensively about happiness. There was only one direct question in the interviews about happiness, yet happiness and everything related to it—being positive, hopeful, and even inspiring—came up all over the place in students’ answers, no matter what the question. Happiness, at least the appearance of it, was a huge concern to them, as were the ills that stem from everyone’s attempts to display happiness online, especially when those attempts ring hollow. The appearance of happiness has become so prized in our culture that it takes precedence over a person’s actual happiness. By the time our children reach college, they know that a large part of their job is to present a happy face to the world, as they once might have presented a book report in class or performed a role in a school play. And we (the parents, teachers, coaches, and mentors in their lives) have helped push them to this place.

  I don’t believe these concerns are restricted to college students.

  When I talk about the findings of this research with friends and colleagues, the conversation often sparks people to share their own struggles with online appearances versus the realities they live and experience. It is my hope that the themes addressed in this book will resonate with people far beyond college campuses. Everyone seems concerned with happiness, and never more so than when we attempt to paint our own portraits of it on our social media profiles.

  There are many benefits to social media, primary among them (according to student participants in this research) the ability to connect with friends and loved ones who are far away. It is a basic tool for making real-life plans. Social media can allow us to be playful, expressive, poetic, flirty, and even silly. But it is clear that image-consciousness and professional concerns among young adults are eclipsing these benefits.

  As a professor and teacher of many years, and as a former professional in Student Affairs for many years, I want the young adults I work with to feel empowered with respect to the things that influence their lives, choices, relationships, and behavior. I want them to become good critical thinkers about these things because critical analysis helps us to have power over these forces rather than being swept up in the tide. There is no doubt that social media is a major influence in young people’s lives. Social media is also one of the newest, fastest-changing influences for all of us. It’s still so nascent that most of us are reeling in the face of it, and only recently have we, as a society, begun to unpack how it is changing and affecting us for good and for ill.

  Many people and organizations seek to offer up-to-the-minute accounts of the latest social media trends. Their efforts are laudable, and I draw on some of their research, but my intent here is different.

  My priority is to showcase the voices and stories so generously offered by the students I interviewed and surveyed so that their college peers, their younger siblings, and the adult mentors and parents in their lives will have the opportunity to continue these conversations at home, in residence halls, in the classroom, and in the workplace. My hope is that the young adults who read these pages find themselves, their friends, and their peers represented in a way that empowers discussions of the issues they find most relevant. I hope that faculty and university administrators as well as high school teachers and administrators find these voices and stories useful in their attempts to talk about these important themes both inside the classroom and out. I hope that adults will find themselves, and their own struggles and thrills around social media, represented in these pages. I also hope that parents will come away from this book with a greater understanding of some of the challenges their children might face as they shift from high school to college while engaging in their near-constant public lives on social media. The students represented here demand our attention and call us to the conversation—and it will be a complicated one.

  Listening to other people’s stories can make us feel vulnerable. Stories open us up and empower us to talk about things we normally might never tell another soul. I think that’s why, whenever I teach my memoir class, it always ends up hitting students at a deep level. When we are in the presence of others who have shown us their best and also their worst, their successes and failures, their joys and their deepest moments of pain, their stories call forth the same in us, they stir up the good and the bad, they ask us to look at love and loss, its presence and absence, our greatest triumphs and our darkest moments. They humanize us and call forth empathy.

  The stories that follow are funny, sad, shocking, beautiful, frightening, insightful, and very, very real. I loved hearing what the students had to say, and I hope you love reading about them. They are the heart and soul of my research and the heart and soul of this book. I hope they open you up in thought-provoking ways that spark lots of conversations and big questions, like the memoirs that work their way into the hearts and minds of my students.

  The stories presented here, I think, are like tiny memoirs of their own.

  THE HAPPINESS EFFECT

  INTRODUCTION

  MASTERS OF HAPPINESS

  I think that people want to show other people that they’re happy. It’s like a happiness competition sometimes, which is funny because I think if you’re really happy, you don’t feel that need to show other people that you’re having a good time.

  Blake, senior, private-secular university

  It’s kind of like how everybody says with their high school reunion, they want to go back and show off how great their life is. It’s like that now, but you don’t have to wait for your ten-year reunion. It’s like that every day.

  Brandy, junior, private-secular university

  EMMA: THE WORST VERSION OF ME VERSUS THE BEST VERSION OF EVERYONE ELSE

  Early on a sunny Saturday morning, Emma shuffles into the interview room. She has just rolled out of bed after a night of partying. Her hair is pulled back into a high ponytail, and she is adorned, head to toe, in sorority attire, T-shirt and sweats bearing Greek letters. I’m visiting Emma’s southern, Greek-dominated university during homecoming week, and ever since I arrived, I’ve had to step over fraternity brothers and sorority sisters sprawled on the floor of the student center, building floats for the upcoming parade.1

  Even in sweats, Emma is stunning. Her eyes are tired, and she might be nursing a hangover, but Emma is effortlessly beautiful, the kind of girl who surely sparks envy among her peers. What’s more, Emma is smart and very invested in her studies. A junior honors student, Emma has a double major in finance and psychology to go with her status as an officer at Alpha Alpha, her university’s most prestigious sorority. If there is a social hierarchy at this school—and there pretty much always is—then Emma is at the top of it.

  On the day we meet, however, she is so over being a sorority girl. Emma is incredibly unhappy, and she’s not afraid to show it. She’s frustrated with Greek life and especially with the pressures that come with being so high up on the food chain. It makes life ridiculous, Emma says. And social media just makes things worse.

  Emma rolls her eyes so many times when talking about sorority life that I lose count. “Every house has its own reputation, and its own facet of people that fit into that house,” she tells me. “I’m not exactly congruent with the type of people that are in my house, so that’s been a challenge in getting to know people and, you know, where I fit in. I don’t really like to party or drink, and my sorority is known for that.” She pauses to roll her eyes. “We’re also known for working out excessively, not really eating—that’s pretty much every sorority on campus.” Emma’s tone is sing-song, as if she thinks everything about sorority life is absurd. Her facial expressions are exaggerated, almost theatrical. “[My sorority sisters] don’t like to be challenged in relationships and questioned because that would require having an opinion and a brain.” On the surface Emma might sound snobby, and she i
s certainly angry, but I detect an unmistakable sadness beneath everything she’s saying. Her comments prompt me to ask why Emma belongs to a sorority at all. “If you’re not in a Greek organization, it’s extremely hard to make friends,” she says. Then she grins a bit wickedly. “If you are in a Greek organization, it’s extremely hard to make friends, but people automatically have to like you if you’re wearing your letters. Or, at least, they have to automatically be nice to you because there are repercussions if they’re not. Not because they’re good people and they like you—it’s that, you know, they’ll get in trouble if they don’t. So it forces a sense of camaraderie and this illusion of belonging on the part of the individual. It just forces the system to expedite the whole making friends process.”2

  Despite Emma’s problems with Greek life in general and her prestigious sorority in particular, she claims she’s happy she joined because “I would rather the social stigma of [Alpha Alpha] be on me than the social stigma of someone who’s not in a sorority. It’s the lesser of two evils.”

  Particularly hellish, I learn, is the period when sororities on campus are courting new members. Emma and her sisters spend up to twelve hours daily, “practicing chants and going over matching and how to bump someone, and just all the logistical nonsense that goes into formal recruitment on the side of the chapter.” This year, Emma is trying to “limit the hypocrisy” on her part (eye-roll), so she got herself excused from recruiting. She didn’t want to stand there and tell new students how her sorority “is everything.”

  After a couple years in Greek life, Emma has very little faith in a person’s ability to be honest about who they are. “I think, in general, people are not very authentic,” she says. “I’m probably jaded, and not maliciously, I just think there’s so much pressure to fit in with the mold, that there’s no way there’s this many people that actually behave that way, and if there are, then God has a sick sense of humor, and we’re all clones of each other.”

  This is when she turns to social media.

  “People do [social media] for the ‘likes.’ People take pictures, experience things, go places for the reaction that they’re going to get on social media.” Emma hates the fact that people she knows on campus will do things just so they can post pictures on Instagram. “Obviously, I don’t go around saying, ‘I think all of you are fake and snobbish and unintelligent’ and things like that,” Emma says, even though that is obviously what she believes. “That is my authentic opinion, but I would be a leper if I shared that opinion. So I definitely am guilty of just going with the flow, wearing my [sorority] letters, because of the reputation that I have because of it, because of the esteem that my house holds on this campus… . Why make it more difficult for yourself if you have the opportunity to make it easier by wearing a shirt, or by wearing a button, or by telling someone you’re an [Alpha Alpha], or by telling someone you’re part of this or that? I don’t think anyone should make it harder on themselves unnecessarily. So I am hypocritical in that sense, that I have all these opinions, but I am very much one way with the people that I am close to in my family and another way with the general public.”

  Emma is clearly disgusted by the state of things and by how social media exacerbates inauthenticity among her friends and peers, but she is also disgusted with herself for going along with this charade. Emma has both Instagram and Facebook accounts. I ask Emma if it’s tiring, being one way in public but feeling like a completely different person in private.

  “Yeah, it is, but I think that everyone is like that,” she says. “I put things online that people are going to respond well to. I stay far away from any political platform, religious platform. I don’t post statuses on Facebook. I think that my life is interesting to me, and I enjoy it. My mother loves hearing about it, my boyfriend loves hearing about it, but outside of ten or fifteen people, my fourteen hundred Facebook friends don’t care. Sometimes I’ll upload pictures to Facebook and Instagram if I think I look pretty and I’m going to get a lot of ‘likes,’ ” Emma admits. Even as she dismisses her Facebook friends, she can’t help but mention the impressive number of them. Emma participates in social media, but she thinks it has spawned a “very weird culture.” “People used to do things and then post them, and the approval you gained from whatever you were putting out there was a byproduct of the actual activity,” she says. “Now the anticipated approval is what’s driving the behavior or the activity, so there’s just sort of been this reversal. Not everyone is that way, obviously. I just feel like the majority of this campus [is], judging by some of the things that I’ve overheard in my sorority house.”

  Being a sorority sister exacerbates this, Emma thinks. “If someone who was highly associated with Alpha Alpha were to do something like protest for gay rights and put it on social media, people would be taken aback,” she tells me. Politics—anything potentially controversial—is off limits for sorority sisters. “If someone who was not in a Greek organization were to protest for gay rights and put it on Instagram or Facebook, that would make more sense. It would be more congruent with the category we lump those people into.” Emma rolls her eyes. “I just said ‘those people,’ so there you go. That’s how it is. It’s very Greek/not Greek…  . Even amongst Greek life, we have tiers. We have top-tier sororities, we have secondary sororities, we have third tier.” Emma goes on to name the sororities and fraternities on campus and how they associate, or don’t, with each other, and how anyone on campus who isn’t a part of Greek life is called a GDI (God Damn Independent; this was the first time I hear this acronym, but not the last). The careful social hierarchy the Greeks have constructed plays out online in a big way, Emma says.

  But not necessarily in the way you might think, with a constant stream of wild party photos. Far from it. The era of posting pictures of frat boys doing keg stands and girls chugging beers at parties is over. Emma tells me, “We have social media workshops about what is appropriate for social media because my sorority engages in some pretty questionable behavior that needs to be discussed, that we can’t put online.” Everyone knows that bad behavior happens; you just need to make sure not to take pictures of it to broadcast on Instagram. Emma thinks that her sorority does “more bad things than good things,” which is also why the sorority helps its sisters choose which photos to put up on social media. She shakes her head. “The hell that would come down on you if you were to share or be tagged in any kind of photo that is congruent with our actual behavior and not this ‘[Alpha Alpha’s] sisters are smart,’ and ‘[Alpha Alpha’s] sisters are responsible,’ and blah, blah, blah. You would be sent to standards, and you would be ripped a new one.”

  Emma’s sorority (like many sororities and fraternities, she indicates) has a designated person who monitors all social media activity among the members. This person at Alpha Alpha has pseudonymous accounts on various social media platforms, and if she “likes” any posts or photos a sister puts online, this means they are inappropriate and must be taken down immediately. “Your picture better be off every social media platform” within twenty-four hours, Emma says. Emma’s sorority also monitors the social media accounts of those seeking to join. The sisters take screen shots of behavior that is not up to Alpha Alpha standards. “Any behavior that is not congruent with being an [Alpha Alpha] is questioned,” she says.

  Despite being annoyed by her sorority and overwhelmed by the expectation to be a public, personal example of the kind of girl the sorority wants to advertise to the world, Emma finds herself doing exactly that—projecting a fake version of herself. “It’s just interesting,” she tells me. “I put forth [Alpha Alpha’s] version of myself on social media.” Everybody else is doing it, so she goes along and does it, too. In part, Emma is driven by what she sees everyone else posting. She doesn’t want to appear to be falling behind, having less fun, being less spectacular. Even a beautiful, accomplished young woman from the most prestigious sorority on campus sometimes sees things on social media and starts to feel bad about hers
elf.

  As Emma’s reflections progress, cracks appear in the hardened attitude she’s trying to project. “People share the best version of themselves, and we compare that to the worst version of ourselves,” she comments. “I know I’ve done it.” “Over the summer, everyone was in bathing suits all the time, posting fun pictures,” she went on, “and I said, you know, ‘Wow, I want that.’ Like, I forget what I have. Like, I would like to look like that.”

  Here, Emma hits on something that many students expressed, though none quite so succinctly or vividly: that on social media people are seeing only the “best versions” of their friends and acquaintances, which have been edited and curated down to the last glorious detail. Yet, behind the screen, they are still themselves, with all their imperfections, insecurities, and perceived failures. To hear Emma say this is startling and telling because she seems to be the epitome of what others would envy and wish to be. But in the end, Emma is just like everyone else. Social media can bring down even the most popular and successful students on campus.

  Remaining rational while viewing one’s Facebook feed and other people’s Instagram photos is no easy feat, according to Emma. She knows on an intellectual level that people are posting only happy things and pretty pictures and not sharing anything difficult in their lives. She knows that not everyone is as perfect and as happy as they seem on their social media accounts. But being exposed nearly constantly to everyone else’s veneer of happiness can get to a person after a while. Emma may know that what she’s seeing isn’t reality, but it’s one thing to know this and another to scroll through an endless stream of beautiful, smiling faces while sitting alone in your room.