The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  “I think I’m a very confident person, and I recognize that the pictures I’m seeing on social media are not anyone’s struggles or anything like that,” Emma says. “I know not to compare myself, you know, when I’m having a bad day, to these images that I see because that’s not them having a bad day. So I think that it can very much affect self-esteem if you let it, and if you are under the illusion that, you know, this person is perfect and this is how they are all the time, nothing goes wrong in their life, blah blah blah.” Emma offers the example of a girl she knows who is on antidepressants but who posts pictures “throwing her hands up and jumping in the air, so happy.” Emma realizes “there is a lack of congruency between who we are as people and the image that we put out there.” People shouldn’t put a lot of stock in what others share on social media, she says, because “it’s very shallow,” but sometimes you just can’t help it. “I feel like, [on social media], it’s the best version of people,” Emma comments for the second time. “It’s just sort of a slap in the face. It allows a platform to brag, and if you are experiencing, you know, [lonely] feelings, it makes it a little harder, a little more obvious that you’re alone or lonely, or whatever the case may be.”

  Emma feels immense pressure to live up to the image of perfection that she sees on social media—not to mention living up to the expectations of her high-achieving, image-conscious sorority sisters. But there is also the pressure to be perfect for an entirely different audience: future employers. “We have all these talks [on campus] about employers checking social media regularly,” Emma says. “There’s a lot of opinions that are formed based on people’s social media platforms, rightly or wrongly, so just the gravity that it has on society today is a little unnerving. People cannot get jobs, or not get interviews because of what they put on social media.” Students have this drilled into them, and it makes them incredibly anxious about what they post. Here, too, is pressure to be some perfect version of yourself.

  The only time people are really honest about anything on social media, in Emma’s opinion, is when they are anonymous. Protecting one’s identity is paramount. You need to go to sites like Yik Yak—a popular app at colleges, a sort of anonymous Twitter feed tied to a person’s geographical location—to see anything “real” about what’s happening on campus. “I would like to pretend that I’m a good enough person not to get on Yik Yak and see what is being put out there,” Emma tells me. Yet she’s not—she’s on her university’s Yik Yak, just like just everyone else. “But it’s Animal House… . If I were looking at this university as a senior in high school again, and I had access to the profiles of people in Greek organizations at [my school], and Yik Yak was a thing, I would not be here.”

  Unlike Facebook and Instagram, where what you see is a carefully crafted showcase of a person’s best, happiest, prettiest moments, what you see on sites like Yik Yak is reality, according to Emma. Nobody is honest on platforms that require real names to be attached to their posts, but give a student body anonymity, and people go to town—often in the ugliest of ways. “I feel like unfortunately [what’s on Yik Yak] is a pretty accurate representation of what happens at [my school],” Emma explains. “It is calling people out for everything. People use specific names, like ‘Sarah is a whore. She hooked up with this person, this person, this person, this person, this person, this person.’ And, ‘So and so does cocaine.’ And, ‘[Delta Betas] are,’ and any kind of degrading comment you can think of.”

  The people who get attacked, maligned, and degraded on anonymous campus feeds are usually women, in part, Emma believes, because men are more drawn to Yik Yak. “Girls don’t really post on Yik Yak,” she says. “I’d like to think it’s because we know how it feels to be spoken of poorly, in such a public arena, and so we wouldn’t want to put anyone else through that.” But maybe it’s the women Emma knows in her sorority who aren’t posting, since her sorority’s sisters aren’t allowed to post on it—ever. “The week that [Yik Yak] got popular, we were called into [Alpha Alpha]. ‘[Alpha Alpha] does not comment. [Alpha Alphas] do no post on Yik Yak,’ ” Emma mimics. Underlying this edict is the belief that the anonymity promised by the app is an illusion, and Emma’s sorority is not willing to take any chances when it comes to its very esteemed, yet very precarious, reputation. “It’s very much the whole Snapchat thing; it doesn’t disappear, there’s a record of it. Yes, after twenty-four hours, [Yaks are] no longer at the bottom of the page, but the IP address that’s associated with your phone is associated with everything that you do through the app, and that’s dangerous. [Alpha Alpha] is concerned about what we put out there. We have been on social probation in the past for doing things, like getting caught doing cocaine in the house, so we’re very careful about what we’re putting out there, regardless of the alleged anonymity that Yik Yak provides.” The fact that inappropriate posts are seen as the equivalent of using cocaine tells you how concerned people are about social media.

  Despite Emma’s frustrations about what she sees as the inauthenticity of social media, the drama it causes, and the ways in which it makes her feel bad about herself, she doesn’t really think about quitting any of her accounts—though I eventually learn that she has tried to do so. Sort of. She once gave up social media for Lent but has no plans of doing something like that again. For Emma, there’s “entertainment value” in social media, and she doesn’t want to miss out on it. She deserves the entertainment, really, given all the stress social media causes her. The same goes for Emma’s relationship to her smartphone. She simply can’t be without it.

  “If I don’t have my phone, I feel empty,” she says. “You know, if it’s not in my hands, I feel like I’m forgetting something, I’m missing something. Even though when I’m with people, I make a conscious effort not to be on my phone at dinner, at lunch, in social situations… . I will leave it in my bag at dinner. I won’t take it out at dinner with my boyfriend or with friends or anything like that. Even if we’re eating dinner at home, it’s not on the table in front of me. But I’ve never, I don’t leave it at home, because if something happens, I need to have it.” Indeed, Emma considers it dangerous to be without it. At this point she reflects on how there has been a number of sexual assaults reported on campus recently, and because of this she “would hate to be without her phone.” Today, especially if you are a young woman, a smartphone “is very much a necessity.”

  Although Emma is an extraordinary young woman, when it comes to her struggles with social media, she is absolutely ordinary. She is concerned about getting “likes.” She gets caught up in the comparison trap, constantly seeing the “best versions” of people on social media, which makes her feel bad about herself. She believes that keeping up online and being always available on her smartphone is almost a job (though one that comes with definite entertainment value). But Emma is typical with regard to the pressures she feels to maintain a positive, nearly perfect appearance on her social media accounts, and she is extremely careful about what she posts as a result.

  I ask Emma if there’s anything else she wants to mention before we end our interview. “I think the weight of [social media] is a little concerning,” she says. “But we do it to ourselves.”

  THE HAPPINESS EFFECT

  During the course of the last decade, I’ve traveled to well over a hundred colleges and universities to discuss my research about college students, sex, and faith. In doing so, I’ve had the opportunity to listen to students all over the United States describe their concerns and struggles with life on campus. We’ve talked over dinner and in small groups for coffee and in classes. Inevitably, these discussions widened to involve questions about meaning and purpose in general, about identity, and about what it’s like to be a young adult in the first generation that has grown up with social media.

  It doesn’t seem to matter whether I am visiting a Catholic university in the Midwest or a private-secular college in the South; social media is on everybody’s minds of late. Students can’t stop talk
ing about it. Questions about the various stresses it provokes in today’s college experience are nearly constant. Students discuss the notion of the “real me” versus the “online me” and the dissonance they feel between these, the pressure to document publicly a certain kind of college experience, their fears about making themselves vulnerable on social media, and their worries about how to maintain real, meaningful relationships when a seemingly artificial online world dominates their social lives. Students want to know what their peers think about social media and whether they experience the same struggles. They want, in other words, information about how their generation is handling one of the most significant and dramatic cultural shifts of our time. Most of all, they want to know that they are not alone in feeling the way they do.

  That students are aware they are splitting themselves in two—that they somehow have to do this to operate effectively and safely online—has been particularly fascinating and worrisome to me. It’s not as though students don’t talk about the joys of social media—they do. They love the ease of the connections it offers among far-off family and friends, and many of them love the ways that social media affords a certain creativity and opportunity for self-expression. But they are also exhausted by it. There are many things with which they struggle, things that unnerve them, that make life difficult and even painful, and they don’t know where to turn to talk about them with any honesty. Many young adults experience some kind of alienation because of social media, but they are further alienated because they don’t see a thriving public discussion about the struggles they are experiencing—perhaps because those struggles aren’t as racy or extreme as the ones that are the stuff of newspaper and magazine headlines.3

  Media coverage of social media often focuses only on the belief that this generation is the most narcissistic generation ever, or on the scariest examples of what happens to young people online—predatory behavior, risqué pictures that get circulated, and cyberbullying and related suicides.4 Clearly, these are important issues. But while young adults and college students buckling under the pressure to project a false self online may not be as sexy (literally) as teens sexting nude photos to each other, it’s a pervasive struggle, and we need to talk about it with them.5

  So, beginning in the spring semester of 2014 and continuing on through the spring semester of 2015, I visited thirteen colleges and universities to conduct private, one-on-one interviews with nearly two hundred randomly sampled young men and women. I also conducted an online survey of students who volunteered to share their opinions in a series of essays.6 After both the interviews and the online surveys, I feel confident in saying that the social media world is a far less scary place overall than the press would have us believe, and that the young adults with whom I spoke are as smart and thoughtful as ever. They are doing their best to navigate a dimension of culture so new and different—and so pervasive—that it sets their generation apart. Like most of us, young adults have no choice but to confront social media in their lives.7 It shapes their identities, their relationships, and the ways in which they make meaning—or don’t. It troubles them, but it’s also a sphere in which they are learning to work out the dimensions of their social lives and identities in much the same way that my generation did as we rode our bikes through the neighborhood and hung out on the playground.

  It didn’t take long to find out that one of the most central concerns college students struggle with, however, is the feeling that they are constantly monitored on social media—potentially by anyone and everyone. When they were still in high school, they were wary of their parents, their teachers, and the admissions officers at the colleges they hoped to attend. When they arrive on campus, they believe that future employers will be assessing their every post. Emma had the added pressure of her sorority, which was literally monitoring everything she did online. I heard similar accounts from Greeks at other universities I visited, but everywhere I went students talked about people who were monitoring them: athletic coaches, Student Affairs staff, professors, the Career Center, Campus Ministry. One student who had dreams of holding political office was concerned about future constituents. Students even worried about other students who liked to keep an eye out for potentially offending or negative posts by their peers.

  The result is that students create carefully crafted, fantasy versions of themselves online. But on platforms that allow for anonymous posts, things get really dark.

  In the best of circumstances, apps that come with the promise of anonymity and impermanence—like Yik Yak, Snapchat, and the anonymous Twitter feeds and Facebook groups students create for venting, confessing, and other types of honesty not found elsewhere—serve as cathartic forums in which highly pressured and highly monitored young adults can finally be themselves. Sometimes they are playful and silly. Yet the kind of commentary that often bubbles up can be incredibly vicious, revealing a nasty underbelly to the student body that shocks even the students themselves. Simply put, anonymous forums tend to degenerate into cesspools of obnoxious, cruel, and sexist comments, in which students treat each other (and their professors) in the worst possible ways, and entire campuses find out exactly how vile and racist certain members of the student body can be.8

  A “work hard, play hard” mentality often prevails on campus. Extremely stressed, high-achieving, incredibly busy college students work extraordinarily hard at their studies, sports, and activities during the week but then party like crazy and drink as heavily as they can on the weekend, believing they “deserve” to engage in such behavior because they are so overburdened the rest of the time. This mentality seems to transfer online. Students feel they must maintain a perfect, happy veneer on Facebook and other profiles attached to their names. They must be that high-achieving, do-no-wrong, unstoppable, successful young woman or man with whom everyone would be proud to associate, to have as a son or daughter, to boast about as a resident assistant or a member of a team, and, eventually, to hire. Many students have begun to see what they post (on Facebook, especially) as a chore—a homework assignment to build a happy facade—and even to resent such work. Then they “play hard” on sites like Yik Yak where they have learned to unleash, to let go, and often go a bit crazy—even if people get hurt in the process. They deserve to let loose, after all, since it’s tiring to be so perfect all of the time.

  The colleges and universities I visited were incredibly diverse—geographically, ethnically, socioeconomically, and in terms of their religious affiliation or lack of one and their level of prestige. Yet across them all, one unifying and central theme emerged as the most pressing social media issue students face:

  The importance of appearing happy.

  And not just happy but, as a number of students informed me, blissful, enraptured, even inspiring. I heard this at one of the most elite private institutions in the United States and at a school that doesn’t even appear high enough on the rankings for people to care where it ranks. The imperative transcends every demographic category.

  The pressure to appear happy seems universal. In fact, it came up so often in the interviews that I asked about it directly in the online survey. Students responded to the following statement by indicating “yes” or “no” (or “not applicable”):

  I try always to appear positive/happy with anything attached to my real name.

  Of the students who chose to answer this question, 73 percent said yes. Only 20 percent said no.9

  What makes these data especially important is how ubiquitous social media has become.10 Out of the 884 students who participated in the online survey, only 30—a mere 3 percent—said they did not have any social media accounts. For the vast majority who do, students were asked how often they check their various social media accounts per day. The results are shown in Figure I.1.

  It’s clear from these data that students are checking their accounts compulsively throughout the day, with approximately 31 percent of students checking at minimum twenty-five times and potentially up to a hundred.

/>   Given the amount of time young people spend on social media, the pressure to appear happy online can become overwhelming. Adolescents learn early how important it is to everyone around them that they polish their online profiles to promote their accomplishments, popularity, and general well-being. They practice this nearly constantly in their online lives and this has a tremendous effect on them—emotionally, in their relationships, and in their behavior on social media. For better or worse, students are becoming masters of appearing happy, at significant cost. This is what I’ve come to think of as the “happiness effect.” Simply put, because young people feel so pressured to post happy things on social media, most of what everyone sees on social media from their peers are happy things; as a result, they often feel inferior because they aren’t actually happy all the time. The chapters that follow all explore themes that emerge from this larger issue.

  Figure I.1 Daily Levels of Social Media Usage

  The happiness effect not only has implications for the emotional health and well-being of the young adults in our lives but also has repercussions for the way we parent and how institutions of higher education help (or hinder or ignore) how students experience college and interact with the wider world. Anyone who works in higher education as faculty, staff, or administration, who is a parent, or who works as a high school teacher or counselor needs to think broadly and deeply about what we are doing when we teach our children that proper online behavior requires the appearance of happiness—because they are learning it from us, even if we do not practice it ourselves—and boy do they notice when we don’t. We need to reflect, very seriously, on the message we are sending. It may seem like a logical and responsible thing to teach our young people—post only happy, flattering, achievement-oriented things—but when the young people receiving this message are on social media nearly constantly, what seems like a simple rule can have extraordinary consequences.