The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  If students have not already imbibed the lesson that a happy appearance is the right appearance on social media, they will certainly learn it once they get to campus, whether from peers, professors, or the career center. The notion that one must carefully craft, cultivate, and curate (what I’ve come to think of as the three Cs of social media) public profiles at all times permeates the lives of students. It’s a given. This doesn’t mean that people don’t rebel against this expectation and find clever ways around it, but a young woman’s or young man’s ability—or inability—to live up to this pressure and constant expectation infects every dimension of his or her online experience. It influences a person’s vulnerability to bullying, people’s biases about gender and race, whether students express their religiosity and politics, whether they choose to quit social media for a time or permanently, students’ relationships with their smartphones, and their sense of place (or lack of one) in their larger social worlds. It influences what students post and how they post it, whether they post at all, their sense of their future, how they feel about the “real them” and how they find authenticity (or don’t) in their relationships with others, the ways in which they compare themselves to their peers, and whether or not they feel accepted or isolated socially.

  The pressure to appear happy can also warp how students see themselves—as successes or failures—and whether they have an enjoyable or discouraging college experience, or even one that they feel is inferior to what they see online in the experiences of others. Further, the energy required to maintain such appearances on social media can be exhausting. It forces many students to hide who they really believe they are and teaches them that anything that doesn’t present “a happy face” is best kept out of view. It also teaches them that provocative opinions do not belong in the public sphere—provocative opinions get you rejected by friends and acquaintances, and perhaps even by the employer of your dreams. Students have learned that signs of sadness or vulnerability are often greeted with silence, rejection, or, worst of all, bullying. The importance of appearing happy on social media—the duty to appear happy—even if you are severely depressed and lonely is so paramount that nearly everyone I spoke to mentioned it at some point.

  And some students spoke of virtually nothing else.

  1

  IS EVERYBODY HANGING OUT WITHOUT ME?

  COMPARING OURSELVES TO OTHERS AND THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING “LIKED”

  [Social media] gives this false image that you’re living a perfect life, that your life is just like a fairy tale. Like, everything is good at all times because you don’t want people to see you at your low times. You want them to see only the good times so that they go, “Wow, I want to live like him.”

  Michael, sophomore, public university

  I mean, it’s not necessarily like, “My Instagram is better than your Instagram,” but they want to one-up people to show, like, “I’m in a better place than you are and I want to prove that to you and show you that I’m extremely happy,” kind of thing. Like, “I’m doing better. I’m in a better place, and I’m much happier than you are.”

  Laura, junior, private-secular university

  MARGARET: FACEBOOK CAN REALLY GET YOU DOWN

  Margaret has soft, dark curls, glasses, and, from the moment she walks into the room, a nervous demeanor. One of the first things I learn about Margaret is that, though she is only a junior, she is already engaged. She proudly shows me her ring. Both Margaret and her fiancé are on the ballroom dance team at their Midwestern Christian college. Margaret is involved in theater and choir too, and she volunteers at a nursing home—she wants to be a social worker. Ballroom is really the center of Margaret’s life, though, and most of her girlfriends are involved in some way with it, or at least are highly supportive of her participation on the team.

  On one level, Margaret seems very self-possessed. She’s excited to get married, loves her activities, and is already sure about her choice of careers. But Margaret’s mannerisms—she sighs and sighs often, great long exhales, her voice shakes, she hems and she haws and backtracks and then stumbles forward again as she talks—reveal a young woman who is unbelievably insecure and stressed out by much of what life throws her way.

  Especially when it has to do with social media.

  I don’t even have to ask Margaret any questions about social media. She launches into the topic on her own, in particular how she’s really been trying to stay off Facebook lately. It’s been “a struggle” for her. “I’m not as involved on Facebook because I compare myself a lot to other people, and Facebook is a really easy way to do that,” she says. “You can just click on other people’s posts, see everything that everyone’s doing, and when I see that on Facebook, I think, ‘Oh, they’re doing all that, they’re just so happy,’ because no one puts anything bad on Facebook. They only put the greatest things going on in their life, so their life is only a part of their life that they’re showing that’s good, but everyone still has the bad.” Even though Margaret knows on an intellectual level that people who show only happiness are posting selectively about their lives, she still has trouble preventing it from upsetting her. “I forget about all the great things that are happening in my life, that I need to notice,” she says. “It’s just really been an easy trap for me to get into, just comparing myself, and Facebook does not help.”

  The more Margaret and I talk about social media, the more pronounced her mannerisms become. In addition to sighing and speaking in a shaking voice, Margaret pauses occasionally to cover her eyes with her hands or to lay her head down on the table. She tells me several times that she’s trying hard to stay off Facebook, that she only posts a status maybe once every three months—usually it has to do with ballroom dance, or a major event, such as when her cousin got engaged—though she still accepts any and all friend requests. If she does go on Facebook, she gets on and off quickly, but these brief visits upset her. Margaret gets distracted, she says, she stops “living in the moment,” and her “mind is everywhere.” There was a time when Margaret was on Facebook constantly, but she soon found out that it “wasn’t good for [her].” “It wasn’t helping my self-esteem, so I just decided to stop,” she says. “[Because of Facebook,] I still didn’t recognize what I had going on in my life that was important.”

  Margaret has a slow, antiquated smartphone, and although she resents this, in many ways it has been a blessing. She can really only go on Facebook if she’s at her laptop, and that has helped her to stay away. Margaret loathes what happens to her when she’s on Facebook. “If I spend a large amount of time on Facebook, there are things that I want to happen on that Facebook page,” Margaret explains. “I want people to be IMing me, and sometimes I do not take the time to start IMing them first but I just want them to see, ‘Oh, I’m on Facebook. Please, like me.’ Like, ‘Start that conversation.’ Or, ‘Make sure you “like” my pictures or “like” my post.’ And then if you don’t ‘like’ it enough, then I grade myself that I’m not as good and that’s stupid,” Margaret adds with a long, frustrated sigh. Margaret would like it if people communicated more by email, but students at her college tend to use Facebook instead, and they are constantly checking it. “I don’t want to be a slave to Facebook,” she tells me. “I think it’s just not worth it.”

  Margaret realizes that social media isn’t going away, though. She keeps trying different platforms and then getting disillusioned soon after setting up a profile. Margaret thinks they all “suck in time.” Social media is for people who can multitask, and Margaret is not one of them. She mentions repeatedly the hours and hours that a person can waste on social media—she marvels at this, is maddened by it, and wishes she had the willpower to tear herself away.

  When Margaret was on Facebook all the time, she became obsessed with “likes.” “I would just basically compare the number of ‘likes’ that other people got to the number of ‘likes’ I got, and then I wouldn’t be happy with those and then, once again, I would grade myself based on that,�
� she says. Not getting enough “likes” made Margaret feel she wasn’t popular enough, or even that she wasn’t friends with the right people.

  That Margaret talks of “grading” herself based on numbers of “likes”—that she actually uses the word “grade”—is striking, and telling, too. As with “likes,” grades are quantifiable, and designed to tell a person if they are doing well or perhaps, failing. In The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media, José Van Dijck names what she calls the “popularity principle,” the idea that, on social media, quantity equals value. For example, the quantity of Facebook “friends” one has can affect one’s sense of personal social value. The same goes for the way people like Margaret respond to that “like” button. “Online quantification indiscriminately accumulates acclamation and applause, and, by implication, deprecation and disapproval,” Van Dijck writes. “Popularity… . thus not only becomes quantifiable but also manipulable: boosting popularity rankings is an important mechanism built into these buttons.”1 For someone like Margaret, sitting there and watching the number of “likes” go up on her post—or not go up at all—is akin to watching her popularity rise or fade away. So potent is the experience of getting and not getting “likes,” that Margaret givies herself a “grade” in relation to them. Through “likes,” Margaret has learned to quantify her self-worth—or lack of it—and too often Margaret has found herself getting failing grades in the category of popularity.

  Because of what she saw on Facebook, Margaret used to spend all of her time thinking she should be “somewhere else,” and that prevented her from being happy with where she actually was. “Self-esteem for me has always been a battle,” Margaret explains, sounding more and more fatigued. “You can do a lot of damage on Facebook. Like, I was never bullied on Facebook or anything but, to be honest, I’ve always sort of bullied myself. I put myself down on a lot of things and judge myself really critically.”

  As with Margaret giving herself “grades,” this comment—that she “bullies herself”—is both stunning and telling. The more sensitive a person, the more emotionally vulnerable, the worse he or she fares on social media. The students I interviewed who suffer from insecurity, who have anxiety about their social standing, who fret about how they are seen by others, are the ones who are drowning on social media. These are the young men and women for whom social media is a highly destructive force, and they stand out from the many other students I met who feel ambivalent about social media and the rare few who really thrive on it. Margaret is the kind of young woman who should make us concerned—her real-life vulnerability is magnified by social media.

  Margaret actually spoke of worrying about other, younger kids who go on Facebook and “don’t feel accepted,” believing they could become “suicidal, just based on what they’re seeing.” I ask Margaret if she ever felt this way when she was younger, which provokes one of her deepest sighs yet. “Ahhhhhhhh. Possibly,” she says. “I definitely have had times when I was in high school that I was very depressed.” Margaret knows that personal suffering is not to be shared or discussed on social media, however, so she kept this to herself.

  “I think that not doing as much social media has helped me, for sure,” she says toward the end of our interview. “Yeah, and the problem is, this world is moving forward, and I don’t really care to go,” she adds with a sad laugh.

  MICHAEL: EVERYTHING YOU SEE IS FAKE

  At a public university in the Southeast, I meet Michael, a classic frat boy in looks and mannerisms who hates social media. He was a heavy user for years but felt so lonely and bad about himself all the time that he forced himself to quit. Michael’s Facebook page still exists, but he hasn’t been on it in ages—his last post was four years ago, he tells me. Now, his only contact is really through his fraternity’s Facebook page (which monitors the brothers online much like Emma’s sorority), and life is better as a result. Before I learn all of this, Michael tells me his mantra for himself, which turns out to reveal a lot about who he has become since he stopped comparing himself to others online.

  “Just be you,” he says. “Just don’t be ashamed. Who cares what other people think? Don’t try to be something that you’re not to try to impress someone else, or for whatever reason that you may do it. Just be you.”

  For Michael, social media is all about performance—a performance of your “self” in an effort to impress other people. Michael is cynical about social media and doubts that there are many people who are really on it for themselves. “I feel like social media is very not authentic,” he says. “It’s kind of an ego thing, I think. It’s all about the ‘likes.’ It’s all about, ‘What can I do to show everybody else how great my life is?’ I just don’t feel the need to put my information out there.”

  At least not anymore. But high school was another story.

  “I would post daily statuses about just anything. You know, ‘I’m doing this right now’ or, ‘I’m eating breakfast right now.’ It just got old to me”—Michael pauses here for a long moment—“and it was redundant and I felt like it wasn’t a necessary thing for me to be doing, so I stopped.”

  A rather unlikely source prompted Michael’s first step back from social media—his grandmother. When she got a profile and friended him, she went onto his page and was appalled by how much he posted, the kinds of updates he made, and the fact that he used so much profanity. This was not the grandson she knew, and she told him so. Michael realized she was right, and once he began thinking this way, he felt “there was no point” to posting anymore. It has been a huge relief. He no longer has to worry about posting, getting “likes,” regretting something he put up after the fact, or maintaining an online image. But the biggest relief is not getting pulled into the game of everybody comparing themselves to everybody else.

  “[Social media] is becoming more and more how can we show other people how happy we are instead of just, you know, spending the time with the other person,” Michael says. “The best example I can think of is last year, for one of my friend’s birthdays, we went to [a baseball] game and it was a big group. It was eight girls and eight guys. We got down there and we made this whole big thing. It was an hour long where we had to take pictures together so that we could post them. We had to take them by the water. We probably took two hundred pictures. It was ridiculous. And, you know, of course we go to the game. We come back and they post all the pictures, and from the pictures it looks like everybody’s smiling and everybody’s having a great time, but while we were taking those pictures, nobody was having a good time.” Michael laughs here and shakes his head disbelievingly. He goes on to talk about how the girls were all worried about their hair, and everyone was worried about which photos had the best lighting and whether their smiles were good: “It’s a stressful thing because they want to get the best picture so that they can post and show everybody. I think that’s what [social media] is turning into.”

  And Michael is glad he’s exempt.

  “It’s comparing yourself to other people, I think,” Michael tells me, trying to explain what’s behind the need to take two hundred photographs and then worry about choosing only the best ones to post. “If one person posts a selfie and gets ten ‘likes’ and you post a selfie and get eleven ‘likes,’ you may feel better than that person. You may feel like you’re superior to that person. It’s all about our mindset. It’s all about where you place your values. Where do you get your confidence from? What do you think matters?”

  Social media sells Michael’s generation on the notion that what matters most of all is what everybody else is doing—and managing to fit yourself into that mold of what other people idealize as opposed to who you really are. People’s confidence comes from this misguided place, Michael thinks. People see themselves as superior when they get more “likes.” The worst part, Michael believes, is that what you see and what people post on social media is all fake. It’s a carefully cultivated facade.

  “[Social media] gives this false image t
hat you’re living a perfect life,” he explains. “That your life is just like a fairy tale. Like, everything is good at all times because you don’t want people to see you at your low times. You want them to see only the good times so that they go, ‘Wow, I want to live like him.’ ”

  Michael doesn’t think that his generation is more self-centered or self-obsessed than any other—it’s just that his generation happens to have the tools “to show everybody” how self-centered and self-obsessed they are. “Everybody wants to be noticed,” he says. “Everybody likes feeling approval. They all like it when other people like them.” Social media just gives people a way to amplify this—a really big, public way. Michael mourns this reality. It saddens him that he doesn’t know what it’s like to live without social media, since it’s been around as long as he can remember. He believes it “affects people’s happiness for the worse.” When people get that coveted public affirmation they are so desperately seeking—when a post is “successful”—“that might make you feel good in the moment,” he says. “But then you scroll down your Facebook feed and you see someone else who posted their pictures, like, one of the two hundred pictures they took that day, and it looks like they’re having a great time, then you ask yourself, ‘Why am I not? Why can’t I have as much fun as they are?’ Even though they were in the same exact position, they weren’t having a good time while they were taking that picture. It just gives off the impression that they were, that their life is perfect.”