The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  For the entire first part of our conversation, she sits poised on the very edge of her seat, as though ready to make a run for it at any moment. She sighs and huffs as I go through each of the questions. Then, things finally turn to the subject at hand, social media, specifically Facebook, and Cherese’s demeanor changes. She edges back into the chair a bit and looks directly into my eyes.

  Cherese suddenly has things to say. A lot of things. Things she seems ready to get off her chest, that maybe she’s wanted to say for a while but has only now found the right forum (or the anonymity). She launches quickly into a litany of complaints about how you really have to watch what you post online because of what certain people will think, and how she spends a lot of her time worrying about who she can allow to see which posts and who shouldn’t see any. Cherese restricts certain posts to certain groups. This prompts me to press her about what criteria she uses in deciding what to show to whom, which is when she tells me something that makes my jaw drop.

  “I have seventeen different [Facebook] groups,” she says.

  “Seventeen?” I repeat, stunned.

  “So I have a church group,” she begins. “And then I have the greater Chicagoland area, and then I have people from churches that we go around to, some that are in the DC and West Virginia area, but then I have a different group if they don’t believe that Baptist people should be doing this, or because they just don’t believe that’s [within] the doctrine of faith… . I have three different [college] friend groups. So, if I was just writing something to the general [college] population, then it just might be something about a class or something about a major, or I use it for advertising something from the office or something else that’s happening on campus. But I have my multicultural [college] friends list, then I’ll post something … . like, ‘Student activists taking control at another college or university’ or something that they will feel empowered from looking at.” Cherese goes on to tell me that she blocks her mother from most groups (though they’re friends on Facebook), and she lets her father see just about everything she posts because he’s “more accepting.”

  “Is it difficult to juggle seventeen groups?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Cherese agrees. “It just becomes like, ‘Well, if I get ready to post this, then what am I getting ready to say to this person, and what am I going to say to that person, because if I say this to that person, then they may be offended or they may have other questions and because, then you have to change [the post] and see who you’re trying to say something to. I won’t say I’m afraid, but I’m just very conscious about what I get ready to post to certain groups of people… . I’m an activist, so I post something about gay rights and then [someone goes], ‘Oh my, we should talk to you about your sexuality. Have you been questioning your sexuality?’ So then, well, I’ll put them in this group on Facebook so they won’t see when I post something else.”

  I ask Cherese if her fear of offending someone is related to her religious background. She tells me that is part of it, but it’s more that she likes to post about “revolutionary things,” by which she means racism, feminism, and sexual orientation—things that provoke strong responses from people, and not always the kinds of responses she’s seeking. When one of her Facebook friends seems unable to handle a certain comment, she relegates that person to one of the many groups that she doesn’t allow to see those sorts of opinions. Actually, very few people get to see those provocative, opinionated posts Cherese cares about so much.

  “Why don’t you just unfriend those people instead?” I ask, thinking that this would simplify everything.

  “Because that’ll cause another problem,” she says. “Well, [and] because then I would have, like, zero people because I would delete everybody.”

  Cherese truly believes that her only option is to engage in this continual, frenzied dance of multitasking, managing seventeen groups, trying to please (or at least not upset) a diverse array of “friends.” She’s gotten herself into this situation by accepting friend requests from people she obviously finds difficult to please (or just plain difficult), but she doesn’t feel able to liberate herself from them. It’s obvious, too, that Cherese wants at least something of an audience. She wants to be able to share her opinions and, ideally, to be heard. She wouldn’t like having “zero people” on Facebook, even though she implies that it would be easier on her. By creating these groups, Cherese has found a way both to maintain a wide audience and to be heard only by those she believes will agree with her opinions. Like so many students, she’s conflict-avoidant. Cherese is a young woman who knows she can be provocative, yet she’s figured out how to use social media so that she expresses her provocative views only to those who won’t find them provocative.

  And while just about all college students are hyperaware of the future employers who might (and surely will, at some point) be watching them, some, like Cherese, worry about the image they project on social media in a much broader way. Cherese’s interest in social media is still, well, social. She’s incredibly image-conscious, but the juggling of her many groups seems rooted in this desire for—and acute awareness of—an audience from which she is seeking approval (or, at least, not disapproval). She isn’t worried about “likes” as much as someone like Rob, but she wants reassurance that there are people out there seeing what she posts—the right people.

  Social media is the new stage for performance, and as the actors in a play or musical hope for applause, many college students are learning to “play to” and actively tailor their “performances” to the crowd. They learn to manipulate the audience. And Cherese has become a good manipulator, though this doesn’t exactly make her happy.

  Cherese and I spent a good deal of time talking about happiness, too—how it often seems to elude her, how she doesn’t really know what happiness is, how she thinks she’d probably be a lot happier if she stopped worrying about what other people think and how other people define happiness. Cherese’s housemates are always telling her that she doesn’t have any fun because she never goes out like they do, but going out like they do isn’t her idea of fun. “I get excited if I win stuff, if I can win a prize or something,” she told me. “I’m a very competitive person, but I also like winning souls… . Basically I’m an evangelist, so if I can bring people into the church, that’s exciting, or something else exciting is to do something for a social cause, anything dealing with an ‘ism,’ like, to bring down stereotypes.”

  This is one of the reasons Cherese needs so many Facebook groups. What makes Cherese happy isn’t necessarily what makes her peers happy. In fact, the things she associates with happiness are often things that upset other people. She finds satisfaction in fighting racism, for example, but some people don’t want a continuous string of serious and sometimes seriously depressing news on their newsfeeds. By sorting friends into separate groups, she’s both protecting those people from seeing posts that might upset them and protecting herself from constantly having to reckon with how her definition of happiness is vastly different from theirs—a fact that both pains and annoys her. Cherese has learned that the best course of action is to display the right kinds of happiness to those groups that will appreciate that particular version of it.

  Cherese has also learned that if she posts anything that is the least bit negative, everybody freaks out. She now knows how to turn a negative into a positive so she can ease everybody’s mind and play into the reality that social media is about everybody feeling good, all of the time. Posting on social media, she says, is about “feeding” other people’s “stereotypical sense of happiness.”

  “I don’t just post like ‘Hip, hip, hooray!’ [or] ‘I got a 100 on a test,’ ” she explains. “Basically, you pick one good thing that happened so that you’re not just posting bad and depressing things. So I turn the negative into a positive. Like, yesterday wasn’t such a good day at all, but my peer mentor helped. So [my post] goes, ‘Thank goodness for peer mentors,’ and then everyone took it as somethin
g very positive and happy.”

  “You just leave the ‘not a good day’ part out?” I ask.

  “Yeah, just ‘Thank goodness for peer mentors’ was the exact wording,” Cherese confirms. “So it was just, have the happy moment so that people flourish and think, ‘Oh yes, she’s happy now. Okay, so we won’t have to say anything else.’ … . If you post something bad or if you say, ‘Oh, my day wasn’t so bad’ or ‘My day was just, really bad today,’ then everybody gets to calling and becomes concerned … . and then it just kind of cause[s]‌ a really bad backlash … . So it’s like, ‘Well, I’ll just post: “Today was an excellent day,” ’ and then nobody will come to say anything.”

  I ask what seems like an obvious follow-up question: Why keep posting if you can’t really be honest? Cherese laughs at my naiveté. If she doesn’t keep posting things, she explains, then people also become concerned. Posting, in general, is like “a public appearance,” she says. You have to pop up every once in a while to prove you are okay. Cherese refers to it as “people-pleasing.” Constant people-pleasing can be tiring, she says. “If you’re just going to say one happy thing, it does become exhausting, overwhelming, because you’re always thinking, ‘Is somebody looking at this?’ and it’s like, if somebody’s looking at it, who’s looking at it? So then it’s like, ‘And how will it be interpreted?’ ”

  Cherese isn’t exactly sure why people need to see that you’re happy all the time. “I think that they just want to see you conform,” she says. “I think people believe that if you’re happy, then everything is good, so you don’t have to do anything. So the more they could see you happy, then—I don’t think it’ll make them happy, but it just seems like, ‘Oh, she’s like us.’ ”

  Cherese is getting at more than just the need for mere conformity. In her eyes, people want the relief of not having to worry about anybody else, or being required to do something in response to another person’s pain. If everyone plays along and pretends that all is well, then the “audience” gets to feel at ease, even apathetic, about everything they see. The happiness effect, in this case, is one in which viewers get to remain just that—passive viewers, scrolling through the feed and nodding their heads and never really having to engage anyone on a level that is real.

  THE (HAPPY) FACE OF SUCCESS

  Cherese’s management of seventeen Facebook groups is unusual. But the general notion—dividing your life between what’s post-worthy and what isn’t, and maintaining a carefully crafted facade by posting only positive things—is typical. This division has repercussions far beyond social media. It has both emotional and social consequences for young adults, who suffer from the dissonance between what they see others post and what they feel about themselves and the realities of their lives.

  “I think sometimes people think, ‘Oh, I have all these pictures, and friends on Facebook, and they’re all happy and successful,’ ” says Gina, a junior at her Midwestern Christian university. “I feel like sometimes it’s kind of a wall, like, you try to take a picture and be like ‘Oh, look how happy I am! Look how great my life is!’ But in reality you might not feel like you’re that successful.”

  I press Gina to say more about what she means by “successful.”

  “Like, you could be posting a picture from this ceremony or from graduation or something, which is extremely successful, and a huge, monumental period in your life,” Gina says, referring to that all-important “highlight reel.” “But then, you could just be, I don’t know, putting on a happy face for a picture to show other people that you’re happy.”

  On a basic level, this propensity to post only happy, positive photos and comments seems completely reasonable. Who wants to put up tearful, unflattering, unsmiling images of themselves for the world to see?

  But the conflict or, perhaps more accurately, the burden students feel with regard to both kinds of posts is palpable. It requires maintenance on their part: because social media is a constant in their lives, the expectation to post those highlights and smiles is also constant. To post something less than happy or to stop posting altogether might set off alarms among the people who know and love you, as Cherese worries. Worse, if it doesn’t set off alarms, it might confirm your fears that you are invisible to everyone else and that nobody really cares about you. Then, there is the fact of having to see everyone else’s happiness and highlights all the time. Being constantly bombarded by smiles and successes when you’re feeling low—seeing, as Emma described it, the best version of others versus the worst version of yourself—can be difficult to endure. The way students talked and talked and talked about making sure to “put on that happy face” for everybody sometimes evoked for me those maniacally smiling emoticons that give off a kind of frenzied joy—happiness with an edge, if you will. That is the self-image students are learning to project.1

  Lucy is a junior at her Catholic university, and she’s very focused on academics. She has a round face, glasses, and long brown hair, and she is quick to smile. She’s also very devout.

  “I choose to post happier things,” Lucy informs me as we are talking about who she is online, and how she portrays herself on her social media accounts. “I got a good GPA this semester, or I’ll post pictures with my family. Things that are going well in my life.”

  “I want people to know that I’m happy and doing well,” Lucy says, emphasizing the importance of demonstrating her happiness for others. She does this many times during our interview. “I want people to respond in a good way and be excited for me. I want more encouragement or… . I don’t really know how to describe it. I guess, it’s just that positive affirmation that you get from posting something that I enjoy.”

  Lucy likes to post the exciting things that happen in her life because it pleases her to be congratulated by others. She posts so people can know what’s going on with her, but she also thinks “it has something to do with being successful.” Lucy has learned that happy updates get her that positive affirmation she so desires, whereas the not-so-happy ones often result in a deafening silence—something to be avoided at all costs. Lucy is different from Cherese in this regard. Cherese agonized about not wanting to make other people worry. Keeping her posts positive made it so none of her “audience” would feel a need to do anything—at least not anything really taxing—to help her. All they needed to do was click the “like” button. But Lucy doesn’t post anything negative because she’s afraid that even when others see that she’s having a difficult time, they won’t care enough to say anything, and she doesn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable either.

  “I don’t think I would post something that is not going well, or I’m struggling with,” Lucy explains with a long sigh. “You kind of put on a happy facade, kind of just share things that are good important in life, not bad important… . So I think I’m pretty happy online. Maybe it’s not representative exactly of who I am in life because I do struggle with things and I’m not happy all the time.” But Lucy knows from experience that such thoughts are not appropriate for Facebook. Seeing depressing comments from others on social media makes Lucy uncomfortable. “You don’t really know how to respond to it,” she says. “It’s okay to say that you got a good GPA because it’s something that’s not going to, you know, reflect bad on your character.”

  Character is something Lucy considers often when it comes to who she is online, and what she and others post about themselves—not character in the moral sense, as Aamir thinks about it, but more like character in the fictional sense. In fact, Lucy thinks about “creating that character” nearly constantly. “Not that [this character] is completely different from who I am in life,” Lucy tells me. But she tries to post only about happy things or things that are exciting, she adds, in order to create that “character.” Lucy’s concern with her “online character” reminds me of that very particular “sorority image” that Emma’s sisters required of her, and how Emma’s sorority house went so far as to monitor its members to make sure they were putting for
th the image the sorority wanted to show to the public.

  I press Lucy to say more about what she means by “creating a character” on social media. “I think I am true to who I am on Facebook, but I just leave stuff out,” she explains. “I wouldn’t post insignificant things, or things that are, you know, not happy. I don’t think I’m being wholly truthful with what I post. I mean, what I post is true… . I don’t think I edit those posts that are true to me, so those things that are online are true to me, I just leave certain things out that might make it more true to my identity and who I am.” Lucy stumbles over her words as she tries to explain how her decision to post only happy things still somehow represents who she is, yet at the same time is not really a true representation of who she is because she’s not always happy—even though it appears that way if you visit her social media profiles.

  It’s hard for Lucy to know what to make of the differing versions of herself. On the one hand, Lucy should be thinking about her character and what might reflect badly, or positively, upon it. This is a mature attitude to have about one’s online activity. Lucy thinks that focusing on one’s online image and creating a certain character on social media can be a healthy thing. It gives her the means to explore different ways that people might perceive her and different ways that she perceives herself. But this can be negative, as well, she says, “because you can spend all your time focusing on how your character is perceived by other people and [wonder constantly] if you are doing the right thing.” Sometimes college students like Lucy become so concerned about not posting anything that could reflect badly on their character that they develop a crippling fear of failure and a concern about “appearing happy” so extreme that it can eventually sound almost pathological.