The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  One of the most interesting selfie converts I met is a young man named Adam, who tells me his conversion story. He is excited to talk about social media because he recently starting dating his first girlfriend, and he is in love with her. He smiles the whole time he talks about her. Adam loves to share things about their relationship, especially selfies, and especially on Facebook, because he is proud to have a girlfriend. He wants to shout it from the rooftops. Having a girlfriend marks a new and exciting moment in Adam’s life, and he wants her on his highlight reel. Adam is so sweet and enthusiastic that it warms my heart. Something he says is one of the most moving and positive things about social media that I hear in all my interviews, and it has to do with selfies. First, Adam makes a confession: he used to really hate looking at himself in the mirror—he didn’t like what he saw.

  “For the longest time, I’m like, ‘Man! I don’t look good,’ ” Adam admits. “But pretty much since my girlfriend, I actually look at myself like I’m happy with myself.” This is where the conversation turns to selfies. “I never used to be a fan of selfies, and then once I started dating, I love the selfie,” he says with a laugh. “It is not an official event with us until we have taken a selfie. [My girlfriend] made me so proud of the way I look and now I probably sound like a complete narcissist, but I don’t know. I just enjoy it. I wanted to capture that moment.”

  Adam doesn’t sound like a narcissist, though. His comment echoes that of Elise, who came to see selfies as a way to honor a moment when someone is feeling good about him or herself, creating a memento of it that a person can refer back to, perhaps on a darker-feeling day. And with Adam, his newfound interest and joy in taking selfies reflects and memorializes an important and healthy uptick in his self-esteem.

  I ask Adam what he and his girlfriend do with all the selfies they take. “Upload ’em to Facebook and keep ’em,” he answers with pride. They take all kinds of selfies. “Like, we did a charity event for cancer research. We went to a nice dinner. We saw each other for something, I don’t remember what. Then we went to the beach. Just, like, fancy trips, special dates.” There’s something about selfies, for Adam, that makes everything he does with his girlfriend seem more real. “I used to be opposed to [selfies], but once I actually started doing it, it is kind of nice because it puts a more solid base on a memory. Like, you can think something in your mind, but then it starts getting hazy. A photo, you can pull up and be, like, ‘Oh, I remember this. That was happy, that’s when we went to [a restaurant]. That’s when we went to the beach. That’s when we went to that.’ ”

  I ask Adam whether the selfies he posts get a lot of “likes.” “Yeah,” he says. “A lot for me is, like, ten to fifteen ‘likes.’ It’s my friends, and my family and her family. Her family really likes me.”

  In the online survey, about a fifth of the students had positive feelings about selfies, and the reason coincided with the opinions of Elise and Adam: that selfies can be good for boosting self-esteem and forging an identity (and particularly so for women).2

  “I love the selfie culture,” said one such student, a first-year woman at a private-secular university. “It’s a movement to take your identity into your own hands. A lot of women are able to control the way they portray their own bodies and beauty, and I think that’s wonderful.” Other students commented on how selfies “reflect a positive body image” and “promote self-confidence and body positivity.” Another young woman mentioned the political power of selfies: “Especially for young women and marginalized groups, selfie culture is super powerful.” Yet, she wrote, because selfies are so often associated with young women, they also get unfairly critiqued.

  Another woman who started off her answer with “I love selfie culture!” went on to list how good selfies are for self-acceptance. “It’s important to have a place to express yourself and love yourself in a positive manner,” she wrote. “Some people feel annoyed by selfie culture, but why? It’s so rare to find self-acceptance. The goal is to love myself so much, others wonder why. Happiness is found in self-love. It’s important to celebrate yourself!”

  Yet another pro-selfie answer came from a woman who saw selfies as a way to affirm and “honor ourselves,” even if others don’t think we are attractive. “It is a way for us to display pride in ourselves, even if we are not good looking, because we did the act of taking it,” she wrote. “Before, others would honor us by taking our picture, and they still do. But given technology, we can honor ourselves without the community of another individual desiring to take our picture.”

  Selfies seem to offer these students an important opportunity for self-affirmation, especially among those who feel this sort of affirmation from others is typically lacking in their experience. The act of taking a selfie—deciding for yourself that your image is worth capturing and posting for others to see—is a way for some young adults to take control back from their peers. Rather than letting others decide who and what is photo-worthy, selfies allow a person to decide this for him or herself.

  One young woman even found selfies inspiring, and helped to remind her of her future dreams. “For some people, like myself for example, seeing pictures of people traveling and living the American dream, it pushes me to want to finish school so I will be able to provide that life for my future family,” she wrote. Another reflected on what aspects of the self are fulfilled by selfies: “We like seeing our own face. There’s a little bit of vanity behind it all. Also playfulness. And adventure.”

  Even students who take lots of selfies and love them know there is a limit on posting them, though—if you post too many, people will think negatively of you, so you have to be careful how often you do it. But most people will forgive a selfie now and then, because they’ve probably taken one at some point, too.

  SELFIE CULTURE

  When I asked students what selfies are all about—What do they think started the trend of documenting ourselves this way? Where is that impulse coming from?—many of them weren’t sure what to say. They were sort of miffed about the trend and the origin of the impulse, even though so many of them participate all the time.3 Some people simply cited the ease of taking pictures on smartphones and the invention of the front-facing camera.

  However, one young woman, Amy, gives me a kind of chicken-and-egg response. “I think it’s kind of a snowball effect,” Amy says. “Because I don’t think this used to happen. I mean, I’m younger and this has always been a part of my life, but I tried to picture, you know, what it was like before the Facebook/Instagram thing, and I don’t think everyone was showing how awesome they are in your face all the time, or at least I hope not. But I think, like I said, things kind of snowballed because people see other people sharing their life, and then they feel the need to contribute to that, to make it seem like their lives are really cool, and then they do things to, you know, keep up with the Joneses. I think other people see that, and then they join in, and I think it kind of just spirals out of control and becomes a thing where everyone’s doing it, and everyone’s constantly feeding into it.”

  There are also students who genuinely worry about selfies and the way people are becoming obsessed with posting photos about every little thing they’re doing as a way to “prove” they’re doing it—“pics or it didn’t happen,” as the popular phrase goes. Students worry that selfies are taking priority over living one’s life—that people do things for the photo and not for the experience. And some students, like Max, who attends an evangelical Christian university in the Southwest, think that selfies and this impulse to document play into the worries about future employers and the need to provide them with a highlight reel.

  “I think a lot of people try to prove to themselves and to others on social media that they are someone that they’re not, or that they’re trying to show that they are having a good life,” Max says. “This veil of not being authentic, I think it comes from the very root of why you’re taking these pictures, to put [it] in very literal terms. For me, my personal a
ccount, I enjoy photography so I just enjoy sharing that. I think that when I share pictures, it’s not to make other people jealous. It’s not to make other people, ooh and aah at what I’m posting. It’s not to show that I’m hanging out with certain people when it comes to little things, like who you tag in a picture. I think that has a lot to do with self-worth, in that kind of culture.” Max thinks that selfies can make us feel really insecure because they offer idealized versions of people’s lives.

  Max thinks that the “photo culture” we see online has a lot to do with professional concerns, and even here, in a conversation about selfies, Max adopts the language of business as he tries to explain the phenomenon: “Social media is a powerful tool for promoting the self. If we’re going to go in terms of companies, it’s a promotion tool, it’s a marketing tool, it’s those kinds of things. So there’s that facet of it. In terms of a personal account, whether it be Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram, I think it’s, like, someone’s ideal self sometimes. They put too much weight into the way they view themselves, the whole selfie thing.”

  Selfies are a big part of the happiness effect. They are a product of the need, even the perceived requirement among college students, for self-promotion online. And this in turn takes away from the real joys and happiness of living something without worrying about having to promote it on social media.

  “I personally have a lot of beef with it,” Max says. “I think that you lose the intimacy and the importance of the moment when, the second you pull out your phone to take a picture of it. Even for me, if I think something is awesome, whether it be a hike I just did or a concert I just saw, those kinds of things, I make sure to enjoy it first. The reason that I’m going is because I enjoy those things, and then I take a picture more for the memory of it. You know, I think that I can look back on my Instagram account twenty years from now, if that app still exists, and be fond about these memories, more so than [to see] what I was trying to promote or what I was trying to make others see, or make myself seem like I was happy, or I was fulfilled.” Max sees his photos as a tool for remembering experiences, but he thinks that for other people selfies are replacing experiences. Many other students made similar comments, sharing Max’s worry.

  “I think that at the root of documenting experiences is insecurity. We feel this inherent need to post things that will validate our lives,” Max tells me. “It’s become this competition of who can go to the coolest places, who can find the coolest things, who can take the best picture of themselves, and it just becomes this very selfish, self-centered culture that I think is taking our society in a wrong direction. Because people are starting to lose out on the importance of the events themselves, whether it be a concert or a hike, those things that I was referencing. People aren’t enjoying the music anymore, they’re making sure to get the perfect angle. I find myself in those positions as well, but I think people take it to an unhealthy extent.”

  As is apparent from his comments, the culture of selfies is complicated for Max: he takes selfies, but he also worries about them.

  David, by contrast, is not at all conflicted. David does not “do” selfies. “I’m not gonna post a selfie everywhere I am,” he says forcefully. “I wouldn’t post a selfie on my way walking in. Like, ‘Oh, I’m about to go to an interview,’ ” he jokes. Then David effects a funny, falsetto voice. “I want to post a selfie right now!” He seems disgusted with the very idea that people take pictures of themselves all the time.

  David searches for a reason behind the trend and comes up with a number of possibilities. “A lot of people, you know, just do it to update people on what they’re doing, and I also blame our technology a lot on it, our new phones,” David explains. “You have a great camera. Why not take a new picture every day on your new iPhone 6? Might as well!”

  David is passionate about this. “I’m so against it,” he emphasizes. “Personally, if I go on Twitter or Instagram and I see the same person every day, it makes me mad. Why do you post stuff every day? It’s cool to know what you’re doing, but I don’t want to see you on my timeline every day.” David likes that he can keep up with people on social media, but it really bothers him how constant the influx of information is. “Don’t put enough for me to know what you’re doing, where you’re at, you know, who you’re with every day,” he says. If David wants more information about someone, he feels he should just go directly to the source and ask for it.

  According to David, women do this more than men—though men do it, too. “Women are posting a lot of selfies,” he says with a laugh. “And guys don’t post as much, but guys still do post selfies.” David thinks that girls simply post more than guys. “Guess they’re more interested in social media and taking pictures,” David comments by way of explanation.

  SOCIAL MEDIA: A WOMAN’S WORLD?

  David has a lot of company in thinking that women post more selfies than men, and that women post more often on social media in general. The majority of interviewees seemed to think that women take and post more selfies than men do—by a lot—and most think that social media is more of a “girl thing.” Both women and men feel this way.4

  Cherese, she of the seventeen Facebook groups, is sure this is true. “First off, guys really don’t post too many selfies,” she says. “They won’t post too many selfies, and all theirs will be just all different, like, a football game or it’d be something maybe sports related, but it would be nothing that’s actually personal. As opposed to, like a gay man, or women, who post more personal things about themselves. They may post about their whereabouts or how they’re feeling, more of the emotional side, as opposed to just generic things that are happening in the world that anybody could’ve seen.”

  In this short statement, Cherese hits on most of the major gender differences students perceive:

  1.Men don’t post as many selfies.

  2.Men post about sports, cars, and events happening in the world.

  3.Men don’t post about personal things in their lives.

  4.Women almost always post about personal matters and their emotions.

  5.Women post selfies and lots of pictures in general.

  Cherese’s comment about how “gay men” also post in the same way as women was not something I heard often, though it did come up occasionally. But what Cherese is saying about women is an expression of age-old gender stereotypes: women care about appearance, emotions, and the personal, whereas men are about being active and out and about in the world. These are the very same stereotypes that scholars Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan documented and critiqued in their groundbreaking book from the early 1990s, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development, which looks at how, when girls reach adolescence, their worlds grow smaller, less active, and become about image and appearance, whereas boys’ lives become about their important place and future in the public sphere, as well as all the amazing things they will do in the world (to sum it up succinctly: boys’ lives expand, and girls’ lives contract).5 Decades later, these very same gender norms are playing out on the social media profiles of college students, with both women and men rattling off these norms with very little (if any) critical concern about the fact that with this commentary they are playing right into these stereotypes. These students seem to take it for granted that women are more into selfies because selfies show off their faces and bodies, and men are not because they don’t have to care as much about that sort of thing and instead can focus on their exciting adventures and the occasional newstory—as though this is simply the way things are and how the world works. Whether or not students can identify these as gender stereotypes, they certainly see these classic stereotypes playing out on social media every day and report back what they’re seeing accordingly.6

  Matthew, who goes to the same university as Cherese, echoes her comments and then adds a few to the list. “Guys usually post more athletic stuff,” he says. “If they want to post something funny, then it’s usually more vulgar, I suppos
e. And if a girl is posting something they think is funny, it usually has to do with, I don’t know, something weird that their friend just did. Like more innocent, I guess. As far as the food thing goes, it seems like it’s almost always girls posting what they’re eating.” Matthew pauses to laugh here. “This probably sounds bad, but I feel like, on Twitter at least, there’s definitely more complaining from the girls that I follow about things than there are from the guys… . My friends play this game where we’ll read off somebody’s tweet and we’ll try to guess whose girlfriend posted that or which girl from the high school said that because they’re always real similar.”

  Matthew hits on another of the stereotypes about “what girls post” that I hear frequently: girls refer to their friends and are more relational, more expressive, and more willing to share. Matthew and his friends see girls’ expressiveness as whining, in some cases.

  Elise really sums up the notion that social media is a women’s world. “I don’t see guys post that much, actually,” she says. “I think it’s definitely more of a girl thing. I don’t know exactly why that is. Maybe girls are just more open with their feelings and, you know, their thoughts of the day, I’m not sure. But guys are definitely more just, more blunt, I guess… .Whereas girls, you know they’d put all the emojis and all these different hashtags and things. So I think girls are more open on social media because I think because the majority of people that post are girls. I think it makes it easier for girls to connect with other girls they don’t know, or even girls that they hardly know. And guys seem, especially on Instagram, like they only comment on pictures if it’s a girl that looks really pretty. And, I mean, that’s just a guy thing, but you don’t see guys putting up selfies that much.”