The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  “No,” I tell him, laughing and shaking my head. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  Ephraim almost went to a university whose student body consists nearly exclusively of Orthodox Jews, but he’s happy he chose this coed public university, where he gets to mix with people of different backgrounds. He likes going to classes with women, too, and at one point he marvels at how different this reality is from that of his home life—even the basic fact that he is sitting in a room with a woman now, just the two of us, doing this interview. Ephraim even lived away from home for a while, in a “basement full of guys,” he tells me, all of them Orthodox. “It was wild,” he says, gleeful at the memory.

  Ephraim is clearly very pleased that he has done things differently than his Orthodox Jewish peers. “I define myself a lot by otherness,” he says. “By the fact that I am able to perceive myself as unique in the place where I come from… . I was always somehow different than everybody else.”

  Like Dinah, Ephraim avoids social media.

  Despite starting off our conversation by saying he might be a “bad specimen” for my research, it turns out Ephraim cannot wait to tell me all about why he’s so different than everyone else. He informs me that our interview will probably be interesting precisely because of this, and it will show me “another side” of things I haven’t yet heard. Opposition to social media is a central part of Ephraim’s self-understanding. His stance against it is crucial to his identity and how he sees himself in relation to others—how he sets himself apart. “It became part of my persona,” he says. “Like, I’m a non-Facebook guy. Which is also part of the myth … .,” he adds, trailing off.

  As in, the myth of being Ephraim.

  “In terms of my perception of myself, [having Facebook] would make me more like everybody else, and I don’t want to be like that. But this is me admitting to my own fantasy,” Ephraim tells me. He also admits he’s afraid that if he tries out social media, he’ll like it so much he’ll get addicted to it, and that would really undermine his sense of self.

  “I hate social media,” he says, laughing, referring to the mere presence of it, the temptation it poses both to himself and to everyone around him. “I despise it. I think, first of all, that the Internet as a whole is a terrible distraction. I think technology as a whole is a terrible distraction. I am one of those Luddites, you know, the ones that would basically be, I would pretty much be happy in the Stone Age, you know? Horse and buggy works fine with me. I don’t think it’s added anything to what’s essential to life. I think it’s just sped it up and added quantitatively to what life is. And, slowly, it’s adding qualitatively to what life is, and I think that’s bad.”

  I ask Ephraim what he means by this. “[Social media] is sort of usurping real knowledge, real study, real concentration,” he tells me. “All those things that make for greatness, that make for, you know, hard work in the intellectual sense. It’s making it basically obsolete.”

  Unlike Dinah, who finds that her Orthodox Jewish community is very open to social media, Ephraim feels that in his community, “there is a strong anti–social media movement, if you can call it that,” he says. “It’s almost universal, so it’s not really a movement—they all hate social media. They’re afraid of it. I think any religious community is, especially one that’s as tight and close-knit as the Orthodox Jewish community. So, yeah, I think it sort of protects me by default.” Ephraim’s nonreligious friends are all on social media, of course, and he says they’ve “begged” him to get on Facebook so they can stay in touch more easily, but he always refuses. “I think another part of why I don’t like social media is the facade that you have to [create] … .you have to create yourself in a virtual medium, and I hate that. I just have a knee-jerk revulsion of it, of this having to create your persona in this very superficial way. Putting up pictures and doing this, people commenting, it’s just so silly to me. And I’m just not interested. I’m not buying it.”

  Both of Ephraim’s parents have “bought it,” though—they have Facebook accounts, and they wouldn’t mind if Ephraim got one. But, interestingly, while Ephraim’s parents and he can have Facebook accounts, it’s a different story for his sisters. There’s a clear double standard. “Because girls are considered a lot more vulnerable,” he explains. “I don’t want to generalize, you know, but my sisters, they’re not even allowed to have phones with texts. Everybody’s too nervous about protecting our virgin women.” Ephraim says this last bit with a smirk on his face followed up by a roll of his eyes.

  Ephraim and his Orthodox Jewish guy friends are also allowed smartphones, and one of the consequences is that they can explore sex in ways that girls are barred from doing. He starts telling me about how, for a while, they were all obsessed with ChatRoulette—a Skype-type platform that connects people randomly via video—you never know who you are going to get. I wonder if going on ChatRoulette is an example of the “wild times” Ephraim told me about earlier on in our interview, when he mentioned living in that basement with lots of other guys.

  Ephraim refers to it as part of “the underbelly” of the online world.

  “My friends introduced me to this, and obviously it was about getting girls, you know?” he says, laughing. “You see a fair amount of naked guys on it, you’ll click to get out of it, like, ‘He’s naked, next.’ But there are also a lot of girls on there,” he adds, giving me a knowing look. “There would be these long marathons and we would be on three separate computers, different ChatRouletting. It’s a fascinating underworld universe, and I think it’s very dark. And I know friends who have gotten girls to strip for them and things like that. It just shows this desperate need to get out of your own universe and to live in a social universe that’s more accessible. And I think online offers that.”

  Unlike the devout Christian students I met, who worried so deeply about honoring God in their posts or staying away from social media if it tempted them away from God, Ephraim clearly loves his memory of the era when he and his friends had these online adventures, more so even than Zachary. But he also hates the way they became obsessed with it. Eventually, “I stopped it, and I did sort of force my friends to stop it,” he says.

  Internet, smartphone, and social media addiction is a regular theme for Ephraim. He talks a lot about how he has an addictive personality. He refers often to his fear that if he tried social media, he’d become addicted to it, which is why he refrains. He feels addicted to his smartphone, for instance. Then again, while at regular dinnertimes he finds it difficult to put his phone aside, Ephraim doesn’t struggle with unplugging for Shabbos each week. “It’s not difficult because you know that it’s not even an option,” he says. “And there are so many other things that we do regularly that you don’t do on the Sabbath, it’s just one of those things.”

  Ephraim worries that “we’re becoming more online people than we are people with just an online outlet.” This is tragic, he believes, but he credits his religion with protecting him from the worst of it. “I think it’s disrupting to a lot of people and the way they socialize,” he says. “A lot of the people I know happen to not be such technology-crazy people because of the religious thing, and I feel like I don’t suffer as much as others would. I think if I hung around more with more secular people, I would feel it more acutely.”

  FREEDOM FROM EXPRESSION?

  For Dinah and Ephraim, the choice to stay away from social media itself builds character. And while the Christian students sense that God is watching, this seems to inspire them toward a kind of positive zeal in their faith. Those devout students who are on social media find it to be an incredibly useful, rich, diverse, and, at times, subversive, playful tool for religious expression. That so many college students—because of image-consciousness and their fears about the judgment of future employers (and the judgment of just about everyone else as well)—have taken religious and political expression off the table for their online lives should at least give us pause.

  What does it mean that so
cial media is not an inviting space for many students to be honest about their faith? Or their politics, for that matter? Is it a significant loss that young adults need to be so careful in these areas? And what does it mean that colleges and universities themselves—institutions that boast about turning out good, activist, tolerant citizens of the world—are also training their students that, above all, they must be concerned about what everyone else will think, especially future employers, and “post and delete accordingly” on social media? Are there ways that we can shift the conversation such that political and religious views might not jeopardize your ability to get hired in the future? Or is it simply naive to think that might be possible?

  What is clear is that young adults long for places where they can be themselves without censorship or fear of repercussions. To find such freedom, they often turn to anonymous platforms, which come with their own set of problems.

  6

  VIRTUAL PLAYGROUNDS

  THE RISE OF YIK YAK, THE JOYS OF SNAPCHAT, AND WHY ANONYMITY IS JUST SO LIBERATING

  I do follow Yik Yak, kind of like a bad soap opera.

  Gina, junior, private-secular university

  It’s a little liberating to be able to post what I really think without any fear of being judged for whatever reason. It does, however, disturb me when I read racist or homophobic or generally hateful comments. I used to use Yik Yak almost every day until I got overwhelmed by the racism that exists on my campus.

  Hope, first-year, private-secular university

  GRACE: MY TRUEST SELF

  When Grace and I sit down for our interview on a bright, sunny weekend morning, she says something I almost never heard other students say: “I actually think I’m arguably more authentic online.” Grace is of Chinese descent—petite, with long, shiny black hair and a friendly demeanor. By the time we meet, I’ve grown so accustomed to students talking about how they can show only one side of themselves—the happy, positive, even inspiring one—that I’m a bit taken aback by what Grace says. How has she found a way to be more authentic online? How has she (has she?) escaped the pressure to appear happy?

  The answer is simple: total anonymity.

  Grace is most active on LiveJournal, a blog site where people can write to, interact with, and follow others. She loves LiveJournal because nobody on the site knows who she really is. Well, almost nobody.

  “It’s basically a bunch of communities, you can join them, you can talk about things that interest you,” she says, smiling enthusiastically. “So there’s one community that is for a music group that I enjoy, and I’ve made a lot of friends on that website, but they’re not people that I know in real life. Well, there are a few I know in real life, but mostly, like, strangers.” Then Grace captures the blessing and the curse of anonymous platforms: “You can be anonymous basically, so you can say and be who you are, and no one can really judge you for it because they don’t know who you actually are. And because you have that mask to hide behind, that, I think, enables a lot of people to be very authentic and very genuine in expressing what they think. Sometimes too authentic. Sometimes people will say things that are mean, and if they were in real life they would never say something that mean, but because you have this shield, this mask of [anonymity].”

  Grace uses a pseudonym on LiveJournal, which means she’s not risking her “brand” or courting disaster with future employers, as she would be on Facebook. If anyone Googles her, they’re not going to find her LiveJournal account. And that is very liberating.

  “No one uses their real name, and it’s not connected to Facebook,” Grace explains. “It’s not connected to any other platforms unless you choose to, and very few people choose to, so a lot of the people are just some sort of [a]‌ user name and that’s who you talk to. And, again, it feels like a very trusting place, and that’s why it’s easier to speak up.”

  As we talk further, it becomes clear not only that Grace is different on LiveJournal than on other social media sites but also that she’s different there than she is offline. In real life Grace is not very outgoing, and she has only a small group of very close friends. As she tells me about her LiveJournal self, she’s almost gushing.

  “I think [when I’m on LiveJournal] is when I feel like I’m being truest to myself,” Grace explains. “Because I’m able to type how I feel, and it’s just more comfortable that way, for me at least. Well, one because I have a little more time to think about what I want to say, and two because if I say something that I didn’t mean, I can delete it before I send it. I can say it and then correct myself and say, ‘You know, maybe on second thought, that’s not what I actually mean. This is what I actually mean,’ and then I can say that instead.” Scholars who study social media refer repeatedly to the control people want, feel, and assert over their online communications, one that often comes at a detriment to their real lives.1 Grace’s comments highlight this desire and also show how heightened her sense of control becomes when the platform is anonymous. The anonymous platform not only offers freedom in an online world that is largely about maintaining a happy appearance in the service of pleasing one’s audience but also acts as an outlet, allowing Grace to escape from real life, too.

  Grace has “friends” on LiveJournal, but they are all anonymous, too. “So it is like having real friends, because they’re there for you and you’re there for them,” she says. “I’m able to just speak with them very candidly.” Grace loves that she can be “emotional” on LiveJournal—another thing I almost never hear from students about their lives on social media. Almost everyone thinks that emotions other than pure bliss are off limits. In the online survey, I asked students to respond to the statement:

  I am open about my emotions on social media.

  Only 19 percent of students agreed with this statement. Nearly all the rest (74 percent) said no. So Grace is quite rare in seeing social media as a space for her emotions, especially because she means all kinds of emotions, not just positive ones. It was so common to hear students talking about forced positivity that I began to wonder whether there were any college students who do not follow these rules in their social media lives.

  In Grace’s case, anonymity allows her to be more honest and more herself than she is in her real life. She can be someone totally different from the person her friends, family, and teachers know. “I think, [who I am on LiveJournal] is not just a part … .” She pauses here, then backtracks. “It is just who I am. But who I am is expressing something in this media. Through this format, I’m expressing myself… . There are many forms of me, and I think that social media is just another way that I can be me, and interact with more people than I can when I’m here. I don’t feel like it’s an extension or a different part of me at all. It’s just who I am, expressed differently.”

  Then, suddenly, all the expression of enthusiasm about Grace’s online life comes to a screeching halt. It happens when I ask her if she is also like this on Facebook.

  First, her face falls. Then, Grace shakes her head. “I hesitate to post everything that I would like to talk about,” she begins, and the young woman who just spoke with such joy about the incredible self-expression she finds on LiveJournal is gone, replaced by someone resentful and frustrated. “I’m not someone who posts statuses every day. I’m not someone who shares a bunch of things. That’s mostly because on Facebook there’s a different dynamic that doesn’t exist elsewhere.” Grace goes on to list the many things she does not like about the “Facebook dynamic,” which include “the concept of ‘liking,’ ” the comments feature, that it’s all about who’s popular and who’s not, that people post things specifically to get “likes” so “they’ll feel good about themselves.” “It is a popularity contest,” Grace says, and she has no desire to compete with others like this. She finds it exhausting, demoralizing, and inauthentic. Worse still, Facebook is attached to your real name. “It’s very public, and I don’t want everyone to know what I’m thinking or saying all the time,” Grace explains. “I do
n’t like that anyone that is a friend of a friend can come to my page and see what I’ve been up to. It’s none of their business.”

  For Grace, even the potentially terrible disadvantage of online anonymity (bullying, cruelty, meanness) is worth the risk for the satisfaction she gets out of getting to be who she really is, “expressed differently” as she put it—a satisfaction Grace feels she’ll never be afforded on a platform like Facebook. Anyone who reads the newspaper knows about this downside to anonymity on social media. “People can be whatever they want, and if they get banned, they can just make another account,” Grace says. “There is that ability to discard an identity and just come back to it later or create a new one and keep going regardless of what happened to the other one. So I definitely think people are more loose with their tongues online… . But that’s the nature of having that screen to hide behind. That’s the nature of online socializing.”

  Here, Grace is specifically referring to sites where people have usernames that are fake and are not associated with their real identities—which is what allows them to “discard an identity,” as Grace puts it, and simply create a new one to replace it. Grace has chosen to live with this side effect of anonymity and seems to have made her peace with it. But the very anonymity that allows Grace to feel so empowered, to be as expressive about herself as she wants, is also what can make certain platforms havens for bullying, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination and threatening speech—speech and also behavior that are nearly impossible to control, and that cause the young adults who are its target to suffer deeply. As Grace points out, users can simply shut down one account and create another to continue their maliciousness, taking advantage of and hiding behind the anonymity the platform provides.