The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  It turns out I am—very happily—wrong.

  Corban is a very well-adjusted social media user. There are a lot of people out there who share his interest in chain mail and robotics, and social media brings them together. And though Corban may seem like an atypical student in terms of hobbies and appearance, when it comes to social media, he’s very much in the mainstream. He has rules about posting (“If you wouldn’t say it or do it in person, don’t do it online”) that are common, and he generally sees social media as a fun way to kill time. When I ask him whether he worries about online bullying, or the ways that people can be mean to each other on social media, he says, “It’s definitely a thing I’ve seen happen. I haven’t done it, it hasn’t been done to me. And it hasn’t been done to my friends personally. It’s hard to combat something that you’re not directly impacted by or that those around you are impacted by, so it’s more of a thing I’m philosophically against but have no way to actually combat.”

  This, too, is pretty standard. He’s never been bullied, his friends haven’t either—but, sure, he worries about it in an abstract way.

  Corban goes on to tell me that he never really spends time comparing himself to others on social media—which is unusual but healthy. And when I ask Corban if he thinks that social media can affect people’s self-esteem, his answer is even more interesting. “I think it can, but really, I think a lot of who you are on social media is a reflection of who you are normally,” he says. “So if you’re prone to have lower self-esteem normally, on social media things will tend to lower your self-esteem more, whereas if you have a higher self-esteem regularly, social media will help improve that. I generally have pretty good self-esteem, I would say.” Then, in a very measured, logical way, he explains that posts that get a positive response help him to feel better about “what he’s done,” and posts that get a more negative response, he thinks “you can take it with a grain of salt.”

  Corban gets right to the heart of the problem with online bullying on several levels—so much of it is about keeping perspective, about self-esteem, and, in many ways, whether your skin is like Gore-Tex and the nastiness just rolls right off, or if you’re one of those unlucky, sensitive people, and meanness and cruelty go straight to your heart.

  THE RARITY OF (NON-ANONYMOUS) BULLYING

  Online bullying, or cyberbullying, is a hot topic.1 Stories of teens committing suicide because peers harassed them so constantly and so viciously terrify and outrage us, especially the parents of children approaching the age when they will set up Facebook and Instagram accounts and launch their vulnerable, tender selves into the wild, uncontrolled, and sometimes extremely cruel world of social media. That world can be soul-crushing for a child or young adult, humiliating in a way that is so severe they cannot see beyond it, so horrific that they cannot find a way to survive it. Online shaming is not restricted to children and young adults, but it is particularly frightening at that age, and many parents and even schools and colleges aren’t sure how to respond to it or, ideally, prevent it from happening in the first place.

  Just about everyone is aware of the high profile cases of teens committing suicide because of online bullying, tragedies that inspired the writer and journalist Dan Savage (and his partner) to post the first “It Gets Better” video on YouTube in an effort to let other young adults suffering bullying and harassment know that there is hope in the future. Dozens and then hundreds and eventually tens of thousands of similar videos followed, and now the It Gets Better Project is a formal organization that offers assistance to the LGBTQ community and family members of bullying victims. But of course, while there are incredible resources out there for young people, bullying and cyberbullying continue to be terrible and tragic problems, often caught only when it is too late.2

  The reasons for everyone’s concern are obvious. Two separate studies show that cyberbullying seems prominent among both middle school students and young adults—with approximately 30 percent identifying as victims of both cyberbullying and traditional bullying, while approximately 25 percent identified as being perpetrators of both cyberbullying and traditional bullying. Girls are more likely to be the victims of bullying, and boys are more likely to be the perpetrators of it.3

  And college students are just as upset as parents about online bullying. When I asked the interview participants if they worried about online bullying and the ways people can be cruel to each other on social media, just about everyone said yes. Occasionally someone added that they were especially worried about their younger siblings because kids can be really mean to each other. And students definitely feel that anonymous sites like Yik Yak are expressly designed to promote bullying.

  But when I asked these same students whether they’ve ever known anyone who’s experienced online bullying, or were ever bullied themselves, almost everyone would pause, think about it for a moment, and then say no.

  “Oh, absolutely,” Elise tells me, she is definitely worried about bullying. But then she can’t think of anyone she knows who this happened to. “I’m trying to think if I know anyone personally, or like, from friends and stuff, about people being bullied online. Because you know, in high school we’d always have the assemblies about people who are victims of bullying, or even people who were victims of domestic violence via social media. I can’t think of anyone personally close to me. I think people are getting smarter about it than they were … . but, yeah, I think it’s definitely still a big concern.”

  During my visit to an evangelical Christian college in the Southwest, Max gives me a similar answer when asked whether he worries about cyberbullying. “All the time, yeah,” Max says. “I have never experienced it firsthand, and I’ve never dealt it out firsthand. I do think that people feel much more safe behind a screen than they would ever feel in person. So in terms of bullying and in terms of bad comments, they feel completely okay doing it, whether it’s under a false profile or if it’s on their own profile, and they’re commenting and criticizing and bullying, they just feel safer behind the screen because they can’t be touched.” Max goes on to say that the way in which people feel safe saying cruel and terrible things to each other because they are behind a screen creates “a culture of cowards,” which really bothers him.

  But he still can’t think of anyone he knows who’s been a victim of cyberbullying.

  Then there’s Brandy, who has a somewhat different reaction. “I feel like so many people make cyberbullying to be this huge thing, and I never see it on my personal Facebook,” she says. “I never see people doing that stuff on Facebook, and I always find that really strange. People talk about all these cyberbullying cases, and I can’t think of an instance where I’ve ever seen that because I feel like my generation has ingrained in their head that other people can see what I’m doing, kind of thing, which is a scary thought. But I feel since they know that, then obviously you’re taught that bullying is wrong, and because of that, people aren’t going to do it.”

  If cyberbullying is happening, she thinks, it’s happening privately because everyone else knows that people’s online behavior is being watched. If you’re worried about future employment (as just about everyone is) and appearances (as just about everyone seems to be), you’d be crazy to behave that way in the online equivalent of broad daylight.

  One young man, a football player at a Catholic university, went so far as to say that one of the issues he worries about most is that meanness on social media is so common that we’re becoming “desensitized to it.” We don’t even notice it when it happens, because we’ve accepted it as a fact of life.

  Occasionally, I interviewed a student who thought she had seen people being bullied firsthand but still couldn’t name any examples. One young woman, Sarah, was extremely concerned about bullying and raised the topic over and over during her interview. Sarah was on the track team and in ROTC, and she was a resident assistant, too—clearly an overachiever. Sarah applied the Golden Rule when it came to her criteria for posting on social med
ia. “If I wouldn’t want [something] posted about me,” she said, “I would never post it about someone else.” A very self-possessed young woman, she’d never been bullied, didn’t worry about ever being bullied, and didn’t have any friends who’d been bullied. But Sarah felt as though bullying was occurring all over the place, especially on Yik Yak. She told me she thought Yik Yak was designed as a platform for people to bully others. Overall, she felt, social media “does more harm than it does good.”

  “There’s so much negativity online and so much bullying that it has a negative effect on people’s happiness,” she said. Sarah went so far as to say that if she saw people being mean to other people she knew online, she “took it personally.”

  The rise of Yik Yak seems to have drastically changed the landscape—and visibility—of bullying. When I was finishing up my interviews and surveys, Yik Yak was still in its infancy, but even then students had begun to regard it as the “bullying app.” And they are deeply upset by it. They worry that Yik Yak is bringing bullying close to home and hurting people they know and love, and they said as much in the online survey. Of the students who chose to answer an open-ended essay question about anonymity, a third of them used the opportunity to comment on bullying, though bullying was not mentioned anywhere in the question. Many students naturally connect anonymity with bullying and opted to vent their dismay.

  Now that Yik Yak is raging on campuses everywhere, I suspect that more college students will be able to identify specific victims of bullying—Yik Yak seems to have changed the game. As the app grows in popularity, it’s possible that bullying will become less rare and that a growing number of college students will be able to point to many examples.

  I did meet a few students who knew someone who’d been bullied in high school or middle school. Amy told me that “online bullying is a big thing.” She felt this was because people “don’t have to own up to what they say,” and the computer acts as a shield—no one ever has to “face the person when they say it.” This means they “will just comment random things that they wouldn’t actually tell that person in real life.” Amy told me that a really good friend of hers from high school had been cyberbullied and that it “made high school a lot harder.” Amy was rather scarred by watching her friend go through such hell, and said, “I think [bullies will] do anything to take down their opponent.”

  The rarest student of all, though, was the one who had actually experienced cyberbullying in her past—and I use the pronoun “her” intentionally. I met only two cyberbullying victims, and both were young women. Though victims are rare, their stories remind us why people are so concerned about this issue. For even one young adult to endure such intense pain, humiliation, and isolation is unacceptable. The two young women whose stories I tell in this chapter struggled mightily to survive and move on from their experiences—indeed, they were still struggling when we met.

  MAE: LONGING TO BE DRAMA-FREE

  “Cyberbullying, it’s very idiotic,” Mae tells me about midway through our interview. Normally soft-spoken, she now speaks passionately “I don’t believe in bullying, period. I was always bullied as a child, so I’m against bullying completely. I don’t understand why people cyberbully anyway because they’re just hiding behind a computer screen instead of confronting someone about their feelings or their problems.”

  Happily, Mae is talking about this with some distance between her life now and her personal experiences with bullying in the past. A tiny, pretty, first-year student at her Catholic university, she is relieved to have put her experiences with bullying behind her and wishes she could help others avoid the terrible things she went through.

  Mae explains to me that about six months earlier she had shut down all her social media accounts. She uses Snapchat occasionally to send pictures to friends, but she doesn’t put Snapchat in the same category as public platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Mae feels that she has more control on Snapchat, whereas public platforms can be painful, which was too much for her to handle. When I ask Mae to describe herself socially, she says, “I think I can get along with people and I don’t stick out of a crowd, I’m just part of it… . I don’t really like to attract too much attention, so I try to just stay quiet.” Blending in, not making yourself noticeable, is a theme to which Mae returns repeatedly. If you stick out, you might become a target, and Mae never wants to be a target again.

  There was once a time when Mae felt differently. She wanted to be noticed, she wanted to be cool, she wanted to be liked in ways that made her feel special and different. So she threw herself into social media. All that wanting and hoping made Mae especially vulnerable. She didn’t anticipate how, when you seek attention, the kind of attention you get might be bad, and she learned the hard way. But it takes a while for Mae to admit that her desire to be noticed and liked resulted in an episode of cyberbullying that made her swear off social media altogether.

  First, Mae talks about her concerns that people aren’t always “themselves” on social media. “I feel like because of social media and because of peer pressure and stuff, teenagers especially, they try to be something other than themselves,” she says. “I think maybe that’s the reason why I stopped going on Facebook. I felt like I was being someone other than myself, and that worried me. So I just stopped going on Facebook.”

  I ask Mae to tell me more. “Well, high school was really cliquey,” she begins. “There was always groups of friends, like how in the movies they portray the popular kids and the jocks and the geeks. I was in band, I was always in the honors classes, I was always a little nerdier, so on social media, I felt like I should try and be like one of the cool kids. But then I realized that that’s not who I am, I should just be myself. And then I realized how much people try to change themselves on social media, and it irked me I guess, so I just felt like I didn’t need social media, really.”

  Mae’s attempts to “be like one of the cool kids” backfired.

  “I would post, I guess, selfies,” she says. “I would try to make cool statuses about what I’m doing or who I was talking to. I would add strangers whenever they would send me friend requests because their mutual friends would be the cool kids. Or I tried to talk to people that I didn’t know on there.” Mae mentions—with regret—that she now realizes that it’s dangerous to talk to strangers online, but at the time all she cared about was getting attention—any attention. “I really focused on how many ‘likes’ I got, how many comments I received, how many people told me that my pictures were nice. Then I realized that it affected my self-esteem and my time because I was always on Facebook, I was always worried about who was posting a new status and how many ‘likes’ they had compared to my status and how many ‘likes’ that I received and it was just too much, so I stopped.”

  Mae mentions time and time again how eventually “she stopped” being on Facebook. Almost every one of her answers ends with her saying something like this—how she got off of Facebook or about how unhappy being on Facebook was making her feel. But eventually she expands on what she means by how she used to “talk to strangers” when she was fourteen and fifteen and, with hindsight, how reckless this was.

  “Social media before just encouraged me to make friends with random strangers on the Internet that I would never meet in person,” Mae explains. “Some of the strangers would be from different countries, so I couldn’t even pronounce their names. They [messaged me]. They would talk about how beautiful my pictures were and how old I was, where I lived. They would also add my friends and then they would also message my friends. And then we would all talk about it and how weird it is, but [my friends] wouldn’t, some of them wouldn’t even delete that person, they would just block him, so that he was still on their friends list but they didn’t have to talk to him. I feel like they were trying to ‘up’ their friends list, like, the number of friends they have on their list to seem cooler about how many friends they have.”

  This is every parent’s nightmare: their little girl (or bo
y) is talking to potential predators via social media. I ask Mae if she ever told a parent or an adult about what was happening, and she says no. She explains, though, that eventually, “after I thought about it,” she began to worry that older men were messaging her. “It was really creepy so I just stopped. It scared me.” For Mae, it was enough that she stopped engaging with them—she didn’t think she needed to tell anyone. Her mother already had plenty to worry about.

  That Mae would enjoy the attention of strangers telling her she’s beautiful and that she’s a victim of cyberbullying doesn’t seem like a coincidence. Mae was so desperate for attention, she would seek it anywhere, and it’s this desperation—to fit in, to feel pretty, to feel special, to simply be noticed—that leads young adults into dangerous territory on social media. Not only does it make them potential targets for anonymous criminals, but any whiff of desperation, of neediness, of true vulnerability—which comes from feeling invisible, as if you don’t matter—can make someone a target among their peers. This is especially so during the middle school and high school years, but even during college. When you talk to someone like Mae, it starts to seem as if social media is designed to prey on the vulnerable.

  Mae tells me how at one point she had to start taking birth control pills, and she gained weight. All the popular girls at school would post bikini pictures over the summer, so she did too, and then she’d sit there on Facebook, comparing her pictures to theirs. She thought they looked better than she did, so she took down all her pictures because of how ugly this made her feel.

  This is where our conversation finally turns to Mae’s experiences of being bullied. “I tried to fit in online,” she tells me again. “But then I just, I would get into cyberbullying fights. A girl would message me and she would get into a fight with me and then I would get into a fight and then there would be this really big fight over both of our Facebooks, and then in messages, and it affected me because I felt like people were bullying me and I felt like I didn’t have any friends.”