The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  “Did you talk to anyone else about what you were feeling?” I ask her again, wondering whether it occurred to Mae to tell her parents or another adult.

  “I talked to my mom about it, and she told me to just stop responding, but I still did [respond] for some reason. And I talked to my friends about it, who all also had a Facebook, so then they would jump in, and that really wouldn’t help the situation because then it just caused the fight to get bigger and bigger.”

  I ask Mae to tell me more about what this “fight” was about.

  “It was over a boy,” she responds. “It was sophomore year [of high school]. This girl, she accused me of something and then she would message me all the time, she would call me names, she had her friends message me and call me names and say nasty things to me. So then I would just, I would try and fix the problem by trying to talk to them but they wouldn’t, they would just continue calling me names, like bitch, and they would use the ‘c word,’—I don’t like saying the ‘c’ word. They would call me a whore because apparently, I guess, [they said] I cheated on [the boy], but I never did, I just broke up with him and he was upset about it. This girl was his friend, so then he told her about everything that we went through, he was exaggerating about it, then she just assumed I was this big, nasty monster and then she messaged me on Facebook.”

  Because both the boy and the girl who were bullying her went to her high school, Mae would have to see them during the day and then endure their taunts and cruel comments online. “But it’s funny because I played softball with her, I saw her during school, she lived in the same community as me, but she would never say anything to me in person. She would just look at me and walk away, she would never say anything to me, but on Facebook she can message me anytime of the day and then call me these nasty names.” Mae tried to talk to the girl in person about what was happening, “but she just walked away.” Then Mae tried to confront her on social media, “since I guess she felt more comfortable talking about my problems with her on there.” But the girl only continued to call her “nasty names.”

  The behavior eventually stopped because the girl finally called Mae one of those nasty names at one of their softball games, and Mae’s father heard it happen. “He went over and talked to her, so then after that she stopped, she left me alone completely because my dad had a talk with her.” I ask what her father said, but Mae has no idea. “He didn’t tell me, and she, I don’t talk to her, I was just playing softball and then I just looked over and I saw that he was walking toward her.” Mae doesn’t care much about what her father said—just that he said it, and afterward, the behavior stopped. That is all that matters.

  Plenty of young adults would be able to endure such treatment from their peers—they might blow it off, they might have enough confidence not to let someone else get to them, they might have a thicker skin. But this is the tricky thing about both bullying and cyberbullying: what one person might be able to endure is another person’s nightmare. Some of us are simply more vulnerable than others to such treatment. And in situations where someone like Mae is preyed upon and doesn’t have the emotional resources to withstand the experience, that the bullying would be amplified, expanded, and made even more public on social media makes it that much more destructive. The bullying can seem so big and so pervasive and so impossible to escape—it’s not as though it happens only when that person is in the room, or stops when you leave the school building—that someone like Mae starts to feel like she’s drowning.

  This means Mae is not a good candidate for social media, and she knows this now. Granted, she thinks that social media can be good—for socializing with family and friends who are far away, for example—but the drawbacks for her far outweigh the potential benefits. She is unbelievably relieved not to be on it anymore and not to be subjected to the potentially cruel treatment of her peers as a result.

  “I don’t have to deal with the drama,” she tells me. “Because I feel like people express their drama on social media rather than talk about it in person, and I feel like if I [go onto a] social media account, that’s all I would read, just drama. And I don’t want to read drama, I want to read the good things that people do during the day or achievements or good news,” she emphasizes. “I feel like I’m drama-free [now] and I’m not wasting my time sitting at a computer screen, messaging people or posting statuses or, hashtag this, hashtag that.”

  I wonder whether she ever misses it or if it’s difficult to be completely off of social media now that she’s at college and everyone around her is on it—and using it to socialize—nearly constantly.

  “No, I honestly don’t,” she says. “Now whenever I listen to my parents talk about Facebook or I watch people get on Facebook or Twitter or whatever, I think about what I used to be like when I had a Facebook and then I realize that I enjoy not having a Facebook now, more than I did when I had a Facebook. And then I look at them and I realize how much time they’re wasting just sitting there on social media when they could be going outside, and hiking, or spending time with family, studying for school.” For Mae, coming to college has actually been a relief because so much of the socializing happens face to face. This is much more suited to who she is. “I feel like [college] has helped me become less socially awkward,” she says.

  It’s also true that just about everyone she’s met at college is constantly on Twitter and Instagram, they’re always updating and posting pictures, and sometimes Mae feels a little pang that she’s disconnected from something that consumes everyone else around her so completely—but then she realizes that she really doesn’t want to go back there. “Sometimes I feel like I’m missing out, when everyone’s talking about that funny tweet or all this other stuff, but then at the same time I don’t. I don’t feel like I’m missing out and I feel like I made a good decision to stop social media, to stop using it.” I ask Mae if she thinks she might eventually change her mind and go back onto Facebook. “I think I can make a strong commitment to [not doing this],” she answers. “It’s been a while since I’ve gotten on Facebook, and with how busy I am in school I feel like it distracts me from using social media. But whenever I do get bored and I have the urge to just browse on the computer, I just go and find someone to hang out with, I just find something to do.” It helps, too, that the friends she’s made at college have accepted the fact that Mae just doesn’t do social media.

  The cost of social media was too great for Mae, and the benefits of quitting have been too big to ignore. She feels like a much healthier person now. “I feel like how I see myself now has positively increased. I don’t care what people say anymore, I focus on myself, I don’t have low self-esteem, I’m comfortable with my body, I’m comfortable with how I look and who I am, so I feel like it has helped me a lot.”

  HAILEY: FACEBOOK IS NOT A PLACE FOR VULNERABLE PEOPLE

  When Hailey walks into the interview room, I immediately think of Sarah Jessica Parker’s character on Square Pegs, a television show I used to watch when I was a kid. Hailey has long, curly black hair, glasses, and the kind of geeky, funky style that Parker embodied as the lovable Patty Greene. Hailey is incredibly sweet and also incredibly insecure—despite the fact that she is a physics major at one of the top private universities in the United States. Sometimes Hailey is so insecure that it’s painful to listen to her talk.

  Right out of the gate, her face falls and she tells me that college has been really rough. Then she brightens and talks about her major—particle physics. She “likes studying neutrinos,” and she has met pretty much all her friends through her major. What makes her happy is having deep conversations with them about ideas. And Hailey finds meaning in her work. “I really like doing physics, doing my research,” she says. “I know that I’m helping expand research and expand our knowledge in this world, and hopefully later on down the line, that will help people in a direct way.” It’s obvious that Hailey loves her studies, and at least in the academic sphere, she has some confidence.

  But as soo
n as the topic shifts again, her confidence evaporates.

  The reason college has been so rough is because of her boyfriend—now her ex-boyfriend—who was abusive. He made her convert to Christianity, but she was never good enough in his eyes, she tells me. The boyfriend did not like that she studied physics—the one thing Hailey truly loves. “He thought that God wasn’t calling me toward it, and he was trying to use that to try to make me doubt that I should do physics.”

  Hailey lets out a big sigh, then apologizes for “dumping” her boyfriend troubles on me. I tell her not to worry, and we begin discussing her online life. At the moment she’s on Facebook, Snapchat, and Yik Yak. Like so many other students, Hailey talks about the importance of posting only happy, funny things. “I want to show people that I’m happy and that my life is good,” she says, even when it isn’t. Hailey posts happy things even when she’s unhappy; if she’s too unhappy to show the world she’s happy, she doesn’t post at all. Besides, her boyfriend used to tell her it was ridiculous when she posted silly things or tried to be silly in public. It only made her look stupid. “Nobody wants to see you making a joke,” he would say.

  By the time Hailey finishes explaining this to me, she sounds morose. I ask if she has stayed away from social media since she’s been having such a rough time, and she responds, “I unfriended the ex-boyfriend, and, yeah, definitely I stayed off of Facebook a lot.” Hailey explains that Facebook was one of the reasons they broke up. He refused to make their relationship “Facebook official,” plus, others girls were flirting with him on his page, which hurt Hailey’s feelings. “I told him when I unfriended him that it was because these girls were flirting on his Facebook, that I just didn’t want to see it… . I just don’t want to see it.” Then, there was the fact that her boyfriend hated when she tried to be funny on Facebook—she repeats this four times during the interview—it embarrassed him, which made her feel ashamed.

  I ask Hailey if she’s ever considered getting rid of Facebook altogether, and she tells me, yes, actually; very few of her physics major friends are on it, so sometimes she doesn’t see a point in staying. And even though part of the reason she’s stayed is to keep in touch with people from high school, some of those people have hurt her in the past. “Actually, in high school, it was really, there was a lot of, you know, you see things on Facebook and it upsets you, or somebody makes a status about you that’s mean.”

  Hailey was bullied in high school, she explains. Some girls would post videos on her wall to make fun of her, and the girls at her school would call her a lesbian, even though she isn’t one. “They would make jokes saying, ‘Oh, you’re like, what is it like to be a lesbian?’ and blah blah blah. I didn’t identify as a lesbian at all, but also that was mean of them to say… . That’s insensitive.” Hailey had another friend who these same girls would encourage to “kill himself.” Recently, she went back through her Facebook timeline from high school. She feels a lot of shame about it—not only about having been bullied but also about the way she responded. “A couple months ago I looked at the stuff I had posted when I was a freshman in high school and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. I’m so embarrassed.’ I posted stuff about people bullying me online, and like, I would not, I mean, I guess, I don’t know. I posted stuff and I was like, ‘Oh all the bullies. I’m talking to the principal tomorrow, and all the bullies are going to get their just deserts,’ or something like that.”

  She sighs. “Nobody responded or commented.”

  Hailey thinks that social media is not a good place for “weird people” to be their weird selves—and she is weird, she says, or at least she was in high school. She believes this was why she became a target. Weird people are particularly vulnerable, in her opinion. It’s too easy for others to go on their Facebook pages and make fun of them. “That’s also why I don’t like being vulnerable on Facebook. Other people can look at it and say, make fun of me you know, because you’re not there. They’re seeing this … and, I don’t know, they can be anywhere. Anybody can see it.”

  Basically, Facebook can become a world of hurt for certain people, according to Hailey, because of all the ways in which you discover you’ve been left out of things, because of all the drama that can come from it, because of the ways people are mean to you. “I went to a really small high school, like, thirty-five people in my class. Toward the end of junior year, everybody was sort of friends with each other, and then all this drama started happening. Basically, there was a faction, and I tried not to choose a side because I saw both sides of the story, and I was like, ‘You guys are being ridiculous. Each side is misunderstanding what’s happening.’ I guess, because of that, a lot of the girls didn’t like that I was doing that, and so there was a hierarchy formed, and there would be parties. Like, they would invite my two best friends, but I wouldn’t be invited, and I’d see the pictures on Facebook. And that was pretty hurtful. It was sort of a way to make it clear, ‘Oh, you’re our friend but not that good of a friend.’ ”

  Later on, Hailey circles back to the subject of how Facebook can make you feel bad about yourself. “I feel like Facebook can really hurt me and make me feel lonely, if I see things on Facebook, like, ‘Oh, these people are having a really good time.’ If I’m in a bad mood and I see people having a good time, that can make me feel really lonely… . I think it helps to have friends who are off Facebook, and who still communicate with me, even though they’re off Facebook because it’s nice to know my friends aren’t on Facebook, they’re in real life. They’re here… . But then, yes, there’s still a loneliness factor for me, and I think it probably is different for different people.” Hailey cites her current roommate as an example of someone who seems made to succeed on Facebook, for whom events haven’t really happened until she posts about them. Her roommate loves Facebook and is constantly updating her page. It’s people like this who gave Hailey a hard time about not making her relationship status public, which made Hailey feel terrible. “It’s like, if it’s not on Facebook, it didn’t happen, or it’s not real,” she adds.

  Leaving people out of parties has been going on as long has high school has existed. The difference today is that young adults end up living out their humiliations in public. It is thrown in their faces—sometimes unintentionally, but sometimes very intentionally. Social media becomes a tool for provoking hurt among the more vulnerable, or the “weird,” as Hailey put it. Savvier young adults learn to use it as a kind of weapon, and for girls like Hailey and Mae, who want badly to fit in but don’t quite know how, social media can take what once might have been a private, fairly brief episode and turns it into something that lasts forever, continuing to victimize them far into the future. That Hailey could go back through her Facebook Timeline and see evidence of this was shameful and upsetting.

  It’s also true that many students feel pangs of hurt when they see pictures of their friends hanging out without them, or pictures of people at their college partying and having a good time, when they feel like they never get to—maybe because it’s not their style or, more likely, because no one told them about the party. Again, this is pretty typical social politics for people of that age. But students feel many different levels of hurt about this, and for someone like Hailey, the hurt is deep and lasting, especially because of how public everything is. Social media announces to everybody around you who is included and who isn’t. Each time you go online, there is evidence that you aren’t cool, that you aren’t desirable, that people don’t even know you exist. People like Hailey aren’t as emotionally equipped as others to handle this constant barrage. Hailey has a thin skin, and social media requires young adults to develop thick skins—very thick—at very young ages, so that they can withstand the disappointment and hurt that can come from being exposed to the nasty side of this “connecting.”

  Despite all of this, Hailey made it through the dark days of being bullied in high school; she still maintains her accounts and says that she likes the ways in which social media connects her to people.
But it’s obvious when talking to her that at one point in her life, being on social media was devastating. The way her voice wavers, the way she backtracks again and again to mention her shame and embarrassment is painful for me to witness. One would hope that Hailey, who is incredibly smart, could find a way to better interpret her experiences on social media. The problem, of course, is that social media tends not to be an intellectual enterprise but an emotional one, and on that level, Hailey simply falls apart.

  JACK: THE VARIETIES OF TROLLING

  As rare as it was to find anyone who had been bullied, it was just as rare to find anyone who would admit to being mean to others online. Of course, it’s not surprising that it would be difficult to find people who freely admit they’re awful to others. It’s unbecoming to identify as a jerk, even when you’re promised total anonymity. For someone to sit there, across from an interviewer, and say, “Actually, I’m one of the people who’s nasty to everyone else,” is a pretty intense thing to do.

  But I did meet a few people who owned up to this behavior—all of them young men. One of them, Jack—a supersmart, academically engaged senior at a northeastern private-secular university—seems like an incredibly nice guy, is thoughtful in all his answers, and always responds with a careful critical analysis. He’s very interesting to talk to, so when he tells me he’s an Internet troll—someone who posts provocative comments to get a reaction out of others—I nearly fall off my chair.

  Jack’s training as a troll started early—back in middle school, on Myspace. “I was trying to be a sort of edgy comedian, and at that time, you now, edgy comedy is sort of this very … . Jack pauses to sigh. “It’s just, you write all the things that you think would offend somebody, and you just cram it all together and write basically the most disgusting things you can think of.” He pauses again. “And those are things that you shouldn’t be putting your name on, right? … . And, you know, I really didn’t like high school and middle school, so I definitely aimed a lot of this, I guess you could say aggression, toward the established school and that sort of thing. Not like death threats or anything crazy like that,” Jack adds.