The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  SHOULD ANYBODY NEED A SKIN THIS THICK?

  True cyberbullying seems a rare thing.5 It’s difficult to find young adults who have experienced it. Rare or not, there is a reason we, as a society, should be concerned about cyberbullying. When we hear extreme stories of teens who have been harassed so cruelly and so constantly they’ve thought about killing themselves, who cannot see a way through their humiliations, it shouldn’t matter whether these cases are rare. That any teen or young adult should have to endure such terror, humiliation, cruelty, and total rejection by their peers is unacceptable. We should not tolerate it. Period.

  One student, Nora, tells me that she and her sister were bullied online during middle school, and now—from the safe distance of college—she worries a lot about other kids. “It was just negative, hateful comments about how I looked, how I dressed, boys, that kind of stuff,” she says. She can talk about it now with an obvious sense of detachment. But the experience makes her angry about the existence of cyberbullying. “When I hear of someone doing it to other people, the first thing I tell people is don’t, don’t feed into it, you need to report it, you have to report it.” Nora feels that she and her sister became targets for bullying because they posted if they were feeling sad or down. They learned the hard way that “it’s better to be positive than to be negative” on social media. Any show of vulnerability opens you up to bullies who will prey on you.

  After talking to so many student about this subject, it becomes evident that bullying, in many ways, is in the eye of the beholder. Some young adults are simply more emotionally equipped to brush it aside when people are nasty to them. What might feel like bullying to one person is just something to be “blown off” to another. Students seem to agree that what qualifies as actual bullying, depends, in part, on how the target takes things. Naturally sensitive people and people who show any level of vulnerability or emotion on social media—whether sadness or unbridled enthusiasm—are at much greater risk of bullying, harassment, and mean treatment from others. Just about everyone agrees that younger kids (middle schoolers, for instance) are far more vulnerable to bullying than older ones, and that part of what it means to grow up on social media is to develop a skin thick enough to endure life online. The near-universal mantra that you must appear happy on social media starts to make more sense when you recognize how vulnerability turns you into a target. The appearance of constant happiness is a defense mechanism, a way to protect yourself from the risks that come with putting yourself out there for the scrutiny of others.

  Yet even college students who learned long ago to protect themselves on social media are still occasionally surprised when a post sparks meanness and cruelty. Everybody knows that whatever you post is subject to public scrutiny, but sometimes that scrutiny shows up in unexpected ways. And usually this happens on an anonymous forum such as Yik Yak or Reddit.

  Like many of her peers, Maria believes that the level of cruelty one might experience “depends on the degree of anonymity associated with the social platform,” as on Reddit and another platform called 4chan. She warns me to not even visit 4chan. “It’s very scary,” she says. “It’s an evil place because there’s so much anonymity … .whereas on Facebook, your name is associated with what you say, so you are what you say, and what you post is somewhat representative of you, supposedly. But on these other websites, it doesn’t matter what you say so you can say whatever you want.” Maria goes onto explain that sites like Reddit have a ranking system that allows people to see what is most popular at the moment. People “upvote” and “downvote” everything that is posted on the site. Huge numbers of upvotes will push a post all the way up to either the general home page or the subject home page. If people don’t pay attention to a post, it gets pushed so far down that it falls off the radar completely. Often what’s most popular is something very mean, Maria says, and this is “disheartening.”

  Maria once had a very “successful” post on Reddit—well, successful at first. Then it all went downhill. It was a photo of her in a Halloween costume. “[The costume] was something I made by hand, so I was proud of it, and I wasn’t really into Reddit at the time,” she says. “I was just kind of using it to figure out what was new in the world of the Internet, and [the photo] got very popular, and I thought there was nothing wrong with it. You know, it’s just a picture, and I had thousands of upvotes, but it shows you the ratio of upvotes to downvotes and then your net score. So my net score was, I don’t even remember. But the number of upvotes was almost equal to the number of downvotes.” Theoretically, downvotes are a way of pushing posts to a place where they no longer matter, of saying, “I don’t want more people to see it,” Maria explains. “And then an upvote is like, ‘I want more people to see this, I want the world of Reddit to see this.’ I think that just comes with having a lot of exposure and gaining popularity. You’re more exposed on that platform.”

  As Maria’s post got more and more votes, things started to get nasty and rather ridiculous. “[The photo is of] me in a wig, and my face is covered [she describes her Halloween costume],” she explains. “To me, there was nothing you could say negative about it. But people were saying things like, ‘You’re fat.’ Or, ‘Your mirror is so dirty.’ ” Maria had taken the photo in her parents’ bathroom, where they have both a toilet and a bidet. “People were like, ‘So rich! Why are you so rich? You have two toilets!’ I was like, ‘What?!’ They were picking apart my image, looking for things to downvote for. It was so weird,” she adds, shaking her head and laughing.

  Maria is trying to shrug off the experience, to prove she realizes this is the sort of thing that happens all the time when you post things on the Internet. If you choose to expose yourself in any way, however innocent, you must be prepared to suffer the consequences. Maria laughs a lot and rolls her eyes as she recounts this story, but it’s clear she was hurt by it—especially the comments about her being “fat”—and she’s trying hard to seem like she wasn’t bothered by it. Maria tells me she’s learned her lesson about posting on Reddit and won’t do it again anytime soon because even the most innocuous pictures aren’t safe. “I posted a picture of my puppy when I first got her … .and people downvoted it! It’s just a picture of a puppy! Who downvotes a picture of a puppy?!” Maria’s eyes are wide, and she continues laughing. “People!” she adds, shaking her head.

  Overall, young adults have come to expect—and accept—a certain level of meanness on social media. They endure it and try to shrug off. Getting mocked, getting harassed, having people say cruel things to you occasionally—by both strangers and “friends”—is just part of the deal. One young woman spoke of getting called a slut again and again on Twitter. While some people might feel bullied by this, to her, this sort of negativity is simply a consequence of being on social media. She didn’t feel bullied. The experience seemed to roll right off her.

  Bullying is in the eye of the beholder, it seems.

  People with thick skins fare better on social media than people without them. But how thick do we want our children’s skins to get? How healthy is it to feel you need to protect yourself all of the time? What does this do to a young adult’s sense of self? Or his or her ideas about others? Should anybody ever need a skin this thick?

  Again, college students seem to be living between extremes. Most of them are doing everything in their power to appear happy and display only positive emotions, which—in addition to protecting one’s image and future professional interests—is a way to avoid displaying one’s vulnerabilities. And there is the minority, made up of people like Ian and Jack, who like to poke at any exposure they can find and, at least in Ian’s case, take great pleasure in the despair and humiliation of others. With people like Ian and Jack around, why wouldn’t their peers work hard at trying to become invulnerable, or at least present themselves as such online?

  What I find odd among the bullies is that they seem to believe that they are invulnerable. They don’t seem to realize their behavior might get th
em into trouble at some point, if they push too far. Students are either acutely aware they are vulnerable and therefore constantly work to present an impenetrably happy front as a way of protecting themselves, or they don’t have any sense that they could become vulnerable by posting inflammatory things because they truly believe they are one of the few invincible people out there.

  Conversation on social media—either associated with one’s name or anonymous—lacks nuance. It tends toward the very, nonthreateningly positive or the very, sometimes threateningly negative. Emotions on social media lack nuance, too. And while I do not believe the students I interviewed and surveyed lack critical or emotional nuance in their real lives, they are learning to practice extremes online. We should be worried about how this practice will affect their (and our) ability to stay nuanced about these things in the long run.

  As my interview with Nora comes to a close, she has one more thing to add. She sighs heavily and says, “If I could just hug all the kids in the world that are being bullied I would.”

  8

  So You Wanna Make That Facebook Official?

  I wanted the world to know that I was so happy to be with her. I guess, like, standing on top of a mountain and shouting it out to the world. That was my way of doing that, and I also wanted every other guy out there to know.

  Mark, senior, public university

  We definitely went through every single social media post, and we’re like, “Delete that. Delete that. Delete that,” because we wanted to have this image that we were together.

  Hannah, sophomore, public university

  ADAM: OH, TO BE YOUNG AND IN LOVE (AND ON FACEBOOK)!

  Remember Adam from the chapter on selfies? The young man who used to look in the mirror and not like what he saw, but who—after finding a girlfriend—changed his whole outlook? Perhaps not surprisingly, Adam was also effusive about making his relationship public.

  If you go to Adam’s Facebook page, he tells me, the first impression you’ll get is, “Number one, I love my girlfriend because she’s in my profile pic.” You’ll see other things, too, like Adam’s favorite city, his favorite football team, and that he likes architecture and has many intellectual interests. But, mainly, you’re going to see pictures of Adam and his girlfriend. He jokes that on his page, it’s “Myself, her, myself, her,” and then maybe a photo of a dog. Oh, wait, the photo of the dog is Adam, his girlfriend, and the dog, he adds with a laugh.

  Adam and his girlfriend are “Facebook official,” of course, meaning that his status is “in a relationship.”

  “I actually asked her,” he says, seeming a bit embarrassed. “I’m not really sure why. I think I just wanted it because I kind of wanted it to be there to remind myself that someone does love you. Someone does care about you. And then it was also for show because I’m that guy who’s never had a girlfriend, so everyone was waiting for it, and as soon as everyone saw it, they threw a party in a sense.”

  Adam’s experience of being Facebook official is incredibly sweet and endearing, and it has done wonders for his self-esteem. Showing off his relationship on social media reminds him he is loved and cared for, in a way that no one before has cared for him, at least romantically. Seeing evidence of this online makes the experience all the more real for him. And being open on Facebook allows his friends and loved ones to celebrate this change in Adam, and to do it in a public way. This is social media functioning at its best—it’s helping with Adam’s self-esteem and making him feel more connected to and supported by his community.

  “I got sixty ‘likes’ on that [post],” Adam tells me, referring to the change in his relationship status. “That’s the most ‘likes’ I’ve ever gotten on a post.” I ask Adam if he was excited about all the “likes,” and he responds, “I was more excited about actually just beginning in the relationship than the Facebook ‘likes.’ That just was icing on the cake.” Adam and his girlfriend became Facebook official nine months before our interview. Now they spend a lot of time messaging each other on Facebook and posting things on each other’s walls.

  And Adam always, always has her in his profile picture.

  For many students, becoming Facebook official is a fun thing to do—though Adam might have been the happiest of all. In general, it doesn’t involve much angst, and is just another step that people take as things get more serious. Like Adam, other people I interviewed were excited to go public about their relationships on social media, sharing a profile photo with a significant other and writing gooey things on each other’s walls. Plenty of students were ambivalent about this change in their status—they didn’t think much about it. They just did it. It’s just what people do, in other words, so for many of them it’s not a big deal. They have seen their friends do it, or they’ve done it before with previous boyfriends or girlfriends.

  Generally, though, other people pay attention to shifts in relationship status and take notice when those profile pictures suddenly include a significant other. Many interviewees cited either their shift in status to “In a relationship” or a photo announcement of “We’re officially together” as the post that got them the most “likes” ever on Facebook.

  Another young man I interview speaks only briefly about being Facebook official with his girlfriend, but he does so nearly as enthusiastically as Adam. He’d mentioned his girlfriend earlier on in our conversation, so eventually I ask him if they are Facebook official.

  “Yes,” he says. “More so because I wanted the world to know that I was so happy to be with her. I guess, like, standing on top of a mountain and shouting it out to the world. That was my way of doing that, and I also wanted every other guy out there to know.” He laughs at this part. “You mess with her, you mess with me.” If you are in a relationship, he says, everyone starts asking you if you’re being public about it on social media. “Is it Facebook official? That’s what you hear all the time. Is it Facebook official?” he repeats. “Are you on Facebook?”

  Jake, who attends an evangelical college in the Southwest, also speaks at length about how common it has become to make your relationship Facebook official, and how important it is to do it. “I had gotten in my relationship abroad and we started dating, and we became exclusive, and then we asked to be boyfriend and girlfriend,” Jake says; here, he’s talking about the real-life—as opposed to Facebook—evolution of his relationship. “And it was always that moment of, well, ‘Let me tell my friends really quick first before we make it Facebook official,’ ” Jake goes on. “It’s almost like our society has placed Facebook as an establishment. For example, when people get engaged, that’s how they announce it, on Facebook, and we’ve coined the term ‘Facebook official’ because now it’s so official to announce through Facebook because everyone has a Facebook. It’s such an official statement when you make it on Facebook.”

  This was not the case with Jake’s previous relationship. He and his former girlfriend weren’t public about it, and that didn’t sit right with Jake. “For example, my last relationship, my ex didn’t want to make it Facebook official, right off the bat, and that was something that made me wonder too. Like, well why not? I felt like, if we’re going to share that, if you don’t care that our friends know, then why would we care that everybody else knows as well?”

  Jake is very happy that he and his current girlfriend are Facebook official. But it can have its downsides, the main one being that, if you’re open about the existence of your relationship on social media, there is a possibility that any future breakup will be public as well. “That’s one thing that really makes it clear to the rest, too,” Jake says. Jake’s glad that Facebook allows you to prevent your status change from showing up on the feed. “When you go back to single, I think it changes your status, but I don’t think it posts that you went from in a relationship to single,” he explains. “So I would say that it’s visible to those who would want to go look; however, I don’t think it’s advertised in the same way that it would be if you got into a relationship and t
hey put that post out there.”

  That’s a relief.

  Students tended to be laid back both about making their relationships public and about shifting their status back to “single” if they broke up. The comings and goings of various significant others is just another aspect of being on social media that young adults seem to be growing used to—it happens to everyone; therefore, if and when it happens to you, it’s normal. You are not alone. The announcement of a new relationship is greeted with joy and approval (usually), and breakups for the most part are treated quietly and discreetly. People know that commenting publicly about someone else’s breakup is something you just do not do, which makes most students feel a bit safer about not having to go through the end of a relationship in so public a way—though they realize that people will figure it out. The “hiding” of the breakup is another means of preserving the veneer of happiness and perfection.1

  Being Facebook official is generally something students want to attach to their names.2 It is a personal statement that can boost one’s image. It says to everyone, “Somebody loves me and thinks I’m special,” and it emphasizes that a person is “normal” and not a social outcast. And it’s one of the key highlights on most people’s highlight reels.

  There are exceptions, however.

  AINSLEY AND PETER: BREAKING UP IS EVEN HARDER TO DO ON FACEBOOK

  Ainsley is unlike any other student whom I interview at her evangelical Christian college—or anywhere, for that matter. She’s wearing a lot of makeup and is covered in jewelry. She is very nice, even sweet, but she talks like a Valley Girl, and on several occasions I feel as if I’m interviewing a reality TV star. Ainsley turns out to be something of a Baptist party girl. And she has had a lot of trouble with regard to her romantic life when it comes to Facebook.