The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  As far as my phone, my wallet, and my keys, they have to be present. If they’re not present, then I’m missing something, that’s like me missing my heart or me missing my brain.

  Jackson, senior, public university in the Midwest

  It’s a perfect day because I left [my smartphone] at home and I feel naked right now, I really feel naked.

  Katrina, senior, public university in the Northeast

  People expect you to be always online, or to respond as soon as you see something. But frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. I’m a firm believer that people will write you whenever they damn well please, so there’s no point counting minutes.

  Omar, sophomore, private-secular university

  BLAIR: CLEARING MY MIND

  “I just never really had a need for it, or even for a cell phone,” says Blair. She’s talking about her laid-back, almost ambivalent attitude toward social media. “Growing up, we weren’t allowed to have [Nintendo] DS and PlayStation, but all my friends had it. I feel like me and my sister never really complained about not having it.” Blair is so ambivalent about social media that she gave it up for Lent last year. “I was good without it, I could live without it, I feel like a lot of people couldn’t live without it, and I feel like I would be one of the persons that would be able to live without it.”

  Blair is tall, beautiful, athletic, blond—the kind of sun-kissed girl you see walking down the beach carrying a surfboard in a teen movie. And Blair does surf, and sail, and is involved in “all water sports,” she tells me. When I press her to say more about what prompted her to give up social media for Lent, I learn something interesting: it has to do with her smartphone. Or, more specifically, a particular incident that changed her relationship to the device.

  “This summer I went without a cell phone for a week because I dropped it in the ocean,” she says with a laugh. “I was working, and I’m a lifeguard. So you sit for half an hour, and then you’re on the stand, and then you’re half an hour off, and everyone’s just always on their phone. It’s boring after a while [being on your phone].” When the phone fell in the water, Blair was a little traumatized. But then she began to feel better. And better. “I did so much more that day, just, other things that I normally wouldn’t have done if I didn’t have my phone. And my mind felt so clear after, like, one day without it, and it was such an amazing feeling that you’re not just on your phone the whole time, in your face. And it was relaxing, too. You just don’t have to be in touch with everyone 24/7.”

  Between the incident this summer and Blair’s Lenten sacrifice, she learned that without social media and her smartphone, she was able to concentrate more, to live in the moment. Even while she was sailing this summer, she noticed how everyone was busy getting notifications from their friends all the time and not really paying attention to what they were doing.

  Blair’s relationship to her cell phone has changed since she dropped it into the water. She has a new phone, but she often doesn’t have it turned on. And if it is on, she’ll put it in a mode that only allows her to receive phone calls—not even text messages. “I actually found that I don’t care if I get a text message, or if I respond right away,” she says. “I keep leaving it on silent and not knowing if I get a text. When I have time I’ll look at it to see if I have one, but I’m not constantly checking. I don’t really care if I keep on getting text messages. Text messages will be there all the time. If a phone rings, then I can pick it up, because a phone call I feel like is more important than just a text message.” And she no longer has her social media apps on the home page of her phone. Instead, they are hidden in a folder “a few pages back” to make them harder to get to.

  Blair has made an effort, of late, to not let her smartphone take over her life. She sees people all around her who are obsessed with the battery life on theirs. “Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s on, like, 5 percent, oh my gosh!’ I actually turned it off recently, and it’s so much better to have one less worry I can’t do anything about it.” If Blair is aware that her battery is low, it stresses her out, but what she doesn’t know alleviates that unnecessary stress.

  Blair would prefer that smartphones didn’t exist—or, at least, if she didn’t have to contend with them. “I wish I grew up in a different generation, just for that reason,” she says. “No one makes eye contact anymore. I’m always smiling, being superfriendly, and no one does that anymore because they’re always on their phone, [with their phone] in their face.” Blair’s friends are always on their phones, even when they’re out to dinner, and this upsets her. “I’m like, ‘Oh, phone party,’ ” she says with a sigh. “Everyone’s on their phone, and I’m never that person that’s on their phone. If I’m spending time with people, I want to spend time with them, not with some person in cyberspace.” It frustrates Blair to no end that her friends won’t put away their phones while they’re socializing. “I’m like, ‘Guys, phone party? Really? Again?’ Then they’ll put it away a little bit, but still, I can’t stand it, so I don’t do it. Like, I try not to be that person.”

  THE JOY OF BEING UNPLUGGED

  My first visit to a campus for this project happened to be shortly after spring break at a Catholic university. Many students had either been to places or in situations where they’d had to set aside their smartphones for the week. And they couldn’t stop talking about how much they loved their life without a smartphone—at least for a bit.

  Like Blair, it frustrates Gina to no end when she’s in a group of friends and everyone is on their phones. She’s also done it herself and then regretted it. Suddenly everyone around her will laugh, and when she looks up from her phone, she realizes she missed whatever was so funny. “I think technology definitely pulls us away from the real world, which is okay at some times, but I think most people are not as engaged as they should or maybe would want to be with the technology that we’re always using.” Gina is guilty of texting and using her phone in class, because it’s so hard to put it away. She brings her phone everywhere, and even in the cafeteria she’ll have it out on the table. She’s a little embarrassed as she tells me this.

  “I think what’s sad is I justify it with myself and other people because with school, we’re constantly getting emails, and if you miss one email, that could be something really big that you’re missing, like a group meeting or someone who needs you to, like, for volleyball, sign a waiver for something or picking up graduation gowns,” Gina explains. “It’s just, we have so many things that we need to keep straight, so we’re constantly getting emails. We’re constantly looking at our calendars, constantly trying to figure out times to meet with people. So you almost need to have your phone or you could be missing out on something important.”

  Almost everyone Gina knows expects her to be constantly available. I heard this same complaint from one student after another. But then Gina mentions her recent time away from her phone.

  “I was just away for spring break,” she says. “Didn’t touch my phone for the whole week just because we could use Wi-Fi, but it was only two hours a day, and I was like, ‘Whatever, I’ll just let it go.’ It was great. Like, so liberating. It didn’t feel like I needed to talk to anyone. I didn’t have to like talk to someone, and time wasn’t really a factor of my day, I’d do whatever, whenever. I didn’t have to worry about anything.” Gina paid for all this freedom afterward, however. When she came home from spring break and turned on her phone again, it was so full of emails, texts, and Facebook notifications that she was overwhelmed and incredibly stressed out. “But during it, it was awesome,” she adds, laughing. It made Gina “feel more on vacation,” and she loved how everything was more relaxed—how everything seemed less scheduled. Gina spoke of her smartphone as a kind of taskmaster, controlling her life and keeping her in line, always reminding her of her endless to-do lists.

  If being without a smartphone was really so nice, I ask Gina if there’s any reason she can’t adopt a phone sabbath of sorts.

  “I d
o wish I could, but I feel that I just can’t,” Gina tells me. People always need her—her teammates, her coaches, her roommates, her professors, her parents. “If I don’t have my phone and I’m not available, I feel like then if they need something from me, it’s going to reflect poorly upon me that I’m not responding quickly. Because that’s another thing: I want to respond to people quickly because if I reach out to someone, I would hope they would like respond in a timely manner.”

  Kristin, a junior at the same university, had a similar spring break experience. She, too, starts out by telling me how she’s on her smartphone all the time and also how she “doesn’t know how she existed without a smartphone” before they were invented. But then spring break came along.

  “I went on a cruise, and I turned my phone off for the whole week and it was great! I didn’t have that fear of missing out. I didn’t want to turn it on,” she says, laughing. “When we got back, I was like, ‘I wish I could just keep it off forever.’ ” I ask Kristin to tell me why she feels this way. She explains, “I think that being in constant contact with the world sometimes is overwhelming, so if I can get my email at all times of the day, it’s like, I always have to check my email, you know? … .It would be nice just to be able to relax and not have the expectation that I’ll be getting people’s messages and having to sometimes act on them. So it’s nice just to be unreachable for a little bit.”

  I ask Kristin whether, given how much she loved being away from her smartphone, she’s considered making herself “unreachable” occasionally. “Sometimes I do,” she admits. It’s okay, she thinks, to set aside her smartphone when she is studying for an exam. On Sundays, too, she’ll just “put it in another room while [she] goes about her business.” But setting it aside in the long term seems infeasible. “I don’t think overall I would get rid of my smart phone because it does have its uses, and I think it’s hard to function in society if I were to completely make myself unreachable.”

  In addition to students like Gina and Kristin, I heard from others who’d gone on volunteer trips to far-flung locales and who had no choice but to give up their smartphones for the week. They waxed poetic about what it was like to socialize when no one was looking at their phones.

  When I met Amy, she had just given up her phone—reluctantly, and at the urging of her mother—while on a trip. In the end, she was glad for the experience. Amy spoke of never being without her smartphone, of how she worries about not being immediately available, how the expectation these days is 24/7 accessibility. But then her mother complained that Amy’s face was “buried in [her] phone all day.” So her mother made Amy leave her phone on the kitchen counter, told her that for the entirety of spring break she needed to disconnect, that she wasn’t allowed to bring her phone up to bed with her, or carry it around at all, not when in the house and not when she went out either. “And it was awesome, you know?” Amy says, upon reflection. “And [my mother] was kind of policing me about it, because she would see me go and check. But after a day or two it didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything. I was talking to my family more, and I was watching TV and actually watching it, not like, half watching it and half scrolling on Reddit. And it was a really, really nice change. And every so often when I’m home, I do that same thing without [my mother] telling me to. I just leave it on the counter, and I go about my life.” “But, she adds, “I don’t do that when I’m at school.”

  This was a familiar refrain from students: on vacation, sure, on spring break, sure, on a service trip, sure—I can set aside my smartphone. At school, that’s impossible. Most students feel pressure to be available seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. But if they felt they had a legitimate excuse to sign off for a time, they did so happily.

  One student, Avery, had spent the previous semester in Africa, and the entirety of it unplugged. I ask Avery how it felt to go for that long without being connected.

  “It was just really good,” she says. “I felt like it was a legitimate excuse for me [to unplug] … .because I don’t like to be constantly plugged in to social media on my smartphone or constantly texting people back. I felt like not having Internet and not having Wi-Fi was a legitimate excuse for me not to keep up and replying to this, commenting on that. So it was very refreshing.” Avery especially liked how living unplugged changed her relationships with others, especially those in her study-abroad program, and she enjoyed her activities more because she wasn’t on her phone all the time. “We went on camping trips and safaris and awesome beach trips. I cannot image being on one of those and having us all staring down at our phones. That just sounds horrible.” Avery bemoans the fact that Wi-Fi will soon be everywhere, all over the world, so being unplugged will not be easy.

  I ask if it’s been strange being back and being connected again.

  Avery says the hardest part is meeting the expectations of others. “People weren’t expecting responses extremely quickly when I was there, and now they are, because they know I’m back. But I still don’t give them very prompt replies.” Avery’s time abroad has changed her relationship to her smartphone. She leaves her phone in her room more often now, if she goes to the cafeteria or even on a weekend trip. She finds her smartphone distracting, and she doesn’t want to be like her friends who are “totally debilitated without their phone.” Avery doesn’t like the way people compulsively check their phones or pull them out if there is a quiet or awkward moment. When she walks across campus, she sometimes counts how many people are actually not looking at their phones, and is dismayed to find how few are paying attention to the world around them. She guesses maybe only one in five is looking up. A smartphone “takes you out of the moment, and it brings you to another place that is probably not important at all,” Avery says.

  There were other students like Avery, who told me of trying to give up their smartphones periodically each week in order to study. In the online survey, of the students who answered the essay question on this subject, 70 percent said they intentionally take breaks from their phones.

  I heard from students who played tricks on themselves, like intentionally leaving their chargers at home, and making a pact that, once the battery ran out, this was it: no more smartphone that day. Some students take simple, short breaks, leaving their phones at home during social situations or dinners, putting them in another room while studying, leaving them home for the day on purpose. Many students spoke of that corner, way down in the third floor basement of the library, where the Wi-Fi doesn’t work and where, for exactly this reason, they—and so many others—cram in with everyone else to study. Many claim they simply can’t study or concentrate unless they unplug from their phones.1 And many talked of a daily battle to stay away from their smartphones while socializing and studying, doing things like turning their smartphones to “airplane mode” and putting them face down or even relinquishing them to a neighbor in their residence halls when they had an exam coming up. It is indeed a battle, too, and the students are fighting hard, to the point where some of them sound like they need a kind of Smartphones Anonymous support group to help them work through and deal with their addiction. I even met a few students who told me that one of the reasons they liked going to church—and made a concerted effort to do so—was because it gave them a reason to get away from their phones for at least one hour a week. Students would nearly always mention how hard it is to be away from their phones at first, but most ultimately find it liberating.

  Other students said they take far longer breaks and specifically look forward to circumstances where they will simply not have access to their phones for days or even weeks at a time. These students are exuberant about the time they spend off of their phones.

  Mercedes is one such student. She sought relief from the pressure to be constantly available. “I feel like you can be reached at all times, all day, every day, via many different outlets,” she complains. “That can be difficult, especially because [people] know you’re on your phone, they know you have it with you,
so why aren’t you answering? So you should probably always respond immediately.” Mercedes goes to Catholic Mass weekly, and she never uses her phone during church. She enjoys and looks forward to that hour away. When I ask Mercedes whether she ever feels tempted to take a peek at it during the service, she tells me, emphatically, “Absolutely not.” “I usually leave it in the car or make sure I turn it off,” she says. But then she goes on to explain that the first thing she does when she gets back in the car is check her phone to see who’s texted or what’s happened on Facebook. “I mean, I’m sure the first thing I’ll do when I leave this interview is I’m going to check my phone. That’s definitely going to happen.”

  At a Catholic university in the Northeast—the same one where I met Blair—I happened to be on campus a couple of weeks after students from the psychology department had done an experiment in which they required everyone to put their smartphones into a basket for the duration of dinner in the cafeteria. Everyone was talking about it.

  Among the many students who mentioned this experiment was Emily, who’d gotten off Facebook and Twitter for the summer, and who told me she always turns off her smartphone when she goes on vacation. She doesn’t like the compulsions that both social media and her smartphone make her feel—she can’t resist the urge to “click it,” she says, so the best option is to just “get rid of it for a while.” When she does this, Emily feels like “a burden is released.” Like most everyone else, Emily also detests how people are on their phones at the dinner table—though like most of these same students, she is guilty of doing it. This is when she tells me of the psych department’s experiment. “They put little bins on all the tables, and you had to put your phone in it, face down,” she explains. “You couldn’t check it all dinner, and everyone was actually having a conversation together. Which is pretty rare.” Another young man who mentioned the experiment told me how, at some point in the middle of dinner, with everyone’s smartphones sitting untouched in the baskets, he realized that the entire cafeteria was “louder” than normal—because people were talking and laughing so much more than when everyone is on their phones.