The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  Of the students who answered the essay question about whether they take breaks from their smartphones, about 30 percent said they never do—at least not willingly or intentionally—and a fair number of them expressed a kind of superiority about this. They felt a sense of pride in being able to have their smartphones with them at all times, while not feeling addicted, distracted, or dependent on their presence. In these answers, students expressed judgment about those who “lacked the self-control” to stay off of their smartphones without needing to create circumstances in which they can’t use it. Students who have their smartphones with them at all times and have the will to resist feel smug. They are well aware that they are an unusual breed.

  But almost every student I spoke with complained about how smartphones are detrimental to social life. One young woman called them the “new yawn,” because yawns are supposedly contagious, and once one person pulls out his or her smartphone, everyone else follows. I heard again and again about deals students made with each other to try to prevent this from happening during dinner, with everyone agreeing to relinquish their smartphone either into some sort of bag or at the center of the table, with the first person to give in and look at his or her phone having to leave the tip or pick up the check.

  Besides creating a pressure to be “constantly on,” the most common complaint I heard about smartphones was their disruptive presence in social situations. Despite this resounding frustration, the students who complained also tended to admit (rather sheepishly) that they were guilty of such behavior themselves. And despite the rather notable downsides of smartphones, it was rare to encounter a student who wanted to do away with them altogether, or who would be willing to give them up even if this sacrifice came with great social satisfaction and the relief of not being constantly available, day and night.

  ALWAYS “ON CALL”

  It used to be that certain doctors, police officers, firefighters, and, well, the president were the only ones who needed to make themselves available at all times, even in the middle of the night. But according to the students who chose to answer the optional essay question about this very subject (Due to the prevalence of smartphones, do you believe we are now expected to be available 24/7?), today, we are all like doctors. At least we act that way. College students believe that smartphones have created an expectation that they are “on” all the time, day and night.2

  Sixty-nine percent of the students who answered this question did so in the affirmative. And mostly, they hated the expectation. A few students seemed to thrive on the pressure to be available at all times, and they tacked on phrases such as “And I love it!” or “I like it that way” or “And I think it’s great!” to their answers. But these students didn’t have much company.

  Most students used an extremely negative adjective to describe the perceived expectation of constant availability: stressful, awful, terrible, frustrating, impossible, exhausting, unrealistic, absurd, unfair, ridiculous, devastating, and unhealthy. People expect you to answer them “even while I’m asleep,” one student said, while another lamented, “If I don’t respond immediately I need to explain myself now.” A number of students commented on how, because of this expectation, it’s never been more important to set boundaries around personal time, and several wrote that despite this expectation, they simply don’t make themselves available. One student who thought this expectation was ridiculous and overwhelming actually added, “But it seems I am alone in feeling this way,” which nearly made me laugh out loud because nothing could be further from the truth.

  Even the 25 percent of students who said they did not feel they were expected to be available all the time were affected by the expectation of this perceived by others. Some were defiant, saying, “I don’t allow myself to be” or “I draw boundaries.” But just over a quarter of those who answered no took the question very literally: people can’t expect you to be available when you are asleep—the implication being that during waking hours you are expected to be available at all times.

  It’s no wonder that so many students feel such relief when they unplug.

  But not everyone longs to unplug even for a little while—not for themselves or even for their friends. In fact, several students I met seemed to live for their smartphones and feel that they, quite literally, could not live without them.

  CHERESE AGAIN: YOUR SMARTPHONE OR YOUR LIFE

  “I like my phone a lot,” Cherese says, by way of beginning what will become a very long, rather amusing, and somewhat shocking conversation about her relationship to her smartphone. Cherese tells me she’s had a smartphone ever since they came into existence, and before that her phone had one of those slide keyboards with buttons on it, which she also loved. Her little sister broke that phone one Christmas Eve, and Cherese tells me that she was “just getting ready to kill people because I needed my phone.” Cherese had to wait until the day after Christmas to get another one, so “it was just not the best of days.” Her phone is her “safety net,” she says. Her security blanket.

  As with so many people, Cherese uses her phone for everything. Her calendar is on it, she does her banking on it. But unlike other people who love their phones, Cherese once risked her life to save hers.

  “So this summer, I was robbed,” Cherese tells me. “It was when I was on the bus, and I actually paid somebody just to give me my phone back, because my phone was just, like, that important. It was a group of them… . I paid them a hundred and fifty dollars for the phone.”

  I have a number of friends who’ve been mugged for their smartphones—but everyone I know has simply handed over the phone, to avoid getting shot or stabbed in the process. “So these people mugged you for the phone, and you ended up giving them money?” I ask, to make sure I understood Cherese correctly.

  “Yeah,” she confirms. “And they had already stolen my wallet, but I was just really concerned about the phone because I can go and cancel the cards. [Afterward] my parents were telling me, ‘That wasn’t the best idea to get off the bus and pursue it,’ but I had so much stuff on my phone.”

  “So you actually got off the bus to pursue them?” I ask, still incredulous.

  “Yeah, I followed them to get the phone, and then the police were like, ‘Oh, that wasn’t the best idea,’ and I was like, ‘Well, I’ve lost my phone before and I really need my phone.’ ” When I press Cherese to tell me if the phone was truly more important to her than her own safety, she laughs. “At the moment, I really thought it was. That’s the only thing I could think about. I wasn’t thinking about my wallet, my keys, or anything like that. I was just really focused on the phone because it was just like, ‘I have everything on here. I really can’t survive without my phone. I really need to get my phone right now!’ ”

  Earlier on, Cherese had told me that she once went on a seventeen-day “fast” from social media. I ask her now if she’d ever done the same thing with her phone. No, she tells me. She wouldn’t even attempt such a thing because she wouldn’t be able to make it.

  “Like right now,” she says, “I left my phone in the other office. I’m just thinking like, ‘Wow, what if [the woman working in the office] leaves with my phone sitting there?’ ” Has she been stressed about it the entire time we’ve been talking? “Uh, a little bit,” she admits. “It’s just like, it’s my phone. When I leave the house, I don’t worry about my keys. I worry about my phone. So, I’m just really concerned.”

  “So you’d rather be locked out of your house?” I ask her.

  “Yes,” she says simply.

  I tell Cherese that we’re almost done with our conversation, and that she’ll be able to retrieve her phone soon.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” she reassures me. “I don’t think that [the woman is] going to leave because I can still hear over there.” Cherese goes on to tell me that she’s been monitoring what was happening in the office next door the whole time we’ve been talking to make sure that her phone was okay. The reason she left it there in the first pla
ce is because the battery dies quickly, so the all-important charger is there too.

  Just seeing her phone sitting on the table makes her feel more reassured, Cherese tells me, especially in social situations. The presence of her smartphone makes her feel calmer, and it serves as a helpful heads-up to others that she’s always available to interact with them. “My phone affects my happiness. … Having my phone and knowing that it’s here if I need to get ready to use it, it’s just reassuring because I know that I kind of won’t have to talk to other people. Sometimes I’ll just use my phone as a way to not talk to people. So, it’s like, ‘Don’t you see that I’m on my phone, so don’t say anything to me.’ ”

  LIFE BEFORE SMARTPHONES VERSUS LIFE AFTER SMARTPHONES

  Cherese’s relationship to her smartphone is unique. She is certainly the only person I met who was willing to risk her life for it (or at least, the only one who openly admitted this). More common were the students who brought their smartphones with them everywhere, who were constantly checking them, who felt that smartphones brought a certain amount of really great convenience, and at the same time, a certain amount of really unfortunate responsibility. It was rare for students to speak only favorably about their smartphones, and even the ones who really liked their phones could still appreciate a forced vacation from them now and then.

  But even some of the same students who found great relief in having been forced by circumstances to give up their smartphones for a time sat with their phones in their laps for the entirety of our interview, cradling them, turning them around and around in their hands, though not checking them directly. It was rare that a student actually checked a phone during our conversation—it happened only a couple of times. And even though so many students longed for the opportunity to be unavailable for a while, to not have to be constantly “on,” there were few students who said they’d like to give up their phones entirely. There was a clear demarcation for them between life before and after the smartphone.

  “I remember my life before the smartphone,” says Matthew, whom we met earlier. “I had a flip phone, and I had to hit the same button, like, four times to get to the right letter and it was terrible, and now, everything’s so easy. My phone guesses what I’m trying to type. It’s really nice. I can just talk to my phone and it’ll type it for me. I don’t have to actually even have my hands on my phone when I’m in my car, to use it.” Matthew goes on and on about the wonders of this, and how it’s also made getting onto social media easier as well. But then, once Matthew finishes listing the many conveniences smartphones offer, he begins to mention the drawbacks. “But also, I feel like people just put it up to their face a lot of the time, and then there’s a lot of stuff that’s happening that they’re missing. Like, at lunch, I’ll pull up to a table with six people, and we’ll be eating, and five people will be on their phones and it’s just me and this one other guy talking.” Like so many others, Matthew is dismayed by the negative consequences of smartphones in social situations, especially if he’s out on a date. “If I’m on a date and my date pulls out her phone in the middle of me talking or something, I’m like, ‘I don’t want to date you at all now! We’re done! Like, put your phone away, I’m right here,’ ” he says, laughing.

  While this is a deal-breaker for Matthew when he is on a date, he finds it incredibly difficult to put away his own phone. “I feel like I, I can’t,” he says with a groan. “Especially lately. I dropped my phone, and it’s been weird, so my battery hasn’t been lasting long at all. I literally have to rush between classes to go charge my phone so I can know what’s happening. At any point there could be an email that is important for what I’m doing later, so I get real anxious if my phone’s dead or it’s not on me.” Matthew gives me an example. The previous night, he had been trying to text his mother and his girlfriend. His phone was dying, but his charger was across campus. “I could not concentrate, and I think after ten minutes of trying to fight it, I ended up walking all the way across campus to get my charger and walking back so I could plug it in to the wall.” He seems embarrassed and adds, “Yeah, it is bad.” I mention that it sounds like his life revolves around plugging in his phone, and he admits that before our interview his phone died again, so charging it is the first thing he’s going to do when we’re done. Then I ask if this stresses him out—that his phone isn’t currently charged. “I am a little stressed out,” he says. I tell him not to worry, we’re almost done. “Well, before my next class I’m going go charge it, so everything will be okay.”

  Matthew and his phone would be reunited soon.

  He wasn’t the only student I needed to reassure about this. One of the things I had to do quite often during interviews was tell students not to worry—the interview was coming to a close in just a few minutes, so very soon they could return to their smartphones.

  I heard from many other students about battery stresses, too—how, with smartphones, they don’t last long, so it’s important to carry a charger around with you. Some students asked to charge their phone in the room where we did our interview. I met one young woman in the Midwest who calls her smartphone “Meg”; she wasn’t the only one to give her phone a name. It was common for students to use phrases like “my smartphone and I are very close” or “my smartphone and I are always together,” as though their phone was another person to whom they felt great attachment, almost like a significant other. Some students laughed and said things like, “We have a complicated relationship.” They both loved and hated this object they carried with them everywhere, for better or worse.3

  The relational language the students used, the “we” and “my smartphone and me,” the tendency to personify smartphones in some way all make it seem as though smartphones are not merely objects to us—they are like people with whom we develop relationships. We love them, even cherish them, then resent or even hate the things they “demand” from us, like 24/7 availability. Smartphones can be as needy as an insecure boyfriend or girlfriend who constantly seeks reassurance that we’re still there, that we care.

  One student I interviewed claims that our relationship with our smartphones is like a romance—it’s really intense at first, and then you get more in control of things as you get used to it. “You sort of have to get the handle of it and master the way that you use it because it can be overbearing,” he says. “But when used properly, it’s a good thing.”

  Then there are students like Jackson, who likens leaving his smartphone at home to going out without his brain—a comment that makes both of us laugh. But the thing is, Jackson is serious, and we both know it. “Everywhere I go, my phone goes,” Jackson says. “My phone’s kind of old, so it tends to die, so I take my charger too, but yeah, everywhere I go, the phone has to go with me.” Jackson is the unusual student who never tries to get away from his phone, never wants a break from it, and seems untroubled by the constancy of its presence in his life and the way it compels him to be on it all the time. He doesn’t find his phone to be a distraction from what’s essential. His phone is essential. “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 is smiling, laughing, and nodding at me as he says this. “Those are the three essential things that get me through my day, I guess you could say. If I have my phone, I’m able to contact people; if I have my wallet, I can, you know, survive as far as finances; and my keys, of course, get me in my house and my car.”

  Like Jackson, Daphne lives for her smartphone. She has her phone in her pocket for our interview, she tells me. And then she goes on to offer a comprehensive list of every phone she’s ever owned, starting with her “first flip phone” and including five other “craze” phones, all the way up to the latest iPhone. It’s really important to Daphne that she has the most cutting-edge phone out there. She’s constantly on apps, or texting and chatting with people. “I always have the thing. Something might happen, someone need
s to talk to me, or my family needs to get ahold of me… . But then again I’m on my phone constantly texting my two close friends and my boyfriend all the time. And my grandma even texts me too because we just got her a smartphone because she wanted one.”

  I ask Daphne whether she feels that smartphones make it so that she has to be available all the time—that constant complaint I hear from her peers. No, it turns out. “I just feel like I’m going to miss out on something,” she says. “I download the apps just ’cause it’s there and just ’cause I got it. So when I’m bored waiting for a class or I’m looking through my phone, creeping people, seeing what’s going on, killing time.” Daphne insists that she’s not one of those people so enslaved to their phones that they would “jump in front of trains to go get their phones,” though. “Which I would never do,” she says, “because I’d just buy a new one. Because it’s easily replaceable… . And I’m like, there are people who jumped in front of a moving train to go get their phone! Which I don’t think is good, but it’s just, everyone is so attached and constantly needs to be talking to people and showing the world what they’re doing. Which is silly, but then again, I do it as well.”

  Daphne does try to draw the line and not check her phone in social situations, especially when she’s with her boyfriend. She has stayed off her phone on vacation (her mother made her) and during a church retreat, and after a while “it feels good when it’s not there and you have nothing to worry about,” she says. “But then again you feel like you need it.” Daphne expresses a deep desire to be with her smartphone at all times. It’s a security blanket and seems to give her emotional support.