The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  “It’s just that I feel empty when I don’t have my phone,” she tells me.

  Stacie, a junior, speaks at first about how much she loves going on camping trips where there is “zero service, so there’s zero communication.” She “loves it and it’s so stress-free.” Stacie thinks that there is “something really relaxing” about not having your smartphone with you, and that “you become a lot more self-aware without your phone.”

  Despite this, not only would Stacie never want to go back to a time when smartphones didn’t exist, but she believes we simply can’t. We’re too dependent on them, even for basic things like getting around. “People don’t know how to use maps anymore, they don’t know how to use dictionaries, and I think that if you took a person to the next state and put them on a corner and then just left them, they would need a phone, they would absolutely need a phone,” she says. “Everything is so easy now that we don’t really have to be independent, you know? We’re dependent on our phones.” If smartphones disappeared, Stacie thinks “we’d all be lost.”

  Stacie sometimes tries to leave her phone in the next room, so she’s not always checking it. But both she and her friends go crazy if they try to get in touch with someone and don’t get an immediate answer. They get mad, and they panic. Even though taking a break from your smartphone can be “relaxing,” Stacie also claims “it’s kind of scary, you know, not having that crutch,” the feeling of holding a smartphone in your hand and knowing it’s there with you. “I think you can absolutely just leave your phone at home, but is it safe?” Stacie wonders. “That’s the real question, you know? It’s one thing to be like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to communicate with the world, I just want to be at peace and with myself,’ but it’s no longer safe, especially for a girl my age. It’s definitely not safe to just go out without a phone and do whatever you want. So, you know, you really can’t be without communication.”

  That comment about safety—that it’s “not safe” to go about anywhere without a phone—came up again and again, nearly compulsively so, as did the one about how we “must” be with our phones at all times because you never know when there might be an emergency and someone needs to reach you or you need to reach someone else. Even though entire generations grew up without such “safety measures,” students lean on this notion because it makes them powerless to put their phones down. Being without a phone just isn’t practical, since you never know when tragedy might strike.

  UNPLUGGING … MAYBE FOREVER?

  Occasionally, I did meet a student who loathed what smartphones have done to our lives and fantasized about going back to a time before smartphones existed or forward to a time when they would no longer be needed. These students regarded smartphones as a kind of necessary evil.

  When Marcus walks into the interview room, the first thing I notice is the colorful black eye on his face. He’s tall, muscular, with short, curly hair and has the look of a tough guy. But as soon as we start to talk, it’s clear that he’s sweet and sincere—the black eye is from playing football. He’s very engaged in his Catholic campus’s life, too. In addition to being on the football team, he’s heavily involved in his business major.

  Marcus cannot stop talking about his smartphone. It starts off as a love story.

  “I don’t want to sound like I’m in love with it, but you know, it has my agenda on it, it has my work schedule,” he says. “Honestly, probably texting is the least I do on it. I use my phone, you know, [for] pictures, my music’s on there, … .so I use my phone a lot. I charge it, like, one and a half times a day, so it’s definitely a necessity, I would say, in my life.” Marcus, like everyone else, feels he needs to be accessible 24/7 and tells me so.

  But the love story between Marcus and his smartphone quickly takes a turn for the worse. “It’s a shame,” he says, that having a smartphone makes him feel like he needs to be accessible all the time. “But, you know, on my bucket list, I have ‘retire,’ and then I have ‘get rid of my cell phone.’ You know: get a home phone.” I am surprised that among his dreams would be getting rid of his smartphone. I ask him to explain why.

  “I did not want a cell phone,” he says emphatically. “I think it controls everybody’s life. I just, I don’t want one, but you know, I have to have one.” Marcus believes that it is impossible to survive modern life without one, especially as a college student; smartphones are practically a requirement—even if having one makes you feel unhealthy as a person and damages your relationships. “People are using electronics to communicate, and it’s efficient for me, so it’s working to my advantage,” he says. “But I would love a life where I just didn’t need a cell phone. Where if I told somebody I was going to be at a meeting in a week, at 2:00 p.m. in this room, I would be there and so would they. You know, I wouldn’t need to keep texting them and reminding them. That’s a world I would like to see, but I don’t think that’s happening,” he adds with a chuckle.

  When Marcus goes away with his family or friends, he leaves his smartphone behind. But he definitely believes that, for business purposes, he’ll need to carry his smartphone at all times. It’s unrealistic to think that he won’t. “I’m a marketing minor, so social media is how you get things out,” he explains. “You can get a thousand people to join a Facebook event and you know that can boost your sales, boost revenue, boost profit, and that’s the world I’m in right now.” But talk of how much Marcus will need to use social media and his smartphone for his career leads him right back to talk of retiring. “You know, I’d prefer to live my life without it, but it’s not going happen,” he says, a bit sadly. “I’ve come to the realization that, when I retire, then I’m going to get rid of it. That will happen. It’s going to happen.”

  When I travel a little farther north, to a different Catholic university, I meet Stephanie, a senior who has a smartphone but hates it. In fact, Stephanie’s exact words are “I hate the thing,” which tells me right away that she isn’t the type to personify her smartphone. “I mean, I’m connected to it,” she admits. “If I can’t find it, I freak out a little bit.” Part of Stephanie’s hate stems from her worries about the object itself: Will she lose it? Will it break? What if she forgets it somewhere? Smartphones are expensive, and Stephanie doesn’t want to be out all the money she spent to buy hers. She does find it convenient, though. “It beats carrying around a laptop,” she says, and she thinks it’s helpful for staying connected to her mom. “And, you know, if she forgets to feed the dog she can tell me,” Stephanie says.

  Stephanie rarely takes a vacation from her smartphone, but “it feels good” when she does. “It’s liberating, you know? You’re not clinging to this thing that’s in your pocket or your purse and you can just do something for yourself. Like, you don’t have to worry about someone texting you or missing a call. Or even going on social media. You can just go out and just appreciate the world,” she adds, chuckling. Stephanie notices a “huge difference” in her mental state when she has her smartphone on her as opposed to when she doesn’t. When she has it with her, she worries about what everyone else is doing, but if she leaves it home, she thinks about what she wants to do instead. What’s worse, smartphones make us more dependent on social media, in Stephanie’s opinion, and “being dependent on social media means losing a bit of yourself” because you become so focused on everyone else. “So, getting rid of [your smartphone] helps you reflect on yourself. And so being attached to [your smartphone], making it a part of yourself, takes away from you, if that makes sense? It’s like, a leech or something.”

  Stephanie—true to her philosophy-major self—takes time to imagine what her favorite philosopher, Heraclitus, would say about social media and smartphones. “Heraclitus was very much about change, and he says change is a good thing, seeking knowledge is always a good thing, also self-discovery,” she explains. “People are constantly changing, the Internet’s constantly changing, he would accept that. However, the truth part of it, finding yourself, you’re distracted by that with socia
l media. Social media is distracting you from finding your true self. I think that’s what he would think.” Stephanie pauses to reflect a little more broadly. “I feel like the world is losing its self-identity,” she says. “You know, you have people looking down so much at their phones they don’t get the chance to look up and see the world around them. And social media can also prevent you from meeting someone, who might end up being very important later. You’re just so tied to this little device in your hand, and I think that’s really unfortunate. I wish people could just break this habit, but habits die hard. The way our generation is going, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to change … and, I mean, it’s unfortunate.”

  SMARTPHONES ARE HERE TO STAY—AND THEY ARE EVERYWHERE

  Many college students resent the ways in which smartphones are changing people’s expectations, and many of them long to take breaks, even if it’s difficult to do so. But students love their smartphones, too, and the devices are ubiquitous among the college population. Only 4 percent of the students I interviewed, and 5 percent who answered this question in the online survey, did not have smartphones.4

  For the most part, the students who do have smartphones always have them on hand, and many students draw comfort from their presence—a kind of reassurance that all is well.

  “The act of having my phone in my hand probably brings some kind of comfort to me, like, that’s my armchair,” one young man explained. He used to think this was kind of a negative thing, to be so dependent on his phone, and would try to convince himself to stay off of it, but lately he’s changed his mind. As he told me, “If my phone is my armchair, I don’t think it’s that bad. It’s not bad enough. The benefits outweigh the drawbacks.”

  This seems to be the prevailing feeling. College students may be frustrated and even dismayed by how smartphones have changed their lives and especially how they can affect—negatively—social situations, but almost no one is ready to give them up. Some students fantasize about going back to a flip phone or look forward to someday “retiring” from their smartphone, and students may indeed take breaks and engage in negotiations around the extent of their smartphone usage and their availability, but they are too accustomed to the conveniences of smartphones to actually live without them.

  In Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle also writes of the ways in which we both lament the changes technology has wrought and at the same time “resist” changing our relationships to it. She, too, heard interviewees in a workplace speak about their smartphones being problematic on many levels, but when she asks “why they continue to bring their devices to meetings, they say, ‘For emergencies.’ ”5

  There is no doubt that students love the convenience smartphones offer them, the easy access to just about anything they want, the constant availability of the Internet, the GPS function, how smartphones make everything “immediate,” that smartphones make it easy for them to keep track of their busy lives and commitments, that they can play games and listen to their music on them. A few students made simple effusive comments about their smartphones, such as “It is my life,” “I love it—all of it,” “It’s like having the entire world in the palm of my hand.” One student went so far as to say, “It makes me feel like I can do anything!” There were a number, though, who felt that even these positives were also negatives, and that smartphones were ultimately “a curse in disguise,” in the words of one; others, when asked what they liked most about their smartphones, replied, “Very little.”

  There is a prevailing sense that if someone just did away with the things, all of us could get on with our lives in happier and better ways. The burden we are carrying around because of our phones would be lifted if they would only disappear off the face of this earth. These tiny, light, pretty, shiny devices have come to represent an outsized weight upon our shoulders—we look at them and see our to-do lists, our responsibilities, other people’s needs, our perpetual inability to keep up, the ways in which others constantly judge us, everyone’s successes amid all our failures, among so many other stresses—stresses that feel more like thousands of pounds than a few ounces. At the same time, we see them as our escape from boredom and loneliness, our connection to loved ones and friends, our guide when we are lost, the archive of our best hair days and most memorable moments, the diaries where we place all our most intimate feelings, hopes, and dreams.

  It is clear that students’ relationships with their smartphones are intense and often fraught—much like the relationships we have with other people. Indeed, students are at least as attached to their phones as to their friends. And while they might sometimes wish they had never met their smartphones, ultimately they can’t give them up.

  Or can they?

  11

  TAKING A TIMEOUT FROM THE TIMELINE

  STUDENTS WHO QUIT SOCIAL MEDIA AND WHY

  I went to bed on Instagram, I woke up on Instagram, and I most likely went to the bathroom looking at my Instagram. That’s why it had to stop. No object or person should have that type of stronghold on you.

  Zooey, first-year, evangelical Christian college

  I have deactivated my Facebook account several times just for temporary reasons. If I start becoming too hard on myself and thinking that I need to be doing what everyone else is doing or having more fun or traveling more or just any number of things, than I delete the account and make myself take a break. The first couple of days are hard to not just log back in and check what’s going on, but the more time I spend away from Facebook, the easier it got, and once I even got to the point where I no longer thought about checking Facebook. Eventually I reactivated the account because it was summer break and I was bored. But I did find that I was happier without Facebook and I hope to delete it completely soon. I think it is an unhealthy obsession for me and I’d be better off without it in the long run.

  Tamara, senior, public university

  LAUREN: I’LL QUIT SOON

  Lauren, of the dating fail, is carrying eighteen credit hours this semester and also has a part-time job. She’s a sophomore at a Midwestern public university, and in a perfect world, she might try to join a sorority next year, but who knows if she’ll have the time? As Lauren begins to answer my questions, tell me about her life, and share her opinions, I’m laughing nearly constantly. She’s hilarious—by far the funniest student I interviewed.

  What I learn quickly, loudly, and clearly is that Lauren hates social media, hates smartphones. She’s on social media, she has a smartphone, she just loathes them. First of all, she thinks people lie constantly online. “There are millions of people that lie on social media daily,” she says. “There could be authentic people, but the likelihood of that happening is unlikely because I think people have social media just because they want to be a different person to other people, and change other people’s perspective on how they’re looked at.” I ask Lauren if she ever wants to appear differently to other people. “No,” she says emphatically. For Lauren, social media is purely a tool for staying in touch with family and friends.

  But then she sighs and rolls her eyes. “I don’t know why I have social media,” she says. “I keep deleting it and deleting it, and then I keep reactivating it.”

  It turns out that this is something that many students do, but Lauren expresses extreme frustration with herself about constantly going back and forth. She seems to suffer from a kind of social media whiplash. “Some days I wake up and I’m just annoyed with all of it, so then I’ll deactivate all my accounts, and then in a few weeks, people will be like, ‘Oh, did you see that Tweet?’ or ‘Did you see that Facebook thing?’ and so I reactivate it, because I want to stay involved and see what’s going on on social media.” She sighs once more and gives me an exasperated look. “Then I deactivate it again,” she adds.

  For example, she tells me, just this morning, before our interview, she deactivated her Twitter account. “I just thought, ‘Man, I really hate Twitter today,’ and I deleted it, but I’m sure in a few days, I’ll reacti
vate it again.” Her reason for quitting is that she thinks people express too much negativity on Twitter, and she just doesn’t need any more negativity in her life.

  Lauren has done the same deactivate-reactivate dance with Facebook. Her account is currently active but only because she unfriended a lot of people so she can see only the important ones. The people she unfriended don’t seem to have noticed, either, which cracks Lauren up. “No one’s said anything to me,” she says. “So that shows how much of an effect I have on people.”

  Her reason for deactivating Facebook—besides the fact that she’s just too busy with school and work—is that she finds it depressing. Her departures from it have lasted as long as six months. The only account Lauren has never deleted is Instagram. She likes looking at the pictures, she says with a shrug. They don’t seem to bother her.

  The first time she quit a social media account was a few years ago, when some girls started calling her a “slut” on Twitter. Lauren says she never cared that girls were engaging in behavior that might amount to cyberbullying—she feels pretty immune to the name-calling, and thought they were just being dumb—but it was really annoying that they were doing it in public. So she quit.

  Social media, smartphones, they’re a burden, according to Lauren. They ruin friendships and cause drama. If someone posts a picture of Lauren with a couple of her friends and another friend sees it and feels left out, suddenly everyone is fighting. It’s just so tiring. I ask Lauren if she ever feels jealous of what she sees people post on social media, or if she ever finds herself comparing herself to others, too. “Oh, yeah, all the time,” she says. “But then I realize that I’m beautiful and I am who I am, and there’s nothing that can change that.”