The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  I ask Lauren what it’s like after she deletes certain accounts.

  “It’s great,” she says enthusiastically. “I don’t have to be on my phone that much anymore. It’s awesome. I can actually interact with people face to face. It’s enjoyable to know that people can still interact without having to use social media.” Lauren may go back and forth, deleting and reactivating her accounts, but she’s already made up her mind about the role of social media—or the lack of one—in her life going forward. “I’m so over it,” she says. “I’m just waiting for the day that I finally delete all of them, and then I don’t have to worry about it, and just get a flip phone. I’m just waiting for the day where I finally get fed up with it and I just go change my iPhone in for a flip phone and just call people on the phone to get ahold of them.” Lauren credits her childhood for her unusual attitude. Her parents were always pushing her and her siblings outside to play. They didn’t have regular access to computers and smartphones.

  Lauren has a plan for quitting all of it, the social media accounts and the smartphone too—and permanently. “I’ve really thought about this a lot,” she says, laughing. She’ll do it by the time she’s a junior, before she has to worry about getting hired for jobs. Lauren has imbibed that lesson about the importance of maintaining a professional presence on social media, but rather than fix her profiles, her answer is to quit. The thought that future employers are watching her online makes her so anxious that she’d rather have no social media presence at all. Employers will have nothing to find and therefore nothing to hold against her.

  “I want to be able to get a job, and if they’re going to be looking at my social media sites, I don’t want them to see what I follow and possibly think that that would impact who I am as a person, so they can prejudge me,” Lauren says. “It has to all go away so I can get a job. I don’t want anything to affect me getting a job. Because that’s the goal, after four years, you have to get a job. And if social media is going to be a factor in that, then I’ll just delete it.”

  I ask Lauren if—after she does get a job—she’ll restart her accounts, especially because so many students seem to think that “maintaining a social media presence” is also an important professional responsibility. “No,” she says, shaking her head. Then she backtracks a bit. “If I really needed another account, I’d probably just make a new one with the job, and just make it all about the job.”

  Lauren also mentioned her dislike of smartphones several times. She is pretty old-school for her age—she doesn’t like to text, preferring to actually talk to people on the phone. Despite her dislike of the device, though, “It’s attached to me at the hip,” she says. She tries “really very hard” to stay off it. It’s distracting to both her schoolwork and her relationships. So, I wonder, why does she take her phone everywhere? “It’s an expensive piece of an accessory,” she says, matter-of-factly. “It was two hundred dollars, and I really don’t want to lose it or misplace it.” Plus, it keeps her informed and is good in case of emergencies. Every chance Lauren gets, though, she’ll leave her smartphone at her parents’ house—for weeks at a time.

  Leaving her phone behind provokes the same sort of joy she experiences when she quits social media. “It’s amazing,” she tells me. “It reminds me of what I was like before I got my phone. It was great before cell phones,” she says wistfully, then laughs. “Yeah. It’s great! I don’t have to worry about whether I lose my phone or not, and I don’t have to worry about anybody trying to contact me. It’s just really freeing. If people need to contact me, they’ll find a way, but, I mean, other than that, sometimes you just need a break from your phone, and need a break from everybody constantly trying to get ahold of you.”

  I ask Lauren what quitting might do to her relationships with others. It shouldn’t affect them at all, she tells me. “If it does, then you have the wrong friends because friendship is based on face-to-face interaction, and you have to spend time with people,” Lauren says. “You can’t just sit there and have a relationship over the phone. That’s not a relationship. You need to actually see them face to face and go do stuff with them, go to the movies or go and do something with your life, don’t just sit there on your phone the whole time.” Lauren pauses for a moment, then offers some of her last words on the subject. “I look at the bright side of things,” she says. “But I feel like social media just looks at the glass half empty rather than half full.”

  ELISE: THE GREAT SOCIAL MEDIA PURGE

  Elise, a tall, beautiful biology major at a Catholic university, finds the intense effort to get “likes” on Facebook exhausting—and disillusioning, so much so that she describes it as “a really, really dangerous, vicious cycle to get into.” To avoid succumbing to this vicious cycle, and to stop having to face this incredibly upsetting behavior in all of her friends, this past summer Elise shut down all her social media accounts for a full month.

  Her brother calls it “The Purge.”

  “I just deleted it for a month, and it was awesome,” she says, with excitement in her voice. “It was really great. I only put it back up, coming back to school.” Elise wanted an easy way to stay in touch with family from home. Currently, she’s on Facebook and Instagram. But “The Purge” has had a lasting effect on Elise. Not only does she use her accounts less frequently than she used to, but she’s also decided to make “The Purge” an annual, or maybe even biannual, ritual. “I’m just going to shut all my social media down for a month, and that’ll be great.”

  I ask her why she likes this purge so much.

  “It was just awesome because there were no distractions,” she says. “I worked at a dentist’s office this summer, and it would be so easy sitting back in the break room by myself, to be on Facebook or Instagram while I was eating.” Then Elise would get home from work and do the same thing. This constant checking, looking at the same things again and again, really bothered her. Quitting, Elise explains, allowed her to focus more and to do other things she loves, such as read. Instead of being on Facebook in the break room, Elise would sit and read a book. She quickly realized how much she preferred reading to constant scrolling. Elise stopped thinking so much about what everyone else was doing while she was at work, whether they were on vacation, or what they were posting about their summers. Being off social media made Elise pay attention to her priorities. “While I was doing [The Purge],” she says, “this definitely let me focus more on what’s really important to me. And, that is not my friend’s post about her vacation. That is not important. Am I happy that she’s having such a wonderful time? Absolutely. But she can tell me about that when she gets back.”

  Elise also loved not checking “fifteen times a day” to see how many “likes” she got on a photo. It really bothers Elise how much she used to care about getting “likes,” and this was one way of breaking the habit. Elise also learned to call her friends up to talk to them instead of going on social media to see what they were up to. Her entire “mindset” about herself and her friendships changed. Elise returns again and again to the subject of how upsetting it is to see what her friends are doing on social media, and also how much it upsets her when she sees her friends in person and they’re on their phones, obsessing about their posts. Elise has learned to pay attention to how her friends “operate in person,” and she really hates it if a friend spends time on social media when they’re together. Such people go down a notch in Elise’s estimation. Now, she feels like most of the central people in her life aren’t the type to be on their phones all the time, especially not when they’re with her.

  Elise likens “The Purge” to a juice cleanse. It has a religious analogue, too: Lent and fasting. Engaging in a social media fast, of sorts, truly felt cleansing to Elise. In fact, as we continue talking about it, Elise’s sense of how long and how often she might purge expands. She begins to imagine getting to the end of year and being able to say she was off of social media for three months, not just one or two. Or even five months. Then she imagines w
hat it would be like to get off of social media permanently. “It’ll probably get to the point after undergrad, I’ll probably delete my Instagram,” she says. “I think after [college], you’re working in grad school or you’re at a job and, you know, you really shouldn’t be spending time on Instagram.” Social media is for “young adults,” Elise thinks, definitely not adults. She might end up keeping Facebook, though, to keep in touch with her aunts in Florida. But at the moment, she’s not sure. You never know, she might quit it all for good after she graduates.

  QUITTING (TEMPORARILY) IS TOTALLY TRENDY

  I was surprised to learn how often frustration with social media led people to quit, at least temporarily. Even those students who didn’t find social media all that troubling usually considered quitting at least one of their accounts at some point or another. The urge—the compulsion—to constantly scroll through the Facebook timeline and Twitter feed bothers them. They regard it as an addiction of sorts and wish they could learn to control it. Most can’t seem to set those limits, however.

  Which is why quitting altogether becomes appealing.

  From the student who quit Tumblr for a while because she was “afraid that it was becoming an emotional crutch,” to the one who got off social media on the advice of a therapist, it’s very common for college students to take breaks from certain social media platforms, at least temporarily.1 In fact, in the online survey, 68 percent of the students who chose to answer a question about whether they’d ever quit any of their social media accounts, either temporarily or permanently, said they had.2

  Most interesting of all are the reasons students do this, as well as the caveats they give about leaving or staying. Among the 32 percent who said “No, I’ve never quit,” their answers were often followed by hedging. These students qualified their “no” statements with “buts” that explained how, though they’ve never quit, they curb their usage in other ways, they’ve “unfollowed people,” and that’s been “liberating.” They’ve deleted “content,” they use their accounts less than they used to or don’t use them much at all, and they either think about quitting or plan to quit in the near future. So, even the students who’ve never quit have thought about quitting or limiting their usage.

  Among the students who have quit—some permanently, some temporarily—their reasons are all over the map. Some feel they are “too obsessed” or “too addicted,” and they don’t like “how compulsively” they check it, wanting to “break the habit.” Others quit because people are “mean,” there’s too much drama, it makes them depressed, and it “was taking over” their lives.

  Students’ reasons for, and their feelings about, quitting and coming back or the possibility of staying off a particular platform permanently are myriad. But it is clear that students often think about quitting or often feel the need to quit (if not permanently), and many of them do actually quit at some point.

  Elise’s “purge” was a calculated effort to enact a temporary, structured break, whereas with Mae, the young woman who was bullied, shutting down her accounts was a way to escape emotional pain and anguish. The more conversations I had, the more I heard about the many reasons and creative methods students have for limiting their social media activity. There was the young woman who created a “Don’t Touch” folder on her smartphone where she would put her social media apps at various times of the year—especially during busy academic times—as a way of convincing herself to lay off things for a while, but also to avoid having to recreate her accounts when she went back. There was the hockey player who hadn’t yet quit but who had dreams of quitting. He spoke wistfully about how people used to memorize each other’s phone numbers and how he used to head out to shoot pucks during his free time, but now he finds himself spending time online instead of doing the things he really loves. He fantasized about the day when he’d be at a place, both careerwise and socially, where quitting all his accounts would become feasible.

  Take Javier, a senior philosophy major at a Midwestern Catholic college, who had been completely off social media accounts for eight months when we met. He and his girlfriend decided to quit together. He was thrilled about it. His relationship to social media had a definitive emotional arc: it started with amusement, then led to disenchantment and eventually full-on depression, which is why he stopped. Mark Zuckerberg makes it really hard to quit, he tells me, because Facebook keeps trying to lure you back. Javier has resisted so far and says he will continue to do so. He felt like he had a “chemical addiction” to social media, and quitting was really difficult at first—it created a “hole” in his life that he needed to find ways to fill—but it helped that he and his girlfriend were in it together. To get over the addiction, Javier had to find new ways of getting that “chemical happiness,” most of which involve “real-world interaction,” he says, which social media had really limited. Now he uses his time more constructively, which he really likes. He studies more, gets better grades, and spends a lot of time reading the “real news.”

  Javier refers back to what he calls his “chemical addiction to Facebook” multiple times. The addiction, he says, had to do with posting things solely to get “likes.” They meant so much to him, even though he knew they were meaningless bits of affirmation. “That’s what made me depressed,” he explains. “I was spending so much time working for these things that were meaningless … .you don’t really know what you’re working for. You’re just working for the next flag to pop up, but after that, then it’s like the same exact goal all over again, and nobody really cares beyond you. So I’d say it was a relief [to quit]. Maybe chemically there were some things lacking when I finally gave it up, but intellectually I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, yeah! I hate Facebook!’ ” he adds, laughing. Javier has all kinds of strong feelings about social media. He says it made him judgmental of both himself and others, and he didn’t like this at all. He felt bad about himself and others nearly constantly.

  There’s a downside to not having it anymore, of course. Javier is a little clueless about events on campus and what his friends are up to. Sometimes he doesn’t get invited to things because people do all their inviting on Facebook. Despite this, he’s upbeat about his decision. “In my heart, I’m happier getting left out than getting brought into that mess, just because of the way it made me feel,” he says. “I don’t think it’s worth it at all to get invited to a party just to feel that horrible about yourself.” Some people on campus find it confusing to meet someone who doesn’t have Facebook—now that he’s not on social media anymore, he can see how addicted other people are. “I would strongly advise people not to spend a significant portion of their life on Facebook or social media,” he says.

  When I ask Javier if he thinks he’ll ever go back, he shakes his head. “Yeah, I don’t ever want to go back to it,” he says. “I think I’ll just send emails to people and meet with them in person.”

  Amy, a senior at her public university, explains, emphatically, that she considers quitting “all the time.” When I ask her to clarify (does she quit and get back on, or just think about quitting?), I find out that, like Lauren, Amy was “quitting all the time,” though now she’s “found a way around [this].”

  “Every so often, I would deactivate my Facebook because I got sick of seeing what everyone was doing,” she says. “But [eventually] either I would want to Facebook stalk someone, or post pictures, or see pictures, or see someone, something like that, so I’d always go back. So I would disconnect for a little bit, but it would always suck me back in.” The workaround Amy figured out allowed her to “quit” only the parts that bothered her. “I wound up unfollowing everybody on Facebook, so when I log into Facebook, nothing comes up on my newsfeed. So I can post my pictures, and I can see when I’m tagged in pictures, and I can go and look at my friends’ walls and write on their walls, but it’s not thrown in my face, everyone’s events and pictures and thoughts and things like that. So, it’s working for me now.”

  I ask Amy why she likes this set
up better.

  “Everyone’s all up in your face about their opinion and what they’re doing,” she responds. “I think it’s easier if I can pick and choose what I see, and especially if I’m just looking at my close friends, because I’m interested in what they’re doing and what they’re thinking. It just kind of waters down the whole thing for me.”

  The issue of “picking and choosing what we see” is a theme that comes up often when students tell me why they try so hard to limit access to their accounts, or even quit for a time. Feeling left out, experiencing hurt when looking at someone else’s timeline, and getting stressed or sad that everyone else’s lives are better than yours are among the most common reasons why people quit or curb their usage.

  This is certainly the case with Hae.

  HAE: IS FACEBOOK USING YOU?

  Hae is a shy, first-year student at a Christian university in the West, who shows up for our interview wearing a suit and heels. She’s serious, studious, “100 percent Korean,” she tells me, and very devout in her Christian faith. One of the most difficult things about college for Hae is learning to balance her time. She has become overwhelmed trying to juggle her studies with her other responsibilities, plus trying to find her way socially. Lately, Hae’s been struggling with the meaning of life and what (if anything) that has to do with academics and grades, something at which she’s always excelled. She doesn’t want grades to rule her life anymore, she says with a heavy sigh.

  Hae is on both Facebook and Instagram—but only because college practically requires them for communication, in her opinion. She’s just coming off of a four-month social media hiatus. It turns out that Facebook and Instagram were getting in the way of life’s meaning. In high school Hae started going on mission trips and realized that it was the face-to-face interactions she had with people—and not whether people are “liking” her photos on Instagram—that made life feel worthwhile. Hae got tired of “hanging out with people always trying to take pictures of the moments of fun that [they’re] having, and trying to post them, and seeing if [they] can get one-hundred-plus likes and seeing who comments on it, who doesn’t.”