The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  Hae tells me that she deleted her social media accounts during her senior year of high school. “I was a lot happier this summer without [social media],” she says. “I didn’t have to think about my old friends who were going to different colleges, and I had a select group of friends that I would talk to, and so with everybody else, I didn’t need to see their partying pictures over the summer and didn’t need to see the concerts that they went to. I could just kind of focus on myself and spend time with my family and just enjoy my summer without those kinds of social pressures in the back of your mind, like oh, I’m here and it’s a Friday night, at home with my family, and there’s other people who are obviously out doing other fun things that I’m not.” As with Amy, not having to feel left out is a big reason that getting off social media was a relief, but Hae also says that it helped her be “more present-minded” and it allowed her to focus on herself for once.

  Hae’s friends were shocked when she quit. But when they protested, she told them she had to “because I hated it.” Her friends were bummed they could no longer tag Hae in things, but Hae liked that they couldn’t. “[Social media] just consumed so much time and energy and emotions and I just didn’t want it to govern my day,” Hae says. “Or the way that I feel on a particular occasion because I wasn’t invited to something and I saw pictures of all my friends.”

  I ask Hae if there was a specific event that provoked her to delete her accounts. One reason, she tells me, was that she’d gotten her Facebook account in middle school, and she had too many “friends” who weren’t friends at all. Hae didn’t like that she was spending so much time paying attention to the lives of people who weren’t part of her life in any real, meaningful way. “The other is because I just knew subconsciously in the back of my mind that as a girl it’s really easy to be insecure,” she explains. “And I have been insecure in my life. I just didn’t feel like I needed it. I just wanted to delete it for that reason. Just to liberate myself.”

  Hae is “kind of sad” that she has reactivated accounts, but even sadder that she “only lasted four months” away from social media. What makes her saddest of all is that not being on social media is nearly impossible. She only went back because so many people at her college (including professors) use social media to communicate. Hae was also having trouble meeting people when she first got to campus. “I feel like it’s sad that social media has become such a big part of people being able to develop relationships, but it is something that I think has become so ingrained in our society, it’s just not going to go away any time soon.”

  Now that she is back on social media, Hae is doing some things differently. She started over completely—she didn’t just reactivate her pages. She doesn’t accept friend requests from people she doesn’t really know, and she accepts requests only if they are people she wants to see on her newsfeed. Hae has made it so that she’s looking at posts only when she wants to see people they are doing. This is also a way to protect her privacy. She doesn’t want anyone who isn’t close to her reading what she writes or seeing her photographs.

  Hae is also more conscious about how social media can really do a number on a girl—and she’s vowed to not let this happen again. “I think it does mess with you mentally,” she says. “I realize now, looking back, how the Internet is not a safe place to just openly say what you’re feeling and to openly post pictures… . I just don’t like the idea of not being in control of who knows what I’m thinking and who knows what I’m saying.” Hae is doing everything she can to maintain control of her accounts now, to not allow them to make her feel hurt or out of control. She’s trying to use Facebook and Instagram only in ways that are useful to her, and that serve her current needs either socially or academically. In the best way she knows how, Hae is struggling to use social media without losing what considers meaningful to her.

  KATIE: IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT SOCIAL MEDIA!

  Katie, a senior at her public university, is sweet and reserved as she patiently answers my initial questions. When we start talking about social media, however, Katie’s entire demeanor changes. She becomes passionate. Katie deplores posting all the time—she feels like this is a trap people fall into. And like Hae, Katie is worried that social media is sapping the meaning from our lives, or at least from hers. “I don’t want to end up feeling like things I do don’t have meaning unless everyone else knows about it,” she says.

  Katie didn’t always feel this way. She used to love going on to Instagram. She enjoyed the constant stream of photos from people she knew. But she quickly became disillusioned with it—and with all social media. As Katie scrolled through everyone’s updates, she began to realize that people post only “the bright side of things, but never bad things.” This lack of honesty, the distortion of reality, really bothers her. “I just feel like it makes people seem fake,” she says. Plus, it stymies communication with her friends. If everybody sees what’s happening with everyone else on social media, then they feel like they don’t need to make personal contact anymore. On one level, this fits conveniently into everyone’s very busy lives. But on another, Katie has realized that just because people appear happy on social media doesn’t mean that they are happy in real life—and friends going through tough times can end up feeling isolated and alone as a result.

  Katie has quit her various social media accounts in the past. She got rid of Snapchat at one point, though then she felt left out because her friends were constantly “snapping” each other, and she wouldn’t know what was they were talking about half the time. So she went back. “Then I’ve gotten rid of all of [my social media accounts] at one point last year,” she says. “When finals came, I was like, ‘I don’t want any distractions. I want to just be studying, not worrying about stupid stuff.’ So I just got rid of it for, like, three weeks, almost a month. At first, I’d take my phone out and go to check on social media, and be like, ‘Crap, I deleted the apps.’ But after a while, like, after two weeks, it kind of became regular.” Once Katie got used to not checking her social media apps, she enjoyed not having them. She began interacting with people in person more often. She focused on what was happening with herself more than what everyone else was doing.

  But when winter break started, Katie downloaded everything again.

  It’s one thing to quit for a while; it’s another to stay off permanently. Katie believes it’s very hard to maintain an active social life if you are off of social media entirely. She resents this, however, and wishes she could quit altogether, forever. Katie thinks about quitting all the time, and her boyfriend fully supports this. They go back and forth a lot, discussing whether they should take the plunge.

  But they never do it.

  Katie really does not want to feel like she’s missing out on what everybody’s doing, though she suspects—she hopes—that this will change as she gets older. “I feel like the older I get, the less and less I care about it. So maybe eventually, I’ll just get rid of it, but not really worry about it.”

  Katie longs for a world entirely without social media. She thinks life would simply be better if it did not exist. As she elaborates, “I think that if everyone didn’t have it, life would be a lot better, but the fact that if I just got rid of it and everyone else had it, it wouldn’t be that much better because then I would just feel left out.”

  Katie hopes that social media will have disappeared by the time she has children. “I hope by then it’s gone,” she says with a laugh. “There’s no need to say everything that’s on your mind. You don’t need to post it to feel like you’ve gotten it off your chest. You don’t need to have self-validation from social media. You don’t need to post things to feel good about yourself or get a certain amount of ‘likes’ to feel good about yourself,” she adds. Katie’s wish for her future children sounds like a wish for herself.

  ARE THE GOOD THINGS GOOD ENOUGH?

  There is an underlying angst among college students about how much time they spend on social media, as well as how some of th
ese platforms affect their feelings about themselves and others. Many students engage in a cycle of quitting and returning, then regretting it.3 For some, quitting simply reveals their ambivalence about the medium, but for others it belies a high level of stress and a desire to escape the pressure and unpleasant emotions that come with social media.

  Regardless of which category they fall into, the young women and men I interviewed and surveyed are searching for rules.

  Right now, social media is a vast and largely unregulated sea of information, emotion, drama, competition, showing off, pressure, expectation, and a million other things. It’s still incredibly new, in its infancy, really, and society has yet to catch up to this dramatic change in our world and how we live in it (or escape from it). We’ve yet to truly begin to unpack what it means for humanity, ethics, the construction of self, gender, race, our socioeconomic situations, and the enterprise of education. And this leaves young people floundering.

  At the moment, many of us are social media gluttons, unable and often unwilling to curb our appetites, trying to navigate through a never-ending battle of wills against our brain’s desire for that quick fix amid a consumer culture determined to stoke our addictions with ever more clever platforms and devices.

  Amid this, young adults are searching for a footing somewhere, a way to anchor themselves in this sea, because too much of anything, including something we love, can eventually make us sick. Students are searching for rules and, not finding them, are making up their own.

  They want boundaries. They want guidance. They want to talk about their experiences of social media and their struggles with it, to try to figure out how to better live with this new force that has taken over our lives.

  They want to be “liberated” from it, in the words of several, in the sense that they feel controlled by it and even used by it, and they want to regain control.

  The genius of social media is that the more people join a network, the more difficult it is for others not to join it. This has made Mark Zuckerberg and others a lot of money, but it has also made a lot of people miserable. Social media has become so embedded in our lives that quitting can make social—even professional—life impossible, especially for younger people. Even if they work up the nerve to quit, and are much happier as a result, and even if they aren’t sucked back in by simple curiosity, it is very difficult to live your life—especially college life—without it. When everyone communicates by Facebook, when everyone is expected to be on social media, it becomes a burden not to be. And usually that burden is too much to bear, so even the students who quit for a while, eventually go back.

  Plus, there is plenty that makes the allure of social media difficult to resist.

  By far across the interviews and in the online survey, when it comes to what young adults love most, connectivity is everyone’s number one, favorite thing. Of the students who answered an essay question about the best thing social media offers, 43 percent identified the way it allows us to connect with, keep up with, and stay in contact with old friends and family members that are far away, in addition to being a wonderful tool for making plans.4 A distant second were the 12 percent of respondents who cited sharing and seeing other people’s photos as the best thing about social media.

  These good things would be difficult for most people to give up over the long run.

  A few students couldn’t find anything nice to say, though. They began their answers with “I hate it,” and went on to discuss why. Also notable was how for many students, listing their favorite thing also provoked them to reveal the things they hated most. The connectivity and sharing can be a double-edged sword. Several students mentioned in the same sentence that what they loved the most was also what they disliked the most, as with the person who wrote simply and briefly, “Favorite is connectivity, least favorite is connectivity.”

  “My favorite thing about social media is you can be as anonymous or as public as you want,” wrote another student. “And my least favorite thing about social media is you can be as anonymous or as public as you want.” One young woman began by talking about how great social media was for photos, for finding out birthdays, and quick access to an overview of someone’s basic interests. But after listing these pluses, she finished up harshly. “It takes away the personal conversation. While it can be convenient I think social media is destroying our generation. We cannot hold a conversation, we don’t have an attention span longer than six seconds, and we are obsessed with ourselves.” There was also the young woman who spoke of the wonderful photo-sharing aspect of social media, and then went on to complain about just this. “I don’t like how addictive it has become and how I now live my life in terms of taking pictures for social media,” she wrote. “It’s taken away just being and living.”

  Several students used this question as another opportunity to complain about the appearance of happiness. “I don’t like how the purpose [of social media] for some people is only to feel validated by others… . [P]‌eople usually only put their best foot forward which creates an illusion that everyone is happy all of the time,” wrote one of these respondents. “Everyone always seems happy and people seem to have the perfect life on social media because they only post about good things that happen,” wrote another. “This can make others feel depressed or that something is wrong with their own lives because everyone else seems to be having such a good time.”

  A separate essay question asked if students had any advice they wish they’d received when they were younger or that they would give to the next generation. These responses were full of guidance about getting accounts later in life, counsel about not posting so much, and warnings that what goes up on the Internet lasts forever. Many students commented that they wished that someone had told them not to care at all about social media, that it doesn’t really matter, and that the important things in life have nothing to do with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And there was a lot of advice about not comparing yourself to others, being aware that social media is fake, that people lie, and that people are not showing you their real selves in what they post.

  The students who seem to handle social media best are the ones who are able to be ambivalent about it—those young women and men who can manage the self-promotive dimensions without too much stress, who can live with the pressures of constant evaluation, and who aren’t made so emotionally vulnerable by social media that its negatives wreak havoc on their self-esteem.

  Apathy has become a healthy mode of survival.

  But is this the lesson we want people to learn: that the best way to deal with one of the most significant aspects of our social lives is to master an ambivalent attitude about it? Is learned ambivalence the way we want people to cope with the changes that social media and smartphones have brought us? Is this, in short, the best we can do?5

  The alternative is for everyone to remain vulnerable to social media’s ups and downs. Even if young adults work hard to mask their feelings, the 24/7 stream of social media and the ever-presence of smartphones become a roller coaster of banality, plan-making, fun, disappointment, stress, hope, pride, loneliness, distraction, showing off, pressure, and a million other things. On the surface, this sounds very human. Any social situation can be wonderful and fun or stressful and awful, and everything in between. Life is messy and angst-ridden, full of unexpected potholes, words better left unspoken, and painful disappointments, just as it is full of joy and love and those moments that no one ever wants to forget.

  Social media reflects this reality. But it doesn’t just reflect this reality. It adds another dimension to it, enhancing this reality by making it public and constant.

  Because social media is so public, because every post has an audience—and potentially a very large audience (not to mention a very large judgmental audience)—it is like a hyperintense form of reality, a pressure-cooker version of life itself. It’s no wonder that so many students take regular breaks from it. And while it’s true that people can use social media to bro
adcast their best achievements, it’s equally true that their most embarrassing moments might be visible on an enormous scale and may, in turn, follow them forever. The sense of permanence and high-stakes consequences for one’s actions can overwhelm some people and paralyze others. And everyone is learning to watch their steps, often to an extreme. What began as something intended to be social, expressive, and fun has become a burden to many, none more so than the young who now face growing up online. And the professionalization of social media and the expectation to appear happy are exacerbating a success-driven and overachieving culture during high school and on college campuses.

  Despite these drawbacks, very few people are interested in giving up the benefits of social media. It has come to dominate our lives because of its benefits—the way platforms like Facebook make it easy for us to stay connected, make plans, and record memorable moments. These advantages are too appealing for us to go back to the way things were. It’s unrealistic, too. Social media isn’t going anywhere, so the question becomes:

  How can we better live with it?

  And how can we better advise the younger generation on their use of it?

  CONCLUSION

  VIRTUES FOR A GENERATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA PIONEERS

  Our culture today is forming around “being happy,” and although that is good, I feel people actively neglect the fact that life has ups and downs. Therefore, social media is used only to highlight the ups of life, while the downs are more often internalized behind the walls of our bedrooms, homes, and personal lives. Although I do not feel that social media is a place to air negativity, I think it is okay to not be 100 percent happy all the time, and social media promotes the latter to the extreme.