The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  Jake, sophomore, evangelical Christian university

  People want to see others as happy, and people are easily bothered by someone who confesses that they aren’t happy or aren’t what everyone wants them to be. If more people stepped out of their boxes, found their true selves, and posted that self online, they would get a lot more hate and they would be a lot more vulnerable, but ultimately maybe more people would start being honest.

  Alice, first-year, evangelical Christian university

  PIONEERS OF A VIRTUAL WORLD

  The Facebooks and Instagrams of today are like the grand new boulevards of still nascent modern cities: public spaces for everyone to stroll in their fashionable best, to parade their romances and their families and their finest, to display with pride their riches and achievements, to inspect and acknowledge the similarly garbed and the lucky, as well as look down their noses at the less fortunate and even turn their backs on those they simply do not want to see. Yik Yak and other anonymous platforms are likewise the proverbial mean streets, the dark alleys and dangerous corners where all the ugliness ensues, the kind of behavior best shielded from the prying eyes and bright lights that shine down over the boulevards.1 The world of social media, the new, public, and wide-reaching virtual space it has created for all of us, is at once as old as the town square and its corresponding gossips, and as new and vast, as unpredictable and dangerous, and as thrilling and full of pontential as an uncharted continent.

  And now we have entire generations growing up in this wild terrain.

  Seen in this light, the young are not so much narcissitic. Rather, they are the new explorers, brave and courageous, testing out the unknowns, both the good and the challenging, succeeding and failing and doing their best to at the very least survive, so they can pass on their hard-won wisdom and advice to the next generation so their experience might not be as rocky, and so they can better live with social media than the previous generations. Young adults of today have little choice other than to build their lives in a virtual sphere that did not even exist (or only barely) when their parents were children—a fact that can boggle the mind. They—and we—have no precedent for a life lived and celebrated and picked apart on a virtual scale. Yet the children coming up are mapping out their lives and experiences in this unbelievably new sphere regardless of its unknowns, because it is where our world is headed, and where their lives have begun.

  And soon, growing up online will be all anyone knows.

  But this generation is the test generation, the one that faces working out all the kinks and complications, while we—their parents, coaches, teachers, mentors, professors, admissions officers, bosses, and future employers—are likewise faced with helping them through this massive cultural shift as best we can.

  What I have called the happiness effect throughout this book—the requirement to appear happy on social media regardless of what a person actually feels—is an effect of our own making. We are the ones who have created this problem. Young adults have internalized the lesson that if you can’t say something happy, you shouldn’t say anything at all, even if you feel despair, dismay, anger, or any number of other emotions common to human experience, from us. We have burdened them by obsessing about how people in power might react when confronted with evidence that sometimes we are silly, do stupid things, get angry, say something dumb, appear less than perfect, and maybe even drink a beer before we turn twenty-one. This lesson on our part is obviously well-intended and, at least on its surface, sounds like excellent, rational advice. But the consequences are disturbing. Posting on social media for so many young adults means pretending one’s true feelings are not really there; it requires hiding them and, ostensibly, lying for the sake of one’s audience. Because of this, most of what anyone ever sees on social media are gleeful timelines of joy and accomplishment—the highlight reel. This can make anyone who isn’t blissfully happy all the time feel even worse.

  And none of us are immune to this part of the happiness effect—not really. No matter what age we are.

  While reflecting on what I’ve learned from talking to college students about the state of social media in their lives, the happiness effect and its corresponding highlight reels, I’ve found myself thinking about the photo albums I made when I was younger. How I would sort through my pictures to find only the best ones, because of course I wasn’t going to memorialize a photo in which my friends and I looked terrible, and I certainly didn’t showcase the awful times in my life. There were no pictures from funerals (but then, nobody took pictures at funerals either), no captions saying that just moments before I went to a party where a photo was taken, I had been weeping about a boyfriend who’d broken up with me.

  In other words, my old photo albums are highlight reels, too.

  So then, how is what young adults are doing (and what we’ve taught them to do) on social media any different than the photo albums of my youth? Couldn’t we simply regard it all as the same, except that their photo albums are digital? Which would render our advice to them rather harmless in the end?

  Yes.

  But also no.

  First, I wasn’t constantly making photo albums. It was something I did maybe twice in high school and once during college. Second, although I definitely enjoyed having photos of important moments like prom and graduation, and maybe a fun party with the favorite people in my life, I wasn’t constantly taking pictures of everything and everyone, everywhere I went. It wasn’t practical. There wasn’t an expectation of near-constant documentation. What’s more, the photo albums from my youth are full of silliness and ridiculous antics because those were the fun moments I most wanted to remember. There are plenty of pictures of people doing things that our future employers might have frowned upon. I didn’t filter what I put in my albums based on others’ expectations and nobody imagined I should—because I made them for me and for the precious few people with whom I decided to share them. My photo albums were private possessions, and I could control who saw and didn’t see what was in them. The possibility that anything in them would go viral did not yet exist. I always knew who saw my albums because the viewers were with me at the time—I had to personally grant them access.

  Would I have brought one with me to a job interview? Absolutely not! It would be none of the interviewer’s business. What’s more, I wasn’t about to hand over my album of happy memories to a crying friend. Would anybody with a single compassionate bone in their body do such a thing? I hope not. That’s not how you console someone you care about. I also didn’t compulsively check my own photo albums and the photo albums of others every day. For someone to share a set of photos with me was a rare occurrence. I’m glad I have those albums from my youth, but I haven’t looked through them in years.

  When I was in college, before cellphones were widespread (and long before the existence of smartphones), cameras and video cameras were rare birds that one saw only at the most significant formal dances and in the hands of parents at graduation. This meant that what happened on campus largely stayed on campus and in the fuzzy memories of those people who were there to witness it firsthand. In a recent conversation with some college students in California, we ended up talking about the age-old tradition of streaking—running naked across the quad. It’s not that streaking doesn’t still happen, but during that class, we had a conversation about how, when I was their age, you could pretty much run naked all over the place if you were feeling so inspired. Photos or videos of our bodies would never go up online, since this possibility didn’t yet exist, and so we had nothing to fear. And while cameras did exist, if someone had taken one out to snap photos, they would have been judged harshly for it. You just wouldn’t do such a thing. Today you can still streak, sure, but the consequences could be dire. I use streaking as an example because it’s so typical of old-school college fun, yet today’s students don’t have the same freedom to act on the playful impulse to run a little wild. They can, but doing so might cost them their future and lead to tremend
ous humiliation—and we make sure they know these risks to their very cores.

  I have often wondered how my own experience of high school and college would have been different if I had constantly been creating photo albums with captions to show to everyone I knew—including my grandfather and future bosses. What if I’d been constantly aware that any little thing I did might end up memorialized in a photo for all time, and one that—in the worst of circumstances—could go viral and ruin my future prospects? It’s impossible to know what would have changed, but having talked to so many college students about how social media is affecting the way they conduct and document their lives, I can get at least a general idea. And I’ve tried my best to paint that portrait here.

  Because of social media, there is a major difference in the constancy of creating content, the kind of content we choose to create, and the control we have over that content and who sees it. Social media is a 24/7 performance that requires everyone to take acting lessons. Everyone learns how to behave for their various publics, lest they get bad reviews (or no reviews at all) and risk social and financial ruin. Those of us who’ve already graduated from college, who have jobs and significant others and children, are also subject to these changes, since social media is not just for kids. Nearly everyone I know is on it, often all the time. I have friends who’ve posted thousands of photos on Facebook, who compulsively check, who worry about “likes” and putting on a “good face” for the public, just like the students do. But though the stakes can be high for anyone, they are different for those who are still very young and just learning to find their way in this new world, who are vulnerable and emotional and trying to figure out life and who they want to be when they grow up—as they grow up. These things were hard enough before social media; adding a potentially limitless audience of constant evaluators makes them infinitely more difficult.

  This is what leads me to pause when the accusations fly about the narcissistic tendencies of this generation. As I said before, I don’t think they’re narcissistic. I think they are pioneers, and being a pioneer isn’t easy.

  Social media has changed our lives—all of our lives—quickly and dramatically. It is an incredibly young phenomenon, yet its influence on the way we live now is stunning to behold. That it is still so new means that we haven’t yet had much of a chance to reflect on how it is changing our world, for good and for ill. We are still mostly reacting to as opposed to carefully responding to and shaping its presence in our lives and the lives of those we teach and mentor and parent. Yet the college experience is supposed to foster, not suppress, free thought. The notion that the best way to handle all posts—especially if you are a college hopeful or soon-to-be college grad—is to make them positive and happy is a reactive teaching. It’s triage, a survival mechanism designed on the fly to cope with the incredible invasiveness and pervasiveness of this medium. Social media has the potential to be incredibly destructive if the wrong post or photo gets out, the thinking goes, so the best course of action is to protect yourself. This teaching is a corrective to all those college students in the early twenty-first century who posted photos of themselves doing keg stands, smoking joints, being horribly vulgar and politically incorrect, and it keeps people from being overly vulnerable and overexposed to an enormous audience of not only friends and acquaintances but strangers, too.

  We all need to take a step back and stop reacting for a moment.

  As a culture, we need to take time to rethink the advice and teachings we are passing on to this pioneer generation, which will become the same advice that future generations will receive eventually as well. I do not believe we have given enough thought to the effect social media is having on our capacity to be vulnerable, to be emotional, to be human and therefore imperfect. Or to the fact that we are living in an age where young adults are growing up learning to think of themselves as brands and as marketable commodities. We need to ask ourselves: Do we want to raise employees, or do we want to raise children? Do we want colleges to create “brands” or to support emerging adults eager to become good critical thinkers and citizens of the world? Or, does the dominance of social media mean that to be a citizen of the world today is to be a brand? Is this simply a reality we (and our children and students) must accept or be left behind? Is the “appearance of happiness” the result of good critical thinking about social media? Or is the cost of not always appearing happy, the price of honesty, too great for us to even contemplate?

  In short, can we become better consumers of social media so that it doesn’t consume us?

  EIGHT VIRTUES

  Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is one of my favorite things to teach because his ideas about virtue are so practical and useful. He offers a framework for ethical decision-making that varies from person to person. For example, to drink “virtuously” will differ based on height, weight, food intake on a given occasion, and overall tolerance. For Aristotle, vice hovers at the extremes. We must work to find the “mean” in our behaviors, for it is there that virtue awaits us. And once each of us finds the mean, we must “practice” it until it becomes second nature or “habit.”

  Over the last several years, I’ve often wondered what advice Aristotle might have about social media and the ways our devices have come to dominate our lives. Drawing on the lessons I have learned from doing this research, I have devised a list of eight virtues for the social media age in the hope that they might help us navigate social media and smartphones in healthier, more critically aware and empowering ways—virtues that might help to mitigate the happiness effect, and provide a framework for rethinking the advice we currently give (and receive) about how to be online.

  1. THE VIRTUE OF VULNERABILITY: HONORING OUR THINNER SKINS

  While it is true that the world can be a cruel and violent place, it is not only this. To constantly brace ourselves against this darkness hardens us in ways from which it is difficult to recover. I live in New York City and am a very practical person, which has helped me to accept a certain level of cold reality. But I want to remain a person who trusts, who sees the best in others, who gives the benefit of the doubt, who takes risks and cultivates a rich emotional and personal life. Were I to try to make myself impenetrable to hurt and disappointment, a huge part of the joy and happiness I have in life would disappear. I need a thick skin to survive—we all do—but not one so thick that it is impervious to joy as well as sadness.

  Having spoken to so many young people, I worry about their “skins” and what they are trying to do to them. Many of them are terrified of the exposure that can come from social media, from making themselves available for evaluation and scrutiny online. They fear that putting themselves out there might result not only in negative reactions but in no reaction at all, making them feel irrelevant, invisible, and insignificant. Meanwhile, the most vulnerable among us are prone to devastation and unbearable pain. Everyone is hard at work trying to steel themselves against being hurt, and when it happens anyway, we rebuke ourselves for it. On one level this is smart. It’s not a bad thing to learn to protect ourselves. It’s a fundamental part of growing up and learning to be in the world. It’s necessary for survival.

  But we can go too far and end up sealing ourselves off from beauty and joy and real connection. We can become too ambivalent. The extreme public nature of social media, along with our somewhat uncontrolled and compulsive use of it, exposes all the fault lines and fissures of our vulnerable, tender selves. Before we wall ourselves into fortresses in an effort to endure this, we must consider what we might lose. We should want our skins to be just thick enough to survive, and not a millimeter thicker.

  2. the virtue of authenticity: prizing our real selves over the virtual ones

  The phenomenon of comparing ourselves to others, coupled with the pressure to “keep up a happy appearance” on social media to prove to everyone that you matter, that you are having a blast, that you have friends and achieve enviable things, might seem like it would turn everyone into little na
rcissists. Yet the students I interviewed and surveyed weren’t egomaniacs. They seem, more than anything, deflated about their real lives. Their self-esteem is far from sky-high.

  College students care that they see their friends acting fake online, and that to keep up with the times they need to act fake, too—or at least filter what they post to the point that it reflects only one sliver of who they really are. The popularity of Snapchat and Yik Yak embodies students’ desire for honesty and authenticity on social media, yet they are learning that true authenticity requires anonymity, or at least impermanence, because they are afraid to be honest and truthful on the platforms attached to their names. Standing up for who we are and what we believe is something that young adults are learning is best done anonymously.

  What’s more, the anonymity of apps like Yik Yak encourages sexism, racism, and an excessive level of meanness and cruelty, rather than empowering young adults to find ways to productively express their real feelings, selves, and opinions in public. Anonymous platforms encourage self-expression, but what young people see among their peers often horrifies them. Young adults need to think about authenticity—where and how and with whom it is possible to practice it—so they can gain a better sense of how to express themselves both online and off in ways that make them feel healthy and secure. They need to think about the costs of performing “success” according to social media’s ideals, rather than their own. And we need to help them think through this.

  The happiness effect undermines authenticity. Young adults are spending an inordinate amount of time producing and poring over fake, idealized, public versions of themselves and others, created and stylized to stand up to the scrutiny of many different audiences. Rather than directing this energy toward self-discovery and discovery of the world, they are spending it conforming to others’ desires. We all become excellent people-pleasers, without concern or worry about the effect such constant people-pleasing might have on self-development and happiness. Social media is creating a generation of young people who’ve learned that self-emptying and self-sacrifice for the good of getting, of pleasing, of pandering are more important than attending to and learning about one’s own needs and the real needs of those around you. Students care deeply about authenticity, yet they also know that social media is the last place to go to find it.