I have not been doing well lately, and I thought that I should take some time off from human contact. I was about to deactivate Facebook when I was faced with a unique conundrum. Facebook has brought everyone closer, but it’s so difficult to get off it. Everyone is on it. It is the official mode of communication for work or university classes, and the means to part official declarations and policies. What many would argue is the cure to loneliness, I felt, was causing over-familiarity. It seemed impossible to live “unplugged”.
Boomers would argue that Facebook is a terrible breach of privacy, and while that is true for the most parts, social media actually poses a larger threat that has only recently come into notice, and that is mental health. When you are leading a miserable life, you are less likely to care about what happens to your identity. I do not want to live miserably, and therefore I did a little research. What I found out were pretty interesting.
Why do people join Social Media?
Social Media is a very convenient means to stay connected. People like talking about themselves. They have an innate need to feel heard. In-person communication contains restrictions because two or more people willing to communicate need to secure free time at mutually agreeable periods; and it is not possible to concentrate on anything else (like work) when you are having an in-person heart-to-heart. Much of that changes with social media because with the super-fast internet available today, a post takes less than a minute and can reach a wider variety of people. Nobody needs to secure time out of their days in order to read a random post on Facebook or Twitter.
The Highlight Reel
Although social media would seem like it makes conversations more time-effective on theory, studies show that people dedicate around 2 hours on average to Facebook everyday. The Highlight Reel is a term coined by Bailey Parnell in her TedTalk. Most people lead pretty mundane lives, and nobody wants to hear about that. On social media however, you choose how you want to be seen. Everyone is the best versions of themselves on social media. They only share stuff that makes them seem either elite or happy, e.g. sharing accomplishments, looking pretty, spreading their strong opinions on various topics, or sharing happy memories. People shadow the crevices in their lives. Hence the phrase Highlight Reel, because we only show the highlights of our lives.
This makes us compare between their perfect lives and our regular lives. We wish our lives could be as ideal. We feel undermined by the posts of others, because we feel like everyone is better than us. It works like a cycle because, everyone else is equally intimidated by us.
Nobody wants to be viewed as inferior. That is why, people tend to make even the thriftiest of their endeavors feel like an achievement.
Although this is a human problem not completely related to social media, social media makes you listen to more of these “success-stories”, which makes you feel like you have not done enough in your life.
Anxiety and Insecurity
Social media has its own currency (also termed by Bailey Parnell) which is the likes, comments and shares. Upon posting, every interaction with our posts release dopamine. That is why we keep checking repeatedly how many people engaged and who they are after making a post, despite knowing that the post isn’t going anywhere. When we see a particular person react to our posts, we feel like we are important to them.
We pay careful attention to how many people engage in our posts, and base our self-worth off that. We feel defeated when people do not empathize or have negative feelings about what we share. We check reacts on a post and the audience of it regardless of the content before we ourselves engage to a post. Social media has created expectations that we never knew existed.
We judge people, and are judged against the wrong benchmarks.
Because we subconsciously undermine others with our social media statuses, it causes people to feel less confident about themselves. It creates beauty standards, intelligence standards, or even a standard to what kind of comic-books you can like. These lead to people feeling insecure about their existence.
Shorter Attention Span
Boomers are not wrong when they claim that Millennials have a shorter attention span; it’s actually proven. We live in an era of options. We can always find something else to watch on Netflix, watch some other kind of music video on YouTube, play a different kind of video game, stare at dog memes instead of cat memes on Reddit, or do absolutely anything else. It is impossible to exhaust this list of options. For this reason, our expectations are higher. We keep having dopamine rushes so often that it takes more effort now for us to extract dopamine than when we were younger.
The problem about options is that, people get bored easily.
A side-effect of this is that most Millennials have a screwed-up sleep cycle. They remain in constant search for newer content, they ruin their sleep over it, and they cannot even be happy with what they find. Besides, because of the many options, we expect dopamine triggers to be readily available, and not making us contribute much brainwork. This has made millennials incapable of paying attention to more complicated, or time-consuming matters. Here’s a question, when was the last time you followed your professor throughout the 1.5 hours of his class?
Social Media does not want you to get off
As pointed out nicely by Christopher Gillhaney (Andrew Scott) in Black Mirror Smithereens, social media companies constantly put in newer and newer dopamine triggers and replace outdated ones, because they do not want you to keep your phone down. They place each post and each comment, along with the advertisements and notification buttons in such a way that would push you into interacting with them. The amount of psychology in play here is so fascinating that it has actually opened a completely different field of study in psychology. A demonstration of this is you checking your notifications every five minutes despite knowing that there couldn’t have been any meaningful development in your Facebook feed within that time; or you getting overly eager to check your phone every time you hear a notification-ping despite knowing that it is an offer from Foodpanda that you are never going to use.
Online Harassment
One particular factor deserves special mention when talking about social media, but it’s proven impossible to include the actual depth of it in this article, and that is “online harassment”. I could write a complete article on it in the future. Harassment is a crime anywhere, however when done in person, it is easier to identify the perpetrator. Furthermore, when in person, people are more bounded by social conventions, something that they do not need to worry about online. Over social media, you can be absolutely anyone and do absolutely anything. This makes social media a hub for cyber-bullying; and unsurprisingly, women, people of color and the LGBTQ+ are usually the victims.
Conclusion
Instructing people to get off social media is such a Boomer thing to do. It is also impossible, specifically during the pandemic when social life has mostly been cornered to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. However, over-connectedness comes with an entire package of mental health problems, and it’s nobody’s fault. Sometimes, being surrounded by people and their opinions can feel suffocating. It’s fine to feel like you don’t care about anyone or their lives at times. When this happens, the biggest self-service that you can partake in is pulling the plug. Of the device that you are running your social media accounts on, obviously, not your ventilator, if you are on one.