The Happiness Effect Read online

  THE HAPPINESS EFFECT

  THE HAPPINESS EFFECT

  HOW SOCIAL MEDIA IS DRIVING A GENERATION TO APPEAR PERFECT AT ANY COST

  DONNA FREITAS

  FOREWORD BY CHRISTIAN SMITH

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  Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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  © Donna Freitas 2017

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Freitas, Donna, author.

  Title: The happiness effect : how social media is driving a generation toappear perfect at any cost / Donna Freitas ; foreword by Christian Smith.

  Description: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016009997 (print) | LCCN 2016016495 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190239855 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190239862 (updf) | ISBN 9780190239879 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Internet and youth. | Social media—Psychological aspects. |Youth—Social life and customs.

  Classification: LCC HQ799.2.I5 F745 2016 (print) | LCC HQ799.2.I5 (ebook) |DDC 004.67/80835—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016009997

  This book is dedicated to Katie, Andleeb, Ozzie, Cristianna, and Dion, the extraordinary students in my Hofstra memoir seminar. You struggled together to think about the biggest and most important of life’s questions with openness and honesty, and allowed me to be present for this. You made me laugh and reflect and wonder at my luck in having you all in class. I am so proud of everything that you’ve become.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Preface

  Introduction: Masters of Happiness

  1.Is Everybody Hanging Out Without Me? Comparing Ourselves to Others and the Importance of Being “Liked”

  2.The Professionalization of Facebook: (And Why Everyone Should Keep Their Opinions to Themselves)

  3.My Name Is My Brand and My Brand Is Happiness!

  4.The Selfie Generation: Why Social Media Is More of a “Girl Thing”

  5.Performing for God: Religion On (and Off) Social Media

  6.Virtual Playgrounds: The Rise of Yik Yak, the Joys of Snapchat, and Why Anonymity Is Just So Liberating

  7.An Acceptable Level of Meanness: The Bullies, the Bullied, and the Problem of Vulnerability

  8.So You Wanna Make That Facebook Official?

  9.The Ethics of Sexting: Tinder, Dating, and the Promise of Mutually Assured Destruction

  10.My Smartphone and Me: A Love-Hate Relationship

  11.Taking a Timeout from the Timeline: Students Who Quit Social Media and Why

  Conclusion: Virtues for a Generation of Social Media Pioneers

  Taking Control of Our Smartphones: How Student Affairs Professionals, Faculty, and Parents Can Help Young Adults Feel Empowered with Respect to Social Media and Their Devices

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix: Methodology

  Notes

  Index

  FOREWORD

  Margaret has to avoid Facebook because seeing how happy everyone else appears online makes her unhappy by comparison. Rob gets a call from a friend asking him to “Like” his new Facebook photo to save him from the possibility of it not being liked enough. Michael felt lonely because he spent most of high school trying to impress people on social media rather than spending time with his friends. These are just a few of the people you will meet in this book. And it is tempting to ask: What’s the matter with kids today?

  Everybody knows that the digital communications revolution—the Internet, social media, smartphones, online dating, and more—is transforming our society. But nobody really knows yet how these technological innovations are changing us and our ways of life—possibly including our very sense of self—and just how far it will go. We have lived long enough with this revolution by now to know that it is truly revolutionary, not a superficial phase. But we have not lived with it long enough to know what it really means for us in the long run.

  Everywhere I travel to speak about the lives of youth, I am asked how the Internet, and social media, and smartphones are changing young people’s lives—usually, it is suspected, for the worse. Is it making them less interested in real, face-to-face relationships? Is it turning them into self-centered egomaniacs? Is it causing them to disconnect from social institutions, like sports teams and churches? Is it distorting their sense of morality? As a sociologist, ever attentive to data, I have always had to answer that I don’t really know, because there wasn’t enough good research available. I think the changes are real and big, I would say, but beyond that I could only speculate. My answers were always incomplete and disappointing.

  You now have in your hands a landmark book that answers these questions. Donna Freitas’s The Happiness Effect provides the first really serious and reliable answers to these kinds of questions that parents ask every day. As a researcher, I am very excited about it, even as I find it troubling as a parent. Unlike a lot of writing in this area, this book is neither speculation nor sensationalism. It is serious, focused on a hugely important issue, and based on rock-solid empirical evidence. Freitas elegantly interprets the data—mostly by allowing young people to speak for themselves—in clear and accessible prose that is rare among academic writers. It deserves and needs to be widely read.

  One of the most important findings in this book, to my mind, is the schizophrenic effect social media has on people’s sense of self. Social media produces a world in which the problems and blemishes of real life are hidden behind virtual presentations of self that struggle, often obsessively, to be “Liked.” One must always appear attractive, happy, and clever. And, as Freitas deftly shows, even while many users grasp the dehumanizing forces at work here, they find it difficult to keep themselves from playing into this virtual world’s insidious grasp on human insecurities and fears. The damage is perpetrated mostly by the same people who suffer them. It is troubling to anyone who wishes to see young people growing up to be authentically secure, happy, realistic, and genuinely caring about the real needs of other people.

  The pages that follow skillfully reveal the sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant ways that social media twist and distort young people’s senses of self. I have seen hints of this in my own research, but this book nails it with force and insight. When I interviewed young people, smartphones and Facebook continually interrupted, metaphorically and sometimes literally. I knew social media was an essential topic. This book, which brings us inside the intimate thoughts and feelings of youth struggling to develop authentic senses of themselves, yet also wrestling to negotiate the immense pressures that social media places on them, provides answers to longstanding questions.

  As to the author, Donna Freitas is one of the most qualified—perhaps the most qualified—scholar in the nation to write this book. She has spent years traveling all over the Un
ited States talking directly with many hundreds of students at every kind of college and university, about their experiences online, their personal and social identities, relationships, intimate emotions, sexual histories, views of their own generation, and much more. Freitas has profoundly and personally immersed herself in the worlds of which she writes and speaks—an up-close and labor-intensive research method for which there is no substitute. That gives her an unrivaled authority to write about these matters, one that deserves our hearing. Freitas is also an immensely talented interviewer, speaker, and writer. And, while she is adept at writing for and speaking to popular audiences, Freitas is a serious scholar who is careful about research methodology, data collection, and analysis. All of this makes her a rare combination of talents.

  The book itself is also lucid and engaging—a real page-turner. Readers never have to trudge through difficult passages, numbers, or theories. The fascinating voices of distinct college students tell the stories for themselves. Yet those voices, in Freitas’ skilled hands, add up to an exposition of important themes, insights, and conclusions that beg for our attention and response. The subject matter here is massively important, the engagement of it clear and captivating.

  All of the above means that any number of people really must read this book, think hard about it, talk widely about its findings, and work on constructive responses: every parent and grandparent of children, teenagers, and twenty-somethings; every college and university student and administrator, student affairs worker, and faculty member; every middle and high school teacher and principal; every coach, youth pastor, and other youth worker who deals with teenagers and emerging adults; every young American who is not in college but in the work force or unemployed; every aunt, uncle, and mentor of youth; and every other person who cares about human beings benefitting from technological developments rather than being damaged by them. If you have a Facebook page, this book has much to teach you.

  With this book now before us, we must all ask: are we capable of a response equal in seriousness to the massive consequences of the digital communications revolution that confront us?

  Christian Smith

  University of Notre Dame

  PREFACE

  TINY MEMOIRS

  I think social media is kind of like a book cover: it can show what you are, but then also people can cover up themselves of what they are. Make themselves look better.

  Jason, junior, public university

  TRYING SO HARD TO FORGET OURSELVES

  In a seminar on memoir that I taught at Hofstra University’s Honors College, my five intellectually gifted and academically driven students contemplated falling madly in love while reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids, what it’s like to be young and Muslim via Eboo Patel’s Acts of Faith, and the trials of grief in Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. But there was something about memoir itself, about sitting down to contemplate life’s meaning and purpose, that caused my students to question absolutely everything: their majors, their career paths, their backgrounds, the pursuit of true love. It pulled them up and out of their comfort zones and had them pouring out their deepest feelings. They talked endlessly of the overwhelming number of time-consuming commitments that ruled their days and nights and about how, when they stopped and took time to ask themselves why they were doing what they were doing, they weren’t sure how to answer that question. It disturbed them.

  There are so many things my students discussed that have stayed with me since that spring semester full of snowstorms and too-late spring blooms, but one in particular has played out in my mind over and over as I’ve done the research for this book.

  One afternoon, after a particularly heavy snow, the students began to talk about their inability to sit still and their fear of doing so. Fear. This was the word they used. Being bored, having nothing to do, simply stopping and not using their phones to fill the silence. It scared them because their thoughts scared them. The way their thoughts about anything—life, relationships, love, work, school, family, friends, choices, their futures—would just show up in a way they couldn’t control or block was very upsetting.

  “I was just sitting there in my dorm room yesterday,” one of the students was saying, “watching as the snowflakes were hitting the window and sliding down the glass.” This student noticed how beautiful the snow was, they way it piled up and crystallized. He also noticed how peaceful he felt while watching it. But then, suddenly, in the silence and the stillness, other thoughts began to intrude, bigger thoughts about his life and what he was doing with it or, even more worrisome, what he was not doing with it. He began to feel a conflict as the uncomfortable collided with the beautiful and the serene. He was upset about his impulse to suppress these thoughts by grabbing his phone, because if he’d been on his phone he might never have had the discomfiting thoughts. But then again, if he’d picked up his phone, he would have missed this moment of beauty.

  This was what upset him most of all: the possibility of missing the moment of beauty.

  The young man went on to tell the class how he couldn’t remember the last time he’d just enjoyed a small bit of beauty, let himself be taken by it. His go, go, go, do, do, do schedule and nearly constant résumébuilding and social media updating had robbed him of those moments. But his fear of the thoughts that followed, his inability to handle them, was behind his motivation to never let himself pause and open himself to the possibility of catching more of them.

  How do we deal with this conflict? he wondered.

  Should thinking be so scary?, the class asked collectively. Shouldn’t we be able to pause and live in the moment? Wasn’t this an important thing to be able to do? If we aren’t able to stop and think, will we ever be able to pursue the things that mean the most in life, or even know what might make our lives more meaningful? What if life becomes an endless cycle of escaping difficult thoughts?

  Thoughts and feelings, the kinds of things that come up when we just sit and contemplate the world and our lives, can make us feel vulnerable. And while vulnerability can be uncomfortable, it is often the very thing that leads us to ask the important questions, the big ones that going to college and growing up are supposed to be about. On social media and via our devices, we are learning to shut out these things, these moments, these feelings.

  We are putting up a shield around our own vulnerability.

  I wasn’t too far into this research before I knew that this study I’d begun on social media was really about happiness, about how young adults are learning they must appear happy at all times, presenting to the world what looks like the perfect life. Yet in always trying to appear happy, perfect, even inspiring and certainly enviable, we often neglect the very parts of ourselves that bring us true happiness, joy, connection, love, and pleasure. We become afraid of our true selves, of expressing who we really are, with all our flaws and imperfections. We begin to cover ourselves up, to clothe ourselves in words and images that mask the emotions and even the joys that define our hearts and minds and souls because they seem too intimate, and this intimacy seems inappropriate. We become good at hiding, we learn to excel at it, and society rewards us for the walls we’ve constructed with “likes” and “shares” and retweets and, ultimately, as young adults are learning so well, college acceptance letters and job interviews. By putting up these facades, by convincing our “audiences” not only that all is well but that all is always well, we sacrifice ourselves. By doing such a good job of “appearing happy,” we risk losing the very things that make us happy.

  When my student spoke of watching the snow fall against his window that day, of reveling in its beauty and then recoiling from what this moment of stillness evoked in his mind, he was really talking about recoiling from himself. Our devices and our compulsive posting and checking are helping us to flee ourselves. We are become masters of filtering away the bad and the sad and the negative. But in our attempts to polish away those imperfections and “put on a happy face,” as one student told me, as we try
to forget the darker and more tender sides of our humanity, we also risk losing the best parts of who we are.

  WE ARE WORTHY

  When I started mentioning the idea of a “happiness effect” to my friends and colleagues, about how I worry that it is costing us our humanity, our authenticity, and the things that make our lives meaningful, everyone told me that I must watch Brené Brown’s TED Talks. I hemmed and hawed for a while, then finally sat down and watched the first one, on vulnerability, moving quickly on to the second, about shame. I found myself crying as I listened to Brown speak so eloquently about how in our imperfections we find our own worthiness and are able to encounter love and belonging, and how, in order to live wholeheartedly, vulnerability is essential. To experience true belonging and connection, we must be able to own our imperfections and our messiness.

  All the people who told me to watch Brown’s talks were right—I needed to see them. In the one on vulnerability, Brown talks about how in our attempts to polish our images, to appear as if we have it all together, as if everything is in order and our lives are always great, we end up turning away from the very things that can make us whole. She speaks of how much we lose when we attempt to make ourselves invulnerable and how what we lose, really, is everything—love, belonging, the things that make us feel the most worthy.

  Brown asks us to “let ourselves be seen,” “to love with our whole hearts, even though there is no guarantee,” “to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror,” and “to believe that we are enough.” To achieve connection, the thing that makes life worth living, we must strive to do all of these.

  Yet the public nature of social media teaches us to strive for the opposite. Social media and the ways we are learning to navigate it, as well as the ways we teach our children and students to navigate it, go against everything Brown talks about that makes life meaningful. In our attempts to appear happy, to distract ourselves from our deeper, sometimes darker thoughts, we experience the opposite effect. In trying to always appear happy, we rob ourselves of joy. And after talking to nearly two hundred college students and surveying more than eight hundred, I worry that social media is teaching us that we are not worthy. That it has us living in a perpetual and compulsive loop of such feedback. That in our constant attempts to edit out our imperfections for massive public viewing, we are losing sight of the things that ground our life in connection and love, in meaning and relationships.