Is social media making us miserable?ꦡ Study after study seems to confirm the increasingly common grumbling you hear — that the more time we spend on 𒁏the platforms, the worse we feel about our lives.
The latest, by Holly Shakya from the University of California and Nicholas Christakis from Yale University, actually quantifies our misery. They found that there was as much as an 8 percent drop in personal happiness after using F𒅌acebook.
But is it actually Facebook๊ that’s making us unhappy? There are ♑a couple major flaws in this argument.
The first, and perhaps more obvious o🍌ne, is that Facebook and other social-media platforms like Twitter or Instagram are reflections of our input. They don’t generate content to show us without our participation. We choose what we see.
On Facebook, we generally friend people we know “in real life.” Those peo🦹ple then show us what they had for dinner, post pi🌺ctures of their kids and pets, share their political opinions and their selfies from vacation.
If that makes you feel unhappy, Facebook gives you a range of options. If seeing magical sun🧜sets from your friend’s trip to Barbados induces rage, it lets you click “Hide Post-See fewer posts like this.”
If your friend has becꦅome a political automaton in the wake of an election but you hope they’ll eventual𝐆ly mellow, you can choose the “Pause friend for 30 days” option.
If you’re struggling to get pregnant, or recently got divorced, and your friend’s pictures of snuggling with her husband or kids u𝔉psets you, you can pick “Unfollow friend.” That’s the “mute” option on Fꦰacebook.
Your friend won’t know tཧhey’ve been silenced and you won’t be unfriending them. You can always u𝓰nmute if circumstances change.
In fact, Facebook is the social network that most lets you tailor your experienc🍸e to get what you want out of it. Of course your friends will annoy you on Facebook, as they might in real life, but only on Facebook do you have the ability to shush them for a little while or forever.
But that gets at what Facebook💯 c🌟an’t do: Screen your daily real-life interactions.
In short, it’s not Facebook, it’s you. The “social media is making your miserable” experiments can’t quantify how much other things might make you miserable as well.
They’re not with you on the subway when you read an op-ed that makes you fume. They don’t see your eye-roll when you catch up with a friend over coffee and you end up listening to a half-hour🎉 infomerc🐎ial on all the great things happening in your friend’s life.
Social media, and Facebook in ♛particular, don’t invent thꦅings for you to get mad about, they only amplify what is already pissing you off.
And that leads us to the other flaw in these Facebook-makes-you-unhappy studies: People are already angrier than they used to be, creating a chicken-and-egg conundrum. If you poll angry people, it’s like🉐ly the interactions that boil their broth will have a lot of overlap with their daily routine.
That daily routine, by the way, includes lots of things that constiꦐtute an improvement over the daily lives of previous generations. Even though life expectancy has increased and quality of life continues to improve across the world, we’re angrier and sadder than ever before.
by Ryne Sherman, Sonja Lyubomirsky and Jean M. Twenge 🌄in the journal So💛cial Psychological and Personality Science found that while contentment used to come with age, our older people are no longer happy.
We can’t blame that on Facebook.
In a piece for Quartz last April, economist that our expecta༺tions are too high.
Schrager writes, “Research by British neuroscientists argues that happiness requires more than things simply going well; people also must get more tha♚n they expect. So even if we have more than ever before—good health, leisure time, consumer goods—we have even grander expectations.”
That’𒅌s where the change needs to start. If social media is making you feel like you should be in a bikini on a yacht instead of under the fluorescent lights at work, hunched over your computer, it might not be the worst idea to give it a break. Filter your expectations and you might find you need to filter your interactions a lot less.