321–330 of 486 posts
For me, I've found that social media doesn't affect my level of happiness and/or anxiety directly. What it does do, is take up a lot of my time almost imperceptibly - leaving less time for other, more meaningful activities. It makes me feel like I'm running out of time every day, which in turn causes a feeling of anxiety.
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If a friend gets a great job or starts to live a healthy life you don't feel great for them? I don't believe that puts me in the minority of people, not a chance.
One could be “happy”* for a friend and also feel shitty about themself. “Damn. Matthew has changed jobs 3 times in the past 5 years already, each time to a better paying job. Look at you. You’re still stuck in this shitty job because you suck.” This is literally the kind of thought I have had in the past. [*] Are you “happy” in a polite way? Or are you genuinely happy?
It's great that not everyone struggles with that, but different people struggle with different emotions. Maybe we can all agree that whatever their nature and whatever we call them is beside the point, (I think) that social media engagement optimizations have notoriously exploited these effects as they relate to our attention and habits, taking many people on an unwanted emotional roller-coaster ride for arguably unhealthy amounts of time.
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Thought experiment - let's say you are the poorest person in your neighborhood. Would talking to your neighbors daily about their salaries really make you feel better? I mean them having money, even if more than you is a good thing according to you what you said.
Yes, because if they made less money, it wouldn't help me at all (it could even hurt me because then they have nothing to share). In difficult personal situations, it has often helped me to know that at least others have it better.
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> If other people find their ideal job, have a tropical vacation, etc. it makes me feel... good? Those are good things in general, although the tropical vacation might make me also feel concerned about the climate. If this would be your genuine reaction, congratulations. You belong to the 0.001% of the population that would feel this way.
I feel content with my life and I'm genuinely happy when my friends accomplish something. I can't remember when I was seriously envious last time. Sometimes, there may be a moment when I feel slight envy, but then I realize that they decided to put effort into that, and I put my effort into something else. Time is limited. Everyone has problems; ups and downs. I've mostly quit social media because the majority of act…
This "technique" stuck with me. Want to get it done? Disconnect. And then came the era of Facebook and other sites where people shared their pictures, opinion, thoughts etc. as if anyone cares about their everyday lives. I'm from the generation where you never shared anything with strangers online.
And then, it turns out, people get hooked to this whole infinite scrolling business, being occupied with content they don't care about. They can't disconnect. And when you don't disconnect, you're distracted.
I tried Facebook. I hate it with passion. I don't want to write about myself. I'm not interesting to myself, let alone others. I like privacy. I don't care what my Facebook friend does, why don't they do it without having to archive it? There's many things that are way, way too odd to me when it comes to social media but I understand it's like a multiplayer game to a teenager - it's something new and there's a lot to explore, heck you even connect with certain people on a certain level.
I've never seen a social media user who was not impacted by negative content. For some reason, human turns to negatives before they do to positives. And that's what global social media is - the outlet where a lot of people let out their negatives. That's what makes me unhappy. To read about flat earth, then getting tangled in endless explanations on why it is/isn't flat. It's the people who are stubborn, unreceptive, just waiting to share without trying to receive.
Not everyone had mentors or difficulties in connecting to the internet which gives them the means to moderate the usage of it. Being exposed to a huge amount of information is dangerous, I've seen people become sloppy because they need to read / consume fast so they can move to the next thing which MIGHT be more interesting but they don't know until they try to read/consume it and the cycle continues.
So yes, I wholeheartedly agree without any facts and based purely on my subjective impression of social media - that it's something that makes me unhappy. It does not mean it should or does make someone else unhappy, but I for sure liked the internet when it was more difficult for an average human to use it.
There's some real things I want to appreciate & root into here, but as a geek growing up, one of my greatest & most persistence annoyances was how easy & happy it was for so many around me to pick being so ignorant, so blind, so insular. Heck yes ignoring the world & big matters makes you happier. Heck yes keeping blinders on & seeing less is safer, more secure, simpler. But fuck that. Fuck ignorance. Face things, se…
1) The writer, Cal Newport, gets his news from reading a broadsheet newspaper cover to cover every morning. (Not in the link but he's written about it elsewhere). I think it would be hard to argue that he's less well informed than someone scrolling through reddit, let alone FB or Instagram.
2) He's also said, and I agree, that pre-2006 or so Twitter and FB were pretty benign social media and have a lot of positives. Critically, this is before they developed infinite scrolling style timelines which are setup to maximise engagement. They were just chronological feeds of things posted by people you chose to follow.
3) Similarly to (2), the way those algorithms are optimised is not to deliberately expose you to the views of a wider range of people than you affirmatively chose to follow (although they could be!) but to maximise eyeball-time regardless. It turns out that the way to do that is to let highly emotionally charged and extreme views rise to the top.
As a result, the things you see will be either things you violently agree with from your bubble or things likely to trigger an immediate counter-response from what I think of as your anti-bubble. The anti-bubble looks like diverse views but are actually just fully defined as the inverse of the bubble's views. This deadens the space for mutual political engagement.
I think that "social media" could do lots of great things if it worked differently but I just don't think that empirically it does.
Consider the following scenario: You're pleased and content one minute, thinking your life is going fine the next. You have a few minutes to kill, so you log onto Facebook and begin scrolling... First, you notice a friend's post stating that she has accepted her ideal job. Then you read a coworker's too political rant. You continue browsing and see a video of your neighbour enjoying a fantastic tropical vacation. And…
You meet your friend, he tells you about his new job, you congratulate him.
You meet your coworker and chat to him about politics, and it's kinda interesting.
You meet your neighbor after their trip and they show you the photos and you're fascinated.
You meet your cousin in real life, you see he looks better, you compliment him. You don't feel like you need to do something yourself.
What is it about doing it online that hurts?
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Having actually thrown away my phone, and lived in the woods, I can say I recommend the former as a fantastic mental health improvement. Living in the woods, not so much.
What's wrong with the woods?
If he is growing his own food - a variety of animals will be eating the veggies. Rabbits, cabbage moths (evil bastards), groundhogs, raccoons...
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Politics: it is what most impacts your life, yet you cannot change it, at all.
> Politics: it is what most impacts your life, Doubt that. I’ve lived through some changes of the ruling party in my current country, the only changes I’ve observed were: 1) would taxes be 49.9% or 50.1%, 2) in which exact foreign country our military will be waging or supporting another useless war. Compare that to the price of the stock of your company… > yet you cannot change it, at all. Oh, you can. I’ve changed…
Regarding impact, no, you individually have not changed a single thing. A single person in a protest or a single vote simply has no impact.
Changing country is one way to take control, but I would argue that the politics itself are unaffected.