Social Media: RUINING OUR LIVES?!?!?!

 Aidan Minnihan

Professor John Horgan

5 May 2023

Social Media: RUINING OUR LIVES?!?!?!

For better or for worse, the Internet has become an irreplaceable, inescapable part of our lives. We use it to stay in contact with friends and family; to apply for jobs; to work with coworkers remotely; the list goes on and on seemingly without end. Of course, none of this would be possible without the various social media platforms that exist. Social media has utterly revolutionized the way that we go about our daily lives, and it’s nearly impossible to thrive in our society without at least an email and LinkedIn profile. This necessary attachment to social media has certainly not come without many drawbacks, however, and our reliance on it has done much to contribute to the mental health crisis that we face today.

First and foremost, it’s important to note that even separate from its necessity in everyday life, part of what makes social media such an omnipresent problem is that it is highly addictive. It’s relatively well known that social media acts as a dopamine release for your brain as you scroll through and see post after post. According to Dr. Anna Lembke, the more often we’re on social media, the more we begin to reach a plateau of how much dopamine we get as a result of binge-scrolling. As we get less and less dopamine in return, we still feel dependent on social media to get the dopamine hit, keeping the cycle going even as we remain numb to the pleasure it brings (Waters). In addition, of the innumerable posts we scroll past, despite resulting from an algorithm and being tailored to most suit your preferences, few of them will actually cause any amount of real joy; in fact, many might just make you feel worse. It’s not dissimilar to gambling, and I think this quote from Jacqueline Sperling, PhD, puts it best: “Think of a slot machine: if game players knew they never were going to get money by playing the game, then they never would play” (mcleanhospital.org). Each time you log onto social media, whether you create your own post or look through the countless others in your feed, you’re pulling the lever on the slot machine. Will you get lucky and post something that gets a thousand likes, or will you not get a single like? Will you see some exciting news for an upcoming movie, or will you bear witness to some online drama that has been blown out of proportion? These are the sorts of gambles that occur on social media, but what keeps people coming back is the mere possibility of a good outcome. If they might get something good out of it, then they’re willing to stick with the bad no matter how much it might impact their mental health.

Even if it’s addictive, though, are the downsides really all that atrocious, or am I just blowing them out of proportion? Well, to provide a personal example, Twitter was little more than a blight on my own life in the short span of time that I had it. I had initially gotten Twitter after my friends encouraged me to, telling me that it would help me advertise the things that I had made (namely, video essays analyzing fictional characters I like that I had posted on YouTube). Despite that, I mostly spent my time not posting, but rather viewing others’ content. By its very nature, I was addicted rather quickly, checking whenever I got even the least bit tired from work on my computer, sometimes mere minutes after the last time I had checked. Even if I had just been on it, the nature of the algorithm made it certain that there was always a chance of seeing something new every time; with that in mind, why wouldn’t I check so impulsively? And sure, I’d occasionally see something cool, like fanart for a game or show I like, for example, but most of the time, it was depressing news headlines and the spread of negativity and hate. Even some good things could make my day worse; if I saw someone post about the good in their life, I would then compare my life to theirs (often based solely on that one post) and think my life is terrible in comparison.

So with all of that being said, why did I bother staying? Well, it was a combination of the addictive qualities discussed earlier and the fact that I managed to convince myself that I needed to stay. After all, if I left, how would I keep up to date with the oh-so crucial gaming news and memes my friends post about? So I kept logging in, scrolling through the feed, comparing myself to others, and dreading the entirety of my life. Elon Musk buying Twitter only made things so much worse, with the change that impacted me the most being that people could view the number of people who viewed their post versus the number who actually liked it, effectively allowing people to know precisely how many people didn’t care. Ironically, I suppose I should thank Musk for this change, as it was exactly the push I needed to log off, and I have not since looked back. Is my life better now that I’ve abandoned Twitter? That’s admittedly a tricky question to answer, as I am already diagnosed with depression and the time after I left Twitter was a rife with turmoil in its own ways. However, based on the experiences that I have had, I can confidently say that no random meme or fanart would have enhanced my life in a meaningful way, while the multitude of negative content could have easily made things worse. 

Don’t just take all of this from me, though; there are plenty of sources out there that will defend this fact with ample amounts of research. Back when Facebook was limited to students attending Harvard or other certain universities, there was a notable rise in the number of students reporting mental health issues that was concurrent with Facebook’s own rise at that time (Walsh). One study reports on how the reduction of time spent on social media daily to just thirty minutes a day resulted in the experimental group feeling less depression and loneliness (psychiatry.org), and another showed a decrease in the fear of missing out and mental wellbeing in tandem with an increase in mental wellbeing (Brown and Kuss). So it’s clear from just these three studies that social media has a link with decline in mental health, but what makes this even worse is that it is constantly on the rise. A reported 59.4% of the global population is using social media (datareportal.com), and the majority of social media platforms have seen an increase in active user base from 2004 to 2018 (Ortiz-Ospina). As these sights increase in their usage, so too do the mental health problems that they cause.

Even putting the effects on mental health aside, social media has done much to cripple its users mentally in countless other ways from decrease in attention span to impacting social relationships. There are other downsides simply inherent to the nature of social media, such as the spread of misinformation. If you wish to do more research on the topic of social media and its impact, I recommend spending some time on the Ledger of Harms website. This website comprehensively lists proven facts about the harm that social media has inflicted; for example, with regards to mental health, it cites that 30% of people from 18 to 44 years old feel anxious if they do not check social media within a couple of hours.

In order to learn more about social media’s impact on my age group, I polled some of my friends about their own experiences with various social media platforms, and unsurprisingly, many echoed the negative experiences that I described. Some specific complaints included their ability to pay attention decreasing, their mood lowering when seeing depressing news or witnessing an interaction involving a particularly nasty individual, and of course, its addictiveness. One of my friends described his own grievances as follows: “Since not only is there something new every time I open [Twitter] but something I want to see, it drives me to keep opening it very often. Anytime I have free time at all during the day, or even when I DON’T have free time I’m driven to open up Twitter to see what’s there. To say it’s addictive is an understatement. … So yeah, social media’s bad because there’s too much GOOD stuff on there.” 

However, I was confronted with something surprising when interviewing my friends: Many said that their experiences have yielded a net positive for their lives. Upon seeing this, I realized a critical error: I conducted this survey on a social media platform, that being Discord, an instant messaging platform, so of course the results would be skewed a tad in social media’s favor. However, this is not to invalidate my friends’ opinions, because social media does bring much good and I do not wish to discredit that. The most commonly cited boon was its ability to help my friends connect to others and remain connected to them, and indeed, there are many friends that I would not have stayed in such close contact with if not for social media. In spite of its benefits, though, I remain quite disappointed to realize that I am still addicted to social media, even if it is not a platform that immediately comes to mind when the topic comes up. I check it so often that when I decided to delete the app off my phone for one day of effectual Discord abstinence, I would still absentmindedly swipe to the spot on my phone where the app was and try to open it before remembering it wasn’t there. If that isn’t a sign of how addicted I am to this platform, then I can’t imagine what would be a sufficient sign.

So with all of that said… What then? I would honestly be remiss to delete Discord permanently; I have a considerable handful of friends that I can only contact there, and unlike how I was with Twitter, I have been active on Discord every single day for years in order to keep in touch. I know I’m addicted, but like my friends said, might the positives outweigh the negatives? That might be so in a world where we have become so reliant on online connections, but this doesn’t mean the negatives don’t exist. All of this is to say that I don’t know if it’s truly possible anymore to fully quit social media; it has become too crucial to the way our society functions. Even in professional settings, that interconnectivity is an absolute necessity. Even still, it is important to be cognizant of the harmful effects social media has. If you have felt that any of the information in this paper has been resonant with your own struggles that arise from social media, then I suppose this is the message I am trying to impart: It may not be possible to quit social media due to the way things are, but it might be worth at least logging off for a day to see how it makes you feel. Or maybe a couple days. Maybe a week. Maybe even a month. Whatever time you’re able to afford away from the Internet, I advise you to do your best to take it, if for nothing else, just to see if it helps at all.

Works Cited

Brown, Lorna, and Daria J Kuss. “Fear of Missing Out, Mental Wellbeing, and Social Connectedness: A Seven-Day Social Media Abstinence Trial.” International journal of environmental research and public health vol. 17,12 4566. 24 Jun. 2020, https://www. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7345987/.

“Global Social Media Statistics - DataReportal – Global Digital Insights.” DataReportal, https://datareportal.com/social-media-users. 

Ledger of Harms, https://ledger.humanetech.com/. 

Ortiz-Ospina, Esteban. “The Rise of Social Media.” Our World in Data, 20 Mar. 2023, https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media. 

“The Social Dilemma: Social Media and Your Mental Health.” Here's How Social Media Affects Your Mental Health | McLean Hospital, 18 Jan. 2023, https://www.mcleanhospital.org/ essential/it-or-not-social-medias-affecting-your-mental-health. 

Walsh, Dylan. “Study: Social Media Use Linked to Decline in Mental Health.” MIT Sloan, 14 Sept. 2022, https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-social-media-use-linked -to-decline-mental-health. 

Waters, Jamie. “Constant Craving: How Digital Media Turned Us All into Dopamine Addicts.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 22 Aug. 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/ global/2021/aug/22/how-digital-media-turned-us-all-into-dopamine-addicts-and-what-we-can-do-to-break-the-cycle. 

“What Happens When You Quit, or at Least Really Cut Back, Your Social Media Use?” Psychiatry.org - What Happens When You Quit, or at Least Really Cut Back, Your Social Media Use?, 14 Feb. 2019, https://www.psychiatry.org/News-room/APA-Blogs/what- happens-when-you-quit-cut-back-social-media.