Looking for Like in All the Wrong Places
Social media apps like Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook are supposed to make us feel more connected, but are more likely feeding our sense of alienation.
“Scholars have analyzed the data and confirmed what we already knew in our hearts,” Seth Stephens-Davidowitz wrote in The Times. “Social media is making us miserable.”
The real world is radically different from the fantasies promulgated online, Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz reported.
Though Americans do dishes at six times the rate they play golf, there are roughly twice as many tweets about golfing as there are about dishwashing. Owners of luxury cars like BMWs and Mercedeses are more than twice as likely to post about their cars on Facebook as those who drive ordinary vehicles.
But Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz has spent five years studying Google search data, and people reveal things to Google they don’t on social media. He calls Google “digital truth serum.” On social media, wives complete the phrase “My husband is …” with words like “the best,” “my best friend,” “amazing,” “the greatest” and “so cute.” On Google, one of the top five ways to autocomplete that phrase is “amazing.” The other four: “a jerk,” “annoying,” “gay” and “mean.”
Curated lives on social media can’t be taken seriously, he wrote: “Or, as I like to sum up what Google data has taught me: We’re all a mess.”
But the need to seek approval online may go deeper than mere vanity and ego. Our health may depend on it.
“Recent evidence suggests that being unpopular can be hazardous to our health,” Mitch Prinstein wrote in The Times. “Yet most don’t realize that there’s more than one type of popularity, and social media may not supply the one that makes us feel good.”
Multiple studies reveal that being unpopular — feeling isolated, disconnected, lonely — predicts our life span. Scientists found that people who had larger networks of friends had a 50 percent increased chance of survival by the end of the study they were in. But researchers have found, and anybody who has attended high school knows, that there is more than one type of popularity, and most of us may be craving the wrong kind, Mr. Prinstein reported.
Those who are are kind, benevolent and selfless, and this form of popularity leads to relationships that are most beneficial to health. Far different is which reflects influence, power and prestige, and is less satisfying.
“Status can be quantified by social media followers,” Mr. Prinstein wrote. “Likability cannot.”
Perhaps it’s best to avoid the social media treadmill and find happiness in the beauty of art, music and nature. And math. Our brains seem to respond to mathematical beauty as they do to other beautiful experiences, Richard Friedman reported in The Times.
In a 2014 study, researchers used M.R.I. scanners to observe the brains of 15 mathematicians while they were thinking about equations and found a correlation between finding an equation beautiful and activation of the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region just behind the eyes. When people find music or art beautiful, this same area lights up.
Mr. Friedman takes pleasure in the knowledge that the Pythagorean theorem always holds up, and pi describes all perfect circles.
“There is something very appealing about the notion of universal truth,” he wrote, “especially at a time when people entertain the absurd idea of alternative facts.”