Why social media doesn’t make us happy anymore

‘Social’ media fills me with dread.

Like a young love that turned sour over time, now I just want to break away. Disconnect myself for good – but I just can’t.

Call me whatever cliché you like – I’m a ‘digital native’, ‘a millennial’ – and yet, I feel trapped on this never-ending digital treadmill. I know I’m not the only one thinking like this, and it’s got me asking – where do we go from here?

The early days

We need to look back to understand how we got to where we are now.

I still remember when I got hooked on social media. It was back in 2006, when Facebook started to infiltrate universities up and down the country.

Back then, Facebook’s expansion was a stroke of genius – by being strictly limited to your university network, it played perfectly into our 20-something anxieties and narcissism. If a night out wasn’t on Facebook, it didn’t happen.

Friendships were made and maintained. When you met someone at the student union, you could look them up the next morning, and make a lifelong friend or lover.

All those messy nights out went from hazy memories to blurry collections of pictures, shared amongst friends, peers and more. A decade later, I’m still untagging myself from all those unflattering student pictures – nobody needs to see me in a wheelchair on my 21st birthday, or in fancy-dress that’d wouldn’t see the light of day in 2017.

For early adopters, Facebook grew and grew throughout our 20s.

It was there when we graduated. It kept us in touch with old friends from college and connected us with our newfound friends in our first jobs.

Something even more distracting came along

And then came Twitter.

As the London-based media professional that I am, Twitter’s appeal was immediately clear.

Here was a platform where the elusive promise of ‘going viral’ was just a mere tweet away. One pithy 140 character comeback could be all I needed to propel myself from a nobody to a SOMEBODY. At least, that’s what we all thought.

No other product in recent memory has managed to stir up so much hype and yet still not be able to explain what it exists for, let alone turn a profit.

We all drank the kool-aid about ‘the power of Twitter’. It broke news. And it brought down regimes during the Arab Spring (although the jury is still out on that one).

And at the same time, Twitter gave me a leg-up. A platform to shout about work to peers and bring me closer that little bit closer to my heroes. I’ll never forget that magic moment when I realised Stephen Fry followed me.

Then came the adverts, and the algorithms

This is where things started to turn sour.

We all know Facebook and Twitter aren’t charities – they need to make money to keep the lights on and pay wages. And to do that, advertising is a necessary evil.

Just like the freesheet newspaper I pick up every evening on my commute home, a couple of ads here and there seemed like a fair tradeoff for a free service that I found genuinely useful.

But then something shifted.

When I went on holiday I started to take breaks from social media. Within days, I was getting creepier and creepier notifications, trying to ‘entice’ me back in.

“Your friends are talking about Trump on Twitter”, one said. “Do you know Vikki Chowney?” – Facebook interrupted me to ask this, knowing that yes, I do, because we had been at the same birthday party days earlier.

What at first seemed innocent and potentially helpful suddenly seemed to reveal what this was all really about.

On social ‘media’ you are the product.

You can’t blame companies like these for trying to lure you back with every trick they can find.

The economics behind it are simple – every visit you make creates extra space for advertisers to fill. And every filled slot means more cash for our new online overlords.

In ‘traditional’ media we call it clickbaiting, but Facebook and Twitter have it down to a fine art.

That’s why the notifications keep on growing. And new ‘hacks’ have been created not for our benefit – but for one simple goal – to keep us coming back.

Facebook Memories has to be one of the worst examples of this. Despite my best attempts at disabling it, this ‘feature’ has dredged up painful memories of deceased friends, broken relationships and much more.

I’m not the only one – there are over 15m pages devoted to how to turn off Memories according to Google search – this is a problem that now plagues, quite literally, billions of people.

And the irony is: we gave all of our memories, or ‘content’ as social media would call it, away for free. If you boil it down, social media takes endless amounts of our effort with zero potential for us to profit – and arguably, we get little back in return.

The mental health factor

The real kicker is that social media isn’t just failing to make us happy – for many of us, it’s damaging our mental health.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) – might sound like a trivial first-world problem for millennials, but the figures make for painful reading. In the last year alone, we learned social media is becoming ‘crack for kids’ and that a shocking 1 in 5 of us feel depressed as a result of using it.

Facebook’s become a glorified bulletin board for the mentally unstable.

Unsurprisingly, in the pursuit of relentless profit, we’ve allowed an addictive beast to consume us whole, without taking a step back to look at what we’ve lost.

I’ve watched real-life meltdowns unfold before my eyes in my Facebook feed. One friend who tried to take his own life, still managed to maintain the illusion of a happy existence on social media. When I found out what had happened – I found it hard to forgive myself for not being a better real-life friend and stepping in earlier.

Countless numbers of my close friends and family have had enough and given up on social media altogether. These aren’t luddites – they’re tech-savvy young people who continue to use technology every day – and recognise that there’s more to life than ‘likes’.

Finding balance

But I’m not going cold turkey. As my good friend and fellow writer Molly Flatt has discovered in her journey into motherhood, we can’t fool ourselves into thinking we can easily live in a world without social.

It’s a part of the fabric of our everyday lives as much as the landline telephone was for much of the past century. Why would you want to exclude yourself from invites and event invites for life?

Despite my loathing of what it has become, social networks online are, I still believe, a force for good.

I love that I can share in the joys of old university friends who’ve gotten married or had their first children. Or friends that now live on the other side of the world.

The fundamental values of connecting people are still there. We just need to find a way to break the vicious cycle of notifications, anxiety and the pillaging of our personal data.

Meet Vero

Earlier this summer I met Ayman Hariri – the founder of a new app called Vero.

This new app promises a lot – it encourages real connections, lets you be yourself, and doesn’t whore you out for the sake of precious ad dollars.

Ayman and I instantly hit it off. He wants to change social media for the better by taking it back to where it all started – meaningful connections with people you love. I’m hooked – and I hope you will be too.

After getting to know the app, we’ve partnered with Vero to create a new series of content about the future of social.

Stay tuned.