What should we do if social media make us lonely, cause depression?

By David McElroy · November 12, 2018

When I joined Facebook in about 2007, I didn’t really see any point in it. I joined only because an ex-girlfriend wanted me to sign up. I hardly used it for the first year or so. I accepted friend requests, but I posted almost nothing. Social media basically didn’t exist in my world.

By about 2009, I was using it more heavily. I’d connected with people of similar political views and I posted a lot about politics. Then I slowly posted more about my own life. By the next year, I had launched this website and that’s when the friend requests really started coming.

I soon hit 5,000 friends — which is Facebook’s limit — and my page was an active cauldron of discussion and argument. For awhile, it was exhilarating, because I was “popular” in my political circle and people were looking at my page as an entertaining place to come.

At some point, all the activity and the contact left me feeling more isolated, though, not more connected.

I started feeling that something was wrong. I had trouble putting my finger on it, but I started feeling more like an addict than someone who was enjoying something. I started feeling as though the platform was using me.

The shallow interaction with others left me feeling more isolated. It made me feel more alone. Somehow, it made me feel more misunderstood than ever.

Over a period of several years, I made two huge changes. I backed far, far away from politics, at least compared with my previous level of involvement. I moved away from discussing so much about news and politics, because they seemed pointless and depressing.

The other change I made was to start slashing my list of Facebook friends. It’s hard to do that without alienating too many people, but I felt as though I had to get rid of some angry and ignorant voices. I blocked a lot of people. I simply deleted many more. I went from 5,000 “friends” all the way down to just a bit more than 700 today. (My goal was to get down to 500, so I’m still not there.)

I can’t get past the feeling that Facebook and other social media are destructive to us. I have strongly come to the suspicion that social media are making us less social, not more. I suspect that our shallow interaction is taking the place of in-depth real-life interaction. And for many people, that’s welcome — because their lives don’t bear close examination, so it’s easier to hide behind false social media facades.

I can recognize good things in social media. There are some people who I care about who I’d have never met without Facebook. I’ve become friends with people — even meeting a few of them in the flesh — who were friends of friends, but who I’d have never met otherwise.

Facebook gave me a promotional platform for my website when I started, so I don’t know that I would have ever found my original political audience without social media.

Probably most importantly, Facebook allowed me to reconnect with someone I’d known in the past. It allowed me to first watch her from a distance and remember why I’d been attracted to her in the past, but it eventually helped facilitate falling in love with her. That was one of the most important things in my life — and it would have never happened without social media.

So I recognize there’s a lot of good in social media — mostly Facebook and Instagram for me — but I’m increasingly questioning whether the tradeoffs are worth it going forward.

I’m a writer and (more broadly) a communicator, but I’ve realized that what I want from media is the same thing I wanted when I first started working in newspapers. I want to do work that’s good enough to earn a position of trust in your life. I want you to choose to listen to me because I’m saying something you believe is worth listening to.

Media as I understand it is something of a meritocracy. Those who are good enough — and who have a message that resonates with an audience — are heard. Those who have nothing to say worth listening to go about their lives without pretending their thoughts are worth hearing.

Social media destroy any sense that you’re being heard because of merit. Social media give everyone an equal voice — and it’s a cacophony of useless noise, with a lot of angry squawking and egotistical preening. Is there a difference between that and what traditional journalists and writers did? I think so, but others might not see it.

I’ve come to find social media depressing. Even though they help me to form shallow connections with people I would have never met, I find that this shallow connection gets in the way of forming deeper and more lasting relationships with fewer people.

I feel as though social media have become mostly a lot of people shouting — and very few listening.

I read last week about a new study at the University of Pennsylvania which suggests that social media cause depression and loneliness. You can read the details of the study here, but I believed it before I saw the details, because I already know in my gut that it’s true.

It’s not a new thing to suggest this is true, but more evidence is starting to turn up to prove it in the academic sense. The question is whether we’re going to do anything about it.

I thought that if I cut my friend list way down — and got rid of the people who couldn’t be civil to one another on my page — that maybe things would be different. It’s certainly helped, but the core problem remains for me. And I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.

For now, you can find me on Facebook here. (I’m not accepting friend requests from people I don’t already know, but my posts are mostly public.) On Instagram, you can follow my main account here or my animal account here. It tells you quite a bit about the pressure to attract an audience that I happen to know my main account has only about 400 followers, but my cat and dog account has close to 2,200 followers. (Why should I know that, unless I feel that I’m putting on a show and need to attract more for the audience?)

I have a need to perform, but social media doesn’t feel like the place to do it. And the truth is that until I have the love in my life that I want, my efforts to speak to the world are all distracted. Despite my best efforts to change this, I still do everything in my life for an audience of one — someone who isn’t there to see it or hear it — which means much of my life feels like a play staged in an empty auditorium for an audience who isn’t there for it.

Even in the broader sense, social media have played to something that has always been a weakness of mine. I’ve always created the things I’ve done with one eye on my audience — waiting for applause to tell me they approve of what I’m doing — but I’ve come to the realization that an artist shouldn’t really care what his audience thinks, as long as he knows he’s telling truth as he understands it at the moment. In this way, I’m not sure a real artist can use social media as a platform for his work, because it’s a platform with strong feedback mechanisms which push someone to do shallow and popular work.

There’s a certain arrogance to declaring yourself an artist of any kind. It’s a claim that you have something to say that’s worth reading or viewing or hearing or somehow understanding. For me, making such a statement has always created intense fear and intense shame, because there’s a voice in my head saying, “Who do you think you are? You’re just a fraud who has no talent and nothing to say.”

It’s been hard for me to get past that — to accept that it’s my role to express truth as I understand it, without worrying about audience approval or understanding.

Social media is all about audience approval and envy and competition, not about deeper understanding. It’s about the lowest common denominator. It’s about being reminded that you’re not what you want to be. It’s about being told that other people are what you wish you could be, even if you wonder whether what they’re projecting is a lie.

I wonder whether I should cut social media out of my life entirely. I know there would be a price to be paid in the short run, but I suspect I’d be better off in the long run. I have a feeling I’d be healthier and I’d do more work which can find a more serious audience.

But maybe I’m too addicted to the thrill of having an approving audience to let it go. That possibility scares me — and I don’t like admitting it to you.

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I’m seeing a lot of simplistic and dishonest explanations right now for the current rioting in France. Those on the populist far right claim it’s all about Muslim immigrants to France disrupting the culture. Their message is that this sort of thing is going to happen in the U.S. unless “we defend the border.” On the far left, socialists and their fellow travelers claim the riots are all about wealthy people in France not paying enough taxes, resulting in cuts to government services. The truth is far more complicated, but it’s rooted in the decline of population growth in Europe. There simply aren’t enough young workers paying into the tax system anymore, so cuts in social services were inevitable. There is genuine cultural tension as more and more people immigrate from other countries, but government cuts to education and other services are even more important to what’s happening. The situation is complicated, so don’t let dishonest people with U.S. political agendas tell you that it happens to support whatever they were already promoting for partisan reasons.

Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

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