Social Media Usage and the Level of Depressive Symptoms in the US [pdf]
drive.google.com
drive.google.com
Same with online dating. If you were bad with the opposite sex you'd get rejected by the women in your circles, but at least you'd get a chance to talk and meet face-2-face and still stay in touch platonically later. Now you can get rejected, ghosted and stood up by thousands of other potential mates before they even meet you which must do wonders for your self esteem (/s).
Same with finance. Some would make more $ than you but you wouldn't know about it. Now you can FOMO while you watch others making $$$ on trading platforms from their Cryptocurrency or TSLA stocks and feel left behind in the rat race.
My $0.02
Missing something, like your sunglasses, makes you wonder where they are, look for them, call people asking if you left them over, etc. This is worry, which is a light version of fear.
"Missing out" isn't like looking your sunglasses but still makes you wonder if where you are isn't where you should be, which is still a type of anxious behavior which will lead to repetition if the emotional response is allowed to go on unchecked.
Check out "Plutchik's wheel of emotions" for emotion groupings.
Comparing yourself against others is a loser's game. If the person is better, you lose. If the person comes out worse, you're taking a dip by comparing yourself at all to that person, so you still lose.
If you don't look at bad dates as a learning opportunity, and instead allow yourself to blame factors outside of your control for causing your bad dates, you tread dangerously close to incel mentality.
Some men bitterly turn misogynistic as a result of their failures, but that doesn't mean that their failures are entirely unique and personal.
Furthermore, I implore anyone who thinks that online dating is easy to create a fake profile with a photo of a semi attractive woman as a test. You get flooded with thousands of requests in no time. I tried it on Facebook and I reached the 5.000 friends limit in just four days. There's no way anyone can reach out and flirt in this mess. You become irrelevant in the noise.
If you're a man who's not in top 10% of most desirable, it's a barren wasteland. Your best hope becomes to attempt to match with basically anyone, and even when you do match most won't respond. So maybe you tried to be witty the first several times and got no response or possibly unmatched. A lot of men will lose their wit after this and just start sending "Hey" in hopes of getting some kind of response.
Meanwhile if you're a woman, nearly anyone who you click 'like' will be a match (except for the few you really want). The men you'll match with may not be charming because they've become tired or desperate or jaded, some may be outright rude, sexist, or cruel, and maybe the guy you want isn't responding at all -- because he's in that 10% of guys that all of the women are trying to match with and he's ignoring you.
The upside of it being impersonal so you have more freedom to screw up without much effort or commitment is also it's downside, where the people you match with don't put much effort or commitment in for you either.
Then how comes the marriage/dating rates are way higher than 10%?
It's the same adverse-selection effect as "why are all my job candidates terrible?" Because you're only interviewing the people who have failed to get a job.
If you want practice and opportunities, go out and and try yourself in bars/clubs. I know it sounds scary and and even superficial but it's humane and it does work. I know, I've been there. My social circle never worked for this purpose, especially not after high school. I've tried online dating about a decade ago just to find that it's completely dysfunctional (it was, even back then!).
However, talking to actual people in bars was always fun even if scary at first (I like that environment a lot, so that might be a factor too, others may work for other people). Heck, even a rejection feels real and less upsetting than online. Not to mention that even the rejections are waaay more civilized and a lot less likely. I used to keep thinking about how to fix online dating back then and one of the problems is that socially unacceptable behaviour is not only goes without negative consequences there but it's actually the easy thing to do. Thus no surprise the whole thing ends up being toxic pretty quickly as people constantly annoy and provoke each other through this.
E.g. if you start to talk to someone in a bar, even if you say the most boring thing possible, they will almost never just turn their back on you and don't respond. Even a quick rejection will probably include a smile and a response like "no, thanks", or "I'm with my friends", etc. But, at least in my experience and my case, that would be below 10% and the other 90% would be at least a short conversation. Which just feels good. Compare this with what you get online. (In my case it was, again 10 years ago!, the reverse or even worse. I.e. over 90% no response. Same person, same looks.)
I have a friend who is very good looking (and I mean it: girls turn around after him in the bars or straight walk up to him) and even he doesn't have too much success online. I mean he does get matches, probably a lot more than e.g. I would get, but then he usually runs into dates not working out, girls looking vastly different than on the profile picture, etc. This just doesn't happen IRL.
I definitely don’t disagree with the above, but I honestly don’t think the exact opposite is very good either. In other words only blaming yourself can get you in a heap of self-doubt, discouragement, distraction and all around lack of faith and hope in ever having a dating life or serious relationship. I mean at this point you don’t think the opposite gender is the problem you think you yourself are. I honestly fall into this trap way too often. Can also say I’ve fallen in the above quoted sections trap from time to time too. But I’m not saying forget doing self introspection. That is important but also don’t beat yourself up. I’m saying you and speaking in general here these comments are not directed towards the parent commenter in any way.
You mention cryptocurrency, so I have to ask. Do you think Satoshi is sitting on a yacht tweeting out photographs of their fancy trips?
Russell puts it better, of course:
http://bactra.org/Russell/on_youthful_cynicism.html
"Moreover many kinds of beauty require that a man should take himself more seriously than is possible for an intelligent modern. A prominent citizen in a small city State, such as Athens or Florence, could without difficulty feel himself important. The earth was the center of the Universe, man was the purpose of creation, his own city showed man at his best, and he himself was among the best of his own city. In such circumstances Æschylus or Dante could take his own joys or sorrows seriously. He could feel that the emotions of the individual matter, and that tragic occurrences deserve to be celebrated in immortal verse. But the modern man, when misfortune assails him, is conscious of himself as a unit in a statistical total; the past and the future stretch before him in a dreary procession of trivial defeats. Man himself appears as a somewhat ridiculous strutting animal, shouting and fussing during a brief interlude between infinite silences."
Any certainly, man's place in the bell curve is not the only problem here, but it is a prominent one, and one that existed before social media, and is almost certainly aggravated by the other problems of social media.
(Not that I think everyone would agree with the infinite silence part.)
I think Russell still paints a valid point, however you're right to think that perspectives were not uniform in the past, nor are they uniform now. I do believe, however, statistical awareness does add a bit more weight to Russell's perspective.
There's a common saying, "why be a big fish in a small pond?" It's used mostly to critique an idea that you should reach for something more - competing in a bigger city or bigger stage to better yourself.
Now, the 'pond' is no longer tied to where you live - it follows you everyday on YouTube, Twitter, Blogs, everywhere.
As I think is argued by Russell and everdrive, the pond has become the full connected world and 'opting out' is hard to do... making the regional experts that provide beauty to smaller communities inferior to the common man who sees greatness on the inter webs scrolling through ads.
What's probably worse, I imagine this connection has removed a few potential regional experts drive to spend the hard time working and learning. I fear many of these people could have become one of the real 'greats' - had they retained the little glimmer of 'unfounded confidence' that is washed away with the constant stimulus of other greats.
Finally, I'm not saying all is lost... some thrive in this and view stimuli of the greats as inspirational... but it's definitely not the same skillset that previous generations used to thrive.
When I was a kid, the neighbor who knew something about Ham radio was a brilliant expert, the neighbor who made bread was an exceptional baker, and the guy down the street who could paint portraits was a talented artist. Now, compared to all the talents in the world, they were all just competent at best, or even mediocre. In those days, the comparison wasn't visible. Now it's in everyone's face 24x7.
It doesn't mean you can't enjoy the activities. But if you're vested in being the best or even notable, you're now competing on a global scale rather than just your town.
> It doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the activities. But if you’re vested in being the best or even notable, you’re now competing on a global scale rather than just your town.
So true, and all this becomes sinister when you begin to realize that ‘enjoyment’ comes in many flavors - and lot of enjoyment comes from sharing with others. So when other people say (not you I don’t think), “well you can do X just for the love of doing X,” they miss out on is the response, ‘well yeah, but I want to share it with you, too!’
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
I the Preacher was king over Israel in Jerusalem.
And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith.
I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.Suppose you have 52 friends who all go on vacation one week out of the year. Every week you will compare yourself to whichever one who is posting their fabulous vacation photos. This doesn't mean you're having a worse life or missing out, you're completely average. You just only notice the 51 comparisons in that direction and don't notice the 51 comparisons during your own vacation week.
Maybe because I was aware of what you are saying, that everyone shares their best experiences and moments, and even those in an inflated way and on top of this, FB will find those and make those posts more popular (because people will react to them more strongly). Though thinking about it, I never had this feeling when I've learned about this IRL while I knew some people actually can get envy (i.e. feel bad) when they hear others are doing good or have fun even if they were 100% OK with their situation before hearing that.
Author's conclusion:
> This paper finds that social media usage decreases the level of depressive symptoms employing a two-way fixed effects model. Direct information on people’s feelings about using social media also supports that using social media can be beneficial. This result implicates that society may have underestimated the importance and contribution of social media.
There's a lot which can be discussed in terms of what is being measured in this study, and what else might make sense to measure. Or how this study's results compare against other similar studies.
For example, I unfollowed someone who started to post photos of their every meal. And I unfollowed my own mother because she tends to repost every scare "chain letter" that comes across her :)
I've muted around 3000 accounts and 200 words, which is a lot when you consider I don't even post on the platform I just read it and still my feed will have political hot takes slip through the cracks.
Twitter has the data, they could put a huge "Politics On/Off" switch in preferences but they choose not to because they know that forcing me to look at politics is both more profitable, ideologically I think they think controlling what political message I see is important too and they're fine with the tradeoff being mental health damage.
Speaking personally, there are several people I follow who never actually generated real content. Instead they just liked asinine, toxic political takes, which then filled my feed.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/2020-elec...
These aren't critical infrastructure. These aren't even remotely necessary services. They're the box of Sugar Coated Chocolate Bombs on the breakfast table of communications. They add no nutritional value to a person's day. They only exist to foster addiction to serve themselves.
As terrible as modern social media culture is, there have been positive effects on the world. Lets not forget things like the Arab Spring which might have not been possible without twitter.
Then again it helps all 'minorities' ranging from BLM to neo-nazis. I'm not sure if total net effect is positive.
> I find that using Twitter decreases the level of depressive symptoms by 27%.
Facinating
Why is it that humans think emotional output may quantified by observing sense information alone? It should be self evident that people who use social media "encode" emotional responses in their words, and some do it on purpose to "trigger" others who may not have defenses against the "fake emotional outrage" or other negative emotions.