What is it exactly about social media that deteriorates mental health?
Why is social media bad for mental health? As far as I can tell, from a quick scan of the top articles in Google search, here are the main culprits:
Social media provides a window through which one can view missed experiences (AKA FOMO) or evidence of being excluded from activities which causes feelings of isolation.
Provides too many opportunities to judge oneself too harshly in comparison to everyone else’s unrealistically-edited pictures.
Causes an overdose on dopamine, that feel-good chemical in the brain which can desensitize you and can cause a perception of non-online day-to-day events as being more dull.
Increases the exposure of negative news (AKA doomscrolling). More negativity causes more negative thoughts (AKA garbage-in garbage-out).
Can increase the amount, duration and intensity of negative offline social interactions when they’re too-easily ported online - like bullying.
Lessens the enjoyment of offline activities by taking you out of the moment to seek online validation.
Social media’s addictiveness increases the chances of staying up too late, neglecting life goals and ignoring responsibilities while crowding out mood-improving activities like exercise, being in nature or spending time with friends.
It saps one’s ability to focus, instilling a persistent hum of restlessness and distraction.
These all seem like legitimate reasons to be very cautious of the content and duration of our screen time. But there’s one mental-health-eroding-element of social media I’ve experienced that hasn’t gotten enough representation: Social media undermines our attempts to believe in our own life-enhancing illusions. We are all born in a certain place and at a certain time in a certain culture which provides a necessarily constraining worldview. This worldview, at it’s best, provides everyone the opportunity to live up to the values it prescribes creating death-denying and life-sustaining meaning. The illusions we live by are not necessarily accurate, but they are useful. So useful, in fact, that they are necessary. As Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death says:
“He doesn’t have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is to plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the “ways of the world” that the child learns and in which he lives later as a kind of grim equanimity.”
Social media exposes us to too many alternate idealized versions of a well-lived life. This is more insidious than comparing yourself to someone else's overly edited photos. No photoshopping is needed. The mere existence of every instagram photo and TikTok video subtly chips away at the confidence we have in our personal method, conscious or not, to attain meaning. As Sheldon Solomon explains,
“To the extent that our own beliefs about reality serve a death-denying function, the mere existence of people with different beliefs is fundamentally threatening because if we admit to the legitimacy of an alternative conception of reality we necessarily undermine the confidence with which we subscribe to our own views and when we do that we expose ourselves to the very anxiety that those beliefs were erected to mitigate in the first place.”
The sheer volume and speed of this social media content is like the constant waves of the ocean eroding the rocky coast of our unconscious sense of self and meaning.
There were times in the past where the idea of needing to find meaning would have never even been conceived of. Everyone was born fully ensconced into a completely believable worldview along with an enveloping role in that worldview. If you were born into a native tribe in the Americas before the Europens arrived, your place in the world was certain and anyone else was an “other.” There were simply no other modes of living on offer. History shows us what happens when two distinctly different cultures, with no prior awareness of the existence of any other way to believe, collide: killing those perceived inferior aliens is justified to demonstrate the superiority of one’s beliefs; my God is better than your God.
Today we are bombarded on all sides by conflicting cultural worldviews and values for every facet of life -- our age, relationship status, career situation, educational level, geographical location, income class, sexual preferences -- all are on table to be undermined (many of which are very inflexible, leading to more hopelessness). Ernest Becker identified this even before there was an internet:
“The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up...[They] have sensed--for better or for worse--a great social-historical truth: that just as there are useless self-sacrifices in unjust wars, so too is there an ignoble heroics of whole societies.”
This puts us in the precarious position of being on our own to come up with the meaning that our culture can’t provide and that social media constantly erodes. The weight of such a task is too much for most, let alone a young person to bear. Not just attempts at meaning, but all of reality begins to fall under suspicion. Depression sets in and with it a tendency to see life with what feels more like improved accuracy. If there are thousands of ways to live and every way of life is equally valid, then none of them are. This so-called “depressive realism” makes Steven Weinberg’s quote very poignant:
"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."
With enough time under this pressure a crisis occurs. Some disturbance or suffering reaches a critical mass sufficient enough to shock us into awareness and reveal all our attempts at meaning--school, games, money, jobs, God--for what they really are: mere man-made cultural inventions. We feel like Cormac McCarthy’s protagonist in The Road, looking over the scorched remains of earth:
“The frailty of everything revealed at last.”
This state of being, as hard as it is, is a precious one. Within it is a seed with the potential to grow into a new search for meaning--not one focused outward, but inward. We are responsible for creating all of the purpose and meaning in the world and we are capable of believing in what we create for ourselves. The answer to the question of which purpose of life is the best has no general answer; only specific, individual and bespoke answers. Personally crafted, consciously adopted and deliberately shaped illusions can stand up against the nature of existence. But it will likely require turning off all social media - something that almost seems heretical in our plugged-in culture.