Aisling Curtis | Senior Staff Writer
There’s something irresistible about a beautiful Instagram filter, transforming a drab frozen moment into a shining one, allowing you the luxury of appearing to live in luxury, even if you don’t. On Erasmus in Paris, I’m disgustingly guilty of this: a rainbow of stacked macaroons, the Eiffel tower, the Seine drenched in golden light and the silhouette of Notre Dame. There’s a lure to editing your life until it looks a little better; a lure that social media has exponentially fed.
More times than I can count, I’ve found myself living the wild life: halfway through the contents of my fridge, doing nothing except aimlessly scrolling Facebook in the hopes that something – anything – will shed a fragment of intrigue on my night. And it’s then that you come across the photos. The beautifully shaded picture of somebody’s incredibly healthy dinner. The light, bright summer pictures, everybody having so much fun. Those on Erasmus, J1s, high-profile internships. The debris of lives that somehow manage to be a hundred times better than yours.
It’s bad enough that the media already bombards us with reminder upon reminder of our own inadequacy: now we do it to each other, too. In a survey conducted by disability charity Scope, researchers found that a third of Facebook users felt lonely after seeing the supposed high levels of connectivity of their peers. And almost half admitted that the sites made them feel unattractive. 62% also acknowledged feeling inadequate about their own achievements, and 60% admitted to jealousy of others.
This “fear of missing out” (FOMO) is another problem that we can add to our generation’s woefully long list: the exquisite anxiety that accompanies feelings that everyone’s having a better time than you, has more friends than you, is more successful or attractive or social than you. Its even been studied scientifically by Andrew Przybylski, a psychologist at the University of Essex in England, who created a ten-item questionnaire that quantified this psychological anxiety (a version of which can be found online at ratemyfomo.com). Those high in FOMO were found to feel less independent and less competent, and were significantly more likely to utilise social media to a high degree. Though the researchers couldn’t fully determine if FOMO drives social media use, or if social media use creates FOMO, they did agree that social media was detrimental to those already high in psychological uncertainty and that “fear of missing out”.
It’s impossible to deny the upsides of all this connection: the ability to keep in contact with far-off friends, to share exciting moments and receive healthy gratification, to feel connected with those who aren’t with you or who you haven’t seen for a while. These types of updates shouldn’t be demonised; they’re good for us, in an age where everybody’s constantly on the move.
And, of course, FOMO isn’t a new phenomenon. It has been around forever, transmitted via letters and postcards and email before social media appeared. The difference now is that it can be hard to switch off. Now, we can check Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and the myriad of other contact hubs every second of every day, gratified – or not – in a moment, the constant scrolling excitement of others’ lives, accessible whenever we wish.
It may not be a bad thing. Social media is regularly derogated, but the truth is it’s too soon for us to really see the effects for what they are, to decisively state that they are good, bad, or – more likely – somewhere in between.
Saying that, I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve habitually checked my phone while writing this. And the four days where I couldn’t access the Internet after moving abroad led to dire acts like stealing McDonald’s free wifi and buying Starbucks just so I could reorient myself in my virtual life. Maybe all of this connection is not such a bad thing; it’s got its good points, but the truth is we probably all need to switch off every now and again.
