opinionated editorial by austin zhuang
Through this past year, I’ve been learning a lot about myself and the growing pains I’ve been going through. The sophomore and junior years of college were a big change not only in terms of my college career as a music major and musical theatre minor, but in my love life and in my health, both physically and mentally.
My underclassmen college years were a roller coaster, but 2019 was a year I’ll definitely never EVER forget. I’ve went through the ultimate experience (you name it): depression, anxiety, burnout, sleeplessness, loss of my motivation drive, and much more. Yet, through the very dark time, I received love and constant support from my parents and best friends who never gave up on me. They gave me the opportunity to learn from my mistakes, guide me on how to find my true self, and distinguish the difference from what it means to live a life of truth and a life of lies.
Eventually, it taught me a very important lesson: social media can either build you up to be a better individual, or it can destroy your entire life in a course of six months. My parents used to always refer to social media as a “utopia,” which, at first, I didn’t fully understand. This led me to ask myself some questions when I wrote this article:
What is the concept of a utopia? Why has social media become the new “utopia” for the new generation? What is loneliness? Why does this concept exist?
How does social media, as its own mega-platform, make isolation and loneliness worse? What factors contribute to the FOMO, or fear of missing out, mentality? How prevalent does FOMO play in social media, and how/why does it heighten anxiety?
I’m a big fan when it comes to personal stories, because from a story told by oneself, we can relate to someone in a much easier way. Last year played a major story in how my depression, anxiety, and self-esteem issues formed, and how it eventually played a huge role in building and destroying my life. I was extremely ready for the spring semester of 2019, in terms of classes. I was ready for the rigorousness of my spring gerontological methods music therapy class, along with gero practicum that I had to attend every Thursday of that semester. What I wasn’t ready for, though, was my mentality to engage in all those activities, including my job.
I had gotten a job as a barista at Starbucks that spring semester, thinking that it would bring me profit and it would help me manage my money in a good way. While my position in the job was relaxing at first, it eventually didn’t make me happy. I had to constantly deal with working late-night shifts, and then wake up before the crack of dawn to open the store with my shift supervisor. Eventually, it made me not only suffer in my schoolwork, but it made me fall into my own virtual world, or as I call it, my “utopia.”
Through that five-month period, I realized that I overused social media constantly; I would be socializing with other people with the intent of using my knowledge of pictures and captions posted on Instagram and/or Twitter to assume how comfortable or uncomfortable they were in their life. By the end of it, I was so submerged into that utopia that I would have social media withdrawals.
So, what is utopia exactly? According to Google, the definition of utopia is “an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect.” In other words, it’s an impractical plan for social improvement; it’s a visionary reform that tends to be impossibly idealistic. Social media, in this sense, has become a new form of this so-called “utopia” because everything posted on social media is perfect. From high school students, to social media influencers, you can name it all. There are thousands of Instagram photos that may show someone’s creative art piece and only get a few hundred likes, or a picture of someone’s bikini and their thick butt which could receive tens of thousands of likes.
Then you have Twitter. The number of followers you have says it all; it shows the loyalty of how many people really want to know about your “virtual” life; on the other hand, retweets and likes are the number of people that truly fanboy or fangirl. Eventually, we might realize that social media makes us fall into a condition of loneliness, or a state of mind characterized by a dissociation between what an individual wants or expects from a relationship and what that individual experiences in that relationship.
You might have heard of the concept FOMO, or the fear of missing out. It is a social anxiety stemming from the belief that others might be having fun, while the person experiencing the anxiety is not present. FOMO can work in both ways: it can happen physically or it can happen virtually. When someone is not able to join in an activity due to a limitation that is out of their control, they start experiencing distress. As a result, they start getting anxious over the fact that they aren’t fully included and that they’ll miss out on the wonderful experience. The concept of FOMO is used more virtually, however, because your events can be seen through social media applications. For instance, say you’re at home and you’re scrolling through your Instagram feed, when you stumble upon an Instagram story that shows that your friend is at a beach with his or her friends, or better, his or her significant other. You then start having thoughts and you start asking yourself questions: “Wait, why am I not there? Would it be more fun if I wasn’t home?” “Oh my goodness, he/she must be having a wonderful time with his/her boyfriend/girlfriend!!” We ask questions like those.
Opinions from quotes I’ve seen:
This article would not have been formed had it been thorough research into two articles, that I read, that talked specifically on the aspect of the effect of social media on mental health. The first one comes from the Centre of Mental Health, located in the United Kingdom, and the second reference comes from Nursing Times.
It has been found that the “so-called ‘social media addiction’ has been referred to by a wide variety of studies and experiments. It is thought that addiction to social media affects around 5% of young people, and was recently described as potentially more addictive than alcohol and cigarettes [...]” Regardless of whether it is a substance use or screen use, the concept behind social media is very toxic. In my opinion, it acts as a separation from the actual world, and it’s much harder to take away for someone that has a mental and/or neurological disability; it can act in both ways: positively, as a therapeutic exposure, and negatively, as a mental and physical destruction from the realistic world. Social media can affect the way we rest too.
The “sleep loss works in a vicious cycle of reinforcement with mental health; that is, that loss of sleep due to night time social media use can lead to poorer mental health, and poor mental health can lead to intense night time use and sleep loss [...]”. Sleep is a modern-day problem for us as young adults; yes, this even includes me. Lately, I’ve been working on sleeping and waking early, and I cannot tell you the amount of increased motivation and energy I’ve been getting, compared to sleeping and waking late. It really makes a difference. We are so used to our minds not only looking at blue light, but also making us constantly updated on what’s going on so we don’t have the “fear of missing out.”
While we don’t realize this part enough, social media also has “[...] the potential to damage mental wellbeing through promoting unreasonable expectation”, believe it or not. This adds to the concept of sleep, and how FOMO (the fear of missing out) kinda contributes to the overall picture. We also use those sleeping hours to create unrealistic expectations and goals that we THINK we are able to achieve. In reality, when we try executing them, it doesn’t come out as we wanted it to be, then we realize that all that planning was for nothing.
It has also been proven that self-esteem and self-love issues fall into place a lot of the time. He exclaims, “When these expectations are inevitably not met, the impact on self-esteem can be damaging, to the disturbing extent that the Royal Society of Public Health recently found 9 in 10 young females say that they are unhappy with the way they look” [...]. This is a true statement, because when these expectations are truly not met, we feel as if we’ve done something wrong. Surprisingly, this concept of “unrealistic expectations” are not just limited to our looks and the shape of our body; it’s the aspect of friendship and social hierarchy that also gets affected as well. When we don’t meet the “unrealistic” expectations, it makes us drive ourselves into a whole heap of stress and negativity. Ultimately, we might ask ourselves these questions: “Why did I not meet my expectations? Why can’t I be as good as the friends around me?”
Statistics are another factor that help add up how severe social media can affect mental health. At the beginning of the Nursing Times article, it has been told that “the number of hours worldwide internet users spend on social media is increasing and in 2018 averaged 136 minutes a day” (Clement, 2019). That’s an insane amount of time spent on social media on its own. This includes Facebook as well, with the other factors included (Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, etc. what not). While that is an average amount, analysis shows that it could be much different; some people could over-excessively use it, while some may not use it at all. Social comparison has also played a huge role in the mental health stance, where “[...] people have a tendency to make downward social comparisons with those who are worse off or less skilled than them, and this can raise their self-esteem. Conversely, upward social comparisons can reduce self-esteem, and are more likely with social media [...]” I can relate to this quote a lot. This isn’t just a trend that happened throughout high school, it even started for me in middle school. Cliques are a thing throughout social realms, and what happens is when we see other people that we don’t really know or haven’t talked to for a while, we automatically see them in person, using the knowledge we’ve gathered from social media.
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