This is Part 2 in the series about the specific ways in which our social media use can decrease happiness.  You can find Part 1 here, addressing how social networks lead us to turn ourselves into a product and how that can negatively affect our mental health.

Post 2: Skimming Instead of Reading, Scrolling Instead of Seeing

Another way that intense use of social media can negatively affect our happiness and life satisfaction is because our minds have become “spoiled” by the availability of endless options and we lose our ability to fully appreciate one single thing in its entirety. 

Let’s look at Instagram. When you see a beautiful model in a photo, for example, how long do you look at her/him before you keep scrolling? Is it even a second? You see the photo, give it a like (maybe), and move on, because you know thousands more beautiful photos and models just like that one await below. But did you notice the color of the model’s eyes?  The details in the background?  Did you think about the inspiration for the setting?  Did you wonder what the model was thinking about or trying to convey?

You couldn’t have, because in less than a second the photo was gone. But imagine if it had stuck around, if you only had that photo to look at – the various directions your thoughts could have taken you, the ideas you might have had, the imagination muscles you could have flexed, the inspiration you may have gathered.

I’m not judging scrolling right past, I do the same thing and I think most of us do.  There is just too much to see to be devoting more than the minimum amount of time on any one image.  I’m just turning the focus on what we’re losing in the process of this lightning fast consumption that we’ve gotten used to.  When you have so many options for stimulation, the exploration-oriented mind wants to see as many as possible.  That means there’s very little time to devote to each one.  But think back a few decades before Instagram or the Internet. There were a few models, actors and singers that you were a fan of and you probably put their photos on your walls, staring at them for hours, thinking about every aspect of that photo and appreciating its details because it was the only one you had.  In that situation, the photo was a prompt but your brain provided the stimulation and entertainment.

Before we had the Internet and its tidal waves of information and endless stimuli, we had to do the best with what we had. We had to suck out every possible second of amusement from each thing because there weren’t thousands more amusements just a click away. That meant delving deeper, appreciating more, thinking harder, and maybe in a sense being more alive. Nowadays, the ready availability of endless external entertainment and stimulation options has eliminated the need for us to develop internal skills like patience, mindfulness and creativity needed to capture the full value of each experience.

This move towards quantity instead of quality can negatively impact deeper aspects of the human experience, like our love lives.  When dating nowadays, apps like Tinder or Bumble show us that there are tons of options out there that we have access to, tons of fish in the sea, and this can make it unappealing to invest the time, effort and consideration required to understand one of them in his/her totality. When things get tough or even just boring, it’s easy to think – why am I wasting my time with this?  There are so many other people out there a click away and there is probably someone more fun, more attractive or easier to be with.  On to the next one!

But what we’re thinking of with this type of mentality are the superficial aspects of romance – immediate physical attraction and the buzz of the new experience.  On a deeper level, every person has their imperfections, every relationship has its rough spots and no match is 100% perfect.  As the saying goes – anything worth having is worth fighting for.  But because our  minds have become spoiled by the easy access to infinite superficially pleasurable options a click, scroll or swipe away, our lazy brains often get tempted to take the easy way out – moving on to the next thing.  This can lead to people being unfamiliar with the deeper and more satisfying levels of pleasure and meaning because they require the cognitive and emotional work that we don’t practice much of these days. 

The stone graces by Salvador Dali

The most beautiful parts of connection and life come into play at those deeper levels.  It’s said that just looking at a painting isn’t enough to truly see it, you must spend many minutes and even hours looking at the same piece of art and thinking about it, in order to understand and receive its full value.  I once took that advice and spent 40 minutes looking at the painting of the four stone graces by Salvador Dali.  It was an incredible experience because of how much detail there was at different levels of the painting and how much I saw that I hadn’t initially noticed.  While I was staring at it dozens of people passed by, gave the painting a glance and a smile and moved on.  I wanted to yell at them, “Stop! Come closer! You have no idea what you’re missing!”  and I thought about how much beauty in our lives can go undetected because we brush past it in pursuit of the next thing.

Mindfulness is the official name for the practice of “stopping to smell the roses.”  It involves slowing down and appreciating the various facets of every experience, thinking about what you see and smell and touch and hear.  Absorbing it and feeling it and focusing on it fully.  The practice has been proven again and again to decrease stress and depression and to improve overall health.  In today’s world with job stresses and the bombardment of  millions of stimuli from the Internet and social media, mindfulness can be easily overlooked.  But adopting it as a common practice can be a positive way to counteract some of the negative effects of a technology-heavy life.

(Here is a step-by-step guide to mindful meditation as well as mindfulness practices you can do throughout your day)

Huge quantities of information have the effect of keeping us on the surface of things, simply because there is SO MUCH out there, the brain can’t process all of it at a more than superficial level.  So we skim instead of read, scroll instead of see. That being said, how we interact with the world is up to us.  We can consciously make the decision to think, feel and experience things more deeply and thoughtfully, more vibrantly and mindfully, and in that way we can begin to feel more alive.