LONELINESS How Social Media Feeds Our F.O.M.O.
On a bustling college campus in 2022, the air we live and breathe is made of social media. It’s the first thing most people look at in the morning, what we scroll through when we wait for the bus, what distracts us from doing our homework after a long day, and what lulls us to sleep at night as our eyelids grow heavy in front of our bright screens in bed. What does this mean for the mental health of everyone who lives in this semi-digital world? It didn’t quite seem possible in an already social media entrenched 2019, but our use of social media drastically increased once the pandemic hit. People were separated from those they already knew, and for students just starting college, meeting new people became an online affair. Following people on different platforms became one of the primary ways to reach out with awkward Zoom classes and rigid social restrictions. It was a lonely time for many, and social media may have eased that loneliness a bit. But, now that COVID protocols are loosening and we’re seeing more people in person once more, what happens to our social media use? I think that, for many people, it’s stayed the same. “We’re not meant to know or see this many people,” Grace O’Brien (COM ‘24) said. And she’s right. We’re meant to know 150 people at the maximum. This is Dunbar’s number, which was arrived at in a sociological study done in the late 1990s. Grace hadn’t known that there was a particular name or number, but she could tell from her own social media
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experience that something was off. She used the word “overwhelming” a lot when describing platforms like Instagram, where content is constantly thrown at us. Once we exceed that 150 person limit, we start to stretch ourselves thin. So, what does viewing hundreds and thousands of people’s lives do to us? Many students I’ve talked to described FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) as one of the primary negative effects. When you need or even want to stay in on a Friday night, it is so easy to feel like you’re missing out when you open up social media and see everything that everyone is doing. This can incur feelings of loneliness in you when you didn’t even feel lonely to begin with. This FOMO extends well beyond seeing people at the club or at a party on their Instagram story. Seeing how other people live, no matter how contrived it may be on their social media can have drastic deleterious effects on how we view our own lives. Even when we are aware of how factitious everyone is on social media, it still affects us on an unconscious level. Arin Siriamonthep (COM’24) described this sort of double-consciousness. He thinks, on the first level, people post and partake in social media to keep up with friends and be in a community. But, on another deeper and more unconscious level, many use social media because they crave attention. And this craving for attention that Arin mentions was absolutely caused by social media in the first place.
