Compulsively Curating the "Perfect Life" and Other Social Media Addictions
Frequent selfies, stalking others, and other Internet behaviors that become problematically compulsive
Today, I want to share with you an excerpt from one of the books that I authored that I don’t mention much: Internet Addiction. The topic was assigned to me by the publisher and I followed a specific format for writing the book. As a result, it’s not one of the books I’m most proud of or highlight often. But that doesn’t mean there’s no value inside its pages.
One of the most common types of Internet Addiction is addiction to the use of social media. This is due in part to the content itself; the relationships online are compelling enough to garner our attention. However, the design of the sites is what really makes them addictive, and social media designers have been tweaking that design steadily to increase addictive qualities. The sites want people coming back frequently, and they create incentives to do so, which can lead to or exacerbate addictive use.
Social media launched back in the late 1990s, but it didn’t become widely used until the convergence of broadband Internet and smartphones. More and more people were getting online, and they were doing it more often since the Internet was now at their fingertips, and this opened the door to truly connecting those people. Facebook launched in 2004; Instagram launched in 2010.
Back in the early days of social media, including the beginning of Facebook, the purpose – and the reason that people spent time on the device – was to connect with other people that they already knew in real life. People spent time on the site as a novelty, because it was fun and somewhat social, but it didn’t dominate their attention. Over the years, Facebook has added countless tools designed to exploit the brain’s addictive nature.
Take, for example, the “like” button. Do you remember back in the early days when it wasn’t there at all? The button actually wasn’t introduced until 2009, five years after the company launched. Why did Facebook add that button? Author and social psychologist Adam Alter posits that it marks the turning point in how Facebook has changed to become more addictive, because it shifted the platform from one in which you passively perused updates to one in which you were an interactive participant. This exploits several of those addictive features that the human brain loves including:
Once you’ve hit the like button, you’re more invested in the interaction. Therefore, you’re more likely to come back to the site, spend more time there, and share it more with others.
You never know when you post whether people are going to hit the like for you or not. This satisfies the brain’s love for intermittent rewards. The more you post, the more likely it is that you’ll get some likes, so you start posting more and checking more frequently on your likes status.
Humans want social approval. The like tells us, at least in theory, that people approve of us. That feels good so we want to keep doing it.
At least two of the people on the original team that designed the Facebook like button (project manager Leah Pearlman and engineer Justin Rosenstein) have come out publicly to explain how addictive it is and that it was designed to be so. So, make no mistake, of all of the content out there on the Internet today, social media is among the most addictive, in large part because businesses have spent a lot of time, money, and energy to make it so.
But what exactly is a social media addiction? Essentially, it means that you keep using social media with increasing frequency even though the rewards that you get from it are diminishing and / or there are negative consequences in other areas of your life. For example, if you find yourself spending time connecting with people on social media at the expense of your face-to-face relationships, that can be a sign of an addiction. You aren’t getting as much from that online interaction as you could from face-to-face connection, plus your real-life connections begin to suffer, and yet you can’t stop yourself.
Of course, it’s challenging to tell when use has become abuse. In trying to determine whether someone has a social media addiction, it’s common to use a question-based assessment. One example comes from psychologists Mark Griffiths and Daria Kuss, who work out of Nottingham Trent University to study the impact of technology on behavior. They offer the following six questions for basic assessment:
When you are not online, do you think about using social media?
Do you experience increasing urges to use social media over time?
Is social media a way that you try to forget about your problems?
Do you continue to use social media even after you’ve decided you want to stop?
Do you become restless or upset when you are unable to use social media?
Has there been a negative impact on your relationships, work or school because of your use of social media?
People who answer yes to a majority of those questions might have an addiction to social media. Moreover, if you’re experiencing consequences and have withdrawal and tolerance to social media use, then there’s probably a problem.
In a 2017 paper written by Griffiths and Kuss, the authors lay out some important conclusions about social media and its potential for addiction. They emphasize that you can utilize social media without becoming addicted to it, but that social networking is a way of being that you can easily become addicted to. They note that within social media addiction, there are specific addictions that include Facebook addiction as well as specific disordered thoughts and behavior including nomophobia (fear of being without a smartphone) and FOMO (fear of missing out).
In this paper, the authors also lay out some helpful models for defining social media addiction:
BioPsychoSocial Model: This is built upon our understanding of addictive substances and extends to addictive behaviors. Addiction is viewed in terms of mood changes, preoccupation with use, problems in other areas of life resulting from addiction, and withdrawal, tolerance, and relapse.
Cognitive-Behavioral Model: A person has maladaptive beliefs that that are “exacerbated through a number of external issues” and this leads to social media addiction.
Social Skills Model: A person has difficulty with face-to-face social interaction and turns to social media as a substitute, leading to addiction.
Socio-Cognitive Model: A person has a good experience with social media, then expects to continue to have that experience, and begins to use the sites excessively in search of that despite not always getting what they want out of it.
These are different lenses for looking at social media addiction (and Internet Addiction more generally) that lead us back to the brain and the psychology of humans. People who are interested in working professionally with Internet addicts, such as counselors, can utilize these different models for helping to both assess and understand a person’s addiction to social media. Through psychoeducation, they can help their clients better understand the issue as well.
As mentioned, an individual may have a general social media addiction, or they may have a very specific addiction to one aspect of social media use. This can be an addiction to only one specific platform. For example, someone may be able to take or leave Instagram but have an addiction to Twitter. Another person may have a Facebook addiction but not use any other social media at all. The specific platform isn’t the only thing that people can become addicted to, though; it’s also possible to develop an addiction for certain activities on one or more sites.
For example, you can become addicted to the act of taking and posting selfies or to the act of catfishing others.
Selfies
Selfie addiction sounds a little bit ridiculous if you’ve never encountered someone who struggles with this problem. However, it’s quite a serious issue for a small group of people. Some people will take hundreds of photos of one pose just to make sure that they have the best one to post on social media. After posting, they look obsessively at the comments people are making, and their mood and self-esteem can be greatly impacted by what they see there. They’ll delete a photo within minutes if it hasn’t gotten the quick, positive reception that they expected, and they can feel terrible about themselves for hours afterwards as a result.
Instead of, or in addition to, taking many photos, a person with a selfie addiction might spend hours tweaking one photo just to get it right. They’ll use different apps and filters to perfect the lighting, erase their perceived flaws, and enhance certain traits in order to appear exactly as they want to appear. It becomes an obsession, and this obsession leads to addiction. They keep taking and tweaking more and more photos, looking for the perfect one, never quite satisfied. Every once in a while, they’ll get the image or response to an image that feels great, and it’ll offer that big hit of dopamine, and then the cycle starts again.
Selfie addiction is often inextricably linked with self-image issues. When you’re constantly trying to tweak your appearance for the perfect photo, it’s hard to be satisfied with the way you look in real life. As you zoom in on the screen, you see all of your (real or perceived) flaws magnified. This can lead to, or exist in combination with, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, a mental health condition in which the person obsesses over their flaws, grooms and exercises excessively, avoids mirrors, constantly works to change their appearance, and obviously has negative self-esteem. Whether or not a selfie addiction gets to that extreme, someone with this addiction is at risk of basing too much of their self-worth on their image to the point that it causes problems with both physical and mental health.
As we’ve seen, a characteristic of addiction is that it causes problems in a key area of your life. In the case of selfie addiction, the person might spend so much time trying to get their images to look a certain way that they don’t actually do the things they desire to do. In extreme cases, the individual might live an entirely fake life. For example, they might invest in thousands of dollars of props to make it look like they’re at the beach in their photos. Meanwhile, they’re really never leaving the house. They’re spending so much time and energy on that online image that they can’t even afford a beach vacation.
That’s an extreme example, of course. In most cases, the person will actually attend the events in the photos. However, they may not be enjoying them or participating fully, because they are obsessed with getting the right photos to post later. Let’s say that a man focuses so much on his appearance and the right photos at a mixer that he fails to do the networking that would land him a job that he really wants. This is an example of someone whose real life is negatively impacted by his selfie addiction.
Selfie addiction can also negatively impact real life relationships. There is a 2018 Taco Bell commercial that captures this perfectly. Most commonly known as “Sunset Heart Hands” it features an “Instagram boyfriend” whose primary role in his relationship seems to be taking cute photos of his girlfriend to post on Instagram. Then he discovers a new Taco Bell item, so his hands are full, and he can’t take the photos. She starts insistently repeating the phrase, “Sunset Heart Hands,” because she desperately wants him to take the all-so-often-posted image of her fingers forming a heart that frames the sunset. She gets increasingly agitated, he says, “let’s just enjoy the moment,” and she snaps. Of course, this is an ad for Taco Bell and it’s not exactly a selfie, but it dramatizes an increasingly common problem – the couple selfie that becomes more important than just being together in the moment. The addict becomes so obsessed with documenting their relationship together online that the actual relationship suffers. This brings us directly into a different, but related (and often intertwined) social media addiction: an addiction to curating the “perfect” life.
The Self-Curated “Perfect” Life
This type of addiction goes beyond the selfie to include an addiction to posting pictures of your room or home, pets, clothing, children and family, vacations, and so forth. In addiction you don’t merely want to record and share some your favorite things from your life; you want to make everything look perfect in your online world. This can impact your real life. For example, are you ignoring that your dog is completely stressed out by the outfit you’ve put him in and the camera always in his face? Or have you failed to notice that your child never actually gets to enjoy the experience of feeding the ducks because you’re so consumed with getting her to pose properly for the duck-feeding picture? As with “Sunset Heart Hands,” these small things add up day after day to eat away at your relationships and diminish the quality of your actual life experience.
As with selfie addiction, the addiction can be to taking multiple photos, tweaking photos, and/or seeing the response that those photos receive on your social media platforms. The addict may pay constant attention to the number of followers they have from day to day, feeling devastated when they lose some and elated when they gain a few. They may get a huge surge of dopamine when one of their images gets re-posted by a bigger account, validating the idea that their life is “perfect.” However, the addict often feels like a fraud, because they know that there’s a mess cropped out of the image and that nothing is perfect at all. This can lead to a cycle of trying to perfect the next image even more to try to escape being “found out.”
This belief that you’re a fraud is a condition often called Imposter Syndrome. And this can lead you to feel depressed about your own life while simultaneously making you feel like you have to keep up with this perfect online charade. This experience also exacerbates any pain that you already experience about unrealized dreams you may have; it looks like everyone else is living the life that you want to have. You don’t want to feel that pain, so you desire an escape, and social media offers the perfect, terrible escape so you become more and more addicted.
Internet marketer Morra Aarons-Mele writes about this in her book Hiding in the Bathroom: An Introvert's Roadmap to Getting Out There (When You'd Rather Stay Home) when she criticizes what she calls “achievement porn.” She talks about how achievement has been fetishized thanks in large part to social media images of the peak experiences of life. For example, a pregnant mother might feel like she has to contort herself into the perfect glowing yoga pose on a cliff side in her second trimester to get the perfect image of her “perfect pregnancy.” So, even something as natural as pregnancy, becomes a subject for achievement in photos. The person suffering from an addiction to this is constantly performing for the camera, seeking validation through images. She may eventually start to feel like she doesn’t even know what’s true about herself anymore. This sense of being out of touch with your inner self can wreak havoc on your mental health.
Relative to this, someone addicted to curating the perfect online life often grapples with the feeling that they don’t measure up to the other people that they see online. Human beings have a natural tendency to compare ourselves to others. To the addict, it may always look like someone else’s house is better decorated, their closet filled with cuter purchases, their food prepared more perfectly, their friends happier in photos. If you suffer from this, then you keep trying to make your life look that same way, but you never quite feel like you measure up. You can become increasingly dissatisfied with your own (normal) life because it doesn’t match what you see in pictures. And yet, you can’t seem to stop yourself from looking. You have to know what other people’s pictures look like. You may become particularly obsessed with specific influencers or feeds, feeling jealous of them as you strive to match their following. This leads us to another type of social media addiction: stalking others.
Addiction to Other People’s Content
Social media has stoked the human drive towards voyeurism. Although frequently associated with sexuality, voyeurism more generally means that you take pleasure in watching someone else, particularly when they’re doing something private, dangerous, or scandalous. Social media has put everyone’s private lives out there for all of us to see. Watching what someone is eating for dinner has become a very regular part of our everyday lives, and that is one of the more mundane things we get to glimpse each day. Some people share every waking moment of their lives on social media, and other people can get addicted to following those lives online.
An addiction to someone else’s content can develop into stalking behavior. Stalking encompasses a broad spectrum of things that range from quietly obsessing over the person and following them online without contacting them to full-blown, in-real-life following them and causing them fear if not actual harm. Of course, most people with an addiction to other people’s content don’t become dangerous real-life stalkers but given the right (or rather wrong) brain chemistry and environmental factors, it can happen. Alternatively, someone with unhealthy stalking tendencies can now easily find and follow their object of desire online and become addicted to tracking them in that way.
This type of social media addiction may manifest as becoming an online “superfan” of one or more people, usually celebrities or online influencers. The addict begins to feel like they are part of the person’s life because they see everything that the other person is doing. They think that they truly know the person. And they may come to think that they have a relationship with that person, feeling hurt or offended when the person doesn’t post in a timely manner, respond to a comment, or follow back the addict’s account. The superfan may comment on every single post, tag the object of their addiction in all of their own images, and follow link after link after link to try to learn more about the person’s life. They may contact the person through direct messaging, and if that fails, try to connect with the person’s other online friends and followers.
As mentioned, all of the addictions in this chapter relate to people’s relationships, and that is particularly true with this type of social media addiction. Another way that it can manifest is through online addiction to the content of someone you know in real life. The most prevalent example is in the case of breakups; the relationship ends but one or both partners become addicted to stalking the other on social media as a way to maintain something of the relationship. Other types of addiction, besides to an ex’s content, could be to the content of their new partner or to the content of someone they have a crush on and want to get involved with. It’s one thing to Google a potential new partner to learn some basic things about them; it’s another entirely to fall down the rabbit hole of reading every old post they ever made on social media and trying to analyze it for clues about where your own relationship might go.
Yet another way that this form of addiction can show up is when you become addicted to checking your partner’s accounts. Jealousy as it relates to social media is a significant problem in many modern relationships. The more you look at your partner’s online activity, the more your mind whirls, and the more you try to soothe it with even more information, blowing it up into a full-blown addiction by stalking their social media accounts.
FOMO
Many of the people who develop a social media addiction, particularly an addiction to other people’s content, are driven by a Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). This is the feeling that other people are online doing something interesting, and that if you fail to get online as well, then you’re going to be excluded from the fun. The term was originally coined by MTV who had found that even though 66% of young people found it exhausting to constantly be online, 58% worried that they were missing out on something if they didn’t check in.
FOMO itself predicts addictive use; the more prone you are to the feeling, the more likely you’ll engage in addictive behavior. It’s a cyclical problem; more use leads to greater FOMO. FOMO has been associated with lower feelings of life satisfaction, wellbeing, and general mood and with increased likelihood of engaging in risky online behavior. FOMO can affect anyone, but it’s particularly a problem for young users, who are in a stage of life when acceptance and inclusion with peers is at a high point.
People who are driven to use social media out of FOMO are more likely than others to develop addictive behavior. Author Larry Rosen explains that there are two major reasons people will compulsively use technology, FOMO being one of them. The other reason would be that they really love the experience. People who are driven by pleasure may still develop addictive behavior, but the pain of not using the device is worse for people who are driven by fear (or FOMO).
Author Morra Aarons-Mele emphasizes that FOMO can be a particular problem for people with introverted personalities. The introvert doesn’t necessarily want to be out there in the world doing the things that people are sharing on social media. However, they may feel like they should be, like they are missing out on opportunities for growth, because of those introvert tendencies. Social media is a way to check in and feel connected to experiences without having to get out there.
In fact, social media relies on FOMO as a marketing strategy. The creators of social media want you to fear that you are missing out so that you’ll keep checking back in to the app. The more time you spend there, the more money they make. Therefore, they exploit your fear to keep you active on the site. Coming back again and again becomes an addiction.
It is important to note that FOMO affects people of all ages. The quirky MTV-coined term often makes people think it only applies to teens. It can also make it seem like it’s a problem that isn’t that big of a deal. However, it can impact people’s lives in deep and lasting ways. In her book “I Can’t Help Myself,” advice columnist and author Meredith Goldstein wrote about how FOMO has affected the lives of the people she knows who are in their twenties and thirties. She shares that these people are overwhelming miserable in their day-to-day lives. They often feel like the slightest thing is the end of the world. She attributes this catastrophizing to FOMO. She explains that the plethora of opportunities available makes them feel that every single decision could be the wrong one. It relates to FOMO because, thanks to social media, they “know the specifics of every lost opportunity.” For example, after a decision to move to New York instead of Los Angeles, a person might enviously see all of the beautiful lives being lived out in Los Angeles and mistakenly feel like they made the wrong choice. There is a constant reminder of the road not taken, and it can make the FOMO-motivated addict feel like all of their choices were the wrong ones.
Catfishing
Catfishing is the act of pretending to be someone else online in order to lure one or more people into a relationship with your fake persona. Catfishing can become addictive behavior for the person doing the catfishing, and it can naturally be intertwined with the addiction to curating a perfect life. A catfish can also exploit the social media addiction of others to secure victims.
A person addicted to catfishing might spend hours each day honing their fake profile. These days, most people can tell if a social media page or website looks a little bit fishy. If you want to really trick someone, you have to make it look good. On Facebook, for example, this means that you flesh out the page with photos taken at different places. The catfish steals someone else’s photos, so they spend time searching online for suitable images then tweaking them to add them to their profiles.
The catfish will not only fill out the profile. They have to make the interaction on the page look real. They add a variety of friends, communicating with these people regularly to generate comments on the page. In some cases, the catfish crafts full fake profiles of people to friend the original page to make it look even more realistic. The MTV reality television show “Catfish” has countless examples of people doing this.
This is all in addition to the time spent actually doing the catfishing. That’s time spent finding people to catfish, searching the profile for information to prey upon, chatting and sharing messages and photos, and further developing the relationship. People catfish for a number of reasons including:
Low self-esteem. They want to make friends online but don’t feel like the people they want to know would like them the way that they really are.
Desire to connect with someone they know in real life. For example, they want a romantic relationship with their best friend but are afraid to say so, so they make a fake profile to start the relationship as someone else.
Reconnecting with someone they know but aren’t in touch with anymore. For example, creating a fake profile to continue talking with an ex.
Conning people out of money. Some catfishers are con artists who get money or other material goods from the people that they catfish.
Any of these reasons for becoming a catfish in the first place can become addictive. You can become addicted to being the fake person that you’ve created. You can become addicted to the relationships you’ve created. You can become addicted to the “high” of getting away with it.
Why would someone fall prey to a catfish? Sometimes, it’s as simple as really believing the best in people and assuming that everyone is who they say they are. However, it’s often driven by something else. Loneliness, periods of grief and self-doubt, and the low self-esteem of the victim are all possible reasons that someone would be susceptible to catfishing. Another key reason is that the victim already has a social media addiction. She spends so much time online already that she doesn’t sense the warning signs of a stranger interacting with her there.
The way that the catfish interacts with the person can also worsen the victim’s social media addiction. The catfish feeds the victim positive thoughts and feelings of validation, so of course the victim wants to hop online frequently to find out if they have a message that will give them that dopamine high.
This excerpt comes from Chapter 4 of the book Internet Addiction.
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