The Happiness Effect ─ How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost

Sexting. Cyberbullying. Narcissism. As the pervasive forces of social media continue to define millennial culture, fears about the dangers of online life abound. We constantly hear about how smartphones are pushing young people towards terrifying new extremes of extraversion, allowing them to share and 'like' every last latte on Instagram, advertise themselves to potential mates on Tinder, and barrage celebrities with hostile personal attacks on Twitter. In a world where handheld devices give us instant access to the romantic aspirations, professional quandaries, and political two cents of others, many wonder: is the inescapable pressure to share anything and everything causing young people to disregard the need for integrity and independence in their private lives?

In a survey of students from thirteen college campuses across the United States, Donna Freitas finds that the true danger of social media may have as much to do with what people choose not to share as with what they do. Students face an enormous pressure to look happy online-and not just basically content, but blissful, interesting, successful, and ecstatic in their personal, professional, and academic lives. Unable to maintain this impossible standard, students are consumed with anxiety about letting the less-than-perfect parts of themselves become public. Far from wanting to share everything, they are brutally selective when it comes to curating their personal profiles, and terrified of posting something that could come back to haunt them later in life. Through candid conversations with students of diverse backgrounds, Freitas reveals how even the most rational and self-aware individuals experience undue emotional fatigue and self-doubt when comparing their everyday experiences with the vast collective utopia that lurks online.

The Happiness Effect is an eye-opening window into students' first-hand experiences of social media as they undergo fundamental transitions in their personal, academic, and spiritual lives, and a contemporary reflection on the changing meaning of happiness as it continues both to entice and evade us through our ever more socially networked reality.

Donna Freitas is a Research Associate at the University of Notre Dame's Center for the Study of Religion and Society. She is the author of The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused about Intimacy and Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance and Religion on America's College Campuses (Oxford University Press, 2008), as well as a large number of fiction works for children. A regular contributor to Publishers Weekly, she has also written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Christianity Today.