Most of you would have landed on this page via a social media platform, be it Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Some of you would have clicked out of curiosity because the phrase ‘loneliness epidemic’ sounds intriguing. Some of you might possibly have related to the idea of loneliness, hoping to discover a solution to the biting feeling that creeps into a lot of our late nights. But now that you’re here, we might as well have a conversation about it.
After a recent report by the World Health Organization in 2018, the media quickly started publishing headlines like “India – the most depressed country in the world”. India reported over 5 crore cases of depression and close to 4 crore cases of anxiety disorder in 2015. Moreover, India’s confounding attitude towards mental health continues to be shocking, however, we are neither going to dwell on the mental health care India certainly needs, nor the struggles of the lakhs of people trying to combat mental health issues. We are going to talk about how lakhs of us are placing ourselves through excruciating mental agony via our misplaced focus on ‘more’.
What do I mean by the misplaced focus on ‘more’? Am I going to point to social media here, say that social media is leading us astray by constantly throwing everyone else’s successes in our faces? Or am I going to point to capitalism, as every company out there is going to great lengths to make us keep coming back? Actually, both.
Most millennials reading this have likely grown up with a steady supply of the internet and social media. Facebook has been our way to connect with friends since we were in class 9 and 10, possibly even before that for a lot of us. Whatsapp and Instagram followed closely in popularity during our college years as we got sleeker smartphones. Today, the first thing so many of us do when we wake up in the morning is to check our phones for notifications, as opposed to taking a breath, getting out of bed, and possibly getting ourselves a glass of water or going out to the balcony to get some fresh air.
We spend our free time, even a few minutes riding the elevator, browsing through social media, checking our Facebook walls, and endlessly scrolling through posts.
Social media has had a tremendous impact on the desire to always want ‘more’. There are always more posts to look at, more people to follow, more things to stay updated on, and more ‘likes’ to get. Instead of enjoying the moment in its true essence or capturing it for ourselves, many of us would rather capture it for social media. When we go to a fancy restaurant, of course, we have to click a picture and put it on Instagram. When we go on vacation, almost each and every moment has to end up in our stories and posts, carefully crafted to make it look like we are having the best time of our lives. The tales of people crafting their lives for social media are not alien to us; so many of us, on some level, participate in this activity.
Social media designs a false image of reality by disproportionately highlighting the best moments of other people’s lives for us, and leaving us to constantly live in the shadow of that. So, when we endlessly scroll through social media posts, we compare ourselves to the best part of other people’s lives. On days we are feeling good, or we are having a nice time, this doesn’t create a problem for us.
However, on days we are having a tough time, or feeling slightly low, scrolling through other people’s posts can make us feel lonely and detached. What adds fuel to the fire is capitalism. With targeted marketing and advertising at its peak, so many of us don’t even know how the world of products has been carefully crafted to make products addictive. Both marketing and advertising constantly prey on our sense of feeling inadequate to make us spend money on products we really don’t need. Can we live without a ‘newer and better’ phone every six months? Of course! Do we really wear all the fancy clothes we have in our closet? Not really. Do we need to drink a cold coffee worth Rs. 250 every evening or a sandwich worth Rs. 350 every other day? Possibly not.
Marketing and advertising carefully play with our emotions by turning non-problems (having to make your own coffee at home) into problems, and then feed us ridiculous solutions. They make us feel like happiness is always just around the corner, and that one more thing, one more purchase, one more click, one more vacation, will make us happy. While all they are doing is relying on our need for a ‘dopamine hit’ to make us spend money, which ultimately leads us to feel worse. That’s the reason binge-shopping, binge-eating, and binge-watching exist.
Don’t get me wrong here – social media and capitalism collectively don’t represent the devil. It’s our attitude towards them that is the problem. We let them control our lives to the point that we end up in the passenger’s seat of our lives, as we are driven further and further away from happiness.
Our misplaced focus on ‘more’ – more friends, more likes, more gadgets, more restaurants visits, more travel destinations, more clothes, more things – is keeping so many of us from actually enjoying what we have, on building meaningful experiences from what we have. It’s making inadequacy a permanent fixture in our lives, as we live on our tiny phone screen, growing lonelier each day.