Complex introductions should act as a warning that you are about to embark on reading a lot of waffle—a bunch of complicated theories that the writer may be struggling to get to grips with themselves. The more adjectives involved, the more rubbish you are probably about to read. So, I am going to make the following as clear as I can.

Social media is depressing.

To be more specific: social media is depressing if you are tired, vulnerable, feeling lonely, or anywhere remotely on the scale of being either anxious or depressed.

It will make you feel worse. It is as simple as that.

If you are down and flicking through the faked and fabulous lives of your ‘followers’ it is going to make you feel worse. And if anyone says anything even the tiniest bit critical about any of your posts you are going to read it as being roughly seven times worse than it is. That is an actual as in, yes, it will feel seven times worse than the actual comment is. This is because we know, both consciously, but mostly subconsciously, that this perceived criticism is also being seen by hundreds, maybe thousands, tens of thousands or even more other people.

It’s the ether equivalent of walking into a party naked.

Criticism taps into our deep-seated sense of shame, and, when it is a social media shaming it is very public. It is advised that if you have been caught in a Twitter-type shaming incident you need to shut down and go away for a year and a half.

Oh boy!

How did we get here?

Simple again because this is about how the nature of social media taps into all our primal instincts, and indeed into our insecurities.

1. Image: Our need to project ourselves as having more glamorous lives than we really do digs deep into our sense of ‘living a lie’. This is a guaranteed recipe for insecurity. And it mines everyone else’s insecurity about their drab-by-comparison lives. Even if we know that everyone is posting the airbrushed version of their lives, because we are doing the same thing, it does not stem the insecurity. It makes it worse.
2. Instant gratification: Because the images on Instagram, Snapchat et al give us a tiny pleasure hit (some, but not all of the time) the mind just goes on looking for more, and more, and more. This becomes the law of diminishing returns. The more we flick, the less pleasure response there is. This is just a mind design feature—the first time is always the best, everything afterwards pales in comparison, and goes on getting paler. But still we keep on flicking, getting less and less pleasure, while hoping for more, the mind getting increasingly frantic on this fading pleasure hunt.
3. ‘Likes’ are cheap gratification: Perhaps you’ve just posted your latest delicious ‘look what I’m about to have for lunch’ shot, and you get 354 ‘likes’. Meanwhile the ‘friend’ you follow most closely gets 475 for their latest pic of what looks like a pretty standard cheese sandwich. Guess which of those two you will focus on? Yup! Not your hits, but the fact that your ‘friend’ got over a hundred more hits. How can we be so in thrall to the negative? That goes back to the savannah fight and flight of earlier posts. The mind loves nothing more than a good negative, and then it goes digging, on and on, regardless of whether there are any. It will dig so deep that it will turn those 354 likes into ‘they’re all just liars’ if we give it a chance. That’s the inner self, the endlessly doubting internal commentary, the misery maven set on the bad news story all the time. And so back we go to challenging the teller of endless bad news, and to recognising that it is just doing its job, minesweeping, constantly patrolling. We have to have the presence over that mind to report back to it that, ‘No, actually that’s not a threat, perhaps people just really like cheese sandwiches.’
4. Rude, aggressive, ugly: Do you think arguments would escalate as fast face-to-face, in the flesh, as they do over the ether? I give a resounding ‘no’ on that. Face-to-face we can read each other, assess the threat, work out who is the attacker, and who is the more likely to try and cool things down. In the disembodied world everyone just goes on the attack because we can’t see who is attacking us. So we attack and attack and attack, because we are designed to.

So war breaks out between ‘friends’, and when the fighting of each ether battle is done, no-one is victorious. We are just alone, battered and haunted until there is another ‘ping’, another missile to send us further into despair.

And all the time our life is happening and we are not paying attention. We are choosing to believe in an alternative method of communication that is an extraordinary marketplace of ideas, but it is only that.

Your life is not this.

Look up.