Social media is something that is used everywhere. It is an outlet that has been spread everywhere throughout many years. Starting from myspace, social media has become something that almost everyone uses. . It is used either for posting pictures, updating your status, texting friends/family, posting on your story, or even all depending on the way you use it. Based on recent statistics on social media there are about 3.5 billion people who use social media worldwide. This is roughly about 45% of our population. Facebook which is one of the many social media sites is used all the time and it’s reported that 68% of adults who live in the U.S are Facebook users. Nevertheless, social media is not only used by adults. There are about 90.4% of millennials who go on social media actively 77.5% of generation x, and 48.2% of baby boomers. Baby boomers are considered to be people who were born around the years of 1946-1964, generation x is for people who were born between the years of 1965-1980 and millennials are people born in the years of 1981-1996. When it comes to how much people go on social media on average it is about 3 hours for the sites and messaging as well(Mohsin, 2020). Over time, however, social media has evolved. People are evolving in general. Though some of the same things are still being posted people have begun to bring things to social media that people should be aware of, for example, body image, mental health, sexual assault, police brutality, and many more. I believe all these things are great and should be brought to people’s attention. Even though all aspects are being brought to social media, there is also a downside to this. Your happiness. Some people who go on social media do not look into this at all. They probably don’t even know what might be going on with them until they take a good look into what might be happening to them. Of course, this may not apply to everyone, but it’s very likely that’s happening across all age groups. There are many different reasons why one might not be happy when they turn on their phone and log into their account. You wouldn’t know exactly what might be causing this, but just know that it is. It affects a lot of people everywhere.  However, does anyone know what exactly happiness is? No. Because the answer to this is very subjective. Happiness, as defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is “a state of well-being and contentment” (Merriam-Webster. n.d.).This can vary for everyone. Not everyone experiences happiness in the same way.  Something that may be good for you might not be good for the next person. This relationship can also relate to social media because this can also differ for everyone. One person might feel joy or contentment when scrolling through the different social media sites while another person might feel depressed or unhappy when going through their feed. The essential question here is Does Social media negatively impact your happiness?

               As previously stated happiness does indeed come in different forms. Generally, when people feel happy they want to feel that way for a while. They would like the state of happiness or serotonin to be maintained. Although this isn’t necessarily possible all the time it is something that is wanted by many(C., 2012). During this study, the researchers dove into the book Exploring happiness by Aristotle. This book’s main focus is based on happiness which then also relates to one’s brain science as well. The author of this research article Sisella bok uses this book to go in more depth trying to get the answers to how happy somebody can be, what are some aspects that can make a person happy, and things that make people happy as much as they think they do. When measuring what makes a person happy they used two different definitions. One of the measurements they used to determine this was the satisfaction of life scale.  They used two methods for this which were the experience sampling method and the day reconstruction method. However,  using these two methods they found that it does not necessarily correspond to life satisfaction. To further explain, this essentially means that just because a person is satisfied that does not mean that they feel happy or pleasure and any type of contentment. Some people however do not even have the means to control how happy they are. Only about 40% of people do have control. This is something that is not necessarily new because some people do want to feel happy but are incapable of it. Many different factors could go into this like their own deep-rooted problems, depression, and many more indicators as well.  They also state that only about 50% of one’s happiness has to do with their genetics and that another 10%  mainly has to do with different circumstances. By different circumstances, this means wealth, goods, or materials. Some people depend on different things to keep them happy and do not have to do with how they feel. Although this article does state the different aspects of being happy several implications and limitations would have further pushed this discussion for example they only referred to one other text which makes it very limited and not very expansive. Another implication that happened in this article was that the one other tet they used was based on a literary figure. There could be people who aren’t as interested in Aristotle as others.  They could have used many other texts that catered to the whole audience.

         Now that we have discussed what happiness is in a general context, we now have to add different ages into the mix. By adding this in we can see if the different age factors depend on how happy a person can be. In this study, the authors claim that age has a positive association with a time perspective that then leads to their relationship with happiness as well. Time perspective is something that can be described as putting different life experiences and social experiences in different time frames. By doing this it causes people to really value their experiences and also organize them. As time goes on it’s proven that people change. In different life points, people can be experiencing different things in different periods therefore means are showing a lot of different emotions(Simons, M., Peeters, S., Janssens, M., Lataster, J., & Jacobs, N. (2016).  Different factors should also be included in this as well. Your perspective most likely will change as you get older too so you have to take that into account. When you are about 10 years old you may be happy if you got a really exciting toy you’ve been wanting for a long time now. If you were to jump the time frame and say that you are now 30 years old you might be really happy if you got an exciting job. In simpler words. Your priority changes and so do you. It could also mean the opposite as well. It’s even possible that you start to get much less happy as time goes on. You have fewer worries when you’re younger so it’s understandable.  In this study to measure their hypothesis, they use the dutch version of the subjective happiness scale. This is a 7 item scale so it starts from 1 “not a very happy person” to 7 beings “ I consider myself to be a very happy person”.  Based on the results from this the researchers concluded that it does support the idea that time perspective does have an association with someone’s happiness which then means that increasing age does have to do with happiness decreasing. Some implications of this were they could have used better data collection. They also should have looked into it more regarding older people because they might have been different circumstances that could affect the way the results turned out.

        We have now gone through the general basics of happiness and happiness throughout different age groups but what about social media? We need to take into account that social media can also affect different age groups in different ways too.  In this study, the authors have figured out that his relationship could be derived from two different things/aspects. In the first study, they use experiential products which is what they explain as electronic devices, travel, or even video games. This is then compared to material goods such as jewelry or any type of clothing that people would also use. By using two different sets of products they are then able to tell how it affects everyone differently and how it could change their mood. This could be different for everyone positively or negatively. By doing an experiment that involves social media platforms it could allow the facilitators to understand the consumer better(Berezan, Krishen, Agarwal, & Kachroo, 2018). A meta-analytic was conducted to review people’s age and how that can affect their happiness. For example, as you get older there is a chance that a positive effect could be decreased. However the younger you are the happier you become. They then add in social media and see how that could change someone. They have stated that it is more likely for a college-aged student to gain more socializations on social media platforms than older-aged people. They were all divided up into 3 sections, baby boomers, generation Y, and generation X. These 3 sections correlate to different year groups. Generation Y are people who could be aged around 24-39 years old, Generation x focuses on people who are 40-55, Baby boomers are aged around 56-74 years old. This was then split up to their gender, highest educational status, and employment status as well. After conducting the research they realized that one need that factors into the virtual experience is psychological need as well. The conductors also realized that the more you age does have a negative relationship with your happiness. For generation Y social media is more likely to help them through life and define them. Posting on social media helps them keep their identities stable which therefore keeps them in a good mental state. Generation X on the other hand is the opposite way. Because they are much older, they begin to become independent which makes them not feel the need to use social media to determine whether or not they are happy or not. Baby boomers have less social pressure but at the same time are not comfortable with the idea of social media platforms yet so it takes more knowledge that is not yet accessible. There were certain limitations of this research such as the many differences between the ages and different generations. It could have been hard to keep up with all of that especially since there were many. conductors interpreted the results as something that was limited because of the aging process and how the different experiences can limit what they can put in their study. The researchers also believe that they could have been more longitudinal research conducted that will overlay both the aging process and generational cohorts. They would have also liked to test theoretical models and dive more into direct relationships. Social networking sites are something that can be used temporarily to make some type of contentment but it does not necessarily last. In this study the authors consider this to be something called “ social snacking” (Clark, Algoe, & Green, 2017). This is something that can be more harmful than it is good. We don’t know what normally gets on when someone is done snacking on social media. Social snacking is defined as temporary fulfillment for someone’s social needs. This means that a person can go on social media a certain number of times and be okay with that but after is a different story. It doesn’t last. Sure, it might stay with you for a couple of minutes maybe even hours but eventually, it would go away. Lonely people tend to do this to try and feel something but most of the time it doesn’t usually work. There is no actual connection and it lacks personal interaction. The social comparison also comes into play with this as well. The more people compare themselves on social media the more insecure and unhappy they become. This results in much more negative outcomes in general. More people go on social networking sites for a long period and start to make assumptions that one’s life might be better than theirs which in reality they don’t know what other people’s lives are. However, this does not matter because the comparison is the only thing that they see and know. Some further research could have been done here as well regarding including more people individually to get other perspectives and focus more on behaviors and more favorable/ damaging outcomes. In another study, they research whether or not social media usage affects efficiency and well-being.Researchers study the use of social media by giving people tasks and based on that they try to determine if it would lower or increase the performance of the task. Based on the results of that researchers will still be able to find if it would also lower happiness as well. They concluded that social media can be destructive to a person (Brooks, S. (2015). There are a lot of consequences of using social media so much. It can break you without you even knowing it sometimes. It was also found that going on social media lowered task performance and efficiency. They were not able to do things that they should normally be able to do because their focus is just on social media.

            In another study, they examined various effects on social media platforms and also examined the relationships between social media and happiness as well (Chae, 2018).In this experiment, they used Korean Women between the ages of 20-39 women who used smartphones. They did this because Young women that had smartphones went on social media more. The reason why they only use women was that they concluded that men did not use social media platforms as much as women did. Emails were sent to 7,625 women however only 2,335 of those 7,265 women opened the email.  There was then a wave 1 survey where 1064 completed it and Wave 2 was sent a month later and 782 completed that one. The rate for completion was 14% and the attrition rate was about 27%. Twitter was one of the social media platforms that were negatively associated with a social comparison where on the other hand LinkedIn, Instagram, and blogs were positively associated. Based on the findings of this experiment and research they realized that different social media functions work differently. Since they do function differently they are most likely to affect people differently so not everyone would feel the same compared to others. Some limitations affected the study such as single item measures such as the mediator and two of the 3 dependent variables. Another limitation was the fact that there was no differentiation between active/passive or downward or upward use of social media comparison. They believe that future studies should dive more into the relationship between social media and happiness with more theoretical evidence and much more refined measures as well. Another study was conducted in which children who were around the ages of 10-15 were included in a longitudinal study to see if there was an association between the use of the children on social media and their characteristics (Twigg, L., Twigg, L., Duncan, C., & Weich, S. (2020). They ultimately found that increasing use of social media did show a change in the children’s happiness. However, this did not mean that they had a negative association with life satisfaction. In this particular research, girls were found to be less happy with more time on social media, but the fact they go on social media does not change their view on life satisfaction.

                   Overall social media does affect happiness. The social comparison was one of the reasons why people were not as happy when on different social media websites. Especially going on there for a long amount of time your mindset starts to change as well. It was also learned that as you grow older social media starts to affect your happiness as well. There is a huge effect on your mood and behavior. This is a topic that should be discussed more often because your mental health depends on it. It could even worsen if not talked about. By people knowing about this topic it could change people’s perspective on social media and what it is doing to them. Future research needs to be redirected towards different theories, maybe even different models from different people. If the study was more correct and more longitudinal towards a longer amount of time then results are bound to change as well. 

                                                      REFERENCE PAGE

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Brooks, S. (2015). Does personal social media usage affect efficiency and well-being? Computers in Human Behavior, 46, 26-37. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2014.12.053

Twigg, L., Twigg, L., Duncan, C., & Weich, S. (2020). Is social media use associated with children’s well-being? Results from the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Journal of Adolescence, 80, 73-83. doi:10.1016/j.adolescence.2020.02.002   

Simons, M., Peeters, S., Janssens, M., Lataster, J., & Jacobs, N. (2016). Does Age Make a Difference? Age as Moderator in the Association Between Time Perspective and Happiness. Journal of Happiness Studies, 19(1), 57-67. doi:10.1007/s10902-016-9806-

C., M. A. (2012). A Scientific exploration of happiness: A review of the science in Exploring happiness: From Aristotle to brain science. International Journal of Wellbeing, 2(3), 288-291. doi:10.5502/.v2.i3.10 

Chae, J. (2018). Reexamining the relationship between social media and happiness: The effects of various social media platforms on reconceptualized happiness. Telematics and Informatics, 35(6), 1656-1664. doi:10.1016/j.tele.2018.04.011

Berezan, O., Krishen, A. S., Agarwal, S., & Kachroo, P. (2018). The pursuit of virtual happiness: Exploring the social media experience across generations. Journal of Business Research, 89, 455-461. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2017.11.038

Mohsin, M. (2020, December 03). 10 Social Media Statistics You Need to Know in 2021 [Infographic]. Retrieved December 07, 2020, from 10 Social Media Statistics You Need to Know in 2021 [Infographic]

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Happiness. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved December 7, 2020, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/happiness