However, the camera operator, Facebook, isn’t fooled. It sees the
truth—as do its advertisers. This is what makes the company so
powerful. The side that faces us, Facebook’s users, is the bait to get us
to surrender our real selves.
Connecting and Loving
Relationships make us happier. The legendary Grant Study at Harvard
Medical School has borne this out. The study—the largest longitudinal
study of human beings to date—began tracking 268 Harvard male
sophomores between 1938 and 1944. In an effort to determine what
factors contribute most strongly to “human flourishing,” the study
followed these men for seventy-five years, measuring an astonishing
range of psychological, anthropological, and physical traits—from
personality type to IQ to drinking habits to family relationships to
“hanging length of his scrotum.”^10 The study found that the depth and
meaningfulness of a person’s relationships is the strongest indicator of
level of happiness.
Seventy-five years and $20 million in research funds, to arrive at a
three-word conclusion: “Happiness is love.” Love is a function of
intimacy and the depth and number of interactions we have with
people. At its best, Facebook both taps into our need for these
relationships, and helps nourish them. We’ve all felt it. There’s
something satisfying in rediscovering someone you knew twenty years
ago, and keeping in touch with friends after they move away. When
friends post pics of their new baby, we get a delicious hit: dopamine.^11
As a species, we are weaker and slower than a lot of our
competitors. Our developed brain is our competitive differentiation.
Empathy is what makes us more human. The explosion in images
distributed on social media platforms has led to more empathy, which
should make us less likely to gas children, or at least inspire us to hunt
down those who do these things. It’s common knowledge that
countries that trade with one another are less likely to go to war with
one another. As deaths from violence continue to decrease (and they
are decreasing), I believe we will discover that one of the causes for the
decrease is more people feeling closer to... more people.^12