Sober Contemplation and the Happiness Quotient

Examining the real return on investment of social media

The question was raised again in the course of a consulting project on which I am working: How effective is the use of social media marketing and what is the ROI? The answers, where producer wine sales are concerned, are “somewhat” and “small”. This is still the common question concerning the utility of social media for business purposes. The more important and vital question, however, is this:

What is the impact on society and culture and the individual of having 24/7 access to the unformed and/or vile opinions and ideas of millions of people you don’t know, know only of them, or know them only slightly? This is the dilemma of Social Media today?

In 1990, when I graduated from San Francisco State Univerity with a Masters degree in Diplomatic History, I knew and could describe the political disposition of only a handful of people. They included a few professors, close family members, a few friends, and an assortment of public figures (politicians among them) who I followed through mass media or their writings.

Of most of the thousand or so people I’d met in my 27 years, I knew nothing about their thoughts on the political parties, abortion, religion, the Vietnam War, human sexuality, or most any other topic. Most people didn’t stand on a soap box and announce their thoughts on such topics, let alone do so for millions of people to hear or read.

Among those that did make themselves clear on these issues, the medium through which they made themselves clear generally required clarity of thought, communicative precision, and another person or body of people willing to expose them and their thoughts to an audience. On top of all this, editors existed to make a courageous commentator appear even more coherent than the average Joe or Jane.

In the 30 minutes I spent scrolling through FaceBook and Twitter prior to writing this, I came face to face with the opinions, politics, and the intimate perspectives of hundreds of people I know, know barely, and know I don’t want to know.

I want to suggest that this kind of overwhelming and immediate entre into the minds and attitudes of so many is the fundamental change that Social Media has brought to the American and world cultures. And I think it is detrimental, particularly combined with the fact that one need not be face to face with anyone when we expose our minds to others.

As I entered the wine industry after graduating from college, with the exception of those relatively few folks who I felt close enough to or worked closely enough with in order to develop deeper relationships, all I needed to know about the other folks I encountered was their trustworthiness, their willingness to engage with me in good faith in the work environment and their level of expertise in their space within the industry. Knowing more about them, like their politics, their feelings about their sexual identity, their thoughts on religion and faith, or their conclusions concerning the history of civil rights was really only a burden on me. It wasn’t necessary. Moreover, it would interfere with my business relationships.

Knowing these things about untolled others today, if you are engaged with Social Media, is unavoidable…along with the burden of naturally making judgments one always does upon learning these sorts of things about people.

Judging a person is a very intimate act. It requires self-assessment along with the assessment of others. It requires metaphorically looking the person up and down. Judging naturally leads to making further assumptions about a person—assumptions that are generally too uninformed to be of value…and yet the judgment and process of assumption occurs nonetheless.

Earlier in my career and life, If I encountered a person in the course of doing my job as a Wine PR person who unexpectedly and easily revealed to me their thoughts and moral judgments of others and things, I would have been likely to bring that encounter home with me, mention the encounter with my wife, discuss the meaning of it all and examine my feelings about that person and my judgment concerning how I ought to handle future encounters with them.

What I would not do is run quickly to a busy intersection, pull out my soapbox, and shout out to the world and anyone who cared to know, my uninformed and immediate thoughts on the person along with my assessment of their value as a human being and how they ought to be treated by others based on my short encounter with their thoughts, feelings, and observations.

I don’t think I have to outline the various ways in which this sort of action would be harmful to the person who shared with me their inner thoughts, to the people who crossed my path as I was shouting from my box, and, ultimately to me.

And this is exactly what happens normally on social media—ALL.THE.TIME and at every moment of the day. I am guilty of it and so are you…because in just a few short years it has become the way of the world. And it has consequences.

The chart at the top of this article and the one directly above correlates Internet use with reported happiness, average hours slept, and in person social interaction. It comes from a study done five years ago. The report is entitled, “The Sad State of Happiness in the United States and the Role of Digital Media.” It is an indictment of our culture. I wonder if anyone believes Americans have become happier in the subsequent five years. Let me quote from this study:

“The years since 2010 have not been good ones for happiness and well-being among Americans. Even as the United States economy improved after the end of the Great Recession in 2009, happiness among adults did not rebound to the higher levels of the 1990s, continuing a slow decline ongoing since at least 2000 in the General Social Survey”

Moreover:

“Happiness and life satisfaction among United States adolescents, which increased between 1991 and 2011, suddenly declined after 2012. Thus, by 2016-17, both adults and adolescents were reporting significantly less happiness than they had in the 2000s.”

The study is quick to note that correlation is not causation. But the correlation is near perfect. My hypothesis, as is the authors of the study, is that increased interaction with digital (read: Social) media is the cause of the huge decline in happiness. I believe that this increase in social media use has one impact that can not only cause a decline in overall happiness but many more dangerous outcomes for ourselves and our culture:

What we have witnessed is the abandonment of sober contemplation.

In the past 30 days, more than 260 million Americans have logged into and used Facebook. Two decades ago exactly ZERO people logged into Facebook, let alone Twitter, Instagram or TikTok.

Sober contemplation occurs in the dark. It occurs in the presence of another person you know well and trust and whose eyes you can see. Sober contemplation is the enemy of reflexive contempt. Sober contemplation is the portal to informed empathy. Sober contemplation is a prerequisite to happiness and contentedness. Social Media-induced sober contemplation is an oxymoron.

I don’t think the answer to this problem is abandoning the use of social media. I think the answer is maturity and filtering. Maturity is a willingness to contemplate the world and people around us fairly and with purpose and with empathy. Filtering requires tools.

Our culture and our society have traveled to hell in a handbag with greased wheels. . There we all reside because we have, the majority of us, abandoned sober contemplation and replaced it with the adrenalin of judgment. But there is a road back. It begins with sober contemplation.