Step 5: Engagement

The fifth state of the critical process—engagement—encourages you to take action, adding your own voice to the process of shaping our culture and environment.

Studies about happiness routinely conclude that the best path to subjective well-being (i.e., happiness) and life satisfaction is to have a community of close personal relationships. Social psychologists Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener acknowledge that the high use of mobile phones, text messaging, and social media is evidence that people want to connect. But they also explain that “we don’t just need relationships: we need close ones.”6 Frequent contact isn’t enough to create the kinds of relationships that produce the most happiness.

According to Diener and Biswas-Diener, “The close relationships that produce the most happiness are those characterized by mutual understanding, caring, and validation of the other person as worthwhile. People feel secure in these types of relationships, and are often able to share intimate aspects of themselves with the other. Importantly, they can count on the other person for help if they need it. Although acquaintances and casual friends can be fun, it is the supportive close relationships that are essential to happiness.”7

One way to take action might be to think about how to use social media without creating FOMO in others. Is there a way communications can be structured so that they don’t seem exclusionary?

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RELATIONSHIPS COME IN MANY FORMS, but don’t always produce happiness. Eileen Bach/Getty Images

Another way might be to decrease use of social media whenever possible and to make a concerted effort to put the time you would have devoted to social media into having in-person human interactions and developing close personal relationships.

Also, experiment with a “vacation” from social media—go do something fun or enriching by yourself or with friends, and don’t make a social media record of it. Or take a several-day break from social media (and encourage other friends to do so, and perhaps your whole class or your entire college or university), and discover the possibilities of life without social media.