Social Media is Making Us Lonelier
- galinakirabo3
- Feb 5
- 3 min read
Being on a calorie deficit sucks. When you commit to counting calories properly, you quickly realize how many foods and drinks are empty calories. I learned this the hard way by trying to squeeze Snickers into my deficit. I love Snickers but one bar alone wasn’t satisfying and I couldn’t squeeze in more than one without exceeding my deficit for the day. Every time I ate more than one, the calories were consumed, but usually the hunger remained, or at least came back shortly.
Social media interactions work in pretty much the same way. Many of us scroll endlessly, liking posts, commenting on videos and watching strangers live their lives. It feels social in the moment. Yet, when we put our phones down, we come to the reality that we do not have a strong community around us. Then we pick our phones back up and resume watching people live their lives. Like a snack that’s simply empty calories, these interactions create the illusion of connection without ever truly filling the need for it.
Although social media can be used to find communities of people with shared interests, research suggests that in most cases, it actually increases feelings of loneliness. A nine year longitudinal study conducted in the Netherlands examined the relationship between social media use and loneliness by distinguishing between active social media use (ASMU) and passive social media use (PSMU) (Roberts, Young & David, 2024). ASMU involves creating content and actively engaging with others online, whereas PSMU refers to the passive consumption of other people’s content.
The study revealed that both ASMU and PSMU were associated with increased feelings of loneliness over time, although through different mechanisms. Passive social media use promotes social comparison and diminishes social connectedness. Doom scrollers are constantly exposed to curated snapshots of other people’s lives while in comparison, they might have smaller social circles or little sense of community. Active social media users on the other hand, may begin to substitute online interactions for face to face connections. As they build a community through followers and online engagement, they may feel less motivated to invest in real life relationships, having already established a sense of belonging online. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective), social media connections will never replace real ones due to how superficial they are, thus leading to feelings of loneliness eventually.
The truth is, social media is not inherently harmful, nor is it incapable of fostering real connections. For a lot of people, it offers access to communities that they might have never found offline. However, when it becomes a substitute for real life community instead of being supplementary, its limitations become obvious. Like empty calories, doom scrolling can momentarily distract us from the lack of community in real life, but it will never completely fulfil the human desire for real life community. Loneliness is not solved by proximity to other people’s lives, but by living our own. In order to address the growing sense of isolation around us, I think we should have sincere discourse about what we are seeking to replace by scrolling for hours, and what we might begin to recover if we make the deliberate decision to log off, even if it’s for a brief moment.
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