Confessions of a Social Media Manager

So here’s something people are always surprised to learn about me: I’m not the biggest fan of social media.

Okay, there are some caveats to this, but you would think someone who’d chosen to make a career out of social media would be a more avid user.

The thing is, when I started working in social media back in 2013, it was a different thing entirely. Facebook wasn’t this corrupt entity, just a way to see what was going on in your friends’ lives. People weren’t getting canceled on Twitter, and YouTube stars weren’t releasing apologies over controversies every week. I’m pretty sure social media still wasn’t perfect then, but it definitely wasn’t the beast it’s become now.

Whenever I get started on a social media rant, I always feel like I should be holding a cane and waving it emphatically at any youths in the vicinity. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to say anything you haven’t heard before on the topic. Social media kills our attention spans, makes us more self-conscious, increases anxiety…sure, we know all this already.

It also lets us connect with people all around the world, feel like we’re part of a global community, express our creativity, increase awareness around important issues, do social good with a few keystrokes.

Social media isn’t inherently a good or bad thing in itself. It’s all in the way we use it, and one of the ways in which social media contributes most to our unhappiness is the reference points it provides.

Reference points are important, because they affect how we perceive our own happiness and quality of life. If you compare yourself to a coworker, your life probably won’t look too bad in comparison. If you compare yourself to Taylor Swift, that’s a different story. The problem is, social media presents us with nothing but unrealistic reference points. Scroll through your Instagram feed and you’ll see a bunch of teenage influencers sipping champagne on a yacht, ordinary meals styled to look impeccable with the perfect lighting, girls made up with professional makeup and nary a pore to be found. (This is not actually what my feed looks like btw).

Even your friends only post the best or most photogenic moments of their lives making it seem like everyone’s constantly having the most amazing time. I’ve actually worked with a few influencers at past jobs. It was amazing to scroll through their social media where they’d accumulated thousands of followers. They’d post pictures of themselves wearing glamorous outfits, flouncing around the city without a care in the world. If you didn’t know them in real life, you’d think they spent all their time going on amazing vacations, eating the best foods, and lounging around their penthouse apartments in expensive gowns. I did know them in real life, and real life was a much a different story.

At their day jobs, they didn’t dress up or come in with full faces of makeup. Most of them spent 40 hours a week being stressed out by terrible bosses, underpaid, and unsatisfied with their work. Maybe the rest of their lives were just as glamorous as it was on their Instagrams, but the part that wasn’t glamorous sure didn’t feature in any of their pictures.

Since learning the truth, I now tend to look at most influencers’ posts with a skeptical eye. I know that behind every perfect picture there’s a less than imperfect story, and that’s okay! We’re all imperfect, and if you want to portray a different story on social media, that’s okay too. It’s just important for all the rest of us to remember that what we’re seeing is in fact just that: a story.

There are times when I get frustrated with the people in my own life. Friends and family who will make me wait to take a bite of my meal until they get a great picture or who have their heads bowed down towards their phones the whole time we’re on vacation. I won’t pretend I haven’t been occasionally guilty of doing the same. When I visited Notre Dame in Paris a few years ago, everyone inside the cathedral had their devices out even though there were multiple signs informing visitors this was not allowed. When the news of it catching on fire broke out, I was so grateful for the time I’d been allowed to spend there, and even more grateful that I remembered every detail of the experience so vividly because I’d stubbornly refused to take my phone out.

I guess the whole point of this rambling rant is that social media can be a fun way to pass the time and, in many ways, a great tool. However, it’s up to us to make sure we’re using it in a way that benefits us instead of letting it run the way we live our lives. Lately, my social feeds have been filled with nothing more than pictures of dogs, happy quotes, posts about obscure interests, and cooking videos. That change alone was enough to reduce my daily anxiety considerably.

I’m not trying to tell you how to spend your time on the internet. I’m just saying, a few extra cute animals on your feed couldn’t hurt.

The Hedonic Treadmill

Think about the last time you wanted something. Really wanted something. The thing you were convinced would make you happy once you had it. Was it a new iPhone? A high-paying job? A relationship?

Now think about what happened after you got it. Did it make you happy? if yes, did it still make you happy after a fews day? A month? a year? Do you still sit around each day thinking about how happy that thing makes you even now?

Or like the vast majority of people, did you just sort of get used to it, find something new to chase after and convince yourself that this was the thing that would actually make you happy? If so, it sounds like you’ve found yourself on the hedonic treadmill.

The hedonic treadmill, or hedonic adaptation, is the idea that we tend to return to stable levels of happiness, even after a major change in our lives. That’s why there are lottery winners who find themselves no happier than before they won millions, and amputees who are no less happy than they were before they lost a limb. It doesn’t matter if at the time they thought what was happening to them was the greatest thing ever or the worst. Humans adapt, they start taking things for granted, they find themselves with new things that bring them happiness and new sets of problems.

On the one hand, this is great news. Not getting into the college of your choice, not getting that promotion you wanted, not ending up with the person you were convinced was the one…none of those individual things are going to affect your long-term happiness. I know it feels like the worst thing ever, but guess what? Scientific research shows that people are really bad at predicting how happy or unhappy something is going to make them.

But wait, what about the good things? Does that mean nothing’s actually going to make you truly happy? It turns out, there are a few ways you can increase how much happiness you get out of the good things.

For starters, you can take some time each day to practice gratitude. I’ve done this practice off and on over the years, but I’ve only really gotten serious about dedicating time to it in the last few weeks. I spend about ten minutes writing about a few things in my journal that I really appreciate. It can be something good that happened that day or it can be something or someone that’s been there all along. Sometimes, I’ll find myself writing about things I never even think about, like the fact that I have two working eyes that let me appreciate all the beauty in the world or that I have running water in my apartment. It makes me feel fortunate for all the good things in my life, even on days when things aren’t going my way.

Another thing you can do is practice savoring. If you’ve ever seen a Korean variety show, one staple is the cast being presented with some kind of food. It doesn’t matter if it’s home-cooked kimchi fried rice or a meal prepared by a world-class chef. The cast will ooh and ahh over it, making noises of exaggerated contentment and smiling with each bite. It’s the reason why I always find myself ordering Korean takeout after watching these shows. They’re so good at enjoying something simple, that it makes me want to experience the same sort of joy. Try it the next time you find yourself eating something delicious, having a really good conversation with friends, traveling somewhere amazing. Be present in the moment, and really engage all of your senses. Savor every moment and keep reminding yourself how lucky you are to enjoy the moment.

But one of the absolutely best things you can do is to change what you actually value. Prioritize experiences over possessions. What are the moments from your past that still make you smile after all these years? I bet it’s that time you baked cookies with your family, rocked out at an amazing concert, watched cheesy romcoms with your best friend. I’m willing to bet one of those memories was not the day you bought your AirPods.

All my life, I had the mindset that once all the things on my checklist were completed, I would be perfectly happy and find myself wanting for nothing else. I did check some of those things off, but then I would find new things to add to the list making it impossible to truly ever make it to the end of the list.

I think the most important lesson of the hedonic treadmill is this: you don’t need to wait for everything to align perfectly in your life. Happiness isn’t some distant thing that will always be just out of reach. Hop off the treadmill. When you stop running, you’ll find the thing you’ve been chasing all these years has been within reach the whole time.

Starting Over

One of my favorite quotes is attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.”

Like most inspirational Internet quotes that end up getting commodified on Etsy and pinned to dozens of Pinterests boards, it’s also likely misattributed. But regardless of who said it, I think of these words often.

Since I was in middle school, there’s one thing I’ve dreaming of: being a published author. I was a voracious reader growing up, and I wrote little stories here and there as a child. In 7th grade, I started writing a cheesy romantic novel with a close friend. We would stay up late at night, our faces illuminated by the glow of our laptops, as we took turns typing our story into an AIM chat window (oh dear, did I just date myself?).

It didn’t take me long to recognize that this thing that had started out as a fun pastime had become much more for me.

In high school, I started writing a new novel with a different friend. I had high hopes going in this time, because like me, she was also passionate about writing. We spent the next few years working on a manuscript, plotting out the next three books that would come in the series. I knew everything about the characters we’d created—their hopes, their fears, their aspirations. I loved that story, and I still do, but unfortunately it didn’t work out. While she was a talented writer, my friend was flaky, often missing the deadlines we set for ourselves, her investment in the novel fading as we entered our college years.

When it was clear that the project was officially dead, I found myself asking, What now?

The thought of writing a novel all by myself was exhilarating: getting to make all the decisions by myself, not having to navigate around someone else’s schedule or whims. It was also terrifying. I had never written a novel by myself and besides, I was so, so tired. I’d put so much time and love into crafting that story. I didn’t know if I had the energy to do it all again.

It turned out I did. I spent the next six to seven years working on my first solo manuscript. I wrote draft after draft, sometimes going months without writing due to the fatigue of simultaneously working 40 hours a week with an additional four hours of commuting each day.

Eventually, I moved to New York. I joined a critique group, and for the first time ever, I showed my work to real writers. I learned so much from them, first and foremost, that I had a lot more to learn.

One winter, we decided to take a break from our usual projects and work our way through a book of craft exercises. That was the first time in years that I’d written anything other than my project, which I just couldn’t seem to get to work. I was shocked by what I produced, and so was my writing group. I realized when I wasn’t constrained by a project I’d started writing in college, by a questionable foundation riddled with problems stemming from inexperience, I could apply everything I’d learned over the years and actually write something that was kind of…good.

A few months later, I submitted my entire manuscript to my group for review. They confirmed to me what I’d already known: it just wasn’t working.

So there I found myself with another decision to make: keep trying to make this thing I’d put so much time into work or start over again. I heard F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (or whoever said it’s) quote echo in my head. Did I really have the strength to do this again? I did.

I could feel an immediate difference as I started writing. I was able to implement all the knowledge I’d gained over the years, avoid the early mistakes I’d made in my previous projects. My writing group had overwhelming praise to offer for each chapter I submitted.

It’s been about a year and a half since I started working on that project. Yesterday, I submitted the second draft of the full manuscript to my writing group for their review.

In the past, the idea of starting over or putting my work out there for others to critique was terrifying. I always felt so drained, and asking me to give more was like trying to pour from an empty cup.

One way I handled those fears was by putting things off. The longer I went without showing anyone my writing, the longer I could believe that everything was just dandy. Of course, all I really ended up doing was wasting months I could have been using to improve my craft.

The thing is, all those things I was afraid of, the mistakes I feared making…they’re the reason I was able to write a novel I’m so proud of now. As in life, making mistakes is the only way to grow and living carefully doesn’t protect you from making them. It only keeps you from becoming a better version of you.

So make mistakes. Make them early, and make them often.

One day, I hope I’ll get to walk into a bookstore and see a book with my name on the shelf. When I look at it, I’ll see all the failed novels that came before it. And I will be so, so happy, because to me, it will be a testament that I had the courage to start all over again.

Shhh

I had something of a revelation recently.

The more I learn about the psychology of happiness, the more I realize how much of our current happiness is influenced by the things that happened in the past. I had a relatively boring upbringing (much to the chagrin of this wannabe writer), so I always figured I’d escaped relatively unscathed. I have friends who were affected by parents’ divorces, distant family members, traumatic incidents, while the worst thing I’d ever experienced were some hormone-driven argument while I was going through puberty.

I don’t blame my parents for any of the decisions they made. After all, they were doing the best they could with the knowledge they had, and they did a pretty great job if I do say so myself. Still, nobody’s perfect.

Maybe this is something you can relate to if you come from a South Asian background. Maybe you can relate even if you don’t. Growing up, whenever anything “negative” happened in our family, we were told to keep it a secret. When someone lost a job, when someone was suffering from health issues, when someone was going through a hard time in their life, it was something that stayed in the family.

When grandparents died, I sometimes didn’t find out until days later. When my dad got laid off, my sister and I were told after several months. My parents’ intentions were good. They didn’t want to us to worry, they thought they could protect us from all the bad things. It didn’t matter how much time they let pass, my sister and I would still be hurt by the news, stung that they could keep something so important from us. We constantly wondered what else they were keeping from us.

When it came to our own issues, the intentions were different. My parents were scared that others would judge us or revel in our misfortune. When I was diagnosed with infertility issues, my mother admonished me when she found out I had confided the news to some close friends.

In the end, it didn’t really matter what my parents’ intentions were, because it all just served to make me view the negative events in my life as shameful. Losing my job was shameful, getting dumped was shameful, being told I might not be able to have children was shameful.

Part of me thinks that’s why I’m always striving so hard for everything in my life to be “perfect.” Anything that goes wrong, even if I have no control over it, is a dark secret that would only draw the judgement of others if they were to find out. When I find myself in these periods of life when everything doesn’t line up, my unhappiness is heightened until I find my way to a place where things look a little better from the outside.

Whenever I go against my parents’ wishes and tell my friends the secrets I’ve been so carefully guarding, it feels like a little act of rebellion. It’s exhilarating and freeing, and always comes as a surprise. My friends and loved one never judge me, only offer their support and kind words. And yet, the instincts have been ingrained so deeply inside of me that I still feel like I’m doing something wrong whenever I do it.

I don’t want to live my life with shame anymore. It’s not shameful to get laid-off or get your heart broken or to discover your body isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do. These are things that everyone experiences. It’s all just part of the motions of life. If someone judges you for these things, that’s a reflection on them, not you.

So I’m making a promise to myself. The next time I find myself hurting, I won’t keep it to myself. I’ll reach out all the people who care about me, because as it turns out, the only thing that can combat shame is love.

Round and Round My Thoughts Go

You know what sucks the most after you stop seeing someone? You’ll be perfectly fine, and then you’ll see the most random thing that triggers a memory. Oh, there’s that restaurant we went to once. Look, it’s that movie we watched together on Netflix. There’s my couch that we used to sit on together.

Okay, that last one’s a stretch, but you get where I’m going with this. When I go through a hard time in my life, I tend to pick it apart like I’m picking at a newly-healed wound. It’s painful and messy, and logically I know I should stop if I know what’s good for me, but no. I’m going to keep digging my nail in there until I’m bleeding again and I have to start the healing process all over again.

That’s what it feels like when I’m plagued by negative thoughts. If they were new thoughts or served me in some way, I would accept them. You can’t ignore painful feelings, accepting and working through them is healthy. What isn’t healthy is having the same few thoughts circle around your brain over and over and over again, like vultures.

I’ve since learned there’s a word for this: rumination. I always just assumed everyone experienced this, but I’ve talked to people in my life after having hard conversations and they might spend a day or two thinking about something and then they’ll move on. When my previous relationship ended last year, the guy I’d been dating broke up with me over a phone call that lasted less than a minute. I replayed that phone call in my head for the next week. I heard it in my head while watching TV, while working, while spending time with other people. The only thing that broke the cycle was meeting up with him in person, so I could say all the things I felt like I didn’t get to say.

That’s what’s really at the root of all my negative thoughts. All these words and actions that have no outlet so they just sit stagnating in my mind and making me feel like I’m going a bit mad.

It’s still something I struggle with, but I’ve since learned some techniques that help me cope with them. Journaling is a huge help. If you can’t say what you need to say to someone, you can at least get the words out of your brain and onto paper. When I’m working through something, I’ll sometimes write pages and pages in a single day. It’s a lot easier to untangle a problem, when you can actually see what you’re working with.

The other practice that has made a huge change in my life is meditation. I’m still very much a novice in this area. I started by listening to guided meditations on YouTube, before deciding to try out a paid subscription of the Calm app. I’m not the greatest at sticking to things, but I’ve been pretty good about doing my daily guided meditations for the last few months. I’m also convinced that Tamara Levitt has the most soothing voice on the planet.

Today, I tried doing my longest meditation yet. I sat for a full 30 minutes, listening to my app’s nature noises and a bell that rang every minute to keep me focused. Of course, I live in New York, so I also had the wonderful noises of construction, honking horns, loudly-conversing passerby, and slamming doors to contend with, but I just thought of it as ambient background music.

I definitely didn’t do a perfect job, but after, my mind felt like it had slowed down a bit. When intrusive thoughts tried to push their way into my brain, I gently shoved them right back out. It didn’t matter how many times it happened, the important thing was I didn’t give myself time to dwell on these thoughts.

My hope is that with continued meditation practice, there will be fewer intrusive thoughts each day and I can finally stop focusing on everything but the present. I can’t change the past or predict what will happen in the future, but I have the power to shape my present. I’ve realized lately that the present is the only place where true happiness is found.

It’s a lot of work—and sometimes it feels impossible—but it’s also worth it, because those moments where my brain finally quiets down? It feels like a long-needed rest, and it’s pure bliss.

The Wisdom of the Stoics

Lately, I’ve been thinking about setbacks. In yesterday’s post, I shared a list of setbacks I encountered throughout the year. I’d like to share that list again, but this time with updates or actions I’m taking to overcome them.

-My mom fell and broke her wrist and elbow. Update: she texted me today to tell me she got the all-clear from the doctor and she’s fully healed.

-My uncle went into a coma. Update: he continues to show signs of progress every day.

-At 29 years old, I was diagnosed with a diminished ovarian reserve. Update: I decided to freeze my eggs and have been reading up on all the latest research and making lifestyle changes to increase my odds of success.

-The person I’ve been dating for the last 14 months ended things with me. Update: I’ve already started putting myself out there again and have a few dates lined up.

Not everything is where I want it to be, but having a plan and taking action instead of sitting on my couch and wallowing in my own sadness brings me a lot more happiness than doing nothing. Even if I haven’t reached all my goals, I’m at least moving forward and that’s what’s important.

I listened to an episode of The Happiness Lab yesterday, where the guest was Professor William B. Irvine, the author of The Stoic Challenge. After listening to the podcast, I immediately checked out the book and devoured the whole thing in one sitting.

The Stoics were a group of ancient philosophers, who came up with a way of dealing with setbacks in a way that minimizes negatives emotions. At the core of this strategy are two important techniques: anchoring and framing.

Anchoring involves practicing negative visualization to better appreciate your life. For example, this morning I took a few seconds to visualize going to take a shower and having no running water. I visualized being thirsty and going to take a drink of water, only to find the faucet running dry. Even though I only spent a few seconds doing this exercise, you better believe I was more grateful to step into my warm shower that morning and take my first sip of water of the day.

Framing involves casting your situation in a different context. There are a few different frames you can use. One might be humor, so instead of getting angry about a setback, you can find a way to laugh about it. Another is storytelling, which means you go through the situation thinking about how you will tell the story later, but to have a good story you have to come up with a better resolution than just stomping your feet and getting angry, because that’s not a very good story at all.

My favorite framing technique, however, is pretending you’re being tested by the imaginary Stoic Gods. Whenever an obstacle presents itself in your life, pretend it’s these mischievous beings meddling in your life. They’re testing you with this obstacle because they think you’re capable of handling it (so really, you should be flattered) and also to help make you even stronger and more resilient. Afterwards, you can grade yourself on how well you reacted emotionally and the efficiency of your solution to the problem.

I tried practicing this technique when I had a very minor setback today. Someone I’d had a good conversation with on a dating app and planned to meet up with suddenly unmatched with me (welcome to the world of online dating!) I got a little upset, before I remembered the wisdom of the ancient philosophers. I laughed and thought to myself, good one, Stoic Gods!

Admittedly, I did wallow for a few minutes before I enacted the technique, but I imagine with more practice it’ll become more of a habit.

The thing about setbacks in life is that they’re unavoidable. They’re also costly. They can cost us our time, our money, our health, our relationships, among other things. But when I think back to some of my biggest setbacks, I realized that what followed was always better. When I got laid off from my last job, I got hired at a company I liked more where I got a significant pay raise and was happier overall. After my last relationship ended, I met someone I connected with more and who dating helped me grow considerably as a person. I mean, isn’t that what happens when you go through hard times? Good times almost always follow.

The most important change I’ve had to my mindset recently is that you won’t be magically happier after accomplishing x, y, and z. You might be happier for a time, but then there will be more obstacles and setbacks. Good times and bad times go hand in hand, and it’s the bad times that make you really appreciate how great the good times are. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use the wisdom of the Stoics to make the bad times feel a lot less bad.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Stoic philosophy, I highly recommend checking out The Stoic Challenge.

And if you’re going through a hard time right now: good luck, and don’t let those Stoic Gods get the best of you!