Finding a Way Out: The Uphill Battle of Performing for Likes on Social Media

“The reward feels good, and we keep doing what others want us to do in order to get the reward. With that fear of being punished and that fear of not getting the reward, we start pretending to be what we are not, just to please others, just to be good enough for someone else.” - Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements

When I first heard about Facebook, I was leery. What is this thing? So you type what you’re thinking and people comment? Like a message board or…? Also: Why did I need this? I was happily living my life when a friend of mine from college who lives many miles away encouraged me to join, telling me that all our old friends were there, that we could catch up and share funny memories. I created a profile, figuring I would leave after a month or two, no harm, no foul. It’s been fifteen years now. I’m not proud of this, I am not particularly ashamed, those are just the facts. Yes, I have had fun reconnecting with old friends and my life has been enriched beyond measure by meeting some new ones but I have returned to that initial place of wariness with the platform – actually more so, because I know more – and have been for some time now.

I’m not expressing anything revolutionary or new here. Lots of people have left for a multitude of reasons. I’m just going to try to dive into one here: That utterly human desire to be seen.

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Facebook, and all social media, is weirdly addictive in ways that I don’t think we fully anticipated, in the ways it presses on our dopamine-seeking behaviors. You know how when you start eating potato chips, they taste great but then before you know it, you can’t stop, even when you know that you’re no longer enjoying them, even when you feel icky, even when you’re regretting it in real time? It’s like having hands with a mind of their own, compulsively reaching for something that you know in your overriding brain will make you feel worse in the having of it. A few potato chips, a few minutes on social media? No problem. But when something lights up the reward centers in our brain, it’s not so easy to set limits. This is not weakness or lack of discipline, it’s how we are designed. Most of us have had the experience of how “Just one more minute” of scrolling turns into 20 more minutes, turns into an hour, turns into, “Where did my night go?,” and turns into, “When was the last time I actually read a book?” It’s us pitted against us.

I am not shrugging off our individual responsibilities here. I am saying this is how the platform works if you’re not careful with it. This is what it was designed to do by very smart people. We are supposed to be driven to log on and we are compelled by factors large, like loneliness or boredom, and small, like very easy, free access, to stay on. 

There is so much more that is harmful about the social media platforms, of course. Issues with privacy, surveillance capitalism, lack of user support, the prevalence of hate speech, the pushing of the algorithm that keeps us both in our bubbles and deeply divided. These criticisms are all valid, all worth deep consideration.

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Does Facebook, or do any of these platforms, owe us anything, though? They’re free, aren’t they? No one is forcing us to use them.

In a hyper-libertarian, strictly transactional point-of-view, perhaps it is this cut-and-dried. However, it is our utilization of these social media platforms – the audiences, users, makers, scrollers, influencers, whatever we are considered when we are on one – that has made the tech companies extremely rich in this attention economy. Given that, I would say that this relationship is an exchange, not a thoughtful gift to us, because they would be worthless without our use, and they owe us responsible, transparent practices. Further, this exchange is not balanced and is weighted to their benefit.

The second point, that no one is forcing us to use the platforms, is also correct. Our dopamine, though, may have a different opinion on that.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps us to feel pleasure as part of the brain’s reward system, reinforcing certain choices with the release of its feel-good hormone as part of our survival, which is why it is also so intertwined with addiction. It is that duality of dopamine these platforms excel at tapping into, seemingly superficially, but dopamine centers are not discriminatory or high-brow; they are seeking pleasure, not due to hedonism but because that is how we are wired for survival. It doesn’t matter much to your system if the dopamine is rewarding something that is good for our overall well-being or not, whether you’re savoring a delicious meal with your partner, enjoying a hobby or getting compliments on your most recently uploaded profile picture. It is that an ephemeral but delicious rush of dopamine feels better than not having it.

The social media platforms that hack into your dopamine clearly cut both ways: If your sad post about a break up gets just a couple of “care reacts” and no comments or you find yourself plummeting into self-flagellation because you see a happy photo of a group of your friends going out to something you weren’t invited to while you were scrolling, it hurts. I am not trying to diminish this, either. As much as social media has been excellent at hacking our brains, it cannot fully circumvent our deeply human wiring for connection, meaning and belonging. When this is undermined, it can actually feel threatening. A group of your friends going out together without you? Is that such a big deal? No, but to the primal part of your brain, this means you are excluded, you’ve been cast out, you are at actual physical risk. This drive-to-survive part of our wiring is why seemingly benign things can feel so fraught on the platforms. We might feel silly about it but it’s as real as the dopamine release we seek.

One behavior we may adopt in search of more dopamine hits is to curate what we post about our lives, among other things. It’s understandable that we bend to positive reinforcement like how plants move toward sunlight. But at what cost?

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When I started on Facebook, this playing to the crowd felt oddly familiar. It reminded me of when I was in my early 20s and dabbling in the performance poetry scene in Chicago at the place where it got famous, The Green Mill. The Uptown Poetry Slam was and is a Sunday night fixture there but when I started going, I was just a young woman who was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. Enter the poetry slams. A poetry slam is a competition between poets in front of an audience. At the end of the night, a poet and their poem is decided by judges and sometimes the audience as the winner of that slate of performers. My roommate and I lived ten minutes away from The Green Mill, and she was a fabulous wordsmith so she suggested we check it out.

I went a few times and enjoyed it enough but being a spectator isn’t my jam so I wanted to be on the stage performing what I wrote as well. In college, I had some experience with performance art and improv, and, yes, I am a natural ham, so I thought, “Why not?” I liked to write, too, so entering myself into the mix seemed like an easy decision. Writing and trying to memorize a new poem each week was a new challenge for me that I enjoyed.

From the start, I wrote poems to try to put the Jack Kerouac fan-boys who reigned supreme at The Green Mill in their place: My poems were feminist, dripping with sarcasm, mocking poetic tropes, and fully contradicted by my intentionally doe-eyed, over-the-top girly-girl delivery. Basically, the audience did not know what to do with me, this sweet-and-sour combination in the mini-skirt and platform shoes, so they shrugged and loved me because I was novel and funny. The meaner and the more biting I got, the more confused they became and improbably, the better I was received. I noticed this, of course, so I started to do some hacking of my own. 

Week after week, I finessed, sharpened and honed in on how I was going to win through increasingly trenchant verse. I wrote on lunch breaks; I rehearsed in the bathtub. And without fail, the crowd hollered, whistled, guffawed and shouted words of drunken praise. Each time, it seemed like the audience moved up in their seats in anticipation of what audaciousness was going to come out of my cherubic mouth. They rewarded it with the popular vote but the leader of the slam did not like me. Perhaps he saw how it was more about me manipulating a response than the poetry; I also think he noticed he was losing control of the audience. (He was also kind of a dick.) To be honest, though, the content of my poems became less and less the point. The point was to get the reaction I wanted. When I got honest about that, I lost my joy for it. I had cracked the nut.
I saw that as I got popular at the poetry slams, nuance was torpedoed for cheers. Sensitivity was sacrificed for attention. Depth was abandoned for cheap, easy but reliable popularity. I had trained myself to only aim for a riotous reception, the lowest common denominator, and I was getting tired of it.

To a writer, or really any artist or person with a message or someone just wanting to have connection, positive feedback is akin to catnip, not because we want to be liked necessarily (though that is part of our survival wiring), but because we want to be seen. And skewing ourselves to the likes, the claps and the shares is an intoxicating poison to an independent, creative spirit. Electrifying and rewarding at first, yes, but stultifying and perhaps deadly.

So this is to say that I am not leaving Facebook, but I have my eyes on a different platform, one that is healthier for human beings and honest communication, one that does not sell with our privacy to whomever is buying. It’s what my husband and I have been envisioning and developing for more than two years.

It’s about to emerge in the world. I feel like how I felt when I decided I wanted to be free of catering to what the audience at the Green Mill wanted of me. I feel free, I feel back to myself and I want this for all of us.

Part two, coming soon…