taylor nicholson?

Anxiety and depression are both conditions I have struggled with my whole life. From my diagnosis in elementary school to now, my life was dictated by my own personal battle with my mind. I’m grateful to have the support system I have now through friends, family and therapists, but when I was first showing signs of mental health struggles, I was surrounded by the same mantra “oh, you’re sad? just be happy!” This sentiment always pissed me off to no end, but I didn’t know what to call this mindset until I read Chapter 9 of Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – And How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari, who labeled this toxic ethos as “cruel optimism.”

Cruel optimism refers to plenty more situations that just the mental health crisis, like diet culture, the American Dream, and multiple forms of addiction. In chapter nine of Stolen Focus, Hari talks about cruel optimism from Big Tech and engineers like Nir Eyal and how they claim the solution to curbing one’s social media addiction is to “just delete the app” or “turn off notifications”, but in reality it is not that simple. The rest of the chapter chooses to focus on general technology addiction and its connection to cruel optimism, but it got me thinking about the next layer to this cycle – how social media allows cruel optimism to run rampant with no way to block it out.

Picture this: you just got home from a classic Jersey Shore beach weekend with friends, and want to memorialize it to Instagram. You’ve written your caption, tagged the location and are about to hit ‘post’, but out of curiosity you decide to scroll through other posts people have made from that same beach. Before you know it, you’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of girls with perfect faces, inhuman bodies, all with thousands upon thousands of followers. Looking further into their profiles, it’s all the same sentiment: “just eat healthy, cut out gluten, go to pilates 5 times a week, and be sure to count your calories, even for gum. Without meaning to, you have overdosed on cruel optimism (and probably kickstarted an eating disorder at the same time). Believe it or not, there’s a good chance the girls you saw preaching about how easy it is to look just like them also drank the koolaid and fell for the same promises from another social media influencer, too. Now, I’m not saying that cruel optimism never existed before the internet, but the internet gives it the space to flourish, unrestricted. When one person says “just smile and depression will go away” to you in person, you can roll your eyes and walk away. When hundreds of people are saying the same twisted mantra that becomes immortalized as Facebook bios, you start to believe it to be true, and it suddenly isn’t so easy to roll your eyes and look away.

After I finished this long, existential thought process about social media and toxic positivity, I thought back to Hari’s writings about the deeper solution to technology addiction. The change cannot just be done on an individual level, but the effort needs to be shown by Big Tech to make their products serve the user, not the user serve the companies creating the apps.