In Maintain the kiss, a text that takes up and expands a series of “lessons on love” broadcast at the beginning of 2019 on Rai 3 in a television program entitled “Lessico amoroso”, the psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati writes: “Our time encourages the maniacal solution of mourning: once one love dies, another must immediately take over. Our time is a time hostile to the “unproductive” and “painful” experience of mourning, being dominated by the neoliberal commandment of enjoyment at all costs. The withdrawal into oneself required by the work of mourning appears completely anachronistic. Better to encourage the immediate replacement of the object according to the style most typical of capitalist discourse.”
I dug out the exact quote because the profound meaning of this reflection was the first connection that came to mind when reading about a research conducted by a team of scholars from the Ruhr Universität Bochum, in Germany, and precisely from the Faculty of Psychology. The work, edited by Dr. Phillip Ozimek, started from a question: how does materialism in social media cause stress and unhappiness?
The question has a lot to do with the intricate lives that most humans lead and with what are the most confusing and immediate showcases, sometimes the result of elaborate emotions, but more often only expressed ad minchiam (pass me the Latinorum) . Social channels.
The study, released in January this year, starts from an assumption: people with a materialistic mental structure always desire more and, above all, more than others. Clothes, cars, trips, followers. Social media provide ideal opportunities for comparison with others, which makes this type of person susceptible to addictions or the development of passive-aggressive character traits. In fact, being on social media stresses these people excessively, causing low levels of satisfaction with their lives. A downward spiral that transforms materialistic needs into unhappy lives.
The research team involved 1,230 participants in the survey who had to use at least one social channel at least once a week. On average, participants said they spent just over two hours a day on social media. By administering 6 different questionnaires, the researchers determined the limit beyond which the participants demonstrated materialistic attitudes and the tendency to compare their lives and habits with those of others, whether they used social media passively or more actively. , whether they were heavily dependent on it. Well, when did they appear stressed and how much satisfaction did they express with their lives?
“The data collected showed that a highly materialistic approach goes hand in hand with a tendency to make comparisons with others,” specifies Dr. Ozimek. And comparisons are very easy to make on social media, mainly through passive use, that is, unpicking posts and stories and reels of other people’s lives. Behaviors that go hand in hand with a use of social media that borders, if not confirms, addiction. What does it mean? That users “constantly think about their channels and fear they will always miss something if they don’t stay online continuously.”
Habits that are directly linked to a worsening of mental health, starting from high levels of stress to arrive at a very low level of satisfaction with one’s life and great unhappiness. Not to mention that, as the research reveals, the very real risks of social media are on the one hand that of taking a materialistic mental structure even further to the extreme, for example through marketing linked to influencers, and on the other that of creating and reinforcing it through possibility within reach of satisfying material needs of all kinds.
The psychologists who conducted the study once again recommend the importance of reducing the time spent online, or eliminating social media altogether. To quote Recalcati’s words, taking a time of solitude and breathing space to be in one’s own company, be it a time of enjoyment and rest or of painful work to overcome heavy relational traumas, still unfortunately appears to be an anachronistic solution and demodée. Being on social media means not being alone, being surrounded by friends. But is it really like that? In any case we must do, demonstrate, possess, show, make known. And all this tires us enormously, when just being could be tiring enough. And extremely rewarding.
