Social Media Has Trained The World To Externalize Happiness

The most fascinating discussions I recently participated in at VidCon, the largest content creator event in the world is related to one of the main reasons that there is an inverse correlation between the explosion of social media and the number of people who are desperately unhappy, anxious, and depressed. One of the obvious reasons for this inverse correlation is due to something psychologists call locus of control.

Locus of control refers to where you believe the control in your life resides:

Those who have an external locus of control believe their life is primarily shaped by circumstances, other people, luck, fate, or forces outside their influence. When things go wrong, it is because of what happened to them. When things go right, you got lucky.

Those who have an internal locus of control believe their life is primarily shaped by their choices, responses, effort, and interpretation. When things go wrong, they look at how they responded. When things go right, they recognize the role of their actions.

The research on this is overwhelming and unambiguous:

People with an internal locus of control experience:

• Significantly lower rates of depression and anxiety.
• Higher achievement across every domain.
• Better physical health and longer life expectancy.
• Greater resilience in the face of adversity.
• Higher life satisfaction regardless of circumstances.
• Better relationships and social connections.

People with an external locus of control experience:

• Higher rates of mental health issues.
• Learned helplessness and chronic victimhood.
• Lower achievement despite equal opportunities.
• Poor stress management and worse physical health.
• Lower life satisfaction even with favorable circumstances.
• More conflicted relationships and social isolation.

Study after study shows that your locus of control predicts your life outcomes better than your intelligence, your socioeconomic background, or your natural talents.

Here’s why this matters for your happiness: If you believe your happiness depends on external circumstances, you are already lost. You have made your well-being dependent on things you cannot fully control – other people’s behavior, economic conditions, luck, what happens to you.

But if you internalize the truth that your happiness depends primarily on how you respond to circumstances, you have just reclaimed your power. Nothing that happens to you can take away your ability to choose your response.

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who lost everything, including his family, in Nazi concentration camps, wrote: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

If someone can maintain their humanity, purpose, and inner dignity in a concentration camp, you can find happiness despite your circumstances. The question is: will you?

Let’s talk about why Gen Z is particularly affected when it comes to internalizing happiness. Previous generations had it easier – not because their lives were better, but because their comparison set was limited. You compared yourself to people you actually knew: classmates, coworkers and neighbors.

Gen Z compares themselves to everyone, constantly, in real time, algorithmically optimized to show you people who have more than you.

Every time you open Instagram, TikTok, or any social platform, you are entering what psychologists call a “comparison casino.” The algorithm deals you an endless stream of:

• People with better bodies.
• People in better relationships.
• People at better parties.
• People with better jobs.
• People in better locations.
• People with better lives (apparently).

The poor Gen Z brain is completely overwhelmed. It processes these digital comparisons as if they are real competitors in your immediate social hierarchy. Your nervous system reacts to someone’s vacation post the same way it would react to seeing your actual neighbor succeed while you struggle.

The result is predictable and devastating: Social media trains you to externalize happiness.

Every scroll teaches your brain: happiness is out there, in circumstances different from yours. If you just had their body, their relationship, their travel itinerary, their lifestyle, their opportunities – then you would be happy.

The comparison becomes automatic. You cannot see your own life directly anymore – you only see it in relation to the highlight reels of thousands of people you barely know. Research published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology found that limiting social media use to 30 minutes per day led to significant reductions in loneliness and depression. The benefit did not come from “missing out” less or feeling more connected. It came from reduced social comparison.

When participants stopped constantly measuring their lives against others, they could finally evaluate their actual circumstances without distortion. Most discovered something surprising: their actual lives were surprisingly good. Not Instagram-worthy, but genuinely good.

The comparison trap has another insidious effect: it makes you focus entirely on the wrong metrics.

You start measuring your worth by:

• Follower count instead of depth of friendships.
• Likes instead of personal growth.
• Appearance instead of character.
• Status symbols instead of values alignment.
• Others’ perception instead of self-respect.

Every one of these metrics is external. Each one places your happiness in someone else’s hands and trains you to believe that you need to change your circumstances rather than your perspective.

Imagine you achieve every external milestone you are chasing right now – the perfect body, the dream job, the ideal relationship, the aspirational lifestyle. But there is a catch: you can never post about it, share it, or let anyone know. No one will ever see your achievements or validate your success.

Be honest: Does that sound appealing, or does it feel hollow?

If it feels hollow, you have completely externalized your happiness. You are not actually pursuing the thing itself; you are pursuing other people’s reactions to the thing. You are not building a life you love; you are building a life that looks good to strangers.

That is not happiness; that is performance. What social media does not tell tens of millions of people is that you can perform forever without ever feeling happy!

About the Author

Antony Gordon is a Fulbright Scholar and graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. Antony’s first TEDx Talk has surpassed one million views and was recognized as one of the decade’s most influential TED Talks. He is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal Best Selling Author and the host of the critically acclaimed podcast, The Antony Gordon Show, one of the verticals in Lighthouse-Edutainment a multi-media platform that he launched with the backing of The Yucaipa Companies after working as the Strategic Advisor for Jimmy Donaldson a/k/a MrBeast for several years.