I’ve cut way back on social media over the last few years — largely because most of my real-life friends have too. Blame the algorithms, blame the business model, blame whatever you want.
But on the comparatively few occasions I do use it, here’s what I’ve noticed about my own behavior:
I exchange tips and news with neighbors in my town’s unofficial local groups.
I trade ideas and experiences about skiing in the Northeast with other like-minded folks.
I talk about soccer — and especially the U.S. Men’s National Team — with other long-suffering fans.
In almost all of these cases, the people I’ve sorta/kinda gotten to know exist to me only as usernames. Whether we’re talking about PAskiguy415 on Reddit or Jane Smith on the local town Facebook group, I have an inch-wide, quarter-mile-deep view into their lives.
But we don’t actually know each other in real life.
Now, a new study from Oregon State University just addressed the underlying core questions these kinds of relationships pose:
Do online-only connections count?
Can these virtual relationships do for us what real-life relationships do?
Sorry PAskiguy415. The short answer, apparently, is no.
In fact, for some people, they may make things worse.
Idealization of friendships
Published in Public Health Reports, the official journal of the U.S. Public Health Service, the study surveyed 1,514 U.S. adults between the ages of 30 and 70 in a nationally representative sample.
Researchers divided each person’s social media connections into two groups: people they had met in person, and people they hadn’t.
Adults with higher percentages of online-only connections (people they’d never actually met face-to-face) reported greater loneliness.
Moreover, connecting online with people you actually know didn’t help either. It was associated with neither greater loneliness, but it also wasn’t associated with less loneliness.
Study co-author Jessica Gorman explained the mechanism:
“We know that social media interactions can result in idealization of other people’s friendships with each other, which can exacerbate the effects of social comparison.
This idealization is possibly stronger when those friendships involve people you’ve never met because there is no personal experience to counter that idealization.”
In other words: when you interact with someone online you’ve never met, you fill in the gaps—usually with something rosier than reality.
You don’t see the bad days and the friction that comes with actually knowing someone. The comparison makes you feel worse about your own social life, not better.
‘Happier and healthier. Period.’
None of this would surprise Robert Waldinger, the Harvard psychiatrist who has been running the 88-year Harvard Grant Study of adult development since 2003.
His summary of what decades of data show: “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”
But, this new study suggests that relationships only matter when people build them on actual shared experiences.
It’s apparently about time in the same room, attention paid in real time — the good, the bad, and the ugly that comes along with getting to know almost anyone in three dimensions.
Quick caveats:
The study predates the current wave of AI-powered social tools (summer 2023).
It’s a snapshot, not a longitudinal tracking of the same people over time.
And, we have our old friend correlation versus causation to consider: Lonelier people may be more likely to seek online connections with strangers to begin with, rather than those connections causing the loneliness.
Most probably, said lead author Brian Primack, it runs in both directions.
People experiencing loneliness “may wish to examine critically their interactions with strangers on social media and to prioritize in-person connections over social media ones, even when those social media connections are considered close.”
All of which leads me to: If you see a middle-aged guy in a throwback 1994 denim soccer jersey going a little bit crazy for the U.S. men’s national team against Bosnia today, say hello.
It might just be CaligiurisLeftFoot from your online group.
And you’d both probably like to meet in real-life.
Other things worth knowing …
USA Today: Supreme Court season ended Tuesday as the court rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to redefine who is an American, striking down his efforts to limit on birthright citizenship. The 6-3 ruling landed after the justices backed the president in other cases, including last week’s ruling allowing Trump to end deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants.
Bloomberg: The death toll from last week's twin earthquakes in Venezuela rose to nearly 2,000 on Tuesday, with tens of thousands still missing. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who has been in exile, said she was stranded in Panama after authorities refused to allow her flight to land in Caracas.
Reuters: Happy Canada Day! The Trump administration is expected to formally declare on Wednesday that it will not extend the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade, starting a decade-long clock to wind down the 32-year-old North American free trade zone. That declaration kicks off a six-year review session, part of a “sunset clause” negotiated by President Donald Trump’s first administration.
24WallSt, CNBC: Trump’s personal fortune has nearly tripled since he left the White House in 2021, up to $6.5 billion form $2.4 billion when he left the White House in 2021. Latest jump: about $515 million from the sale of tokens released by the firm World Liberty Financial, the Trump-linked crypto company co-founded by members of his family.
CNBC: Smaller but interesting: Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million in shares of Axon Enterprise — maker of Tasers, body cameras, and policing software — on February 10, just two weeks before ICE posted a notice seeking a five-year, $220 million contract for nearly 18,000 new Tasers. Procurement experts told CNBC that the contract specifications appear to match only Axon’s TASER 10 model.
AP: Scientists have stumbled on a rare dinosaur fossil from Antarctica, tucked away for decades in a drawer. The bone comes from the tail of a long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur called a titanosaur. Scientists haven’t yet identified the species it belongs to. It was discovered in 1985.
Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.
I sent this link to Bill to explore for future ideas to share. But here's a link about off-line time. And this link also includes other ideas to explore.
https://www.yourtango.com/self/things-interesting-people-do-free-time
This is something I’ve known for some time now. I’ve been online since the 80s. I’ve seen how it all grew alongside us. True friendships are in person and up close.