“If every person on earth put their biggest problem in a hat,” I asked my friend, expecting a good conversation, “would you keep yours or draw a new one?”
“I saw that Reel too, man.”
When someone throws those six words at me, I feel as though I’ve been caught, hand in cookie jar, fingerprint at crime scene. It is a terrible feeling, and I’ve tried to take every precaution to avoid it. I no longer speak about social media posts I find interesting for fear of that irrational sensation of guilt. I don’t even bother prefacing that I got my plagiarized thought from Instagram — it feels anti-intellectual and inexplicably embarrassing.
What I find so confusing about this guilt, however, is how different it is from the instinctual joy humans feel when sharing. Watching a friend secretly add your favorite song to their playlist, smiling with a stranger over a mutual friend you both adore, turning your head to check if your friends are enjoying the movie you put on. We love it when others enjoy the same things we do.
Social media somehow deviates. Roughly 86% of young people say their primary source of news and updates is social media. It makes complete sense — out of ease and attention deficit, young folks tend to read the five words posted by the New York Times on its Instagram story rather than the full article on its website. But why, then, do we feel the need to call people out on the “anti-intellectual” nature of social media content when so many of us are using it?
I think it’s because we’re ashamed. The last thing I feel is pride after scrolling for 30 minutes in the morning instead of getting up early to go to the gym. Social media is easily the most common source of information for everyone in our age bracket, and that makes all of us, to some degree, disappointed.
That explains the guilt you feel after getting called out, and I think it also explains the urge to call out others. The other day, I was grabbing breakfast with a friend who was rambling about a disappointing grade they got on an exam. “So it goes,” they concluded, quoting Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.” We both smiled at the reference — an acknowledgment of origin. When a friend quotes an Instagram post, however, my face contorts to an irrational “really, man?” In both scenarios, we acknowledge the origin of the reference — we call it out — yet, when it’s social media, it’s undignified.
My friend and I both know we should be on our phones less — responding to a reference with anything other than condemnation would validate our phone addictions. I also doubt we’ll ever stop these call-outs. Social media will never command the pride you feel after finishing a book. It will never be considered productive or worthy of intellectual conversation. Even if the content you receive from social media imitates the deep thinking you’d get from a philosophical text, it’s no Kant, and it never will be. The tacky, “unworthy” origin will always be attached to the thought itself. For that reason, we will always call out our friends, and we will always feel guilty when we get called out.
But just because we need to put our phones down doesn’t mean we have to start picking up Immanuel Kant. We need to watch more Pixar movies and do more stupid things with our friends. We value the connection we feel when sharing art, stories and people, and we will never truly value our use of social media. That’s healthy. The day we stop calling people out for quoting Reels is the day our addictions become normalized. We can’t afford to stop calling people out, and we can’t afford to stop feeling guilty. We need every incentive to pull our faces out of our matrices of inauthenticity and cultivate genuine connections with others. Diagnosing why we feel so happy when sharing music and so guilty when sharing Instagram Reels is a crucial step in prioritizing what actually brings us joy — prioritizing what short life we have left.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
