Are you living for Likes or liking to live? Is your online life more vibrant than your real one? – Social media is addictive.

Anyone under 25 is a narcissist, convinced that every meal must be photographed and shared.

People bully one another online and send naked photos with alarming regularity. But the real threat is ‘The Happiness Effect’.

The real downside of Facebook, Instagram is constant cheeriness. Any hint of unhappiness or failure may not be posted; it can haunt your future and damage your ‘brand’. This imperative creates a vicious circle.

You feel so pressured to post happy things on social media, most of what everyone sees on social media are happy things; as a result, you feel inferior because you are not actually happy all the time.

You feel that you have to be online almost all the time, but you can not share your real self there, a situation that produces even greater unhappiness.

For better or worse, you are becoming a master of appearing happy.

You can not live without your phone, but you dislike many aspects of your online World. Facebook in particular.

You post updates from significant events: vacations, parties, graduations. Social media posts will follow you forever.

Future employers can look back in time and see posts complaining about a difficult boss or admitting loneliness. You can not get a job or not even get an interview because of what you put on social media.

An overwhelming 73% agree that ‘I try always to appear positive/happy with anything attached to my real name.’ Only 19% agree that ‘I am open about my emotions on social media.’

People alter privacy settings to share different identities with different people. Maybe this generation is not self-centered or self-obsessed than any other.

It is just that this generation happens to have the tools to show everybody how self-centered and self-obsessed they are.

Everybody wants to be noticed. Everybody likes when other people like them. Everybody who has posted a photo on Instagram checks 10 times over the next two hours to count the number of ‘Likes’.

You need to unplug for a while so less energy is wasted in search of ‘Likes’ and more efforts can be made on self-discovery and discovery of the World.