Unintended Consequences

Something that we don’t think about is what are the unintended consequences of what we do.  But it’s worth considering how the things we do affect our relationships even when we don’t intend it.

If you are reading this, you are concerned about a relationships in your life. It’s broken in some way, or your concerned that it might be broken.  And maybe it’s broken as a result of something you did, maybe you did it deliberately. But probably you didn’t intend to fracture the relationship when you took that action. I know a friend of mine didn’t anticipate that a relationship in her life would be broken when she started becoming more vocal about certain of her beliefs, but that was the consequence.

One of the examples of unintended consequences cited by Wikipedia is the effort to eliminate cobras in India under English rule. The British offered a bounty for each cobra caught and killed, and at first, it worked!  They paid out a lot of money. But it backfired when the people started raising cobras to get their bounty. They ended up with many more cobras.

Another example is the movement to make CEO’s more accountable for the company’s performance. The idea was to make part of their compensation stock options, which may have worked. But the unintended consequences were that CEO pay rose exponentially, making the difference in pay between the lowest paid worker and the highest paid workers more dramatically high, widening the social divide. That wasn’t the intention.

Social media is believed to be a way of people connecting, people who wouldn’t otherwise have had that opportunity. And that’s true. But there are a lot of unintended consequences for social media. The research show that heavy social media use is associated with more loneliness! Instead of social media making people feel more connected, they feel less!

Some of the reasons for the problems with social media is that we substitute quantity of connections on social media for quality in real life. It contributes to misery because it doesn’t have the same qualities to it as a real-life connection. It’s a fake connection, a similitude. 

How often do you sit with our friends but pull out your phone, substituting what could be a real-life interaction for the online version?

Connecting with people in real life is hard but rewarding. When you are with someone who cares for you, your physiology changes. That doesn’t happen when we interact with a screen.

But more than that, by helping us connect with “like-minded” people, it has reduced the amount of time we spend with others that we don’t agree with. That means we have less of an effect on them.  That pulls us further apart. Without the softening effect of rubbing off the hard edges, our positions become more extreme. We also get an exaggerated opinion of what others believe when we rely on social media because the extremes get attention.

Consider the unintended consequences of social media before you use it. Substitute in life real time interactions instead, when you can.

And share this post with someone you think might enjoy it!