One way of understanding what motivates us is to separate motivation into Extrinsic and Intrinsic motivation

Extrinsic motivation is when you’re motivated to perform a task for reasons beyond the task itself. Examples would be jobs, where the motivation for doing the job is a reward in the form of payment. You wouldn’t continue to show up and do the job if you weren’t being paid because the motivation is separate from the task itself.

Intrinsic motivation is when you’re motivated to perform a task because the task itself is inherently enjoyable or meaningful. An example of this would be a hobby. You’re not rewarded for doing it, you do it simply because the hobby itself brings you joy. 

In the 1970s a study around this was done with children. The researchers took kids who already showed an interest in art and separated them into two groups.

The first group would receive a reward for every picture they drew. The second group received nothing.

They followed up on the kids after the study and found that the kids from the first group took less of interest in drawing and put less effort into their drawings once the rewards stopped.

The kids in the second group continued to show the same level of interest in drawing as before and overall put more effort into their drawings.

The effect they observed was dubbed the Overjustification Effect. The Overjustification Effect refers to how attaching an extrinsic motivation to something previously intrinsically motivating takes away the intrinsic motivation and ultimately makes the activity or task less meaningful and enjoyable.

Over the years it’s been observed that attaching external rewards to something that was previously inherently meaningful results in lower creativity, worse problem solving, more inclination to cheat, and sometimes even loss of interest in the activity altogether.

I was thinking about this in the context of social media and how its attached extrinsic motivation - likes, reblogs, comments, attention - to the thing most intrinsic - ourselves and our relationships.

Spending so much time on social media, we begin to experience extrinsic motivators around our own self worth and around our relationships.

It isn’t enough to have a good relationship that brings us meaning or makes our lives better. Now there’s a feeling that that relationship is less real or meaningful if it isn’t being validated externally by people on social media.

It isn’t enough for us to like how we look, we need others to see it and confirm whether or not we look good.

Our own thoughts even aren’t inherently valued or enjoyable any longer. We can’t simply sit and think and feel assured in the worth of our own minds. Instead, we’ve come to expect and operate on a baseline that if our thoughts don’t receive the extrinsic rewards of likes and shares and comments, they’re not valuable or worthwhile.

None of these are original observations or even wholly unique to social media.

However, the scale and constancy of social media is new - our insecurities or external validation seeking required more actual relationships and genuine interactions before instead of social media where you can engage any time 24/7 with potentially hundreds or thousands of people.

Moreover, the thing that strikes me is what this does to our sense of intrinsic motivation.

If we become conditioned to be extrinsically motivated in our relationships and personal growth and very existence, eventually the Overjustification Effect will take hold and we lose the ability to enjoy ourselves, our relationships, and our lives on their own merits.

We become less inclined to problem solve in our own lives and relationships, putting less energy into maintaining and working on things because our motivation is now linked to external rewards rather than the inherent meaning of having good relationships with ourselves and others.

We come less creative in how we approach and see our lives as we orient ourselves more and more toward the most efficient and reliable ways to receive our extrinsic rewards.

We cheat ourselves and our relationships by being dishonest with ourselves about our motivations and the degree to which extrinsic motivation has overcome us, in large part because it happens so gradually and silently we don’t even notice it’s happened.

And eventually, we become disinterested and disengaged from our own minds, interests, wants, beliefs, and relationships as these things all become reduced to simple means-to-an-end for the external validation and rewards promised by social media.

Now of course there is a balance that can be struck here and it’s not like simply being on social media at all will have this effect. But when I think about it in my own life, it’s easy to see the ways that higher social media use and fixation has distorted my thought patterns and actually made me enjoy my life and relationships less as my motivations become warped by the reward/optimization fixation encouraged by social media.

There’s a whole other conversation to be had here, too, of course, around how social media most often presents life at its most interesting and dynamic and sets us up to have false expectations and understandings of how life can be and what sort of life others are leading causing us to feel dissatisfied and develop an unquenchable thirst for things to always be better, because nothing is ever good enough when you can log on and seemingly see examples of how life could be better (when in fact all we’re ever seeing is different distorted images where the tradeoffs are masked, obscured, or outright lied about). 

But together all these things combine, I think, into a detrimental effect on our ability to enjoy our lives, our relationships, and ourselves as we become less and less able to be present to life as it is or experience its inherent meaning and more and more motivated to seek meaning and joy through external reward and validation, never fully sated as we can always see other receiving more rewards - more likes, more attention, more validation - than us and always feel like our lesser external rewards reflects on some greater truth about the worth of ourselves, our relationships, and our lives.