Essay on Social Media, FOMO and Youth Loneliness

“Social media is triggering ‘Fear of Missing Out’ amongst youth, precipitating depression and loneliness” appeared as Topic 5 of Section B in the UPSC Civil Services Mains Essay paper held on 15 September 2024. Six lines on the question paper. One hundred and twenty-five marks if you handle it well. A wasted hour if you do not. This guide breaks the topic down the way it should be tackled in the hall — first the meaning, then the angles, then the time map, then the paragraph-by-paragraph plan, and finally a complete 1,200-word model essay you can study, dissect and adapt.

When this was asked and what UPSC is really testing

The topic was set in UPSC CSE Mains 2024, Essay paper, Section B. Three hours, two essays, one from each section, roughly 1,000 to 1,200 words each, 125 marks per essay. Unlike Section B’s older offerings, this prompt is a social-policy statement disguised as an essay — it names a cause (social media), a mechanism (FOMO) and an outcome (depression and loneliness). You are not free to roam; you are asked to argue.

UPSC is checking four things at once. One, can you read a cause-and-effect statement without swallowing it whole — can you accept the trend without losing the right to nuance it. Two, can you marshal evidence across psychology, technology, society and Indian data without sounding like a coaching handout. Three, can you bring in an Indian philosophical anchor — the Gita’s santosha, Tagore’s inner sufficiency — without making it ornamental. Four, can you write 1,200 disciplined words that examine the claim rather than 1,500 loose words that confirm it. The aspirant who handles all four scores in the 130s. The aspirant who only laments smartphones scores in the 90s.

Five angles that unlock “Social media, FOMO and youth loneliness”

The trap with a cause-and-effect prompt is to spend 1,100 words restating the cause and effect. The mark-pulling answer instead identifies several lenses, names them clearly, and weaves them. Here are the five most defensible readings of the topic. You do not need all five in your essay — three, treated well, is the sweet spot. But you should know all five so your choice is conscious.

1. The attention economy — the technological reading. Platforms are not neutral; their revenue depends on keeping eyes on the screen. Algorithmic feeds, infinite scroll, variable rewards and notification design are engineered to exploit dopamine pathways. Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology have argued that FOMO is not a personal weakness but a product feature.
2. FOMO as comparison culture — the social-psychological reading. The curated highlight reel of others’ lives sets a moving benchmark no one can meet. Performative living — posting the meal before tasting it — replaces lived experience with documented experience. The young pay a steeper price because identity is still forming.
3. The India-specific reading — the demographic angle. India has the world’s largest youth cohort, with roughly 65 percent of citizens under thirty-five and over 750 million smartphone users. The urban-rural divide, gendered access, and the leap from no internet to algorithmic feed in a single decade make our exposure unusually concentrated.
4. The mental-health reading — the public-health angle. The National Mental Health Survey of 2015–16 placed the lifetime prevalence of mental disorders in India at around ten percent, with a treatment gap above seventy percent. NIMHANS clinicians have begun describing loneliness as a “silent epidemic” among the urban young, often co-existing with hyperconnectivity.
5. The counter-current — social media as connector. The same platforms host mental-health communities, give voice to caste, gender and disability minorities long ignored by mainstream media, deliver free learning at scale, and, during the pandemic, kept the lonely from going under. A balanced essay refuses to demonise the tool.

A strong essay picks angles 1, 2 and 4 as its backbone (technology, psychology, public health), uses 3 as the Indian anchor and 5 as the counter-current that prevents the essay from sounding like a sermon. That gives the argument rhythm — diagnosis, complication, resolution — instead of one long lament.

A time map for the 1,500-second window

One essay deserves about 75 to 90 minutes inside the three-hour paper. Spending more on Essay 1 starves Essay 2. The single biggest source of below-100 essay scores is poor time discipline — beautiful introductions, panicked conclusions. Use a rough breakdown like this:

Notice what is not on the list: rewriting the introduction halfway, hunting for the perfect quote, fancy diagrams, decorative underlining. None of that earns marks. Discipline does.

What to add — and what to avoid at all costs

The essay paper rewards what most aspirants under-do and punishes what most aspirants over-do. Memorise this list before you walk into the hall.

Add liberally

• One precise thesis, stated by the end of paragraph two and not abandoned. “Social media has industrialised comparison and made loneliness scalable; the response cannot be nostalgia for a screen-free past, but a disciplined reclaiming of attention by individuals, families and institutions.”
• Concrete examples across three or four domains — one technological (the infinite-scroll patent, variable-reward design), one Indian-statistical (NMHS 2015–16, NCRB suicide data for the under-30s), one philosophical (the Gita on santosha and aparigraha, Tagore on inner sufficiency), one personal or literary (the WhatsApp group at 1 a.m., a hostel scene from a contemporary novel).
• Two or three short, named quotes — Tristan Harris on attention extraction, Sherry Turkle’s “alone together”, Tagore on the desire that lives in the soul. One per major section is enough.
• One Indian philosophical anchor. The Bhagavad Gita’s santosha (contentment) and aparigraha (non-grasping) are made for this topic — they name the disease and the medicine in two words each.
• Counter-arguments handled briefly. “It might be argued that social media has democratised voice and saved lives during the pandemic…” — then resolved in two lines. Acknowledging the other side earns more marks than ignoring it.
• A clean conclusion that returns to the opening image — not a fresh argument, not a new example.

Avoid — even when tempted

• Restating the topic in the first sentence. “Social media is a double-edged sword…” — this signals that you have nothing to add. Open with an image: a teenager’s bedroom at midnight, lit only by a phone.
• Drifting into a single domain. A 1,200-word essay only on Instagram, or only on screen time, looks like a magazine column. Range matters.
• Unsourced statistics. “78% of Indian teenagers feel anxious without their phones” — if you cannot name the survey, do not write the number. NMHS, NCRB, Pew, We Are Social — name your source or drop the figure.
• Naming current politicians or party leaders. The Essay paper is graded by humans across the ideological spectrum. Use the institution — Ministry of Electronics and IT, TRAI, NIMHANS — not the personality.
• Decorative scholar-dropping. Citing Foucault, Baudrillard and Han in one paragraph to look serious. Examiners spot performance citations instantly. One scholar, used well, beats four named in passing.
• Moralising. “The youth must put down their phones and read books” reads like a school speech. The essay paper rewards examination, not exhortation.

A paragraph-by-paragraph blueprint

Twelve paragraphs at roughly 100 words each gets you to 1,200. Thirteen at 90 each gets you to 1,170. Either works. What follows is a 13-paragraph plan that maps cleanly onto the model essay below. Each line is what that paragraph is doing, not what it is saying.

1. Opening image — a hostel room at 1 a.m., a face lit by a screen, a thumb scrolling. No mention of the topic yet.
2. The pivot to thesis — name the topic, then state the thesis in one sentence.
3. Define the terms — what is FOMO, what counts as social media, what kind of loneliness is being described.
4. Angle 1 — the attention economy — infinite scroll, variable rewards, Tristan Harris, business model as design.
5. Angle 2 — comparison culture — the curated highlight reel, performative living, Sherry Turkle’s “alone together”.
6. India-specific anchor — the youth bulge, 750 million smartphones, the urban-rural and gendered divide.
7. The mental-health evidence — NMHS 2015–16, treatment gap, NIMHANS commentary on loneliness, NCRB youth-suicide trend.
8. The Indian philosophical reading — the Gita on santosha and aparigraha, Tagore on the desire that lives in the soul.
9. Counter-argument handled — yes, platforms democratise voice and save lives. No, that does not absolve their design.
10. Way forward — the individual — attention as a personal practice, notification audits, the discipline of boredom.
11. Way forward — the family and school — digital literacy curriculum, parent-child screen agreements, hostels without phones at night.
12. Way forward — the institutional — DPDP Act, age-gating, algorithmic transparency, a public-health frame for screen design.
13. Closing image — return to the hostel room, switch off the lock-screen, end on one resonant line.

How to make an examiner stop and read

An essay examiner reads several hundred scripts in a sitting. The first paragraph decides whether they read the second with attention or with autopilot. Four small habits separate the essays that get attention from the ones that get skimmed.

• Open with a scene, not a statement. A bedroom at 1 a.m., a meal photographed before it is tasted, a notification that arrives during a hug. Concrete images cost no marks and earn attention.
• Use the topic phrase itself two or three times across the essay. Once in the thesis, once at the turn, once at the close. It signals discipline and prevents drift.
• Vary sentence length. A short sentence after three long ones lands. Examiners feel rhythm before they parse meaning.
• End paragraphs with the takeaway, not with examples. Place the example mid-paragraph. Let the last sentence be the thought, so the reader carries it into the next paragraph.

The complete essay — “Social media is triggering ‘Fear of Missing Out’ amongst youth, precipitating depression and loneliness”

What follows is a 1,200-word model essay built on the blueprint above. Read it twice — once for the argument, once for the moves. The moves are what you can carry into your own essay; the argument is one of many you could make.

It is one in the morning in a hostel room in Pune. The lights are off. A young woman lies on her side, her face washed in the pale rectangle of her phone. A friend in Goa is laughing into a bonfire. A classmate in Bengaluru has cleared an interview. A stranger in Seoul is unboxing a watch she cannot afford. Each image is fifteen seconds long; none belongs to her life. By the time the screen dims, the room feels smaller than it did at eleven, and the sleep that arrives is the shallow sleep of a mind that has been comparing itself for two hours.

That scene is the everyday face of the proposition that social media is triggering “Fear of Missing Out” amongst youth, precipitating depression and loneliness. The statement is partly diagnosis and partly indictment. It is partly right; it is also incomplete. Social media has industrialised comparison and made loneliness scalable, but the response cannot be nostalgia for a screen-free past. It has to be a disciplined reclaiming of attention by individuals, families and institutions — beginning from the recognition that the problem is engineered, not accidental.

Some careful definitions help. FOMO is not ordinary curiosity about what others are doing; it is the persistent anxiety that an alternative life, more vivid than one’s own, is happening somewhere on the feed. “Social media” here is shorthand for algorithmic platforms whose business model is attention — Instagram, TikTok, X, Snapchat — not for messaging apps that simply carry conversation. The loneliness in question is not solitude, which has always existed and has often been creative; it is the new condition of being constantly connected and chronically unmet, of having three hundred followers and no one to call at midnight.

The first thing to understand is that this loneliness is profitable. Tristan Harris, formerly a design ethicist at a major platform, has argued that the largest social applications are not neutral utilities; they compete for the same scarce resource as every billboard and every casino — human attention. Infinite scroll removes the natural stopping cue of a page-end. Variable rewards — sometimes a friend’s message, sometimes nothing at all — produce the same dopamine pattern as a slot machine. FOMO is not a personal failing of weak-willed youth; it is, in the language of the Center for Humane Technology, a product feature.

The second thing to understand is what the product does to a still-forming self. Adolescence has always involved comparison — to siblings, classmates, neighbours. The feed multiplies that comparison by a thousand and curates only the highlights. The result is what Sherry Turkle has called being “alone together”: documented but not lived; performing a life rather than inhabiting one. The young pay the steepest price because identity is being assembled at the very age when the benchmark for normality is being set by other people’s most photogenic moments.

India is uniquely exposed. Roughly 65 percent of the country is under thirty-five, and more than 750 million Indians hold a smartphone. The leap from no internet to an algorithmic feed has happened, for hundreds of millions of households, inside a single decade — without the intervening years of newspapers and dial-up that trained older societies in the habits of mediation. The gap between feed and reality — the engine of FOMO — is widest exactly where the support systems are thinnest.

The mental-health data is catching up to the lived experience. The National Mental Health Survey of 2015–16 found nearly one in ten Indians met the criteria for a mental disorder, with a treatment gap above seventy percent. NIMHANS clinicians have spoken of loneliness in urban India as a “silent epidemic” that now co-exists with hyperconnectivity rather than being relieved by it. NCRB suicide data has, for years, placed the under-thirties among the most vulnerable cohorts. Correlation is not causation; but the convergence of the curves is hard to wave away.

Indian thought named this condition long before the smartphone arrived. The Bhagavad Gita places santosha — contentment with what is — and aparigraha — the discipline of not grasping for more — at the centre of an examined life. The grasping mind, the Gita warns, is never at rest because each acquisition opens a new comparison. Tagore, writing in a different idiom, spoke of “the desire that lives in the soul” — the inner restlessness that no outer abundance can quiet. A culture that forgot these vocabularies has had to import the word “FOMO” to describe what its grandmothers would have called trishna.

It might be objected that this picture is one-sided. Social media has democratised voice for caste, gender and disability communities long ignored by mainstream media. It hosts mental-health support networks that reach villages no clinic visits, and it carried classrooms and condolence through a pandemic. All this is true. But it does not absolve the design. A medicine that cures while quietly addicting is still a problem; the answer is not to ban it but to regulate the dose.

The response, then, has to operate at three levels. At the level of the individual, attention has to be treated as a personal practice — a notification audit once a month, a phone that sleeps outside the bedroom, the rediscovery of boredom as the soil from which thought grows. None of this is glamorous, and none of it can be outsourced. The young person who reclaims fifteen minutes between waking and the first scroll has begun a small revolution.

At the level of the family and the school, the work is structural. Digital literacy belongs in the curriculum from the middle years, not as a warning lecture but as a working knowledge of how feeds are designed. Parent-child screen agreements — what is shared, what is not, when phones are set aside at meals — are more useful than confiscation. Residential schools and university hostels can experiment with phone-free hours after dinner. Loneliness, the clinicians remind us, is healed by presence, and presence requires the gift of undivided attention.

At the institutional level, the frame has to shift. India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act gives the state new powers to require parental consent for minors and restrict targeted advertising; how vigorously these are used matters. Algorithmic transparency, age-appropriate design codes and the right to a chronological feed are reasonable next steps. The deeper move is to treat platform design the way public health treats tobacco — not as a private product choice but a decision with population-scale consequences.

Return for a moment to the hostel room in Pune. The phone is still on the pillow. The student could reach for it again, or she could turn it face down and let the room be the size it actually is. The proposition that social media is triggering FOMO, depression and loneliness is, finally, an invitation to choose. The cultivation of an inner life large enough to be unimpressed by the feed is the oldest discipline in the Indian tradition and the newest one a republic of the young is being asked to learn.

Word count: approximately 1,200.

How to use this model essay

Do not memorise it. Memorised essays read like memorised essays, and examiners spot them in two paragraphs. Use the model the way a chess student uses a master game: study the opening scene, the pivot to thesis, the way each paragraph hands the reader to the next, the placement of the Indian philosophical anchor, the way the counter-argument is brought up and then closed. Then take a different 2024 essay topic — try “Forests are the best case studies for economic excellence” or “Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands — two equally harmful disciplines” — and write your own essay using the same blueprint. Repeat that exercise eight to ten times and the structure becomes muscle memory. On the day of the exam, the only thing you should have to think about is the topic itself.