I scroll.
A beautiful man. Maybe too beautiful.
Perfect body, perfect light, perfect clothes. Underneath, a sentence that is much less perfect: he talks about loneliness, says he is looking for someone, someone to share a life with.
Thousands of hearts.
I add one too.
Then I keep scrolling.
A few seconds later I stop and think:
what the fuck am I doing?
Not because liking something is serious. It isn’t.
Not because that person could not genuinely be lonely. He could.
And not because there must be some deception behind the photograph. It could all be real. It could be constructed. There could be a person, a business, an AI-generated image.
The point is something else.
I do not know that person.
I probably never will.
And I know perfectly well that, among three thousand or thirty thousand hearts, mine is unlikely to become the beginning of anything.
And yet I tapped it.
Why?
What are we looking for while we do it?
A gesture that looks like nothing
A like takes less than a second.
That may be exactly what makes it interesting.
It does not require a sentence.
It does not require courage.
It does not even require us to know exactly why we are doing it.
Research on online behaviour has shown that likes can work as signals of approval and as a form of social reward. They can contribute to social comparison, reinforce a feeling of participation and influence how we read a photograph or a person.
But that does not mean every heart is hiding a wound, a lack or an existential crisis.
Sometimes a like is simply a like.
I like a photograph.
A joke makes me laugh.
I agree.
I want a friend to know I saw what they posted.
Things become more interesting when a gesture this small starts doing emotional work much bigger than itself.
I see you. See me.
Maybe we are not only saying I like you.
We are saying: I see you.
And sometimes, inside that I see you, there may be another sentence we never write:
I would like to be seen too.
Not necessarily by the person in the photograph.
Maybe by the world.
Maybe by someone.
Maybe by a version of ourselves we imagine as more desirable, more secure, more chosen.
This is where projection enters.
Faced with someone very attractive, apparently happy, free or available, we do not react only to what we know about them.
Often we know almost nothing.
We also react to what that person represents.
A possibility.
A fantasy.
A different life.
The kind of love we would like.
The body we would like to have.
The feeling of being desired that we would like to experience.
Maybe we are not only liking a person. We are also reacting to the possibility that person represents.
Intimacy without meeting
Media psychology has used a term for decades: parasocial relationship.
It describes the sense of familiarity we can develop towards someone we see often, listen to or follow, but who does not know us in the same way.
It is not something Instagram invented.
It existed with actors, singers and television presenters.
Social media, however, reduced the distance.
The famous person, or simply the person with a large following, no longer appears only on a stage.
They are in the kitchen.
In bed.
Fresh from the shower.
They tell us they are sad.
They ask how we are.
They say goodnight.
And we can answer with a heart.
The relationship remains asymmetrical, but the feeling of proximity can become very real.
That does not mean it is fake.
It means it is a particular kind of closeness.
We can feel close to someone without ever truly entering their life.
And it is an extraordinarily convenient form of contact.
I can desire someone without knowing anything about him.
I can show interest without facing a conversation.
I can imagine being chosen without exposing myself to the possibility of not being chosen.
I can move closer without really risking the encounter.
The silent comparison
Then there are the numbers.
Three hundred hearts.
Three thousand.
Thirty thousand.
They are not merely decoration.
Studies on online social comparison suggest those numbers can become information about how a person is perceived by others.
That photograph does not only tell us:
this man is beautiful.
It can also tell us:
look how many people desire him.
It is difficult not to compare.
He has that body.
That home.
That life.
That attention.
Me?
There is a shortcut worth avoiding here.
It is not serious to say that social media automatically make us lonelier, more insecure or unhappier.
The research is far more complex: it matters how we use them, for how long, what we look at, who we are, how we already feel before opening the app.
But constant comparison with highly selected lives can, for some people and at some moments, worsen self-perception and feed the sense that everyone else is living a life from which we have somehow been excluded.
The paradox is that we may look for relief in the very same place where the comparison is happening.
Thirty seconds
We talk constantly about loneliness.
We say we no longer meet.
That we do not know how to communicate.
That we have become more distant.
And at the same time we distribute small amounts of attention every day towards people who, in all probability, will never enter our lives.
I do not believe a red heart makes us lonely.
That would be too easy an explanation.
I am interested in another possibility.
What if some digital gestures work precisely because they can give us a small dose of connection without asking us to take the risk of connection?
For thirty seconds, something moves.
Desire.
Curiosity.
Belonging.
Fantasy.
Maybe that is enough.
Maybe it is not.
Psychology also talks about emotional regulation: we constantly use small behaviours to change how we feel.
A walk.
A phone call.
A cigarette.
A song.
A scroll.
A heart.
They are not equivalent and they do not all mean the same thing.
But the question can be the same:
is this gesture expressing something, or compensating for something?
The finger gets there first
Maybe what interests me most is the automatism.
The finger often arrives before the question.
Scroll.
See.
React.
Move on.
It is one of the system’s great elegances: almost no friction.
We barely have to decide anything.
And I do not want to turn this observation into a sermon against social media.
That would also be fairly ridiculous.
I will keep liking things.
Out of desire, affection, distraction, habit.
I do not want to become pure, disciplined or immune.
I would simply like to preserve that small moment that sometimes comes immediately afterwards.
The one where the finger has already touched the screen and the mind arrives a few seconds late.
Because maybe awareness is not there to make us stop doing something.
Maybe it is there to help us notice when that gesture is doing something to us.
And, every now and then, to ask myself:
am I saying “I like this”?
Or am I asking for something?
A note before we turn everything into a diagnosis
There is no single psychological explanation for a like. Research describes different motivations: enjoyment, relationships, social approval, comparison, habit and belonging. The effects of social media on well-being also depend greatly on the kind of use and on the person.
So the point is not to diagnose the person tapping a heart.
It is to allow ourselves, occasionally, the curiosity to ask what we placed inside it.
Further reading: research on likes as social rewards and online comparison in Computers in Human Behavior; studies on the neural processing of social feedback available through PubMed Central; a 2024 review of parasocial relationships in Frontiers in Psychology; and studies on social media use, comparison and loneliness available through PubMed Central.