Mix of present simple and continuous

Question

An average user of social media feels that he is underperfoming and his self-esteem is constantly decreasing.

I used tenses in this sentence instinctively, and after I had finished I started to wonder whether it is okay. And I am not sure about it.

I guess that one feels something anyway, hence simple, while underperforming and decreasing are continuous "actions" which can be easily stopped, for example by quitting social media.

So, I suppose it would be quite awkard(?):

An average user of social media feels that he underperforms and his self-esteem constantly decreases.

Answer 1

I would say that your sentences are essentially equivalent in meaning, and the first with the present progressive tense sounds slightly better to me, but I'd phrase it slightly differently:

An average user of social media will feel their work [?] performance suffer as well as their self-esteem.

The question mark is because I assume by "underperform" you are talking about work, but I'm not sure.

I would use the gender-neutral "they"/"their" if you're talking about people of any gender.

I would use "will" to indicate that the feelings come as a result of using social media - the future tense puts the feelings in a time after the time when social media is used (i.e., using social media leads to these negative feelings).

I would also rephrase the part that talks about the two actions - it might be personal/stylistic preference, but I think if you're saying "action 1 and action 2" where both actions are pretty much the same (in this case, decreasing/suffering) it sounds better to use two nouns with one verb to emphasize this fact.