Social Media Destabilizes Young People

What is essential activity? The COVID-19 pandemic provided many of us with our first formal introduction to this question. In a world where activity is increasingly divided between virtual and real spaces, it deserves another visit.

Devices enable many forms of activity, and they are considered entertainment as much as, if not more than, work. Social media, which began its ascent close to a decade ago, blurs the lines around play. Unlike many forms of technology that promise to simplify daily tasks, social media generates an entirely new category of activity. The old technology saves us time for the new, which no longer looks as rosy as it once did. Studies show that young people consider their absence on social media unthinkable, and rather than offering the benefits of leisure well spent, social media makes kids less happy. 

When handed personal devices with social media apps, kids’ outside play decreases, their grades slip, and their mental health plummets. In 2017, Jean Twenge revealed what kids aren’t doing because they are on social media: they lose sleep in critically formative years, date less, hang out with friends less, and are less interested in traditional markers of growing up, such as getting their driver’s licenses.

Instagram and Snapchat may seem like necessary forms of social engagement for today’s teens. But as kids amass contacts—and as the platforms roll out high volumes of advertisements and unsolicited footage, via pages such as Snapchat Discover or Instagram Explore—the experience jumps quickly out of hand. Rather than being startled and disgusted by this flood of empty information, kids wade through it to keep their footing in a virtual swamp.

Too many of us have not given much thought to how kids perceive this burden of knowledge—and why they think they need to shoulder it at all. Their stress, depression, and lack of real leisure speak volumes, as does the quantity of energy they must expend to keep apace their feeds. 

Last month, Matthew Yglesias explored the evolution of entertainment in the last few decades. He pointed to the source of this digital heroism: real power to do or learn something good. He wrote, 

The reason the early internet felt so promising is that it mostly seemed like a virtuous alternative to television; reading about niche interests and discussing them with other people in comments sections was an improvement on watching ‘ER’ to pass the time. 

He continued, “But most newer internet things (Netflix, TikTok, Instagram) are like television, but more so just ways to make passive visual content consumption even more compulsive.” 

But TikTok, Instagram, and the slew of social media platforms on the market are not like TV. Yes, they encourage passive behavior in that kids are still on the couch rather than riding bikes. But we cannot underestimate the emotional and mental toll on teens of the increasingly aggressive agendas behind social media content. 

Slacktivism, or armchair activism, rode high during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter after George Floyd’s murder cemented social requirements of digital activism. Researcher Lore Oxford wrote in the spirit of the times, “Covid-19 has ushered in a new era of heightened accountability.”

Teens feel required to signal their support of a whole host of movements, but these causes drive them into a wall. By definition, slacktivism leaves young people feeling ineffective and unfulfilled; after all, they don’t even have to leave their bed to participate. Activism on social media is no longer the rare individual’s choice to leverage his or her personal networks. It’s a project that defines our youths’ world.

There are many institutionalizations of this slavery to public “discourse,” and one once promised to be an arena for experience and freedom of the mind. Social psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff explained in The Coddling of the American Mind that once youth have taken their “first steps” learning to walk on eggshells and distrust institutions from social media, they arrive on college campuses prepared to offer themselves up to the narrative of the elite. 

Social media groom youth for what Haidt and Lukianoff call universities’ “reverse Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” treatments—such as mandatory diversity training—that teach students to reason emotionally, catastrophize, and adopt black-and-white thinking (habits CBT combats to improve mental health). Haidt observed that liberal girls, who use social media most, are most likely to despair and exclaim, “Whenever I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” Conservative boys follow right behind.

Maybe kids are dissatisfied with their college experience because they do not actually experience anything. One CNBC journalist expressed how our country’s most powerful sell college to our kids: 

Ultimately, education increases your happiness, not because of what you learn in the classroom, but because of all the privileges that come along with it, such as job opportunities, increased income, and enhanced relationships.

On the other hand, author and environmentalist Wendell Berry provides a vision for fruitful digital engagement and college well done. He writes in The Unsettling of America,

Experience, which is the basis of culture, tends always toward wholeness because it is interested in the meaning of what happened… The experimental intelligence, on the other hand, is only interested in what works… It invariably sees innovation, not as adding to, but as replacing what existed or was used before. 

The consequence? He continues, “In technology, as in genetics, the experimental intelligence tends toward radical oversimplification, reducing the number of possibilities.” In college, as on social media, kids compete with others in a cut-throat “experiment” with foreign agendas. They acclimate to a toxicity that imbues new industries every day. As Berry explains, 

Whereas the voice of experience, of culture, counsels, ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,’ the experimental intelligence, which behaves strangely like the intelligence of imperialists and religious fanatics, says, ‘This is the only true way.’

No wonder our teens are anxious. The average man, Berry says, “cannot even entertain himself unhappy because he has one chance to live what he conceives to be his life: his own small specialty within a delicate, tense, everywhere-strained system of specialties.” Limitless information and global awareness of the elite’s choice topics have not liberated our youth. They walk a tightrope over cancellation.

It is seriously unfortunate that many youth enter adulthood without confidence or invigorating experience. Without it, they are paralyzed, incapable of building or contributing to anything worthwhile. No wonder American industry and workforces have disappeared. We can ask with my colleague Michael Toscano and Peter Thiel, “Where are the flying cars?” But we know we are closer to developing a new FlappyBird than the vehicles of Back to the Future.

The internet can and should make life better. There is plenty of opportunity for innovation that serves common human ends and helps us save time for the things that matter. But as Berry reminds us in Unsettling, 

We cannot live except within limits, and these limits are of many kinds: special, material, moral, spiritual. The world has room for many people who are content to live as humans, but only for a relative few intent upon living as giants or as gods.

Youth were once thrilled to discover that the world is their oyster. Now they wake reluctantly to the Metaverse.

Elizabeth Self is the Outreach Coordinator for the Institute for Family Studies.