Millennials and members of Gen Z can often get a bad rap. If you’ve ever spent an hour on TikTok, it isn’t always difficult to see why. But we deserve our credit, too.
It’s hard to deny that there’s something unique about the time period in which we’re living. Crumbling economies, terrorist attacks, the rise of the internet, and the advent of smart phones provide the context to our lives. So many of the developments of the last thirty years lack parallels. And yet, so often when older generations speak about us it’s to malign us and talk about how spoiled and entitled and social media-obsessed we are.
“These kids are glued to their smartphones — can’t get them to look up for five minutes,” many might complain. And there’s some truth there. We are addicted to these machines.
But be understanding. We grew up with the entirety of human knowledge floating through the air around us. We signed up for social media accounts before we understood the side effects. If we had, we might not have been so cavalier.
But no one knew better yet and we got to serve as the impressionable guinea pigs of a brave new world. The societal oversight was colossal. We had the freedom to explore an unregulated wild west of odd, craven and often dangerous content from our earliest ages.
For those who can actually remember a world without the internet and social media, I’m surprised they don’t sometimes have a bit more compassion toward the generations of people whose brains formed during this shift. Our minds were molded around a constant overflow of stimuli.
The ways in which different parenting styles can affect children later in life are well understood. The kids plopped in front of TVs don’t tend to do as well in life as those whose parents read to them each night. These findings have been met with relatively little controversy. And yet, when asked to consider the ways in which having an iPhone within reach at nearly all waking moments could effect a child’s development, so many seem to struggle.
Cell phones and social media are so normalized that we can sometimes forget their impact. The dire implications of entire generations growing up hooked to these devices and services are a lot to grapple with. Oftentimes when I speak to my elders about the scope of this issue, I’m confronted by this notion that cell phones can just be put aside and forgotten if we try. But for so many of us it isn’t that simple.
It can seem as obtuse as telling addicts to “just stop using!” But unlike for the sunken-eyed drug users on street corners, professional lives can actually crumble without these social media connections. These devices are our disconnected little portals to the world. Our entire ecosystem is built around these machines, and more and more of our success in life depends on our ability to market ourselves through them.
It’s almost impossible to overstate the extent to which these technologies have changed everything. It might sound hyperbolic to say that they’ve altered our very evolution, but it’s growing harder to dispute. More and more studies and MRI scans are beginning to show major cognitive and structural differences that can emerge as a result of these devices. These phones are a part of us.
The iPhone interface is so user friendly that, as of 2015, most two year olds could navigate it. But to assume that giving children that freedom won’t have ramifications down the road is naive at best. Those two year olds have turned ten, and I can only envision the digital lens through which they view the world now. I know I certainly wouldn’t be giving my kid a smart phone.
Sometimes it seems that older generations can look at their relationship with technology and assume it must be comparable to what younger people experience. “I use Instagram and Facebook. I’m not sure what all these people are talking about with technology addiction,” I’ve heard some of them say.
But to introduce a child to cigarettes, cocaine or Christianity too young is to alter the very course of their lives. There are crossroads that should be approached only once we’re mature enough to make healthy, independent decisions. The state of the world now, though, is one in which a vast majority of young people never had that freedom over their long term mental health. The ripple effects are just coming to fruition.
There are entire generations of addicts that didn’t plan to be this way. It’s just an eerie virtue of the times in which we’re living. For many of us, we don’t know a world without smartphones and social media in it. For millions and millions of people, we can’t remember a childhood that wasn’t constantly interrupted by these dopamine machines in our pockets.
I got my first laptop in fourth grade. I spent my earliest middle school days in constant anticipation of my next notification. I spent seventh grade worrying about like counts and whether it was socially appropriate to say “lol” vs. “haha.” In high school cyberbullying was so inescapable that I assumed it was just part of being a teenager.
My memories of a pre-digital existence are sparse, blurry and sacred. They’re distant, warm and fantastical. They’re wistful like dreams of a forgotten life. Sometimes I’m not sure they’re real at all.
For most of my childhood the vast accumulation of what’s known was already at my finger tips.
The challenges of our time are unique ones. We were the first to walk the earth as digital creatures. We were the first to contend with the destruction of our planet and the collapse of its biodiversity. For the youngest of us, it’s the very backdrop of our lives — alongside pandemics and crushing disparity and deep fakes and artificial intelligence.
The events of the last few decades separate us from the entire world that came before. We’re the children of the digital revolution. Most of humanity never could have conceived of the problems we now face. To grow up constantly bombarded by all of it… it’s something that needs to be lived in order to be understood.
I can’t fault older generations for not understanding this generation of TikTokers and influencers and Twitter personalities. They grew up in a different time in a different world. They’re late adopters of these baffling technologies; they’re old dogs learning new tricks. Our personalities were formed around them. We were born and bred to live our lives online.
Where in the past there was an escape from the pressures of our social lives — of middle school and high school — many of us never had that. We went home each day to be blitzed with a frenzy of posts and pictures of friends boasting their happiest, most manufactured moments. The vibrations in our pockets each arrived with fleeting rushes of dopamine. Their highs were so short-lived we returned for more only minutes later. Sometimes it was as little as seconds.
There are simply no drugs on the market that can fully bring this addiction into perspective for people. Even the shortest-lived highs of the most dangerous amphetamines and nicotine products satisfy their users for a time. But social media functions differently at its core.
There’s no point at which the need is ever met. The void is never filled. These apps are engineered to be as addictive as possible — to keep us scrolling at all costs.
Where heroin addicts can typically draw enough relief from shooting up that they won’t need to again for at least an hour or two, even the influencers who receive a thousand likes per minute are rarely so satisfied that they’re unwilling to return for another dopamine rush a mere 30 seconds later. Dose is irrelevant when it comes to social media. Enough is never enough.
Though there aren’t any physical drugs that can be meaningfully compared to dopamine in effect, there are some figures that offer a glimpse into the severity of this epidemic.
While findings vary, Gen Z averages anywhere between 7 and 10 hours of screen time per day. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2018, 95% of American teens have access to a smartphone, and 45% say they are online ‘almost constantly.' That these trends have only worsened since the dawn of the pandemic is almost undeniable. The statistics available for millennial screen use are little more encouraging.
We face the greatest issues our species has ever faced, and we do it while addicted in ways we never before have been. The constant overflow of stimuli from these machines in our pockets has left us overwhelmed and desensitized. We have a limited bandwidth for the issues that ail us and it isn’t our fault. We’re blameless in the numbness that so many of us feel.
We’ve never known a world that isn’t crying out in pain from each and every corner. And because of social media, we can hear all of it if we choose to. We can drive ourselves mad in the face of it all. Or we can shield ourselves from it with the most captivating tools of distraction that our species has invented yet. We can convince our algorithms that we’d rather keep up with the Kardashians.
I can understand why we’re not easily understood. Growing up during the digital revolution has wholly defined us. For better and for worse, we’re different than the people that came before us. We were born onto an impossible precipice. There has never once been a greater time of uncertainty in our history. Addiction and existential malaise are engrained within our DNA.
So I can understand why some might view the younger generations as a bunch of TikTok users and aspiring social media influencers. It’s not often you’ll hear us deny it. But the name-calling, blame and apathy we so often face is rooted in a total lack of comprehension of what it is to have grown up through one of the most fundamental paradigm shifts in human history. The generalizations are without context.
In life, we can only expect so much understanding. Some events simply need to be lived in order to be appreciated. Empathy isn’t always easy to come by. The best the younger generations can hope for is a little kindness and decency as we navigate this increasingly precarious world. Our lives haven’t been easy.