Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

WaReZ, KaZaA, Ogrish, CD-Keys, drugs, weapon making tutorials, Mail-order-drugs. This was the wild west days of the internet. You could literally put up anything you could sell anything and everything. Classmates were downloading roms, porn, warez, emulators and selling it on CDs. One kid would hack for hire. A black market of sorts was born out of the basketball court. No verification and adults didnt know how to handle it other than installing spyware which we quickly knew how to disable at school.

We would play basketball after middle school and talk about all the crazy stuff we found on the internet. The most disturbing memories were of my classmates talking about snuff films coming out of the second Chechen War (1999), beheadings, crazy stuff . We would always try to out do one another.

Some of us even successfully manipulated our parents to watch porn ("dad i think i like boys i think i need to watch straight porn")

I turned out just fi

My formative years from ages 15-25 were spent in the 80's and 90's. It was the apex of the mall experience. We saw the mall as a place to get away from our parents, hang out with our buds, run into other classmates and feel some sense of freedom while running amok playing video games in the arcade and chowing down tacos in the food court.

Then smartphones and the internet came and all the malls started closing up, dying off and there was an entire generation that just ignored or forgot about them. Most of the malls around where I live have all but closed.

There are still a few open and now? They're thriving. My family now goes together on the weekends and its amazing. All the teenagers are in the food court, in their groups, talking, eating and socializing. You see groups of teens wondering in and out of the stores. I see a very similar cultural revolution happening and its really refreshing. The mall is truly a phoenix rising from its once former ashes. The major anchor stores are constantly busy no matter what night you go there. The movie theater is busy almost every night and its packed on the weekends. Its like an entire generation has re-discovered the mall again and its refreshing to see.

Sometimes I feel like I'm in a dream because so many other malls just north or south of us have either died and been leveled, or are in various forms of trying to reinvent themselves as something else before its too late.

Either way, what I saw in my experiences at our local mall gave me hope that the Zoomers are in some ways, taking a break from their phones and going out and having a different experience and returning to socializing with their friends and creating a new way of connecting with people they're close to. My son said he still uses his phone when he's at the mall, but just to make plans to meet his other buddies and coordinate where they're all going to meet up. For the most part, once they meet up, they all stop using their phones.

So yes, there is hope yet.

The kids also used their phones constructively, for assignments, tracking school progress, Youtube how-to videos, contact with cousins, etc. They had social media accounts but they never became a focus.

At school they kept their phones on silent and in their bags.

--

Fortunately three insights helped us:

1. Casual addiction is the intersection of two problems: an unhealthy addictive thing, and a lack of engaging or planned healthier alternatives.

Solve either one! But the latter problem is far tractable than the former.

2. There are only so many hours in a day, so solutions to the latter problem usually have a low complexity bound.

3. Social media isn't that rewarding for kids, once they have voluntarily invested their interest in longer term activities and challenges. Doom scrolling notably lacks any verifiable feeling of progress.

So solutions are pretty robust to ups and downs.

We kept our kids lives full of physical and real world social activities, family outings, social events at home, regularly eating times for talking and bonding, regular homework times, etc.