Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

I wish my parents reduced the extent to which I was exposed to recommendation algorithms at a young age.

Recently, I've become aware of how much of the time I spend on social media is not necessarily time I want to be spending there. The problem with recommendation algorithms is that they always recommend you continue watching and scrolling. When I was young, I used to read 500 page books like they were nothing, but as I've spent more time on short form entertainment, the harder it has become for me to engage in long form content like books. I still do fine in school, and I've been generally successful, but I feel like if I can't sit in silence for 30 minutes, I'm not really in control of myself. Any time I have a period of boredom or free time, it's easy to fill it with entertainment, rather than thinking on my own.

I've been trying to break these habits (or, honestly, addictions) recently, but it's really hard after years of conditioning.

I don't think modern recommendation media is completely negative, but it is built on getting people addicted, and I can see why you don't want that for your children.

Physical drugs are relatively easy to not get into because for the most part, the majority of society doesn't use them and their users are still mostly marginalized. If your current social group are drug addicts it's possible to find a new, healthier group.

Digital drugs on the other hand are something that nearly everyone uses and thus you have to use them if you want to effectively fit in and participate in society. Not consuming these drugs just makes you an outcast especially in a ruthless environment such as school.

The solution is regulation to make digital-drug-dealing illegal. Kill this whole "attention economy" with fire and make such a disgusting business model impossible to operate and the problem will self-resolve.

I think I would always have had an issue, but I can quite directly point to the pressure cooker environment of getting into University. It is "not enough" simply to be good academically (which I was), you also needed to be a well rounded person, so you better use all your spare time doing activities to signal your well-roundedness!

I don't feel I was explicitly trying to do this, but I also, being 17, didn't really say no - I mean how do you say no to a bunch of career advisors telling you "you have a chance to go to the top university!!!" etc.

In such an environment, there's little respite, because there's always some kids telling you what they are doing.

I don't think social media in and of itself is to blame, but what it does, in concert with phones, is remove any and all "downtime" from this messaging. There's an encouraged perfectionism, so young people are bombarded with images of how _great_ everyone else's life is. Not only are kids pushy/perfect in the canteen, but now they're pushy/perfect at 10pm on your mobile too.

I struggled very badly with this at university. By that time I was a guy with panic attacks trying to keep up with a course, and I wanted to do all the normal stuff too like party. Of course since I _couldn't_ always do this it ended up being interpreted by most people as "let's not invite him". Social media wasn't directly responsible for this situation, but it is definitely a negative contributing factor. When you're far from home doom-scrolling facebook and all the stuff you missed that you're being left out of, this is really not helpful.

So what I think is that social media will reinforce people who are naturally self-confident, but it will not help people who have issues. I suspect every experience is slightly different, but the inability to escape constant reminders of your own inadequacy, if interpreted that way, is a problem.

Or if I can sum it up, it is simply the same old social/peer pressure, extended to 24/7.

What helps a lot is a moderating influence, a reminder that it is OK to be just normal.

I am also very, very glad I grew up when I did. All my early teenage years were free of any of this - we had MSN and texting and all the usual teenage angst, but you never had mobile doom-scrolling late at night - at best, you could text until you ran out of credit. I feel sorry for young girls particularly growing up with Instagram.

However, I agree that social media is just one factor. Pushy parenting, or pushy schooling, is also a huge risk, as are all the traditional risks like teenagers being horrible bullies to each other.

Addendum: the net impact of pushing me to go to a top university so hard was that I did not go to a top university, and dropped out of a pretty good university officially at the end of the first year, but unofficially I was "done" 6 months in anyway. Absolutely none of this career advice and "enrichment" activity helped me achieve any kind of potential, it just made me miserable and blow up with the stress of it.