The anxious generation?
The other night, I couldn't sleep. I couldn't sleep and envied. The green-eyed monster was having a full-blown midnight feast.
I couldn't help myself but remain restless in my bed, tossing and turning, ruminating. I was full of regret and, yes, I admit, that embarrassing and crippling feeling of envy. I envied the erudite writers whose writing I could devour and admire, deconstruct and analyse for hours. I envied this one particular piece of writing I'd come across recently (outside of Substack) that was so good, it was more than good, it was excellent, it was bloody brilliant. Such perfectly chiselled sentences, such wit, such clever punctuation, such lucid analysis of the matter at hand. Loosing any more sleep than I already do is not something I can afford as a chronically exhausted parent of a toddler who doesn't sleep through the night.
And yet, I there I was lying, regretting the many hours, days, maybe even months' worth of time that over my lifetime I've spent scrolling, whiling my precious life away, glued to the hypnotising blue light of a screen as a teen and then a young adult. I can't even recount the names of the apps I used to use or the people I used to “speak” to, whose opinions and standards for having a good time seemed to matter then.
Such now ancient abbreviations as ICQ and MSN resurface in my memory but also the more obvious and still very much thriving virtual social networks like Facebook and Instagram. What was I doing? Fielding opportunities to connect with complete strangers, who most likely (read: often) weren't who they said they were. Looking at my Facebook friends' lives, feeling small for no legitimate reason whatsoever. Playing SimCity, savouring the mindless craft of building my perfect virtual life. Constantly assessing my own life through the prism of my own social media accounts and...feeling even smaller. The things I could have learnt, the things I could have done, the things I could have experienced (in real life that is) in place of scrolling to not sometimes end up this person full of regret and envy. Or would it have happened anyway?
I regretted the lost time I could have spent honing in on my unique writing style and finding my voice. I regretted the fact that I didn't choose to shut out the noise, the pollution of my mind with mindless obsessions and “like” hits, that I had let it go on for so long, that nobody told me not to. But isn't that the case with most addictions? You can't just stop? They do say that our prefrontal cortex (the decision-making part of our brain, that bit behind our forehead) does not even fully develop until we are 25.
Instead I'd wasted my time on taking sneak peeks at the virtual lives that weren't my own (I can't even remember who they belonged to), taking note of the lives that will never matter. I feel all this regret and I wasn't even that bad (screens wise) as someone who attended tri-weekly ballet classes, with hours of weekly Irish dancing on top, piano lessons and other offline activities which mainly revolved around bookworming my way through the many tomes I had on my to-read list. I was a child of the 90s post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine. I’d play hopscotch and the so-called French skipping for hours on end in the summer with the neighbours' kids and, needless to say, TV was banned in my house growing up for a long time (it just didn't exist as an option). And yet, I still found a way to get sucked into the vortex.
I also know that this isn't everyone's experience but I think many would relate to the feeling of depletion from hours spent binging Netflix (Disney/Prime/Now…whatever) or from the anaesthetising feeling of depression associated with social media (the endlessly fun holidays you aren't on but everyone else seems to be on, the perfect happy family that you aren't etc. etc.) Screens are the common factor. The anxiety that they evoke is the common, and lingering, aftertaste.
This year marks the publication of Jonathan Haidt's chilling The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness: a book that represents everything that was wrong about my formative years, and those of millions of others that followed. It is a book that really should have been written much sooner. That the process of endless scrolling on screens of any kind is a ruthless time-stealing rabbit hole is no secret. We've all heard, at least peripherally, of the gruesome effects of social media on mental health in the wake of teenage suicide attempts and self-harm epidemic and the more innocent but pesky comparativitis bug (the feeling of not-good-enoughness) so persistently nurtured by the Instagram algorithm. As a generation that has hit puberty around (or just before?) 2010, we've come to terms with being in the constant relentless gaze of a judgemental virtual Other, and - what's worse - we've been doing it to ourselves.
Haidt puts a spotlight on the haunting statistics around the negative influence of smartphones on the recent generations of children (Gen Z, who are the most affected, and millennials, who haven't exactly been spared either), particularly in their formative years. Spoiler alert: it has lead to an incredible spike in the levels of anxiety and depression in young adolescents and, no doubt, consequently, in the adults that they'd become. I should add that this is all based on some very Western-centric data...
The problem? A decline in free childhood play since the 80s: "All mammals need free play, and lots of it, to wire up their brains during childhood to prepare them for adulthood. But many parents in Anglo countries began to reduce children’s access to unsupervised outdoor free play out of media-fueled fears for their safety, even though the “real world” was becoming increasingly safe in the 1990s." It seems the real issue, as well intended as it was, is the parents’ desire to keep their children within the confines of their homes in a controlled environment. Little did they know...
And then, of course, there's the smartphones themselves: the facilitators of lightning speed interactions, discoveries and entertainment that a young child's neural pathways aren't even firing fast enough to keep up with.
Now, I don't wish to demonise social media or blame it for my lack of writing flair compared to my nerdy writer idols but I do wish, particularly as a parent, to be more on my guard than ever before about how we use it. I understand the irony. I'm writing this on my smartphone, for God's sake!
Perhaps it is the case of introducing some sort of government-led legislation for social media usage in children. Perhaps it is a questions of self-discipline and moderation. Isn’t that the case for everything! It would seem though, at least as far as Haidt’s argument goes, that less screentime for everyone, delayed smartphone introduction in children and more opportunities for real-life interactions and engagement with the world would make us all happier people in the long-run. Perhaps, even people that wouldn’t stay up tossing and turning at night, but who knows?
The particular species of the green-eyed monster that paid a visit to me that night might have had little to do with social media or too much screen time as such. After all, the article that triggered all this word vomit was read on good old paper, my favourite medium. However, envy is precisely the kind of all-consuming feeling that social media is likely to instil. Envy for filtered lives that don't exist. Envy for popularity - in reality, the inherently human desire to simply want to be heard and validated.
There's a difference between being motivated by envy to try and achieve the same and feeling consumed by envy like you're the Mummy's High Priest, gobbled alive by scarabs. This was, thankfully, the good(ish), motivating kind. Maybe… It made me think and want to change somewhat. Onwards and upwards. You're the witness of everything that followed. Needless to say, I think I lost if not the last ounce then much of my millennial anxiety when I left Instagram but it certainly finds a way of making it back into my life in some other ways. I'm only human.
