If you spend enough time on the internet, you can almost believe that the world is composed entirely of young people. Social media disproportionately rewards the attributes of youth: beauty, adventure and frivolity. Gen Z spends an average of five hours a day immersed in these skewed priorities.
At no other time in history has a person been able to peer so effortlessly into millions of other lives. A flick of a finger presents nearly every experience a human could have, and most of this content consists of the attributes of youth captured in exaggerated perfection. The most extreme examples are idolized and rewarded with adoration, attention, money, and opportunity.
The result? An addictive lottery where beauty, adventure, and frivolity become commodified and the real power of youth languishes, forgotten.
Christopher Gallagher is a 21-year-old Western student who deleted all his social media accounts except YouTube more than two years ago. For Gallagher, sharing his experiences corrupted them.
“I think that part of it’s almost like voyeurism, you know?” said Gallagher. “There’s just no privacy.”
Undeniably, there is power and beauty in youth. Young people likely possess the most energy, health and vibrancy they will ever have. But social media cheapens and fetishizes these traits by creating an incentive to perform a charade of adolescence instead of living it. Peering through glass screens at each other’s stiff, posed lives is a distraction from everything real.
Amanda Mohn, a 22-year-old Western graduate, deleted her social media accounts during her senior year of college. Mohn explained that capturing and posting her life made her less present day-to-day.
“There’s definitely that overarching idea while you’re doing the thing that you have to look good and create this end product,” said Mohn. “That always feels like a ton of pressure to me and can take away from the experience.”
It’s tempting to discredit the detrimental effects of social media; after all, it’s supposed to be fun. But there’s something uniquely manipulative in the candy-coated lightheartedness of these apps in contrast with the society-altering results that calculated algorithms have produced. This dichotomy could make a user feel weak, even personally responsible for the harm incurred in their own life by social media.
“I definitely am one to recognize that I let myself get sucked in,” said Mohn about the responsibility she’s accepted for the exorbitant amount of time she spent on social media.
Gallagher feels similarly. “I don’t have the best self-control, and I have definitely spent hours on it,” he says.
However, the average user barely has a chance at autonomy. These companies employ teams of psychologists who engineer algorithms to be as addictive as possible. At an average of five hours a day spent on social media, young people are on track to spend more than five years of their lives online.
If you feel angry and robbed, that’s exactly how you should feel.
Lexi Reese has worked as a higher-up at a variety of giants in the tech industry over the past 25 years, including Google and Facebook. From an internal perspective, Reese confirms that social media companies are concerningly apathetic toward the effects of their products on young people.
“My feeling about Facebook then – and this has not changed, it’s gotten worse — is that there was not a real willingness to reckon with that,” said Reese, who worked in tandem with what is now Meta during its start-up years as an external advisor.
“There was a desire to create a really powerful, ubiquitous tech platform that overall people felt positive about. But if it caused some revolutions or some bullying or some self-image issues, that was just the downside of the product,” Reese said.
For large tech companies, the harm young people have been subjected to via social media is just an inconvenient side effect, overshadowed by massive profits. But the rest of us are getting tired of functioning as the product on a platform that commodifies youth and saps our time, providing in return a lengthy list of mental health issues.
Reese is disappointed in the lack of accountability from social media companies, but she also recognizes that these companies’ only fiduciary obligations are to their shareholders. This means they are not incentivized to analyze the detrimental impact of their products, and as individual users, we are obligated to protect ourselves.
Deleting social media might seem radical, but the subconscious undermining of the precious experiences of youth via social media is not a small problem. Deleting these apps is an act of resistance against giant tech companies that are actively leaving a trail of destruction in a greedy pursuit of money at the expense of users’ mental health. Like Gallagher and Mohn, you have the ability to opt out.
Remember, your value is not dependent on your physical appearance or your ability to capture specific moments, you are not young and full of electric life just so you can be viewed. You do not have to spend your youth posed and stiff or dissociated and dependent on fleeting hits of dopamine. You are not obligated to watch a million other lives in slivers of fabricated perfection while your own slips past you.
Sarah Zieger (she/her) is a Journalism major and Opinion writer for The Front this quarter. When she's not holed up in a coffee shop writing this week's piece, you can find her drawing in a hammock somewhere off Chuckanut or lifting at the rec. You can reach her at sarahzieger.thefront@gmail.com.
