![]() Proponents of this narrative contend that the rampant social comparison on social media is solely to blame for heightened rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among young people. They generally go something like this: users publicize only the highlight reel of their life, their best and most glamorous moments, causing others to suffer from comparing their worst moments, their real and unfiltered lows, to an idealized, curated public image. But the explanations for its harms are highly reductionist. In Generation Z and society at large, there is a vague but deeply-felt sense that social media is bad for people’s well-being. And what do these social media mental health experts advise? Oftentimes, it’s to take a break from social media. Some of it even comes from qualified psychologists earnestly trying to help a generation that suffers from anxiety, depression, and suicide at record rates. There, you’ll find a plethora of mental health content. Social media at large has become a means by which people seek assurance that they aren’t alone in their suffering.Īnd for advice on the pernicious mental illnesses of the social media generation, you can look no further than… social media itself. Often you’ll often find users making deadpan jokes about their great mental anguish and commiserating with the many others in the same boat. You can learn a lot about my generation from TikTok comments sections. Ironically, I learned the terms dissociation and existential dread from TikTok. In the days, weeks and months that followed, these feelings of anxiety, depression, dissociation, and existential dread continued and worsened. I felt like I was endlessly spiraling further into despair, like I had no agency or hope. The emotion’s sheer ferocity made me feel that I had lost control of myself internally and that I was no longer tethered to anything real. To abstain from it was to exclude yourself from the collective coming-of-age of the modern adolescent.īut one day out of nowhere, I was overcome with a visceral sense of my own impending doom. Whenever someone around my age told me they weren’t on TikTok, I pitied them. I’d spend hours alone in my bedroom scrolling through my For You Page feeling as connected to the stranger on the screen as I would a friend laughing right there beside me. My identity as a member of my generation was forged through the app. The culture of Gen Z was formed through an insular language of emojis employed in comment sections with linguistic wit through popular creators who vie for some ephemeral hype through incomparably funny bite-sized videos shared with friends via group chats through the virtual crusade to end systemic inequities.įor a long time, I was something of a TikTok enthusiast. TikTok is the means by which my generation became itself. ![]()
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December 2022
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