A Loss of Youth: How Social Media is Aging Young People

Image Courtesy: @creativechristians on Unsplash

Though our major social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter…) were only created in the 21st century, they have seamlessly integrated into the fabric of most of our daily lives. 

Now, the generation after us is growing up in a world where information is not only widely accessible, but violently thrust before their attention. As a result, what it means to be young is changing – and not necessarily for the better. Rather, the claw grip social media has on society, and especially young teenagers, is threatening the core of youth’s beauty. 

The idea of youth brings to mind images of childhood, love, games, and an overriding sense of carefreeness, vastness. It is a time unrestrained by the responsibilities of adulthood. But now, social media is steadily robbing young people of this boundlessness.

Another crucial part of being young is discovery – of both the world and oneself. One can argue that the influx of information from social media and the internet gives us the tools to decide how we want to live. However, this freedom of choice is counteracted by social media’s never-ending stream of content, which hardly gives us space to ourselves.

For our generation, and increasingly for the generations after us, it is becoming more normalised to sit at home on our phones, waiting for the world to come to us instead of actively going out and discovering our place in it for ourselves. Such a lifestyle of observation is more akin to how one might expect to live during old age when deprived of our youthful capacities. In such a way, young teens may begin to age prematurely if they bypass this phase of life full of endless possibilities. Because we are not yet old; we are young.

In a similar vein, the more productive side of social media – namely its ability to facilitate social and political activism – may stunt this period of youth for young teens and kids. While information is power and it is important to understand the world as it really is, too much at once is overwhelming. Having to grapple with the world’s grave injustices and perhaps even feel the need to resolve them all at once is a lot to put on young generations, forcing them to grow up faster. 

Simultaneously, through every ‘what i eat in a day’ and ‘how to dress for your body type’, social media is telling us how to dress, eat, love, and live in general, making it near impossible to weed out what’s important, and making our very selves appear more and more obscure. 

This incessant mass of social media content will continue to stunt young people’s ability to think for themselves. Some may find empowerment and purpose via social media, but many, myself included, would say that excessive social media use keeps us from achieving the things we most desire. And this is the danger.

Throughout history, it is often young people who enact big changes in our societies, because youth is a time when we know something of the world but still have the capacity to imagine and demand the world we want to see.

But an unnatural information overload is threatening this space of boundless creativity. Now, young teens are incessantly being told, instead of discovering, how to live and how the world is. This is stripping them of the space to dream freely, beyond the confines of our current societies; when it is such a capacity to dream that is needed most of all if we want to see our world changed.