All About Adolescence

Photo by Eliott Reyna on Unsplash

Adolescence is our longest period of brain development and, as those of us who survived it can attest, can be quite a wild ride. That’s been a constant for every age cohort since humans existed. Despite efforts to define generations of the 20th century as separate monoliths — Boomers, Generation X, millennials — until this century, no age cohort has developed under globally unique conditions. The 21st century adolescent is different.

They are living lives exposed on all sides — receiving too much information from the world and sending too much out. The driving force and defining feature of this generation is social media. No other age cohort has grown up in tandem with these tools, incorporated them into their culture, and developed adult brains while holding these tools in their hands. Having the world on the smartphone in your pocket, as almost all people in this age group do, means that the world also has you in its sights, 24–7–365. Escape from the chronic stress of these exposures is almost impossible, and this generation is set to sustain the effects on an unprecedented scale.

A 2018 Pew survey of 743 U.S. teens found that a whopping 95% own a smartphone. Favored platforms include YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Most of them use these platforms every single day, with one 2021 poll showing that the average teen user of Snapchat checks it 30 times a day. The same poll showed that teens spend an average of 4.2 hours a day, or a third of their presumed waking hours, on social media. A 2021 Commonsense Media survey found that 84 percent of U.S. teens use social media, but only 34 percent “enjoy it a lot.” Their use has only escalated during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, around the world, including China, North America, South America, Europe, and Australia, suicide, depression, self-harm, and anxiety all are on the rise, even before the pandemic. A 2020 U.S. study found a “sudden increase” in self-harm, suicide, and unhappiness after 2012. Instagram kicked off in 2010, Snapchat debuted in 2011, and TikTok emerged in 2016.

Experts have theorized that social media increases the frequency of common adolescent experiences, along with their intensity and scale, leading to their amplification. What once might have been sporadic negative exposure largely related to small-scale peer interactions instead becomes a barrage that is multiplied, amplified, and inescapable. Adolescents I’ve interviewed express this feeling in explicit terms: they seek ways to “remain hidden” and to “escape,” while themselves being unable to escape the ever-present awareness of exposure. They can’t just throw away the phones or delete the apps — these tools are crucial to their social lives and tossing them would mean total disconnection.

One feature of Snapchat is Snap Maps, a tool that shows on a global map where users are. “You never feel like you’re alone because you can constantly share location,” Dacnis, a young man from the East Coast, told me [NB: to protect the privacy of the young people I’ve interviewed, I am using pseudonyms]. “You feel like you’re constantly with them because people can see where you are. You can’t be alone and anonymous by yourself — you’re always being a persona.”

What Becard, a freshman at a West Coast college, finds especially weird is how many people just keep Snap Maps on, even as people they don’t even know and haven’t met can see them. Why? Snapchat offers a “quick add” feature, and many users automatically accept the adds because the person is represented as being in their broader social network. “I know a bunch of people who just don’t care, and if I wanted to, I could know what they’re doing almost 24–7,” he said. In a telling choice of words, he added, “I do think that if you actively try, you can stay hidden, but it is definitely harder now.”

For the uninitiated, Finsta is a “fake Insta,” a secret Instagram account that users create in addition to their more public Instagram personas. Adolescents use their Finstas for different purposes, but the commonality seems to center on oversharing, something internal company documentation suggests is well known to developers.

Rosella, age 19 years, certainly felt the pressure. From age 12, she says, “I overshared every single detail of my life. Any time there was a minor inconvenience or I got in a fight with a friend, I’d post a screenshot of the conversation.” She regrets it. During a bout with Covid, “I found myself looking at my own posts and wondering what people were thinking of them and getting really in my head about [it]. My whole life was on there, all of my most intimate thoughts were scattered on this site.”

Rosella also told me that even when she’s in a real-life place where she’s supposed to be having fun with in-real-life people, Snap Maps and peer status and influence are on her mind. “I find myself in a place not having fun and wondering if other people are noticing I’m there because of Snap Maps,” she said, noting that she only turns it off when she wants to “hide.”

Although she’s not alone, she feels lonely. “I know a lot of my friends will track their crushes on Snap Map,” leaving her to wonder if others track her for the same reasons. “Does anyone care? I feel alone all the time.” It’s a Catch-22 with social media exposure: You’re never alone, but if you can’t tell who’s paying attention to you, you’re lonely.

Social media drives these worries with incessant enumeration of “success” through comments and likes. A 2018 Common Sense Media survey found that adolescent respondents who scored low on social-emotional well-being were many times more likely to have negative social media experiences compared with their higher scoring peers. They were more likely to feel left or excluded, to delete posts that received “too few likes,” and to feel bad about themselves if they get no “likes” or comments on what they post. And 35% of them reported having been cyberbullied, compared with only 5% of those who scored high on social-emotional well-being.

“In the end, it sort of seems as though social media exacerbates existing dramatic tendencies,” Crombec, a 19-year-old university student, told me. “It almost seems like it takes all the experiences of adolescence and sharpens them to a point … drama gets more heartbreak gets more drama. Drama can propagate in a way that I don’t think it could before social media existed.”

Emotional abuse and revenge porn are other forms of drama that can propagate. Elaenia told me about a girl from her high school, only 14 years old, whose nudes she’d sent to a crush were distributed “around to the entire school” via Snapchat and Instagram group chats. The abuse spilled over into the brick-and-mortar world. “She was getting bullied really badly. When she was in the cafeteria, people would say stuff behind her back and also be saying stuff online.” The girl eventually had to finish high school in a different town.

This common experience (several adolescents with whom I spoke detailed similar stories) represents amplification of negative and almost inescapable exposures for an enormous population of young people worldwide as their brains are being remodeled for adulthood. A substantial portion of these exposed young people will walk into these experiences bearing vulnerabilities, which will add to that burden. Research suggests that up to a third of adolescents experience chronic toxic stress with social media exposure. That’s some portion of 200 to 330 million people globally potentially undergoing brain development under chronic stress.

One epidemiological tool that’s sometimes used to assess such chronic toxic exposures during childhood is the adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, screener. At the population level, a certain threshold of these experiences — which ultimately are exposures to chronic, unbuffered toxic stress — is linked to increased risk for a host of negative outcomes related to mental and physical health and overall well-being. Those risks start to climb steeply in groups that have scores of 4 or more ACEs.

Now millions of adolescents, already stunned to unprecedented levels by the pandemic, are at risk of more such chronic, repeated exposures because of social media tools and 24–7–365 interactions with the world. They are Generation eXposed, in every way. As the language they use illustrates, they know it.

Some of them will have access to buffers we call “resilience” to come up with new behaviors to cope. Others who come to social media already bearing difficult burdens will not. The latter group represents tens of millions of young people, all among the growing numbers enduring the mental health consequences of the pandemic. Research indicates that ACEs and existing mental health conditions make adolescents vulnerable in their use of digital media and to experiencing it in negative ways, especially with amplification of toxic stressors such as peer pressure, emotional abuse, and bullying. In the vast reaches of social media spacelessness, young people who struggle the most with well-being also have the most negative experiences.

These young people are the first age cohort born into the world of social media, the first to grow up with social media, and the first to endure inescapable, relentless exposure of themselves to the world and the world to them.

They cannot just “put down their phones,” either. Classes, social meetings, and all kinds of other life activities are now conducted via these platforms and pretty much demand ownership of or consistent access to that device.

I am not in a “moral panic over technology. Social media is a tool that can be used for good or for ill. Adolescents find community through these platforms and take comfort in shared identities. And they can and do leverage the enormous creativity of this life stage to co-opt social media as a way to escape social encroachment on their lives. For example, one has a friend track her abusive ex on Snap Maps. The friend alerts her if he ever is anywhere near her location so that she can get out of there.

As for the harms that social interactions on digital steroids can pose, the adults in the room — those at the companies that create these tools, politicians, educators, clinicians, parents — need to act. We must acknowledge that social media amplifies and magnifies typical adolescent risks to levels that uniquely burden this age cohort, and we need to take steps to build resilience and self-protection, instead of exposure and drama, into and around use of these platforms.

I am a science journalist and author of The Tailored Brain: From Ketamine, to Keto, to Companionship, A User’s Guide to Feeling Better and Thinking Smarter (“fantastic and timely,” Salon) and of Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis (which Pulitzer winner Ed Yong calls “a hilarious tour through a menagerie of dicks, and a ferocious guide to not being a dick yourself”). Find me on Twitter @ejwillingham.