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The kids are not alright — and they know it.
It seems like Americans can’t agree on anything today, but if there’s one thing Gen Z is in lockstep about, it’s this: Social media have robbed them of their time, their happiness and their wellbeing.
Hallie Zilberman, a junior at Aspen High School in Aspen, Colorado, feels it. And she knew she couldn’t be the only one.
So the 17-year-old surveyed 1,084 other teenage girls from around the US, asking about their mental health, to confirm her suspicion that growing up online has devastated her generation.
About 6 in 10 agreed that they feel overwhelmed every day, have daily anxiety and feel pressure to be perfect.
She also found that about half — 48.6% — of the surveyed girls have thought about self-harm in the past six months.
“That was really upsetting for me, because that’s basically 50% of girls in my classes, 50% of the girls at the cafeteria at lunch,” Zilberman said.
“I’ve seen self-harm scars on people’s wrists,” she added. “I’ve heard friends talking about their mental health problems that are so hidden … nobody would have known about it. It just shows how many people are hiding what’s going on in their life.”
And she has a wake-up call for parents: “There’s a 50% chance that that’s your kid right now.”
That’s certainly the case for the moms and dads who have been attending and keeping vigil outside a landmark trial wrapping up in Los Angeles, where a 20-year-old California girl, known as KGM, is suing Meta and Google, alleging their platforms were deliberately designed to addict children. (TikTok and Snapchat already settled in the case.)
One of them, Victoria Hinks, talked to me recently about her daughter Alexandra, who was 16 when she took her own life in August 2024.
“When I look through her phone as her 1774066121, I see all the stuff that was being served up really just normalizing depression and glamorizing suicide,” said Hinks, from Marin County, California. “The ‘skeleton bride diet,’ and these creepy, very anorexic-looking girls, it affected her self-esteem for sure …”
Zilberman said she and her peers are very aware of social media’s detrimental impacts on them.
“The amount of people I’ve heard say, ‘I hate TikTok’ but then never delete it is scary,” she told me.
The teen deleted TikTok and Instagram from her phone recently and hopes to inspire her friends to do the same — which isn’t easy, given, as the KGM trial is all about, how dependent kids can be on their phones and social media apps. (The companies have denied all wrongdoing.)
But, Zilberman said, “I think kids who want to change their lives can make it happen. I think teenagers have agency.”
I like her optimism. There’s been a massive grassroots movement to inform kids, parents and teachers about the dangers of growing up online. But it occasionally slips into a fatalism that tells kids that they’re helpless puppets at the whim of Big Tech.
That sort of rhetoric is almost an excuse to surrender themselves to the algorithms.
It’s time for society to empower young people to unplug. Whether it’s parents staving off social media or schools implementing phone bans on campus, we need to help kids help themselves.
There are phone-free parties in New York City. Young men are fighting against porn and creating apps to help others kick their addiction. New apps built by young people pop up every day with new, innovative ways to limit screen time.
Zilberman reports that her life “has been infinitely better” since unplugging.
“I’ve been more efficient with my work. I have more time to spend with family and friends. I’ve actually been looking at the world around me,” she said. “I keep telling people your life will get better.”