Why "The Anxious Generation" scared the sh*t out of me
The New York Times bestseller "The Anxious Generation" had reached the top of my book stack after becoming a father two years ago. The book is aimed at parents of kids, sharing data about mental health in regard to phone usage, and then things you can do to help keep it away from your kids as long as possible. But this book felt personal.
The book mainly studies the effects on devices and social media on Generation Z, with millennials not being effected so much. From my own personal experience, I disagree and see the immense harm that it's had on my generation; a generation that grew up without phones and then received them halfway through their lives.
I remember a time when phones were just simple, pay to text, devices. You'd have to hit each button a million times to get the letter you were looking for. Myspace became big when I was in high school, checking in on friends, and spending most of your time looking online to find the perfect background to copy to your profile to make it uniquely yours. College was the years of basic instagram and posting a few things about your life here and there, unfiltered, and mainly for the sake of fun; to share with your friends all the fun stuff you were doing or doing together.
It was when I left college in 2015 that posting on social media felt like something you needed to do to garner attention, to show some kind of status in how your life was going, and putting yourself out there. At this time I moved to LA to pursue commercial photography. I was excited to go to the land of big dreams and make my mark. When I look back at this time in my life I mainly remember trying to go to parties and wasting an enormous amount of time on an app called Vine. It was snappy, funny, and full of dumb shit that kept me engaged for hours and hours. I never really accomplished much there and left within 6 months to move to the bay area to take a job.
From then on it seems as if we've gone from a device that's looked at once in a while to a constant input of information. We spend every waking moment in front of a device, looking at others bubblegum lives, and comparing ours to their experiences, never knowing if it's true. I've seen the lack of drive form in my male friends, their addiction to video games or online dating. When you go out to eat, everyone is on their phones rather than talking to each other, or they'll say a few things and then get distracted by a ping. I look over when I'm driving and it seems like everyone is staring at the device just a few inches from the steering wheel.
Why the book scared me so much is that it talks a lot about mental health decline in Generation Z due to these things, but I want to add the deep effect that it has had on millennials as well, seeing that the fun full of life generation has just become total zombies every day. As someone who was diagnosed with OCD at 34 years old, I see how spending time on social media made it worse for me over time, constantly looking for something new to focus on and keep my attention rather than staying in my life now and embracing what's in front of me in each moment. It fuels OCD and other mental issues that most of us aren't even aware of since it's so normal to spend hours looking at our devices.
I'm not sure what the solve is here, but I feel like clapping loudly in the face of everyone in the world that stares down at their phone nowadays rather than looking up and embracing the life around them. I'm guilty of it, spending almost four to five hours daily on social media until I deleted it off my phone, and feeling the pull back to downloading these apps when I feel it'll be detrimental to my creative career. But for now I hope that if you're reading this you take a deep look at how being on your phone is effecting your life. Are you missing out on a lot of moments? Does time seem to be going too fast? Can you deeply focus anymore?
Do you remember what you even watched while scrolling yesterday? Probably not.