How Social Media Destroyed My Generation's Mental Health

Imagine if there was some drug that was taken by the vast majority of Gen Z. This drug was absurdly addictive, with many people reporting being unable to watch a movie or read a book without taking the drug. There were well-understood psychological mechanisms by which it made people miserable—making people feel insecure, wasting people’s time, and crowding out social interaction. Gen Z’s mental health took a massive nosedive when—around 2012—this drug became ubiquitous. Furthermore, in natural experiments, places that roll out the drug have much worse mental health than places that don’t. Worst of all, almost 40% of Gen Z spent 4 hours or more taking the drug each day (and that’s just what they admit to) and those who spent more time taking it were considerably more miserable.

It would be reasonable to infer that this drug was responsible for the decline in the mental health of Gen Z. Being concerned about the drug would not be luddite alarmism, but a rational response to a genuine crisis—one almost surely caused by the drug. Yet this exactly parallels the situation with social media.

When you talk to members of Gen Z, there is almost universal agreement that social media is why we’re so miserable. I can think of only one person who I’ve talked to who has disagreed (and he doesn’t spend much time on social media). It’s unsurprising that there are so many accounts—helpfully compiled by Jonathan Haidt, one of the leading voices sounding the alarm about the problem—of Gen Z writers expressing concern about this. The common attitude towards social media, among my generation, seems to be resigned acceptance that it’s ruining their life—a bit like what might be expected of a drug addict who regrets having ever taken their chosen drug. In fact, polls show that Gen Z consistently ranks social media use as the most significant cause of our declining mental health.

Of course, this is not enough to establish that social media really is the cause of worsened mental health. The fact that lots of people think that social media is making them miserable doesn’t automatically mean that it is. But it does make it more likely. People tend to know what makes them miserable. And the theory that social media is the cause of greater misery is a far better explanation of the relevant evidence than any alternative.

Teen mental health began to take a nose-dive around 2012—the exact year when social media became common. This occurred in various countries with smartphones; in the anglosphere, the Nordic countries, and Europe more broadly. There is no satisfying alternative explanation of this; what else about the world changed significantly in 2012? The financial crisis was 4 years earlier, yet had minimal effect on mental health. And why would we still be miserable because of it? Those who deny that mental health is being ruined by social media must posit that some mysterious force began sweeping the world, being sufficiently major to ruin mental health globally yet sufficiently subtle to be non-obvious.

Even more surprisingly, this hit hardest those who spent more time on social media. Girls who spend 3 or more hours on social media are three times as likely to be depressed as girls who only minimally use social media. This is exactly what we’d expect if social media is ruining mental health.

Additionally, it has been girls who have been the hardest hit by this mental health crisis. This is to be expected if social media is ruining mental health; one of the ways that social media ruins mental health is by making people self-conscious about their bodies which hits girls harder than boys.

Finally, there are all sorts of high-quality experimental studies supporting the deleterious effect of social media on mental health. For example, Hunt, Marx, Lipson & Young find that, when a group of undergraduates had their time spent on social media limited to 10 minutes a day, their mental health dramatically improved. Similar things were found by Engeln, Loach, Imundo, & Zola—college students who were randomly assigned to spend 7 minutes scrolling Instagram daily had lower rates of body satisfaction. And this is just the tip of the iceberg—many more studies have found the same thing.

The data is clear and convincing. Yet it is not the only reason I think that social media has destroyed the mental health of my generation. Ask a religious person why they believe in God and they’ll give two sorts of reasons. They might appeal to various pieces of evidence for God from, for instance, the existence of finely-tuned constants in physics or objective morality. But they might make a more general appeal; look at the world in all its wonder. Look around—God must have made things. That’s how I feel about social media destroying mental health—when one takes a look at how young people spend their time, at how they treat social media, you don’t even need to look at studies to conclude it’s destroying mental health.

Shortly before beginning this essay, I was in the dining hall at my university. Just looking around, I saw almost everyone on their phones, including people waiting in line for food. None of them seemed especially happy. Many were on social media, watching 45-second TikTok videos, or pictures of Instagram models. People are glued to their phones, not even treating meals as a time to take breaks from social media.

More concerningly, they seem to regard social media with utmost urgency. Talk to any member of Gen Z who spends a lot of time on social media, and they’ll be checking it constantly, the way one might check their phone when waiting for news on the results of a surgery performed on their ailing mother. Gen Z is seemingly utterly absorbed by social media, yet unlike other things that people find similarly absorbing, it does not make them happy.

There are various things that make people happy: spending time with loved ones, gardening, being outside. Social media directly trades off against those things. People do not finish a 5-hour binge session of watching 30-second TikTok videos and feel really good about how they spend their time. They feel like they’ve wasted five hours, like they’ve been sucked into the dull, gray vortex of constant stimulation that is social media. And yet this is what many people in my generation do every day.

I used to spend a lot of time on social media every day. And it wasn’t fulfilling. It didn’t truly bring happiness. It was just addictive. That is, after all, what it is optimizing for. The pictures that appear to a person on Instagram, the Tweets that appear to people on the social media company formerly known as Twitter, the videos that appear to a person on TikTok are all optimized not for bringing lasting happiness but for being watched, and keeping a person scrolling on social media.

Reading books has largely been swallowed up by social media—people don’t have the attention span to read books anymore. Because people have something that they can do all the time, whenever they’re bored, they see friends less and play less. The hours spent daily on social media aren’t just making people miserable by what they do—they are making people miserable by what they replace. They have replaced the things that make people happy.

There are, of course, legitimate debates to be had about what to do about social media’s deleterious effect on mental health. Haidt has a list of proposals; various people have criticized the proposals. But before we can be clear on the solution to some problem, we must agree on the cause of the problem. The evidence is quite univocal—social media is wrecking the mental health of my generation like virtually nothing in history has. While the world is becoming richer, healthier, and more prosperous, my generation is getting more miserable because they are frittering away their time on social media, rather than doing things that make them happy.

This is a crisis of truly extraordinary proportions. The deleterious effect of the 2008 financial crisis on mental health is virtually undetectable compared to the effect of social media. If one takes a clear look at the evidence, the culprit becomes clear. More girls are harming themselves, more young people are depressed, and more of my generation is committing suicide because a small group of insular tech companies rolled out highly addictive social media apps with absolute disregard for their impact on mental health.