Imagine spending your childhood in places that are fundamentally not real. Your first friends are characters or words on a screen, your internal narrative as a human being underdeveloped because you spent most of your life passively consuming instead of living in the first person. This is a hard topic for me to write about personally, but it desperately needs to be explored at the highest level. I want to do my best to convey what's happening to the younger generation here.

People my age are suffering and I believe the unexamined root cause of this is excessive media consumption. Older generations use digital media differently. For boomers, the internet is a tool to interact with the real world. They communicate with family members on Facebook, catch up with the news, shop online. Their digital use is centered around the world they're familiar with - the real world.

Those who grew up with the internet - and I mean really grew up with it have a completely inverted relationship. Their primary experience of reality is through watching. I'm going to paste a YouTube comment I saw here:

I searched for, “I hate the internet,” “internet childhood,” “internet is pathological,” “ruined by the internet.” I’ve been calling this effect internet psychosis—a lapse in individual narrative or the inability to form a cohesive identity due to the fundamental betrayal of self in letting the entire world’s voices into your head. It’s like being psychotic, and the effects generationally are quasipsychotic, and psychosis is extremely offensive to the human social system because it is intolerably dangerous to drift from reality.

This might be hard to understand at first, but it makes perfect sense when you think about it. Social media is designed to be addicting. Reality is not. What we're seeing now is that social media is gradually devouring our time and thus our entire perception is distorted through the lens of digital content. Gen-Z youth culture exists entirely online. Our identities are now defined by the type of content we consume more than what we actually do or the kind of people we are. Friendlessness is becoming the norm even among seemingly healthy, attractive people with no history of mental illness. Bars are empty or filled with old people. Kids aren't playing outside. This is because nothing in the real world even comes close to the level of stimulation available online. In capitalism we see everything as a competition. Right now, the real world is simply unable to compete with the internet for our time and attention. This is why people are lonely. This is why people don't want to work anymore. This is why college age people get anxiety ordering food at restaurants or making a phone call. We're digital natives. We no longer feel at home in the physical world.

This changes everything.

First of all, we no longer live in the first person perspective most of the time. We live primarily in the third person, watching without interacting. This creates a sense of disassociation that people my age can often relate to even though it's not discussed much. We often feel like aliens or like our bodies are a weird vessel on an alien planet. It can be scary and disorienting at times.

We also have a highly fractured sense of identity. What happens when most of your social interaction is anonymous or through a 2D internet persona? How do you look back on a life spent mindlessly scrolling short-form content? We as human beings learn about ourselves by reflecting on our past and through our associations with others. What happens when we have no past, no life, and no friends? How do we tell a story about who we are to ourselves?

They say the medium is the message. What medium is life now experienced through? It's no longer our own eyes. It's a screen and an algorithm. It's the Tetris effect on a mass scale.

Media is mental junk food. It gives us the perception of love, adventure, despair, beauty, friendship and achievement without actually offering it. The generation growing up now is being deprived of what makes us human, because it's simply easier. It's a cruel experiment.

Psychosis is a mental condition that causes people to lose touch with reality, making it difficult to distinguish what's real and what's not. Is that not what these conditions are leading to? When you sit in a dark room all day without love, without human touch or human interaction, and feel fine. When your body does practically nothing for 8 hours and yet you feel like you've accomplished something. Is that not, at the practical level, a psychosis?

I'd be interested to hear your perspective. I know "phone bad" is trite at this point but I really think there's something deeper going on here.