Childhood, unplugged
Are teenagers, or just the girls, or just the liberal ones, depressed because of their phones? I have no idea. I have not clicked on these articles because I believe teen girl misery to be timeless and do not expect any revelations to shift this understanding of humanity. Skinny models, or less-skinny models, or skinny models once more, or high-waisted jeans (which dig into your abdomen) or low-slung ones (which demand certain abs and no hips), it varies.
It always looks a bit bleak to me, as an adult, that teen girls I see outside are pretty much continuously taking photos of their own faces, but also maybe they’re happy with what they look like and why shouldn’t they be? What do I know.
This is, instead, a post about slightly older people, namely young adults in their early 20s. The internet does not seem to be doing them any favors.
First, we have the now-adult children of influencers, aka people whose parents mined them for content when they were kids. Fortesa Latifi found some of them, and they are not happy. We all saw this coming. Well, it’s arrived.
This comes at the heels of something that went viral on TikTok, though I don’t think I saw the original, wherein you had on the one hand, parents posting a video of their children upset at having discovered them having sex, and on the other, some rando account insisting that it is Actually Child Abuse for parents to have sex while their children are in the house, at all, even asleep in another room. This being online, the commonsense position between these two—or rather, the position that if there was any Actual Child Abuse, it was the posting—maybe got lost, or maybe didn’t, I did not follow this closely.
Then there are young adults themselves, who will never know an era when you can write something in your college newspaper only for it to disappear into the ether. Pity, then, the author of “I'm an NYU student who studied abroad in Florence. I hated every aspect of my semester abroad.”
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