Glowing Screens, Fading Faces; The truth behind teenage addiction

Opinion piece

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Countless hours a day are wasted as social media consumes us all, and it’s no longer just a cure for boredom. Apps like Tik Tok and Instagram have become a rulebook on how teenagers are expected to live their everyday lives in society, and those who step out of line are bound to pay the consequences. A constant backlash for how you stand out from a crowd, whether it's your clothes or the way you talk, creates a need to blend in with everybody else our age.

The way they do their hair, the way they style their clothes, the way they decide to live their lives; influencers set a golden standard that any girl or boy would kill to have. The worst part? Teens are looking up to young adults that are fully developed. It isn’t normal for a 15 year old girl to wonder why her body doesn't look like a 22 year old’s, and yet, nobody on the internet will ever tell her that. These actions are bound to have consequences, ones we’re already starting to feel. Experts go as far to say that depression and lowered self esteem is the toll adolescents have to pay for the price of endless scrolling.

The Arbour Hospital reports that social media promotes unrealistic styles of life, beauty, and popularity that create immense pressure on teenagers to engage in dangerous and performative behavior for the gain of validation (2024). Not only does constant scrolling lead to chasing life-endagering trends, but it also changes the way we start to act around the ones we love. You won’t even notice it happening, but slowly, the people you care about most will slowly drift away as the isolation begins. Parents will tell themselves that it's just a phase and others will say our sudden blandness has something to do with growing up and maturing but that just simply cannot be true. How can young girls and boys go from constantly laughing and begging for family game nights to dark eyebags and barely eating? The truth is, the color hasn’t just faded from our faces by accident, it’s been slowly drained into glowing screens, as if our energy is being traded for battery percentages and endless scroll bars.

This doesn't have to be our future, or our present. Our story doesn't have to end as we lie on our death beds, plugged by a phone charger.

Teenagers are starting to speak honestly about how the internet makes them feel. Some are spending less time online and more time on hobbies that have nothing to do with posting. Others are choosing friends who care about who they are in real life, not who they appear to be online. The more we admit that this “perfect” life on social media is carefully edited and fake, the less power it holds over us. We do not have to keep pouring ourselves into glowing screens. We can choose to step outside, to sit at dinner tables without distraction, to laugh without feeling the need to post about it after. The internet may shape our generation, but it does not have to define it.

There is still color in our skies and joy in others smiles. We just have to look up long enough to see it.

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