On the cover of the November 7, 2016, issue of Time is a picture of a teenage girl. She has shoulder-length dark hair, is wearing jeans and a lace-up pink shirt. Her arms droop at her sides. She looks like all the life has been drained out of her, like she has no hope left in the world. For all of us with children, we think, Please let my child never be so. Next to the teenager is the headline: “Anxiety, Depression and the American Adolescent.”
Of course, teenagers throughout time have been sulky and sullen. But this is something else, something new. The number of “distressed” young people in America is dramatically rising. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, from 2010 to 2015 the fraction of adolescents (ages twelve to seventeen) who reported at least one major depressive episode in the previous year increased from around eight percent to almost thirteen percent. There are, of course, many factors contributing to this epidemic. But some experts say that the main driver is the massive and pervasive presence of the digital grid, with little opportunity or desire to disconnect.
The grid replaces in-the-flesh reality with virtual reality, and that virtual reality is loud, all-consuming, dehumanizing, and relentless. It can drown out the rest of life. And it rushes ahead, without waiting for anyone. Janis Whitlock, director of the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery, says that our young people are “in a cauldron of stimulus they can’t get away from, or don’t want to get away from, or don’t know how to get away from.” According to a recent Pew survey, the average American teenager today sends or receives more than 110 text messages a day. A 2015 study of social-media use of thirteen-year-olds, conducted by researchers at the University of California (Davis) and the University of Texas (Dallas), found that “there is no firm line between their real and online worlds.” A big difference between the digital screens of today and the televisions of the 1950s is that in those days your parents could turn off the darn thing. Not so easy today, when a large fraction of young people have their own digital devices.
So what’s the problem with nonstop stimulation? Ross Peterson, a New England psychiatrist who has treated dozens of teenage patients, told me that in his view the source of increased depression and anxiety in teenagers is their “terror of aloneness.” That terror, in turn, is intimately connected to the intense hyperconnected social-media environment of today. Modern teenagers, who live on the virtual planets of Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram, find it nearly impossible to be alone. They are always connected. Peterson mentioned to me the acronym FOMO, which stands for “Fear of Missing Out.” And what are we missing out on if we aren’t intravenously connected to the grid? The vast, squirming, unceasing, ubiquitous explosion of images and words, stories, messages and tweets, provocations, real news and fake news, happenings, and connections that is the Internet. The grid. It’s an addiction. We can get another hit with just the push of a button. And like any drug addiction, there’s never enough. We are dependent on the digital flow. We are always waiting for the next hit. We are always running to catch up. We are always behind. FOMO.
Associated with Peterson’s “terror of aloneness” and FOMO is plain loneliness. In her new book iGen, psychologist Jean Twenge quotes research by a Monitoring the Future survey showing that the percentage of eighth, tenth, and twelfth graders agreeing with the statement “A lot of times I feel lonely” underwent a dramatic increase beginning in 2007, around the time the iPhone was first released, and has not come down. (And, according to a 2017 survey by investment firm Piper Jaffray, seventy-six percent of teens today own an iPhone.) Twenge asked her undergraduate students at San Diego State University what they do with their smartphones when they sleep. Nearly all of them sleep with their smartphones beside them in bed, under their pillows, or within easy reach. They check social media right before going to sleep and right after waking up. One of the students said: “I know I shouldn’t, but I just can’t help it.” Those are the words of addiction.
Modern communication technology has shaped our understanding of the world, our self-identity, our sense of personal worth, our relationships, even our sense of time and space. As my MIT colleague psychologist Sherry Turkle writes in her book Alone Together, “Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.” Leonora, a fifty-seven-year-old chemistry professor in Turkle’s study, says: “I use e-mail to make appointments to see friends, but I’m so busy that I’m often making an appointment one or two months in the future. After we set things up by e-mail, we do not call. Really. I don’t call. They don’t call . . . . What do I feel? I feel I have ‘taken care of that person.’ ” Audrey, a sixteen-year-old high school student, told Turkle: “Making an [online] avatar and texting. Pretty much the same . . . . You’re creating your own little ideal person and sending it out . . . . You can write anything about yourself; these people don’t know. You can create who you want to be . . . . [M]aybe in real life it won’t work for you, you can’t pull it off. But you can pull it off on the Internet.” Surveys show that since the advent of the iPhone in 2007, young people spend less time dating and less time in person-to-person meetings with friends. Instead, they curl up at home and relate to the world through their digital devices.
A few years ago, I went out to dinner with my then twenty-five-year-old daughter and her friends. As soon as they sat down, the young women placed their smartphones on the table, like miniature oxygen tanks carried everywhere by emphysema patients. Every minute or two, one or the other of them glanced down at her device to see what new messages had arrived and to send out other messages. Occasionally, a factual question would come up as they talked. Conversation stopped, while somebody dove into the Internet and fetched the answer. And what of their sense of time? The world for them has been chopped up into two-minute segments between hits on the Internet. This disembodied and wired existence is no doubt familiar. It’s our new reality. For the younger generations, and some of the older as well, this relation to the world is simply the natural order of things. Yet I did not feel like I was sitting at a table with my daughter and her friends, as I did twenty years earlier. Rather, I felt like I had been digitized myself, that we were all megabytes being streamed through the Web. Spoken words and facial expressions were just two channels among many. And even though my daughter and her friends were together at the table, they were not together. They were not truly there.
To the anxious and depressed American adolescent on the cover of Time, the Internet is infinite. There’s no way a teenager, or any of us, can keep up with it, keep up even with the avalanche of postings by our own friends. Inevitably, we will suffer from FOMO. We will always be missing out. And since the digital screen has replaced reality and has become the architect of our intimacies, we will always fear aloneness. We will find it next to impossible to sit in a quiet room by ourselves and figure out who we are. The biggest thing we’re missing out on is, in fact, ourselves.