To grow up online is to be an experimental guinea pig, modified with a digital appendage.

For those of us raised with iPads in our grubby toddler grasp and iPhones in our middle-school backpacks, a childhood without our devices is unimaginable. A tiny six-inch screen redefined what it means to grow up, hit milestones, and pass time, so much so that this generation’s upbringing is entirely alien even to that of our parents.

Algorithmic feeds took over much of our youth — digital trances replacing many of the foundational, real-life experiences that countless generations had grown up with before the 21st century. 

As a member of Generation Z, I know this firsthand. Though I thankfully predated the iPad toddler era, I got my first iPhone at age ten. I was on Instagram by the next year or so, and soon after made my way to Tumblr and Snapchat.

It was far too early. This wasn’t because I had neglectful parents — quite the opposite. My parents are more invested in my well-being than virtually any family I know. But, faced with unrelenting pleading and the prospect that their shy child would be the only one left out of the multi-line calls after school and the group chats making weekend plans, they relented. Virtually all my peers’ parents had already folded.

Although I did not fully understand it, the fleeting free moments of my youth were constantly being preyed on by invisible forces.

In the early days of iPhones and social media, most parents didn’t understand the bargain they were making. The tiny screens were a portal into a fast-changing digital world rife with anxiety-inducing social comparisons, unrealistic beauty standards, and new forms of predation and cyberbullying. 

They didn’t see the consequences coming. Youth anxiety and depression are reaching record highs. And it’s not just, as naysayers argue, that kids are more comfortable discussing mental health. Self-harm hospitalizations and suicide attempts are soaring.

I’m fortunate to have made it out of that minefield unscathed. But one feature of the online world got me — the algorithm, which drains us of our most precious and finite resource: time. Although I did not fully understand it, the fleeting free moments of my youth were constantly being preyed on by invisible forces. 

Ever since I got an iPhone, I was awash in dopamine — be it from a massive streak on Candy Crush, an Instagram like from the popular girl in school, or a Snapchat notification from a crush.

The result was a subtle but constant gravitational pull toward my phone. Always in the back of my mind was the concern that something could be going on online that I didn’t know about. With maturity came a sense that something was wrong with my relationship to technology.

I silenced my phone so the pings wouldn’t distract me. But the vibrations made it even easier to stay plugged in and peek surreptitiously at my screen, under the classroom desk, or dinner table.

So I turned the vibrations off. But then I found myself checking my phone more than ever, always unsure whether something had popped up on my screen since the last pickup. Through my tween and teen years, there was little meaningful conversation about tech addiction, even though its symptoms were metastasizing in much of the world. Almost all of my peers have similar stories of their failed attempts to break their habits. 

I’ve yet to hear a success story. My generation can agree on very little. We’ve grown up in an age of ultra-polarization, and many of us live in our own ideological echo chambers online. Still, if there’s one thing we agree on, it’s that there’s something wrong with growing up online.

In fact, I’ve never once met someone my age who disagreed with my contention that a predominantly virtual childhood is a childhood squandered. We all wish we had grown up differently — and we all still struggle, even as we enter adulthood, to modify our relationships with technology.

This gives me hope that we can mobilize to inspire change and ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself with each successive generation, who will surely grow up with more technological access than the previous one. 

We were wrong to believe that a plugged-in upbringing was normal.

The rest of the world is beginning to hear the cries for help. Parents today are far more cognizant of these dangers than just a few years ago. The conversation about banning phones from school is becoming mainstream, and experts are beginning to research the effects of social media and screens on kids.

No wonder Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book, The Anxious Generation, a powerful call to action against the digitization of childhood, recently debuted as a number one New York Times bestseller. We’re collectively realizing that, for millions of young digital natives around the globe, every second spent in the online world is a second lost in the real world. It’s a true zero-sum game.

In some parallel reality where smartphones never existed, I wonder what I would have done with the time I squandered on Vine and YouTube and SMS threads. Perhaps I missed out on picking up a hobby. Or meeting a new, dear friend. Or a conversation with a grandparent that I would remember for a lifetime.

Most members of my generation missed out too. What stories from our youths will never be told because our faces were lit blue by screens when we could have been out in the real world making memories?

We’ve never known a world unplugged. And we were wrong to believe that a plugged-in upbringing was normal. We were convinced that our avatars could be our identities. That online friends are just as valuable as real-life friends. That excitement and adventure could be simulated by a video game console. That texting someone “I love you” is just as meaningful as telling them to their face.

None of that was true. And my generation’s suffering is a testament to that fact.

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