Taylor Lorenz

So novels in the 1800s were a massive hit.

I mean, parents were freaking out.

There were these novel addictions and they were trying to get young people treatment for their novel addictions because life was not great in the 1800s and a lot of young people would escape to these novels.

And I think reading about novels, it's funny because

a lot of those claims are the same ones being made about social media today, where it's like, young people are, they see everyone else leading these amazing lives, and it makes them depressed.

And that's probably true in the sense of like,

engaging with media i mean i grew up in the 2000s as a teenager like looking at cosmo magazine being like why don't i look like this the models in this magazine why am i not living this great life of like these reality tv stars right like we all engage in this stuff but i think we just have to be careful at sort of like what we're deeming cause and effect yeah that makes sense so do you think that there is actually a growth in mental health problems among young people

mean what we see around the data it it kind of varies a lot and and has actually backtracked the past two years um you know like suicide like a lot of mental health problems that these people that you know these people on twitter will like go and you know say well like look at the declines in mental health since 2010 or whatever but if you look at it since the 1980s it's significantly up like we're living a better life than our parents and our parents lived a better life than their parents so

There's a lot of things around that.

Now, did we have a financial crisis in 2008 that radically affected the younger generation and devastated the family lives of millions of people?

Same thing with 2020.

Hundreds of thousands of children lost a primary caregiver to COVID alone.

Losing your mom or dad, them dying of COVID traumatically...

that's a lot more traumatic and life shaping than like watching too much Instagram for like three months while you were on remote Zoom school or whatever.

And not to mitigate it, but you know, it's interesting also that like suicides dropped when kids were most online, like that in that year of 2020.

So I just think these things don't always correlate so neatly.

And there's a lot of people, I mean, people, every single top researcher actually on this topic came out together in 2024 and issued this big report on this exact topic and said,

you guys keep claiming effectively that social media causes this.

We at UNC, Princeton, Duke, et cetera, all studied this for a living.

We can tell you social media is not causing it.