The Guinea Pigs

NYU's Jonathan Haidt lectures at Princeton, Feb 5 2025. Photo by me.

I’ve struggled with social media for over a decade now. I go through periods where I temporarily deactivate my accounts for months at a time, across all platforms: Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. While these breaks are often beneficial for my mental health, I do end up feeling isolated, especially while living in a suburban town with minimal friends or family in the area.

My struggle with social media started in high school, around 2013. I experienced cyberbullying as a teen, with peers creating fake accounts imitating me and tweeting vulgar and insensitive things. I modeled as a teen to earn income, and adults would photoshop images of my body and post risqué photos of me on social media sites, even as a minor. Thinking my body needed it, I learned how to photoshop myself as a kid. I was sexualized from a young age, and suddenly my 17-year-old body was something to display online to earn attention, affection, and even money.

We are only now just beginning to understand the mental health effects of social media on minors, with NYU’s Jonathan Haidt leading the charge. (There is a photo of him with a slide from his Princeton lecture included in this post). I like to call my cohort—the very last of the millennial generation, born around 1996— “the guinea pigs.” We were the first generation to grow up with social media, the first young minds to be “experimented on” by Big Tech. Facebook and Instagram were the Wild West in 2012, and parents did not know the risks that these platforms posed to our brains.

Since 2012, reading and mathematics test scores have fallen across the U.S. (source: The Nation’s Report Card via Haidt). Since 2010, there has been a 188% increase in U.S. girls ages 10-14 admitted to hospitals for non-fatal self-harm (source: the CDC via Haidt). Psychiatric diagnoses have soared (source: UCLA via Haidt). I also fear the neural pathways that are continually reinforced in our brains: you post, people like it, you get validation and a dopamine hit. Rinse and repeat. Until suddenly, your brain is behaviorally hardwired to do activities that garner likes on your profile, instead of endeavors that may be better for your physical, emotional, or financial wellbeing.

I’ve taught middle school math over the last two years, and I see the effects of the screen-based childhood happening to my students in real time. I talk to them about it. I ask them how it feels when they are on Instagram or TikTok. “Bad,” they tell me. “But all my friends are on it, so I have to be on it.” I hear this repeatedly. When I meet with parents at my school, they hear the same from their children. Parenting is harder than ever because of it. We are up against a behemoth.

As an adult, I’m trying to figure out a way to make online life function for me in a healthy way. I work with a wonderful psychologist and we try to undo many dysfunctional thought patterns that social media enforced in me from a young age. It doesn’t always work, and I am trying to figure out the right balance; the ultimate answer for me might be to have no social media at all. But if you see my profile online, and then gone the next day—well, this is why.

 Haidt explains how mathematics and reading scores are falling with the advent of social media.

Haidt explains spike in psychiatric disorders since 2012 and the rise of social media.