The Instagram kids are alright Trauma dumping is now uncool

This might make me a bad parent, but I’m going to be honest: I love Instagram. What’s worse, I love that my kids are on it. Something has shifted recently, and our feeds are absolute fire. We’ve reached peak algorithm. The girls and I are constantly sharing memes and videos with each other through social media. They like it. And — I know this is horrible — I like it, too. It is very, very funny.

There has been important research done by social scientists, most prominently Jonathan Haidt, outlining the catastrophic effects of social media on teens, particularly on teen girls. I am not here to argue that the smart phone has been a net positive or even a neutral technology in the life of teens. As a teacher, I can see that it is bad for young people, as it is for me. But the past year has made me far less anxious about the cell phone’s capacity to make teens anxious. The “vibe shift” we’ve all noticed, moving away from extreme progressive ideologies towards more “populist” (popular) attitudes, has made the ubiquity of social media far less worrying. Youth culture has changed. What was once cool on social media is now cringe. These days you wouldn’t be seen dead posting social justice infographics. And therapy talk, thank god, is no longer a trend. This has happened quicker than social scientists might have been able to collate in data points, perhaps. I am not blaming them for that. Teen trends happen in an instant.

To understand teen trends, we need to remember that the teen is essentially a pack animal. Movies since The Breakfast Club, which is now 40 years old, have told us what the packs are: the jocks, the princesses, the nerds, the rockers, and the weirdos. Teens attach themselves to their group. Even the loners are part of a group: the NPC one. Ever since Judd Nelson courted Molly Ringwald, we’ve been told to break down the barriers, move outside our cliques, see people for who they are on the inside. It never occurs to us that the groups are formed in the first place because teens do see each other as they are on the inside, and that the groups are formed accordingly.

The truth is that the teenagers like their groups. They have very little interest in moving outside of them or abolishing them. The groups give them a sense of belonging, and they like to belong. Belonging helps one to feel less alone, and it enables a teen to understand and form judgements about the world around her. The teen typically adopts internally the external markers of her group so that she can find a way to fit into the world. We have been told that identity, particularly gender identity, is socially constructed. But of course it is! Teenage years of development are difficult and confusing. The social groups offer one a sense of coherence about the world, and a template for forming oneself to fit it. The teens conform to each other; even (or maybe especially) the “non-conformists” conform to one another.

That the teenager wants to fit into the world is a good thing, and a necessary one. As the teen fits into the world she also changes it so that it fits her. The Gen Z teen is doing this playfully, for instance, with language. They’ve resurrected old words, “cooked”, and made up new ones, “opp” and “slaps”. They break words apart and put them back together: “unalive”. These words spread quickly, thanks to social media, and using the words signals belonging to a culture — with the extra caveat that the new words all must be said with just the right amount of ironic self-mockery. The ultimate code for belonging to teen culture is to signal that it’s lame to look desperate to belong to teen culture.

Their language games and early adaptability to new words show that the teen is both a natural rebel and a natural conformist. Almost universally girls want first to fit in with other girls. The teen girl moves in a pack, and she thinks with her pack. And while it is true that during the teen years girls start to become focused on boys, their main focus remains, almost universally, on their acceptance with other girls.

What the teenaged girl wants most is to be judged as an insider by the other teens in her group. She wants to feel secure enough in some girls’ approval so that they can collectively give disapproval to other girls, as well as to the guys. In other words, she wants to feel good about herself, which happens by evaluating herself, her values and personality, relative to her peers and to find them wanting. This might make being a teen girl sound like an extended Mean Girls movie or something, but I don’t think it really is. We all judge other people, all the time. (Many readers no doubt judged me as a bad mother when I said I enjoy sharing social media with my kids. I am not hurt if you have.) Judgement is necessary. Our judgements aren’t just our values, but also the way we experience our values. Through judgements the norms of the group become the feelings of the girl. The girl-packs help teens make sense of this and socialise them into it.

Over the past decade or so, the rebel-conformist qualities of the teen girl have coalesced in the conformity of the non-conforming teen. The “rebel” in her fights oppressions, combats “norms”, and is an “individual”. But she is an easily recognisable stereotype, subject to what Matthew B Crawford describes as “the sameness of mass solipsism”. The mass-conforming non-conformists have held undeniable power over teen culture, and their influence have coincided with the advent of social media. We know that social media coincided with a rapid increase of teenage anxiety, mental illness, and general unhappiness. But it also coincided with peak MeToo, peak cancel culture, peak therapy culture, peak social justice culture, and peak trauma-dumping culture.

I am not here to diagnose correlation or causation. The rise of social media and the rise of teenage unhappiness and anxiety are a kind of chicken-and-egg phenomenon; I don’t know what came first. But I do know that the kinds of messages coming through social media have changed, and that this change is correlating with a change in teen attitudes. Five years ago, during the start of the pandemic, one of my daughters fell under the influence of social media messaging on mental health. She was 11, and thanks to lockdowns, isolated from normal face-to-face teenage interactions. And she suddenly developed some sort of depression/anxiety/self-harm habits, as well as a nervous tick. Trauma was really “in” at the time. (This is not to say, and it’s a little embarrassing that I might need to clarify this for some readers, that some kids/teens/adults don’t suffer from mental illness and from traumatic experiences. I am talking about a trend, a zeitgeist, and not legitimate illness nor the traumatic horrors that beset many innocent victims. Some individuals are truly afflicted, and others use it as a persona. Both things can be true at the same time.)

The more afflicted a teen was by trauma, the more street-cred she got for being an authentic victim, or for being an ally. A few years ago, I had a university student in a Shakespeare class raise her hand to tell me that I shouldn’t talk about death because it could “trigger a trauma” in some students. She was there to “educate” me about being trauma-sensitive. That death is traumatic for all of humanity seemed to escape her notice entirely, as did the fact that it would be really difficult to teach Shakespeare without mentioning death. She seemed to think she was protecting at-risk students from something she had supposedly discovered about mortality. What a whiz. (There is an FX series, English Teacher, which satirises this type of student. She suffers from “asymptomatic Tourette’s”, which can only be self-diagnosed, and she is triggered by the mention of any kind of illness in literature class. I haven’t seen the show. I only know about it because my teens share reels of it with me through, *clears throat*, social media.)

Five years ago, weakness was the goal. This not only relieved the teen of the emotional burden of learning how to take responsibility for her own insecurities, it made her feel more included in the teen group that judged affliction itself to be a virtue. But the real emotional satisfaction came in the form of judging anyone who didn’t validate her self-diagnoses. Oh, the rush of feeling morally justified in looking down at those who lack the ethical lens needed to breathe life into your traumas. Trauma-affirmation bonded teens to each other. With friends like those, who needs enemies?

But there has been a colossal sea-change in Gen Z culture since then. It’s been like turning a huge ship on the sea, slow, but there is now momentum behind its critical mass, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change course. It is now decidedly lame to be mentally fragile, an “iPad kid”, someone who spends all their time online, who has followed the trends of trauma-dumping, and of being non-conforming. This is now “cringe”. (My own daughter’s “afflictions” have become a running joke with her. Yes, she knows I’m writing about it. No, she is not offended.) Teens, let’s remember, are both rebels and conformists. As soon as teen brittleness became, as they would have said, “normalised”, teens began to rebel against it. And now it is the norm to rebel against safe-space culture, which is increasingly top-heavy anyway. Once your vice-principal, your Phys-Ed teacher, the mainstream media, corporations, and politicians get behind a teen zeitgeist, it loses its “rizz”. The rebellion has taken the form of ridicule. What was once sacred is lambasted for its sanctimony. And so now the teenager recognises her position as an insider of the group if she is privy to the scandalous jokes told about the dominant culture. The tyranny of “alt-girl” is over. Her downfall was that she was too fragile to be funny.

But what is going to fill the vacuum left by the nonconforming teen? Recently, in anticipation of its third season which begins this month, I rewatched the very first episode of HBO’s The White Lotus. Its opening sequence portrays in microcosm what seems to be emerging on the broad cultural scale. We see two older teens/young women, both gorgeous (played by Sydney Sweeney and Brittany O’Grady), talking in secrecy to each other on a boat, gossiping about the other guests. From their perch under the boat’s awning, they judge all the other passengers, discerning their innermost characteristics. And they are not wrong in their judgements. The two beautiful girls have powers of perception because they are so often on the receiving end of other’s scrutiny.

But the show’s real moment of insight is when these two teens meet one of these boat guests, the young newlywed bride, at the hotel pool. The bride is friendly with the two teens, but they act coolly superior to her (one is pretentiously reading Freud and the other casually flipping through Nietzsche). The young wife quickly realises that behind their smiles the two girls are mocking her. She turns away from them to go for a swim, taking off her beach cover-up to reveal a truly stunning physique. Sweeney’s character instantly looks disappointed and humiliated. “Oh shit,” she says. The natural order reestablishes its Darwinian hierarchy. Survival of the hottest. How cruel.

Of course, Sydney Sweeney’s own perfect physique may not qualify her for this role. But then again, maybe her own sexiness makes her the perfect person to play the disappointed teen: she would obviously be aware of the power hotness wields, which is why she is humbled by beauty. Her response is not generous, but at least she does not persist in arrogance. The teenage girl who is not hot frequently holds onto more resentment and moral vanity. She would feel proud to be ugly next to beauty because it makes her seem like a beautiful person on the inside. That is her claim to superiority. It is oftentimes a compensatory, rival pride that she feels in her own unattractiveness. The moral vanity goes so deep that she doesn’t typically recognise it as vanity — especially when our culture celebrates this kind of pride as a virtue.

This Sydney Sweeney syndrome, part arrogant self-righteous teen and part neo-pagan hot-goddess, occupies a large amount of digital real estate on social media. Both of these vibes no doubt add fuel to the feelings of pride and insecurity we have seen in teens. But we can’t ignore either the sense of fun that’s been emerging in Gen Z. The new cool is to ridicule what was cool a few years ago. This means that the fragile, easily offended teen (who used this identity as a power-play to elicit sympathy and affirmations from others, as well as to raise her status as one who could educate others in higher-order morality) has now become a meme rather than an aspiration. The laughing new teen has a healthier way of being, and my hunch is that we will see a corresponding decline in mental health issues from youth. One tends to become what one pretends to be.

But this is not to say that the new teen is good. She may tend toward arrogance and cruelty in the same way that the cancel-culture teens did. There is a unique opportunity, if one has an interest in these things, in filling the void left by the now cringy “alt-girl”, with something beautiful, strong, and glorious. My hunch is that this may take the form of a return to a more vital way of being embodied – more Nietzschean uber-teen than afflicted victim. The trick will be to make the glory of this teen also honourable, and to make her strength also generous.

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