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 smartphone 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 judgments 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.

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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.) Judgment is necessary. Our judgments aren’t just our values, but also the way we experience our values. Through judgments the norms of the group become the feelings of the girl. The girl-packs help teens make sense of this and socialize 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 recognizable 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 satirizes 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, “normalized”, 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 recognizes 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.

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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 judgments. The two beautiful girls have powers of perception because they are so often on the receiving end of others’ 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 realizes 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 recognize 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 honorable, and to make her strength also generous.

1. Negative Partisanship

Many people’s political views revolve not around what they support, but what they oppose. They’re always fighting against something rather than for something, and the constant focus on what they hate makes them nasty and miserable.

2. Enshittification

Online services start out serving users. When they have enough users, they switch to serving advertisers/shareholders, at the expense of users. For instance, Google Search initially showed you what you searched for, but now largely shows what it wants you to see.

3. Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty

The easier an academic field, the more it will try to preserve its difficulty by using complex jargon. Physicists use simple terms if possible, while postmodern theorists try to complexify their discipline by writing like this:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

4. Reminiscence Bump

Americans of all ages tend to believe America peaked — morally, politically, economically, artistically — whenever they were a kid. Perhaps people who yearn for the time when their country was great are mostly just yearning for their childhood.

5. Region-Beta Paradox

Often we fail to improve our lives simply because things don’t get bad enough. If your new job is hell, you’ll leave it, but if it’s just unsatisfying, you’ll likely grind it out. Thus, small problems often threaten our quality of life more than big ones.

6. Dark-Ego-Vehicle Principle

Social justice activism is widely regarded as driven by noble intentions, but it attracts large numbers of psychopaths, narcissists, and other “dark tetrad” personalities who use it to feed their sense of self-importance and to dominate others. As Aldous Huxley wrote: “To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour righteous indignation — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

7. Protégé Effect

The best way to learn something is to try to teach it to others. The sense of responsibility to your student motivates you to understand a topic, and the act of explaining something helps you to connect the dots and commit them to memory.

8. Baumol’s Cost Disease

As an industry’s productivity increases, wages in that industry naturally rise. This forces wages — and prices — in services without increased productivity to also rise to stay competitive. Thus, as a country gets richer, goods become cheaper, but labour-intensive services like healthcare and college tuition cost more.

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9. Stockdale Paradox

The optimal state of mind is neither optimism (which leaves you unprepared for adversity) nor pessimism (which destroys motivation), but optimistic pessimism: by preparing for the worst outcomes, you increase confidence in dealing with any outcome, and thus, you increase hope.

10. Ozemponomics

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are threatening “limbic capitalism” by reducing cravings. For instance, the average household with at least one family member on a GLP-1 spends around 10% less on snacks. If this can reduce addictions and obesity, it will likely also reduce healthcare costs and unemployment.

11. Explanatory Inversion

Questions rest on unexamined assumptions, so always try flipping them. For instance, don’t just ask why there is poverty, ask why there is prosperity. This helps you realise poverty is the norm and the lack of it is the thing that needs to be explained.

12. Event Bias

One reason negativity dominates the news is that bad news tends to happen suddenly while good news tends to happen gradually so is rarely newsworthy on any particular day. But even though it may not get as much attention, good news is always happening.

13. Pie Fallacy

Many believe wealth is zero-sum; that if someone gets richer, someone else must get poorer. But wealth creation is one of society’s few positive-sum games; if you fix up a battered old car, you increase its value, making yourself richer without making anyone else poorer.

14. Golden Law of Stupidity

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to others while themselves deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

15. Goal Dilution Effect

We assume that the more arguments we give, the better our case. In reality, our weakest arguments dilute the strongest. Generally, you’ll only be as convincing as your worst point, so instead of making as many arguments as you can, make only the best.

16. Bias Blindspot

We see bias easily in others, but not in ourselves. Whenever I post about a bias or fallacy, people tell me how it explains their opponents’ beliefs, but never their own. The assumption that bias is just something that affects those we disagree with is our greatest source of bias.

17. Sheepskin Effect

Employers value qualifications more than education. This is because the purpose of the education system is not actually to educate people, but to sort the “wheat” (worker bees) from the “chaff” (slackers, dreamers). What students learn is not as important as demonstrating that they can follow instructions and complete what they started, which a qualification signifies.

18. Deviancy Amplification

An outrageous act or event gets the public’s attention, prompting reporters to look for new examples. Cases that previously would not have been considered newsworthy are reported just because they fit the trend, creating the impression of an epidemic of such events. A recent example is mystery drone sightings.

19. Rumsfeld Matrix

There are things you know you know, things you don’t know you know, things you know you don’t know, and things you don’t know you don’t know. The last group is the biggest pitfall. Always try to account for what you don’t know you don’t know.

20. Left-Brain Interpreter

Experiments on split-brain patients show that when the experimenters instruct the patient’s right-side of the brain to perform an action (e.g. open the window), the patient will do it, and then the left-side of their brain, which was unaware of the instruction, will convince the patient they chose to do it unbidden (e.g. “because I felt hot”).Our reasons are stories we tell ourselves.

21. Blue Dot Effect

The more we solve our problems, the more we widen the definition of “problem” so that our number of problems remains constant. So don’t expect a life without problems. Progress doesn’t mean reducing your quantity of struggles, but increasing their quality. The goal of life is to trade bad problems for better ones.

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22. Overview Effect

Although astronauts are chosen for their unflappability, when they see the Earth from space — a tiny marble in an infinite void — they’re often overcome with a sense of profound connection with all humanity, and everyone’s earthly squabbles suddenly seem trivial. In the words of Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell: “on that fragile little sphere… all I had ever known, all I had ever loved and hated, longed for, all that I once thought had ever been and ever would be.” When something is bothering you, zoom out to see if it really matters.

23. Barrow’s First Law (aka Barrow’s Uncertainty Principle)

“Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it.” So don’t worry if you don’t know why you’re here, or where you’ll eventually go. Just focus on living. The purpose of life is to find purpose in life.

24. Ichi-go ichi-e

Every moment is unique and unrepeatable, so appreciate every experience as if it’s your last (which, in a way, it is). Even if your current situation sucks, be gracious that, of all the humans that will ever exist, only you will have the privilege of experiencing this moment in this specific way.

25. Sphexishness

Army ants follow each other’s pheromone trails to know where to go. Sometimes, they accidentally form a loop, or “ant mill”, circularly following each other until they die of exhaustion. Sphexishness is when you blindly follow a rule without checking if the rule works in the present situation. Don’t use the concepts in this list sphexishly. They’re not intended as rigid rules, only as food for thought.

This is an edited version of a list that first appeared on The Prism.