The average American teenager spends 7 hours and 22 minutes on their phone per day and is on track to spend over 12 years of their life staring at a screen.

Social media sucks hours upon hours of time from our lives. It leeches attention, monetizing it and commodifying it in a cycle that keeps us on a constant dopamine high.

The generation most exposed to social media—Gen Z—is said to have an attention span of only 8 seconds. It has morphed into a platform for showing off and one-upping others, forcing viewers to compare themselves to false realities posting online. This causes a significant wave of the feeling of simply not being enough—that in every action and reaction, you become a little less you and a little more someone else, someone you deem “better” than you. 

This sort of identity crisis has swept the American teenage population, with over 90% of Gen Z’s reporting dissatisfaction with their lives and bodies because of its influence.  What makes this mass addiction so damaging is that its victims are well aware of the addiction, yet they cannot bring themselves to stop. 

Rather than focus on living life in own way and being quirky and creative and what would be deemed as “cringe,” we toss away our own personalities to adopt the latest and most popular ones. Social media is not just the thief of joy, but the thief of life, in its ever-fleeting span, slowly sucking out the marrow of life until all that’s left is the shell of who we truly are, with all the fun and interesting parts all removed. All for the sake of “fitting in.”