You are what you eat, or so they say, but what about the effect that our environment and surroundings have on our overall personal growth and mental health? Psychologists posit that we are largely a product of our environment, and that includes how we learn and interact with the world around us. These days, however, our “interactions” are becoming less real, and a lot more virtual. For kids, much of what they do day-to-day is online, from how they experience their education, to the many ways in which they connect with friends through social media and online gaming. In fact, many of the young people I see at my office tell me they can go days — and sometimes even longer — without having to be in the physical space of other human beings. With less and less need to be in the real world, what are kids learning through their virtual experiences — and to what extent is this impacting their overall wellness and human development?
Learning life “online”
Think back to when you were a kid and how you grew up, and how often you learned about the world around you through direct experience. If you are old enough to have lived before our modern technology age then you likely learned everything through real interactions, from school to friends, to literally every other human experience. You learned from direct observation, trial and error, and other visceral experiences. What you lived through was reality, as there were no people tinkering with video editing, artificial intelligence, or telling you what you just saw was “fake news.” From these direct experiences you gained a fairly accurate idea of truth from fiction, reality from fantasy. Kids today, however, live a very different experience that is lighter on in-person experiences, and heavy on virtual, online interactions that are often far more fantasy than fact. And with young, impressionable kids, this paradigm shift can be a very big problem relating to mental health and wellness.
Young people around 25 and under have never known a world without the internet, text messaging, blogs, and YouTube. Increasingly more of their every day life today is virtual, including online classes, social media posts, and killing time gaming or watching TikTok videos. While some of these experiences are healthy, many other times young people are learning the world around them by means of fake photo filters, anonymous online posts, brain-rot short videos, and “news” sources that are nothing more than propaganda. As young people passively, and often without any vetting whatsoever, consume this information they also begin developing strong opinions, decisions, and other world views built upon fantasy, not reality.
Even college has shifted dramatically — gone are the days of laboring over tough term papers, or pulling all-nighters in preparation for an exam. Today, increasingly more college students take online courses that hardly guard against cheating, and they resort to artificial intelligence (AI) to complete term papers in mere seconds that used to take weeks. While this might be chilling to learn, college students today can complete their entire degree online (never having to actually interact with professors), and “earn” their degree by utilizing AI to do most, if not all, of their work. Some may see this as great efficiency, while others worry that this new model leaves today’s generation far less prepared for reality than generations previous.
I write all of this to contrast the different “reality” of a young person today compared to just a generation ago. What young people see and experience today often teeters on artificiality by means of how people present online (both with fancy filters and/or other ways of masquerading one’s true identity), interact (less in person, and more online), and become educated (fewer brick-and-mortar classes, and more online classes). So when we wonder why young people seem different, or seem to struggle with mental health issues more than your generation, it might be because they have been raised during a time that is very markedly different than any generation previous.
Final thoughts
Your reality is your unique experience with the world around you, and for young people today that “reality” more regularly consists of interactions with others by remote means (i.e. school, social, etc). As we as a society rely less and less on in-person experiences, we now more than ever need valid, reliable sources for authentic information rather than propaganda, AI, and doctored photos and videos. The tech train has left the station, and we will likely never go back to how we were, prompting us to pay closer attention to the “reality” of a young person today, and the means in which he or she has developed a world view. These very real questions are having, and will have in the future, a dramatic impact on mental health and human development.
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