For many in Gen Z, life is a loop of likes, reels, and doomscrolling. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram were meant to make communication seamless—but instead, they often leave us drained, distracted, and anxious.
The very tools designed to help us connect are making it harder to focus, harder to breathe, and harder to feel. I often find myself wondering what time felt like in my parents’ youth. Life was slower, more physical. Technology had a presence, but it wasn’t the center of it all.
Radios and televisions lived in the corners of rooms—not in our palms. The stories they tell feel brighter, more vivid. Maybe that’s nostalgia speaking. Or maybe it’s something real we’ve lost. The truth is, my own childhood is already hard to recall. Not because it didn’t happen, but because so much of it was spent online—moments lost in scrolls, not memory
Addicted by Design
There’s a reason it’s so hard to log off. Social media is built to keep us hooked. The infinite scroll offers us a stream of visual noise—always something “new” but never new enough to feel satisfying. When the content bores us, the motion itself keeps us scrolling.
Then there’s the algorithm. These platforms study us. They know what we like, what we watch, what we skip. They feed us more of the same, wrapping us in a cocoon of content that mirrors our thoughts, our biases, and our comfort zones. It’s safe. It’s easy. But it’s also stunting our minds.When we no longer encounter disagreement, challenge, or critical thought, we stop growing. We become dulled—not just to ideas, but to each other.…
Seeing Without Really Looking
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” they say. But in a world saturated with images, how many of those words are we actually hearing?Social media floods us with visuals—but only a few manage to stick. Not because they’re artful or meaningful, but because they’re simple, flashy, familiar. Our attention spans shrink, and our ability to truly *see* and *understand* images diminishes. We’re not just distracted. We’re desensitized.
What Comes Next?
As digital natives, we face a double challenge: learning to navigate the online world while also trying to understand it. That’s hard, especially when our brains—and identities—are still forming.Solutions like screen-time limits and digital detoxes help. But we need more than boundaries. We need to become **critics** of the digital world we live in. That doesn’t mean rejecting it completely. It means learning to enjoy it thoughtfully. To question what we consume. To be intentional about how we spend our time—and what that time really gives us in return.We deserve more than just connection. We deserve clarity, creativity, and control.
And maybe, just maybe, it starts with asking:
What am I really looking for when I scroll?…
