I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking, Jack! What are you talking about? You’re young! You’re free! You have two thirds of your life ahead of you!

No no, I don’t mean me. I mean younger. Just a few years younger in the scheme of things... 8 or ten years younger. Generation Z, the first generation to grow up in a comprehensively digital World.

I’m lucky, really. I can still remember when my parents first bought our first computer. It ran MS DOS and took only floppy disks. You could play hangman but certainly not Fortnite or anything even mildly interesting. It took about five minutes and a two stroke engine for the computer to even switch on. It was barely worth it.

Years later, I remember my first foray into social media, MySpace and Bebo accounts. But they didn’t exist when I was in high school. I didn’t get a Facebook account until after university. As a teenager, I never had to deal with any of the pressures that come with likes and shares, and impossible body standards, and your friends who seem impossibly happy and perfect who then start bullying you and shunning you and neglecting you. I never had to deal with any of that as a teenager but those born just a few years later did.

I went to a public lecture the other night but a social psychologist and professor called Jonathan Haidt. He’s based at NYU in New York, but has published a book about what he calls the coddling of American minds, how generation Z is being set up fail.

His message really affected me. His data shows that young people spend up to six hours a day on social media.. the effects of that social media, are enormous. Depression, anxiety, and suicide rates have skyrocketed in the United States in people born after 1995.

It’s especially damaging in young women, which makes sense when you think about it. For whatever reason, physiological, psychological or whatever, boys are more inclined to sort out their differences by hitting each other, while girls are more inclined to participate in destructive emotional manipulation, the sort of bullying which can last years and have a huge impact on a person’s life. That sort of warfare is perfect for social media.

It seems absurd, don’t you think, that we worry about kids walking to school, we design playgrounds where they can’t get hurt, we get nervous about bullrush. And yet so many young people can freely play around on social media with no regulation or oversight whatsoever.

Generation Z might have it worse. But anyone who’s watched the documentary The Great Hack on Netflix will appreciate that all human beings are susceptible to the psychological tricks of social media. All of us are hard wired to want the dopamine hit that comes from a like or a share or the little red notification.  

But we’re being manipulated on a grand scale. Our data is being harnessed and used against us in mass propaganda campaigns.. again, with no oversight and no regulation. No way of checking the information we’re being fed alongside the photos of our old school friend’s new baby or our cousin’s new puppy.. is actually true.