Pressure

 

Teens now experience record levels of anxiety, relative to when my or my parents’ generation were that age. Lots of ink has been spilled trying to figure out what that is and what to do about it. I can’t say I can add much to this discourse. One thing I can relate to is how difficult it is to unplug nowadays, both from incoming information and from external scrutiny. 

For better or worse, we have the world at our fingertips, or more to the point a few finger strokes away via our smartphones. Which is great when it comes to accessing information, but difficult to resist when it comes to just, well, not needing to know something right this second. That’s a lot of pressure, for to be able to call up anything you want within seconds is hard to disentangle from the requirement to call it up immediately. As someone who is inherently curious and doesn’t like to leave things hanging, I could see if being incredibly stressful to throttle down when it’s so easy to rev up. 

Similarly, as an introvert, the notion of being “always on” is exhausting. I recall when I served on the school board in Philadelphia and was being oriented on what it meant to be a public official. Whereas us private citizens can opt into being “on the record” (e.g. giving testimony at a public meeting, speaking on behalf of a cause at a rally), for public officials it is the opposite, as you are considered to always be “on the record” whenever you’re out and about, and the only escape is to the privacy of your own home. Teens these days are similarly devoid of a respite from the possibility of being captured on video and having a careless statement used against you, so you can imagine that the kind of vigilance and exposure that foments is a lot of pressure for an adolescent to bear. 

My teen years were not without danger or hardship. But, I can truly look back with happy nostalgia at the innocence of it all. No screens, no social media, no devices…just endless days with friends at the park or at school, being in person and in the moment. There’s something healthy about that that I hope that this generation of teens is able to reclaim, for the sake of their mental health.