The teens are all miserable these days, and, while concerned adults are scrambling to figure out why, the teens themselves have taken to documenting their unhappiness all over social media. As a fellow concerned adult and a father of two, I am also worried about the teens. I assume they’re unhappy because they spend a lot of time on their phones instead of partying or digging irrigation ditches or playing soccer or whatever it is that happier children did in the past. But I’m also a Waldorf-school type who believes that all children should spend as much time as possible staring at ants, touching rocks, and breathing in the exhaust from redwood trees. It’s occurred to me that I might be wrong—hippies aren’t so fashionable these days—and that it’s totally fine for young minds to have a capitalism-and-anxiety machine affixed a foot from their faces at all times, so I try to stay open to other explanations.
One of the common theories floating around says that kids these days are under an inordinate amount of pressure to compete with one another. Admissions at top-tier universities, which have certainly become far more competitive than they were when I was applying to school in the late nineties, are seen as a major contributor to this stress. The evidence for this appears all over TikTok and Instagram, where thousands of high-school juniors and seniors post their “stats” and then solicit advice and feedback on where they should apply. The mild virality of these posts has, in turn, let loose a flood of guidance counsellors, random commenters, and students at prestigious schools who all make seemingly earnest, yet undeniably cruel posts about how they found themselves sitting on the steps of the library at Columbia, or wherever else.
It is college-admissions decision time right now, which means that all those stat posters have started to reveal what these colleges think about them. My TikTok algorithms have been feeding me an endless loop of these…
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