The Millennial Fortune of Knowing the Before and After of Social Media

I belong to a generation when social media hadn't become a central part of teen life. I was born in 1984, which means for many people like me, the time before the internet revolution and afterwards is remembered clearly. We have played the pranks of sending 'hub crises' and 'take care' pager messages to our older cousins from the IT world, which surely made their life interesting. We have heard the grumbling sounds of internet dysentery connection of the 90s, the lost and found floppy discs, VCRs, cassettes, and had walkmans we used to resuscitate by chewing the tip of batteries to keep the song playing. This was about the level of psychosocial stress that used to exist in the early days of technology and internet.

Today, however, the internet which gave birth to what is affectionately called social media has become a major force in deciding the adolescent experience — more than ever. In this blog, I'll attempt to share what may put the teenage experience in better perspective, coming from a lens of psychological findings about the formation of emotions and from what I know experientially from days before the internet became social life.

Adolescence is a time when shaping the mind is easy. This is good and bad news because if found in the conducive environments, what we learn during this time, stays with us given the opportunities of brain plasticity and change heightened during this time (Giedd, 2015). In poor circumstances, this also means, life strikes us sharply when we are least prepared. If you're above 35, try to recall a few of your teen experiences and a lot of this will make sense.

Part of this story is also contingent on how our emotions are regulated during this time in the background of a transitioning marginalized identity from childhood to adulthood, and only an imagination of an ideal future, if things go our way, wrapped in fluctuating anxiety. Emotion regulation doesn't become intact in adults until the early 20s (Park and colleagues, 2021; for a more nuanced updated description of teen emotion regulation, see Gross, 2015).

In normal language, this is a time of discoveries and disasters, emotionally speaking.

For a teenage mind, the management of emotions is not as sophisticated, has stronger implications for the sense of self rather than the bigger context. Consequently, many negative experiences, a lot of which are also new experiences are seen as less open to change. A typically distressed teenager basically feels like a horse with blinders on, strong and mighty without knowing the exact difference between a good decision and an impulse.

When emotions linger without much understanding of the above, dichotomous thinking is bound to become prevalent (e.g., now or never, life or death, winner or loser, happy or sad), made worse by the fact of not having part of the life choices in your own hands. Yes, now you're probably recalling the time when you thought (adolescently) why not getting someone or something in particular will end your life forever. Of course, later as adults, we realize otherwise, and live to see another happy day.

The other commonly shared theme during this life phase is relatively less experience with time-dependent changes, particularly in the domain of achievement. For example, grit and perseverance cannot be as appreciated in the short run (Duckworth and colleagues, 2007). The nature of most of our pursuits is extrinsically guided as a child (e.g., succeeding at school, following social norms outside and at home) and greater choices of beginning our own long-term personally understood goals tends to become better possible by late teens.

For some of the above reasons, the adolescent mind is not able to see the fleeting nature of most problems, the strength ingrained in their choices to modify situations, the power of reappraisals, foreseeability of other options, and knowing what they consider the universe is only their high school corridor. As teenagers, most of us have had those two years when we assumed life will remain this way for eternity, sometimes for the better, other times, not so much. A change in contexts bringing life shifts and new lives crossing paths changing our emotional and moral route is something we are able to see clearly only after our 20s are over.

Therefore, a good practice as a slightly older younger person near a teen is to remind them of some of these natural limitations, hopefully dotted by some personal stories and revelations of your own. When they'll see how someone else like them has taken various kinds of deep dives in the river crossing from adolescent to adulthood, and remained alive, they'll know one thing for sure — nothing in life is supposed to make us stand or fall forever.

References

Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087.

Giedd, J. N. (2015). The amazing teen brain. Scientific American, 312(6), 32-37.

Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1-26.

Park, C. L., Williams, M. K., Hernandez, P. R., Agocha, V. B., Lee, S. Y., Carney, L. M., &

Loomis, D. (2020). Development of emotion regulation across the first two years of college. Journal of Adolescence, 84, 230–242.