Throughout history, each generation has had significant events that affect them individually through their formative years. These events cause each generation to view the word differently giving each new generation a different viewpoint on the table. Generation Z, our high school students, refer to the generation of Americans who were born from 1997 to 2012. Our generation has grown up in the social media age making us, in my opinion, the worst generation thus far.

Over the past 15 years, social media has completely evolved from keeping in touch with others to now flaunting what we have for attention. We now fall into a constant comparison that leads to changing ourselves completely in order to fit in and become what others want us to be. Social media now only rewards narcissists with the goal to get people to pay attention to you, creating a physiological disorder for the whole generation. We now prioritize social popularity over seeing the beauty of the world, making us miserable and stuck in a constant cycle of endless brain food we will forget about instantly. 

Tiktok is an app that now has most of our population hooked and ramped up drastically during the pandemic. It has become the best way to distract ourselves from the world around us by only overexposing ourselves to everything we don’t have. Tiktok is to blame for the deteriorating attention spans of our generation and the dissociation we face by trapping us in a never-ending algorithm. Of course, Tiktok keeps us connected together and informed on social matters and political events but there is a line between being informed and overstimulating ourselves to the point of losing touch with reality and we have crossed it. 

Social media has spread positive ideologies in the past year such as creative trends and updates on the world around us, but to counteract this we have begun to cancel culture, corruption, and normalization of unhealthy habits.  We have become entitled to a god complex where we cannot stand to see other people more successful than we are, and when someone gains something we don’t have we attempt to grasp onto anything that could expose them. This is very prominent with celebrities who experience canceled culture, but happens in everyday scenarios as well. The corruption of our generation has again come from social media where kids are exposed to things they are not ready for and cannot process in the right way resulting in additional mental health problems and confusion.

 Finally the major unhealthy habit our generation faces is our excessive screen time because it has become the root of countless other bad habits we aren’t even aware of. 

 The pandemic may not have seemed like it changed a lot for many but for some, the year of lockdown stunted our generation’s growth by limiting social interaction and increasing social media usage. A great number of people have reported amplified mental health problems that have become very serious due to isolation. This has led to less time in direct face-to-face contact with other people which is something our generation was already struggling with. We have now fallen victim, something our generation is best at, to the effects of quarantine and become today very sensitive and selfish to the world around us.

Next time you are almost influenced by your for-you page to swallow a tide pod, fall victim to becoming a woke narcissist, or change your whole perception of an influencer you love because of a mistake they made years ago, start comparing yourself to unrealistic beauty standards on TikTok, reflect on your mental state and stay grounded to your morals that should not change due to the influence of our generation’s social media pandemic.