Online Adolescence
The way a lot of people grow up these days
I have this notion of how people grow up now, and it’s mostly online. They have to be online to do their schoolwork, anyway - by the time they’re twelve or thirteen, they are expected to have full unrestricted access to the internet.
Up till this point, it has become unusual for most children to have spent much time playing outside. It’s dangerous out there, and most of them don’t live anywhere that there’s anything to do. I could be all nostalgic and gripey here about how we nailed a hoop to the side of a corner house and played basketball in the street with a soccer ball, which is really hard to dribble, but that’s not helpful. There’s some value in saying “children shouldn’t be expected to go out into an urban hellscape and find entertainment.”
I’m not sure it’s been improved by handing them a phone and letting them doomscroll TikTok or YouTube shorts all day. But that’s what we’ve done, and it means kids around ten and eleven years old are lying about their age to get on social media like the big kids. Because younger children want to be older children, and older children want to be adults, and adults want to climb into a hole and die. That’s how it’s always been.
One of the things that goes along with getting older is finding your people. When you’re a little kid, you don’t have a lot of opinions, except about things like broccoli and root beer. Most of the other kids agree that broccoli is yucky and root beer is delicious, so you have this common ground, and that’s enough to base a friendship on.
As you get older, you start to have more specific opinions. You start to like things not everyone likes, and to dislike things not everyone dislikes. Maybe you really like this television show nobody watches, like The Pink Opaque. Or maybe you think Abba is a terrible band and all their songs are crap. (I know, I know, everyone likes Abba. This is a thought experiment.) Where are you going to find people who like what you like, but also dislike what you dislike?
I mean, in my day, you were just screwed. You had to pick your friend group from the people around you. The people in your class, the people in your neighbourhood, the people who were physically close to you. Although even that was getting tough in my day, with more and more kids riding the school bus and different local kids going to different area schools.
On my street alone, when I was about nine or ten, there were four different schools kids went to: the normal public school, the private Catholic school, the private Jewish school, and the “special” school which was simultaneously for both the developmentally disabled and the gifted program in a positively stunning display of adults Not Understanding Literally Any Fucking Thing.
The modern kid has the internet, and can freely self-select into whatever group they like. Thing is, they mostly self-select into not liking something, because that is easier. If you have ten things and everybody likes one of them but doesn’t like half of the rest, for every one person that likes a given thing there are five who don’t like it. The group of “people who hate thing four” is five times bigger than the group of “people who like thing seven,” and besides “people who like thing seven” are constantly harassed by “people who hate thing seven” which is also five times bigger than them.
Presumably, as they get older, they will tire of hating shit and cluster into a community that likes something. They will start to value the quality of their community, rather than the quantity of its members. And they’ll make their way into a community that likes things instead of a community that hates things.
What I think we’re seeing more and more of is people who are afraid of leaving the community they’ve found. Even though they don’t really like that community anymore, or want to be in it, they’re unwilling to leave and go somewhere else.
It doesn’t help that we won’t forgive past indiscretions anymore; if you said something shitty about trans women or Palestinians last month, knowing even when you said it that it was a nasty awful thing to say, but that was your “tribe” and you had to express this hateful rhetoric to stay in the tribe… you can’t just shake your head and walk away and say “I’m not doing that anymore.”
Even if you delete it, even if you create a new account, someone somewhere has saved screenshots of your past bullshit and can trace the chain of when you dropped the old account and started the new one. They will catch you. They will attach your old tweets to your new account. They will call your boss and tell your mom.
I have mixed feelings about that. It was, I think, good for society when you knew people their whole lives and saw them embarrass themselves and do dumb shit. At the very least, you knew your dumb shit wasn’t the only dumb shit.
But it was mutual. The number of people who never did dumb shit was small. Tiny, even. The best and coolest and smartest people still had some dumb shit following them around. And what we have now is people who do dumb shit, that are immediately called out and spotlighted for their dumb shit by complete strangers who have almost certainly done some dumb shit of their own, but nobody in the immediate vicinity remembers it.
When my old friend Tom calls someone out for their parasocial attachment to the latest seasonal anime chick, I can call him out for literally being in tears when he saw Star Trek Generations and the Enterprise crashed. You can’t lose your shit over "your” ship, then point and laugh at someone over “their” waifu.
But if I’m not there, and neither is my ex-wife who totally saw it too, nobody is going to call him out on that. He would just talk shit about someone without any check or balance on that attitude. Not that he would, Tom is awesome and a super nice guy. But he could get away with it, if nobody there has known him his whole life.
And that’s our world now. We’re not surrounded by people we’ve known our whole life. We’re surrounded by strangers. We don’t know our neighbours. We don’t know our colleagues. We don’t know the people who work at the places we shop.
You’re supposed to become an adult with a group of people who see you do dumb shit, then continue hanging out with those adults, and if you talk shit at a teenager they can remind you that you were once a teenager yourself and remember when you did that exact same thing, or something very like it?
Instead, we become adults and run away, so we can talk shit and tell lies and nobody can call us on it. I don’t think this is an improvement.