Half of Gen Z Regrets Growing Up with the Internet
- Kevin Lankes
- Jul 27
- 6 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/BUbym8O_LBU
It used to be taken for granted that the internet was just unquestionably the height of human technological achievement. All of us were really excited about it for about a billion different reasons, and some of them I’m not going to say out loud because my mom watches these videos. It’s the cat videos, mom. That’s all I’m looking at when I’m alone in the dark with all the lights off.
A lot of the early enthusiasm for the Internet has disappeared. Depending on who you ask now, though, it might even be totally gone. Right about half of all people aged 16 to 21 now believe they’d be better off without it. According to a new survey conducted in the UK, a full 47% of the 1,300 people surveyed said that they’d rather have lived out their youth without the Internet around.
I’m Kevin Lankes, and we’re going to find out if the Internet was really a mistake.
The British Standards Institution, or BSI, published the survey findings as part of their annual report from the International Organization for Standardization’s Committee on Consumer Policy. This is a big nerdy meeting that happens every year for the organization that works to develop standards that are used by the whole world. These can be anything from standards for cleaning medical devices to testing methods for electromagnetic radiation put off by vehicles in motion. The ISO came about in 1947, and it’s the reason why freight shipping containers are pretty much all the same size and shape.
The new data came out a few months ago, and it digs deeper with more specific findings. For instance, 68% of those surveyed said they feel worse after scrolling through their social media feeds. The fact that social media makes you feel bad isn’t new information, but the data on younger people who’ve grown up with it feeling that way is good to have. You’d expect that since it’s just what they’re used to, that they’d be able to tolerate it better. Turns out that is definitively not the case. And 50% of respondents said they’d support a time limit for social media use, physically forcing them out of their feeds in a kind of curfew. Gallup did a study in 2023 that found U.S. teenagers spend 4.8 hours on social media per day on average. So picture yourself taking the morning off work and then going into work, except your work is social media, and working away the rest of the day until you come home for dinner, and that’s the amount of time younger people are spending on their feeds all day. The time increases for 17-year-olds, a full 62% of them spend 5.8 hours on social media per day. Other day reported by exploding topics, a semrush vertical, goes all the way up to 7 hours and 22 minutes.
The amount of time is really important to note, because just by itself, it comes with risk factors. Data from 6,500 participants in 2013 suggests that U.S. teens who spend three hours a day on social media have a higher risk of experiencing mental health challenges. A bigger study from the UK that tracked 12,000 teens found that if they used social media more than three times a day, they’d be more likely to have negative psychological outcomes.
The issue is so pervasive and troubling that in 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on the subject for the American public. It’s full of citations and research and you can check that out in the digeridoodles below, along with all the sources for this episode.
And while you’re down there, do some serious thinking about liking this video and subscribing to the channel. Because, if you have to use social media, you might as well stick with the parts that do some effing good, and that have extremely handsome people behind them.
It’s not just younger people who are in trouble. Everyone experiences the negativity that comes with the Internet in some way. Yeah, social media is designed to be addictive and designed to suck you in and not let go, and force you to spend hours at a time just looking at things you probably don’t care about and won’t remember three seconds later. But that can happen on the larger Internet, too. I regularly go down information rabbit holes and look up from my screen hours later and wonder where the sun has gone. Everything is available to everyone at all times. And if we don’t have guardrails in our lives to keep it at bay, the Internet can do a lot of damage.
Especially now that over half of all Internet traffic is artificial. Bot traffic and AI slop now make up over 50% of everything floating around in there. I did a video on that a while back and you can get the details there, but the overall conclusion is that it’s not a great situation. We really can’t tell what’s real half the time, and that’s not necessarily an exaggeration.
Sometimes, younger people are caught in traps set up by others in order to radicalize them. This is easier with funny memes, and now even easier with AI. Conspiracy theories, also way easier with AI. Can you imagine how big QAnon bullshit could have gotten if AI was as good then as it is now? It would have been actual chaos.
As the Mayo Clinic points out, some social media usage can be positive. The Internet isn’t all bad, not many things are. Younger people who don’t have a lot of connections in their regular lives can reach out and find friends online. And kids who are figuring out their identities can find groups of like-minded people for support. Or those who have certain medical conditions that people around them don’t understand. They can find healthy spaces to express themselves and learn things like emotional regulation and practice social interaction.
But we need to have limits. Limiting social media use for college kids to thirty minutes a day was found to reduce symptoms of depression in just three weeks. These effects are real, and changing them only means building protections into your lives.
The findings keep saying that the issue is nuanced and there are a lot of questions still. I think what it just won’t or can’t say is that this is really a case-by-case type of problem. Parents are going to have to do a lot of legwork here. Teachers and other authority figures who spend a lot of time with kids, too. You’re going to have to know what your kids are doing online, and you’re going to have to know your kids and know if they can handle it.
Look, kids have access to the whole world on the Internet today. I got an anime in middle school that my mom bought for me and when I watched that I was like, holy cow, mom probably should have stopped me from getting this. But she didn’t know anything about this thing. And what I’m saying is, the entire internet is that, just six bazillion times worse. This exact situation is potentially on every web page, every social media post. It’s up to us to be involved in the lives of the younger people around us. Our family, our friends, our community, we’re all resources for each other. You can’t lock kids away in a tower without internet, but you can make rational decisions based on their age and character, and the content that’s out there and popular. Pay attention to what the data says but know how to apply it to your individual circumstances.
That’s how we get out of this alive. Younger people are literally telling us that they need our help to use these tools. Or they need some kind of safety net that protects from the negative aspects of the Internet. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, or even what it should look like. What I do know is what the evidence shows, and it’s a problem that needs to be addressed. Nobody voted for me though, so it’s not going to be me who fixes it. Let’s encourage our representatives to tackle real human problems like this, and let’s encourage our 90-year-old politicians to get the hell out of office so we can elect younger people who understand things and who can capably work up real solutions to modern problems. Let’s do some f*cking good about the reasons why younger people wish the Internet was never invented.
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