In the 21st Century, the most cherished asset of any state is its youth. It is the youth of any country who play a vital role in bringing new ideas and reviving spirits that contribute to the continuity of the state, the development of new technologies, and the resilience of the economy. With the emergence of social media and the digital world, the youth of any state is in vulnerable conditions to survive. There is constant anxiety in youth and this crisis of anxiety is fostering a weak future for the survival of states. Youth’s vulnerability in an era of uncertainty means the inconsistency of a state’s survival.
There is a need to debate how the anxiety-driven generation is growing up. There are four parameters discussed by Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist, who discusses the Gen Z crisis of anxiety. Social deprivation, Sleep Deprivation, Attention Fragmentation, and Addiction all play a major role in cultivating emotionally less stable youth. Play-based childhoods are more likely to promote anxiety and depression than phone-based childhoods.
It was once a normal part of childhood to play in order to develop synaptic pruning, which is a critical process of synaptic pruning. There is a systematic decline in the effectiveness of neural transmissions, free play, and social learning which can be detrimental to developing mental resilience in the future. For example, during play-based childhood, children learn how to take risks and cooperate through unstructured and undirected play. Children are addicted to social media, photo filters, and a constant derailment of energy with the replacement of phone-based childhood. This phone-based childhood leads to decreased resilience, independence, and problem-solving mechanisms in adulthood. All these mechanisms contribute to evolving an anxious adulthood which in turn erodes the stamina and resilience to cope with the fast-paced changing real world.
Social media has presented a money-centred and entertainment-oriented social world that has set a precedent for glorifying materialism. Young people with minimal resources to fulfil the changing expectations of influence, power, and privilege in the culture of media celebrities feel unwanted anxiety. This unwanted anxiety from not acquiring as much as the social world reinforces their behaviours through digital platforms impacting their coping mechanisms to adjust themselves to changing circumstances around them. This overall impacts the performative economy and the creative minority of a country. When a society celebrates only entertainment psychology as the acceptable normal, then the creative minority of this country feels sidelined and starts to fade eventually. The creative minority of any country is the backbone to create new ideas, innovation, and sustainability through constant reinvention of the future.
Social media has become a new reality for Gen Z. It depends on likes, comments, and shares to give us the dopamine rush we all crave together. The dopamine rush is a basic human instinct. But social media manipulates and exploits human psychological vulnerabilities for more engagement. For example, social media is designed in such a way that we all feel the compulsion to check notifications. Sometimes our posts get a lot of likes, but sometimes they get nothing. The uncertainty of rewards constantly engages human beings to scroll and seek validation. This inconsistent nature of rewards is called intermittent-variable reinforcement. Social media makes children and adults addicted to the inconsistent nature of psychological rewards. All this deliberately exploits psychological weaknesses of humans to get more money and capital – digital capitalism.
If humans can control schools, hospitals, and institutions that they created in previous centuries, why can’t they regulate social media and the virtual world? If humans can control and regulate the physical world, they can regulate the virtual world too.
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