We saw two murders last week. It was inescapable for those of us online. The unprovoked stabbing attack on 23-year-old Ukranian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the shooting on a Utah college campus of right-wing personality Charlie Kirk came across our screens unannounced. You can’t unsee the confused despair on the face of the young woman in her last moments; the blood gushing from the Kirk’s neck as an audience looked on. I did not want to see that. I’m sure you did not want to see that. And I can’t help but think of the youth who watched these public executions on their phones.
According to the Pew Research Center, nearly all teens today (95 percent) report having access to a smartphone, up from 73 percent in 2014-15. And 96 percent of U.S. teens say they use the internet every day. Not only are these youth exposed to potential harmful content on a regular basis, horrifying and numbing them perhaps in equal parts; they’ve lived through some of the most chaotic and bleak times in recent history. These children grew up during the Covid pandemic — lockdowns, remote schooling, little-to-no socialization for over a year — and alongside the ever-changing technology landscape that keeps them glued to one device or another, almost entirely disconnecting them from nature and societal norms. Besides the fact that our minds were not made to evolve to such rapid change so quickly — an unendening onslaught of information and notifications and apps and scroll, scroll, scroll — they’ve not experienced the now-lost essence of humanity. Before we celebrated murder. When we took care of — or at least cared about — our communities and neighbors. When we didn’t stare at screens all day. When we went outside.
These damn phones, and the proliferation of AI, have also created a phenomenon called “brain rot.” Of course this somehow was dubbed The Oxford University Press 2024 Word of the Year — sigh — and means, essentially, that we’re all getting dumber from overconsuming useless online content. You either have brain rot or are viewing brain rot material. (But we love those cute kitten videos! Watching someone clean a rug is so satisfying! Did you see that guy give a stranger $100 — totally not staged!)
It’s worth mentioning, too, that according to the Nation’s Report Card from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released this month, only 35 percent of U.S. 12th graders met the proficient level in reading. The most recent Memphis-Shelby County Schools data showed the reading proficiency for 12th graders here was 17 percent in 2022-2023. We’ve shown them murder, police violence, political unrest, war — an increasingly dysfunctional world on view at their fingertips — and on top of that, we’re not even sending them into adulthood fully literate.
A recent Atlantic story: “College Students Have Already Changed Forever: Members of the class of 2026 have had access to AI since they were freshmen. Almost all of them are using it to do their work.” Another from Economist: “The middle-aged are no longer the most miserable —Youth used to be cheerful. No more.”
Somehow this all fits together. We have poorly educated youth who have never been set up for success. It’s nearly impossible for those venturing off to college to do it on their own. Education, food, and housing costs have skyrocketed beyond feasibility. Jobs aren’t paying, or even hiring in some cases. Wages are so low and cost of living is so high, it’s becoming impossible to live a balanced life. And so, here are our future leaders, damaged from isolation and being constantly online, disheartened by our heartless and hard society. A mostly miserable generation, with anxiety and depression among youth higher than it’s ever been.
Maybe one of these kids’ Hispanic classmates hasn’t been to school in a while. Maybe they heard their parents praising the assassination of a person who believed differently than them. Maybe they’ve seen their gay uncle endure hate. Maybe they’re not taught the difference between right and wrong. Maybe they haven’t the first clue how to make it in this broken world. Maybe they are afraid.
And soon they’ll see the troops come into our city, armed guards and military tanks on our streets — for good or bad — another historic event they didn’t ask for, another potential upending. The kids are not alright, it seems. And I ache for the “normal” lives that have been stripped from them.