It was an unusually warm evening in January. The fairy lights glimmered above, and the pleasant hum of chatter enveloped us. As we waited for our food, we tried the complimentary dips at the center of our table. Our conversation, lively at first, waned, and I quickly realized I was the only one talking. So I looked up. Oh. The blue, artificial glow had taken hold of her face – my friend was on her phone.
Preserving small talk at a dinner table is always a challenge. But the common tendency for teenagers to scroll through social media in front of their friend sends them a disheartening message: You’re boring! Don’t fret – this message isn’t always true. Of course, there’s something wrong with abandoning a conversation for more screen time, but the problem doesn’t lie in small-talk skills. The bigger concern comes from the addictive power a phone wields over people’s day-to-day lives.
Social media companies have ingrained a message into teen users: If they don’t check their phones enough, they will miss out on important content. For example, if a teen doesn’t check their phone for a day, they might not realize it was Emma’s birthday, or that Hannah started dating Connor. While this information might seem insignificant to many adults, to teens, not keeping up with the latest high school news can seriously affect their popularity. In fact, this problem is so common among teenagers using social media that an acronym has been created to express their concern: Fear of Missing Out, better known as FOMO. FOMO builds a permanent anxiety in teens, incentivizing them to constantly check their phones.
An Instagram user myself, I, too, have experienced this unwavering FOMO anxiety. I first joined Instagram in seventh grade as a way to connect with my peers during the pandemic. Isolated from everyone, social media was the only way for me to stay updated on my friends’ lives. Once I came back to school, however, I realized that social media provided a whole other set of information on my peers’ lives that they didn’t share in public.
Social media wasn’t merely a way to replace my source of information when COVID hit. It was a whole other community that supplemented reality. I quickly understood that social media was indispensable – it established popularity, friend groups, and students’ personalities among the middle school community. I developed FOMO anxiety once I realized how important scrolling was to survive the brutal environment of a middle schooler’s social life.
Having used Instagram for five years, I have come to realize that a paradox lies at the heart of it all: While social media claims to bring communities together, in reality, it tends to isolate teenagers more than anything else. Instagram and TikTok’s addictive powers lead most of my friends to spend at least four hours a day on their phones. These four hours of social media use are spent alone, isolated from the world around them. Instead of spending time outside with their friends, teenagers become increasingly isolated from reality, preferring to stay in their virtual bubble. This virtual, steady, manicured stream of content becomes the only world teenagers feel comfortable in, dampening the friendships they’ve built in the real world. Although the original purpose of using these apps is to connect with friends, at the end of the day, all that social media does is make teens lonely.
I have seen the impact of social media on my high school community’s mental health. We retreat to our phones instead of biting the bullet to deal with an uncomfortable moment. For example, when I go to parties where I don’t know anyone in the room, I will usually take my phone out as a way to remove myself from the potentially awkward moment. I also repel others from interacting with me.
Because social media offers a great escape from reality at any time, it has led teenagers like me to become less outgoing and social. We’re no longer forced to deal with awkward social moments – we can surrender ourselves by using our phones. This makes us inept at befriending strangers, and we grow more disconnected from the physical world as we retreat into our virtual shell. Thus, by using social media, teenagers become more comfortable in the virtual world than in the real one. Apps that were originally meant to bring people together online have only caused teens to isolate themselves physically.
So, how is it possible to have an online presence while preserving relationships in the physical world? I’ve asked myself this question many times. I have tried to limit my screen time on Instagram to only 10 minutes a day. While I can sustain this time limit for a week pretty successfully, as time goes on, the urge to spend more time on Instagram is too powerful, and my self-control deteriorates. Another solution I have tried is deleting social media entirely. While this helps me stay present in the world around me, it has also led to a couple of awkward interactions with my peers, asking me why I didn’t post anything on Instagram to celebrate their birthday.
Instead of restricting my use of social media, or deleting these apps entirely, a better solution exists – using social media purposefully.
Rather than torturing myself to stop using social media, I have tried to find ways to embrace its benefits while minimizing its harms. The original purpose of social media – connecting with peers – is what guided me to reset my attitude towards Instagram. Instead of following 600 people, most of whom I don’t really know or care about, I created a new account where I only followed my close friends. Sure, maybe I wouldn’t have 700 followers, but it would help me minimize the amount of content I would look through in a day on Instagram. I can avoid sifting through distant peers’ content and only focus on people I care about. I can also post things more comfortably, knowing exactly who my audience is. This strategy helps me stay updated in the virtual world while still maintaining relationships with my real friends.
The purpose of social media is to bring people together. Let’s use it that way.
The Bamboo 
By Elodie Szlasa ’25
It was an unusually warm evening in January. The fairy lights glimmered above, and the pleasant hum of chatter enveloped us. As we waited for our food, we tried the complimentary dips at the center of our table. Our conversation, lively at first, waned, and I quickly realized I was the only one talking. So I looked up. Oh. The blue, artificial glow had taken hold of her face – my friend was on her phone.
Preserving small talk at a dinner table is always a challenge. But the common tendency for teenagers to scroll through social media in front of their friend sends them a disheartening message: You’re boring! Don’t fret – this message isn’t always true. Of course, there’s something wrong with abandoning a conversation for more screen time, but the problem doesn’t lie in small-talk skills. The bigger concern comes from the addictive power a phone wields over people’s day-to-day lives.
Social media companies have ingrained a message into teen users: If they don’t check their phones enough, they will miss out on important content. For example, if a teen doesn’t check their phone for a day, they might not realize it was Emma’s birthday, or that Hannah started dating Connor. While this information might seem insignificant to many adults, to teens, not keeping up with the latest high school news can seriously affect their popularity. In fact, this problem is so common among teenagers using social media that an acronym has been created to express their concern: Fear of Missing Out, better known as FOMO. FOMO builds a permanent anxiety in teens, incentivizing them to constantly check their phones.
An Instagram user myself, I, too, have experienced this unwavering FOMO anxiety. I first joined Instagram in seventh grade as a way to connect with my peers during the pandemic. Isolated from everyone, social media was the only way for me to stay updated on my friends’ lives. Once I came back to school, however, I realized that social media provided a whole other set of information on my peers’ lives that they didn’t share in public.
Social media wasn’t merely a way to replace my source of information when COVID hit. It was a whole other community that supplemented reality. I quickly understood that social media was indispensable – it established popularity, friend groups, and students’ personalities among the middle school community. I developed FOMO anxiety once I realized how important scrolling was to survive the brutal environment of a middle schooler’s social life.
Having used Instagram for five years, I have come to realize that a paradox lies at the heart of it all: While social media claims to bring communities together, in reality, it tends to isolate teenagers more than anything else. Instagram and TikTok’s addictive powers lead most of my friends to spend at least four hours a day on their phones. These four hours of social media use are spent alone, isolated from the world around them. Instead of spending time outside with their friends, teenagers become increasingly isolated from reality, preferring to stay in their virtual bubble. This virtual, steady, manicured stream of content becomes the only world teenagers feel comfortable in, dampening the friendships they’ve built in the real world. Although the original purpose of using these apps is to connect with friends, at the end of the day, all that social media does is make teens lonely.
I have seen the impact of social media on my high school community’s mental health. We retreat to our phones instead of biting the bullet to deal with an uncomfortable moment. For example, when I go to parties where I don’t know anyone in the room, I will usually take my phone out as a way to remove myself from the potentially awkward moment. I also repel others from interacting with me.
Because social media offers a great escape from reality at any time, it has led teenagers like me to become less outgoing and social. We’re no longer forced to deal with awkward social moments – we can surrender ourselves by using our phones. This makes us inept at befriending strangers, and we grow more disconnected from the physical world as we retreat into our virtual shell. Thus, by using social media, teenagers become more comfortable in the virtual world than in the real one. Apps that were originally meant to bring people together online have only caused teens to isolate themselves physically.
So, how is it possible to have an online presence while preserving relationships in the physical world? I’ve asked myself this question many times. I have tried to limit my screen time on Instagram to only 10 minutes a day. While I can sustain this time limit for a week pretty successfully, as time goes on, the urge to spend more time on Instagram is too powerful, and my self-control deteriorates. Another solution I have tried is deleting social media entirely. While this helps me stay present in the world around me, it has also led to a couple of awkward interactions with my peers, asking me why I didn’t post anything on Instagram to celebrate their birthday.
Instead of restricting my use of social media, or deleting these apps entirely, a better solution exists – using social media purposefully.
Rather than torturing myself to stop using social media, I have tried to find ways to embrace its benefits while minimizing its harms. The original purpose of social media – connecting with peers – is what guided me to reset my attitude towards Instagram. Instead of following 600 people, most of whom I don’t really know or care about, I created a new account where I only followed my close friends. Sure, maybe I wouldn’t have 700 followers, but it would help me minimize the amount of content I would look through in a day on Instagram. I can avoid sifting through distant peers’ content and only focus on people I care about. I can also post things more comfortably, knowing exactly who my audience is. This strategy helps me stay updated in the virtual world while still maintaining relationships with my real friends.
The purpose of social media is to bring people together. Let’s use it that way.
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