Imagine you’re 13 years old and decide to dye your hair green. It’s already short, but you went on and changed the color. I have the impression that many people these days would not find it strange, but instead pretty normal, to input a little bit of adventure into their lives like that — but what that represents in terms of how people are now processing what happens to them and will likely happen in the future is a question that demands more nuanced and reliable answers.

It’s no secret that teenagers go through a spike in creativity, emotionality, and concentration of their opinions. There are somewhat recent studies pointing out that “confident optimism” is a key factor in determining whether or not an adolescent will have problems such as substance abuse as an adult if it’s absent in their youth, as shown in an abstract of Comprehensive Psychiatry; but I do wonder how updated the mental health professionals are in relation to newer issues that have come to the fore in the evolution of relationships, the history of affection, the rise of extremism and the politics of minority protections, as well as basic conversational tools to provide for respectful, non-violent dialogue to occur as a standard — and as for the rest, efforts can be made to curb whatever presents itself as an opposite, like a version of mysogyny, a warped perception of online presence and interaction with different generations, and notably, I would add, the aspect of dating app fatigue and its history, paired with the HR practices and AI tools which make the professional world so much of a puzzle for the less informed and maybe for the unemployed, who are not able to see what’s really at stake when they’re busy catching up on YouTube news or trivia.

It’s impossible not to mention the recent events surrounding social media and teens: the Brazilian law that updates the Child and Adolescent Statute, creating its digital version; the anti-misogyny law proposed in Congress; and of course, the penalties for Big Tech for failure to protect teen mental health.

But in an attempt to give you a better grasp of today’s reality, I attempted to search for a good reference in the sense of “speed of news” (actually more interested in the speed of communications, since my current study focus is private messaging culture), and found someone who might not have been heard, since the PhD dissertation only got to the self-publishing links of Academia.edu (specifically, this one).

I can only wonder if we’re going to talk about the punk scene on TikTok, analyze the “Why You So Obsessed With Me” trend, or turn our focus to No Kings Protests; but every time I try to know what’s happening, everyone says it’s war.

Maybe with a utopia in my heart, I refuse to believe it. I know that this is what they’re doing; I just don’t believe that people give a damn about what the government is doing, generally speaking, and just want to be happy. And my goal with media literacy is not to educate people on geopolitics at the age of 13 — when you should be dying your hair — but instead, to play and feel good with the things you’ve chosen to focus on, which should never, under any circumstance, involve self-harm or hate speech, including hacking and leaking practices. Whether or not that proves I’m skeptical and misinformed, time will tell. The examples multiply, and notably, friendships are lost and the subject changes.

On my first blog ever, the title was “where do we go?” — referencing the band Guns ‘N Roses. For sure, we’ve been projected as if we were table pool balls into the black holes of eternal damnation, at least as a construct of moral panic, but sometimes, we’ve been through hardships that younger people not only fail to understand, but ignore in full intellectual capacity, in order to argue that they’ve found out the real problem. The question needs to be asked again: “what about now? where are we going?” — and like someone who doesn’t know what sexting is, taking offense at everything that is said, or worse, expecting more violent discourse to show compatibility with the intensity of their own enclosured, complicated and undiagnosed set of emotions, the one thing we can say is that predictions are worth paying attention to — and maybe, just maybe, wanting to go viral was the biggest mistake we’ve ever made.