The MOST ADDICTIVE social media app ever made.

Okay, look at my new tech talk dance. Everybody’s doing it on the screen, or better yet, look at my new fashionable clothes and my perfect life. I’m out here visiting at the Grand Canyon. I take helicopter rides, and you should be more like me. Or, I better tell you about this terrible thing that the government is keeping secret from us. In fact, this is an alien base. It’s all the time, blah, blah, blah, blah. You see the content, that’s the social media at its worst, and it’s a normal self. And this video, once again, is gonna be about social media, because this article that we’re seeing, this published report from the CDC about the terrible degradation in young people’s mental well-being, is just something we can’t ignore. And so, this video’s got a little bit of a stark warning, and maybe a few ideas about how to deal with it. Stay tuned, coming right up.

As International public speakers and best-selling authors, stay tuned to hear Paul Krismer and Jackson teach the practical science behind happiness and success. So, social media is this crazy thing that we’re all consuming, me included, as guilty as the next one. My guilty vice is YouTube cable news. You’ve heard it before, but our kids are using it in a fashion that’s just unprecedented in our lifetimes. And they also, they literally grew up with devices in their hands. Most 11-year-old kids have some kind of social media conveying device, and the sheer volume of time that they’re spending on these devices is remarkable. The average teen is spending 26 hours on Tick Tock. You may not even know what Tick Tock is, but it is the most addictive social media platform that the world has yet seen, with just rapid content fired at people all day long, such that kids have this adrenaline rush, like cocaine addicts, scrolling and scrolling over and over again to get their new fix of whatever surprising things going to show up on their feed next.

And this sheer quantity of time isn’t the only thing that’s bad. It’s obviously the degradation in their mental well-being that’s the serious impact. We’re seeing suicidal ideation go up so high, and just a general malaise, people feeling unwell that they’re constantly feeling sad and depressed. And the statistics you’re seeing up on the screen are things we have to take seriously. We’re creating a generation of about to be adults in the real world, that are starting lives as unhappy as we’ve ever seen life start before. And then, remember this too, that the advertising that’s sold to these kids or being provided to these kids, in and of itself, is insidious. It’s telling them to buy diet pills and new fashions and all kind of things to make up for the deficits in their perceived well-being. We make them feel bad so we can sell them stuff, and that’s wrong.

But it’s their attention that is the product. That’s why Tick Tock and other social media platforms exist, is it’s the kid’s mind, their awareness, their attention that’s being sold to advertisers. And that is also just plain old wrong and ethically challenging. And then finally, remember how they get them to be driving their daily lives, hours and hours going by to watch this content. It’s because we have to put stuff that’s incredibly provocative in front of them, scantily clad people, terrible conspiracy theories, misinformation, all these kinds of ideas that in and of themselves can be really detrimental to our society. Such that we question what truth is, we question the relevance of democracy in 2023. All these things are part and parcel of this social media disease. And as I say, I’m as guilty as the next person for being a consumer, but we all have to try to do what we can.

And maybe a special message to parents for a moment here, that we need to govern the way our children use these social media tools. And some things that are clear-cut, they should never have them in their bedrooms at night. So all social media devices, put away before they get to the room, and probably put away a half hour before they go to bed, because the blue light and the content is bad for their minds before they go to sleep. And maybe, you know, frequent holidays from this stuff. That when you go on a family vacation to the Grand Canyon or someplace like that, social media devices, your little phones and your iPads and all that stuff, stay at home. And if you can’t quite get that done, then there’s sharp time limits. When I was raising my kids, it was 20 minutes a day until they became teenagers, and then we had to give in a bunch, but we were still trying to have limited time per day that the kids were on their devices.

And hey, I said all those things are good ideas for your teens, they’re excellent ideas for us too. I hope this content is useful. It is unusual for me to be talking about the things that take away from our happiness. I usually like to focus on the other, but this concern is just so profound, I think we need to be talking about it. Thanks for watching. If you like this kind of content, click the like button, share with your friends and family, maybe your HR director, and we’ll see you next week. Bye for now.