little miss ray of sunshine

The endless scrolling nightmare that defines the modern adult’s leisure time is both mesmerizing and heartbreaking. What once was space for hobbies, craft, or spirited conversation has been consumed by glowing screens and ceaseless feeds. We are losing not only our passion to create but also our collective ability to dwell in stillness and depth. This isn’t simply a matter of individual willpower, it’s the result of overlapping forces: capitalism’s relentless appetite, the engineered dopamine surges of social media platforms, and a growing undercurrent of chronic, worldwide depression. Within my own lifetime, from my college days in the early 2010s to now, the cultural shift is staggering. Where once hours were spent doing, making, or in screenless conversation, they are now devoured by digital voids, each swipe promising novelty but delivering numbness.

The blurring of fiction and reality has only intensified with the rise of AI and the pervasive editability of everything we see. Instagram models present “ideal” bodies that are, more often than not, composites of filters, photo-editing software, and surgical intervention. The lens offers perfection; the knife enforces it. These hyper-curated images warp our sense of what is real and what is attainable, setting impossible standards that shape both self-image and cultural aspiration. For young people growing up entirely within these mediated spaces, the distinction between authentic and fabricated is vanishing. They are being raised not in neighborhoods or communities, but in aesthetic ecosystems optimized for engagement rather than truth.

The consequences are particularly stark for young girls, who are caught in the crossfire between body positivity slogans and the quiet normalization of cosmetic alteration. How can a child love the nose she inherited when her mother has already paid to change hers? How can teenagers resist consumerist pressures when every influencer insists that beauty, wellness, and self-worth are products to be purchased; Botox at twenty-five “for prevention,” luxury skincare at thirteen, endless powders and supplements promising perfection? Perfection that disappears when the product is no longer consumed. When does this strive for "perfection" end? Fitness culture, once grounded in health, has become an aesthetic performance, and the home has turned into a marketplace where children learn to curate rather than inhabit their bodies. Beneath it all lies a familiar capitalist rhythm: consume, compare, and consume again.

Meanwhile, the art of conversation and contemplation is withering. Our attention is scattered across fragments: a funny video, a political rant, a heartbreaking confession—all within minutes, leaving our nervous systems in perpetual whiplash. The spaces once reserved for philosophy, theology, art, or simply imagining, are now occupied by aesthetics and algorithms. Even resistance often takes place within the same platforms it critiques, fueling the very machine it hopes to dismantle. The cultural commons have become a monetized stage where even dissent is a form of content.

Perhaps the solution begins with something deceptively simple: turning it off. Imagine twenty-four hours without the feeds, simply existing without documenting. Perhaps if enough households reclaim that quiet, the collective tide might shift. History tells us that civilizations often reach a cultural nadir before renewal. Maybe we are at that precipice now (speaking specifically to America). If we can teach the next generations, by modeling this unplugged counterculture, to look away from the knife and lens long enough to rediscover reality, conceivably we can build a future that values substance over spectacle. One can only hope.

This is not to say that social media cannot be used to connect and provide a community space for creativity (i.e. tumblr, Substack); however, the scales of reality versus online engagement seem significantly unbalanced. Quiet possibly, this is me also simply expressing a death of creativity in my own life, that now that I'm aware of the void, am working to engage with the pre-doomscroll version of myself. Still, I worry for the youngest of us and the damage of existing chronically online.