The other day my little sister turned nine. Since then she’s been zooming around on her new hoverboard and playing all the games she got for her Nintendo Switch. She’s had a phone for about a year now and she’s been streaming videos on YouTube since before I can remember. She’s surrounded by all of this technology but I can’t help but wonder whether or not she would be better without some of it.

About half a year ago she started watching videos of TikTok compilations on YouTube (because my mom wouldn’t let her get the app). I’ll give her credit for her savviness, as neither my mom or my stepdad have any idea of the many ways she knows how to maneuver around their judgment, but it concerns me. She’s not at the age where search histories should be cleared or secrets about those sort of things should be kept. 

She’s at the age when she should be young and carefree and largely unaware of the wreckage of the world. When I was her age I was still running around barefoot outside playing tag and hide and seek. I was still making friendship bracelets with Rainbow Loom and building fortresses with Lego Friends and creating spa days with Orbeez. I wasn’t sitting in front of a screen all day. 

My sister (and I assume most other kids her age) is a slave to it. Her face is pressed up against one screen or another for the majority of the day. Her eyes seeing God knows what and the rest of her having to face problems I didn’t even encounter until the rise of social media in about sixth grade. She, a third grader, already has insecurities about the way she looks and the things she has as a result of all the endless stream of beautiful, rich (and might I add older) people. 

The target audience of a startling percentage of YouTubers and TikTokers is clearly young kids.  Just last year YouTube was fined $170 million for this reason and advised by the FTC that to anyone making kid aimed content, they needed to brush up on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) because they are in violation of it. 

Whether kids like my sister are being suckled young for their market value or for their watch power, it’s creating a generation that I fear will never know face to face life like you or I have. Just since I was a kid so many things have changed and even with many of them being good, there is obvious harm in living life vicariously through the inanimate people you see on a screen. 

This goes for all of us. When do you find yourself reaching for your phone or turning on your TV? I do it usually out of boredom or dissatisfaction with my own somewhat mundane life and as I scroll through someone else’s feed or watch someone else’s interpretation of a Hollywood grade life, it’s like I momentarily get a piece of it. But when my movie ends or my phone dies I’m left with nothing of that fantasy but the unfortunate knowledge that it exists somewhere, and that’s not in my life. 

The momentary satisfaction of these things holds me in suspension yet immediately after they end I feel the drop that represents the gap between my life and my expectations for my life. And even though the drop lasts much longer than that short period of suspension, I seek the experience over and over again, hoping to somehow erase the void all together by prolonging my use of what puts me there. This is the root of all addiction and why many people find themselves trying to fight against gravity. It never works, though, and as the old adage goes, you always have to come down eventually. So remember, you can be addicted to your phone just as much as you can be addicted to anything else.