The Youthquake Has Become a Youth Sinkhole

When I was in graduate school, I worked for a few years as a research assistant on a project led, in part, by my advisor. My advisor didn't care for me, in fact spent the entirety of our six years working together mispronouncing my name or failing to show up for meetings he'd asked me to put on his calendar. But my advisor was—I imagine still is—a very respected expert in his field, one whose approval and status I thought I needed. At that time I was—though luckily no longer am—deeply insecure, so I kept trying to get him to like me, or at least care about my work. A fool's errand.

Despite this, the research project was a very interesting one, and working on it taught me a lot. We conducted a longitudinal ethnography about the development of legal consciousness in teens, or in less jargon-y terms, a research project that spanned about three years during which we went into local high schools to spend hours observing and to interview students and teachers about their experiences with the law, with rules, and with the world around them. I did my PhD at UC Irvine, which meant I spent time in high schools in a nearby Southern California community, one that covered a wide socioeconomic spectrum and that was predominantly white at one physical end but predominantly Hispanic at the other.

There's obviously a lot I could write about that experience, especially given current events and the current political climate. As important to me (and, I hope, to all of us) as that perspective might be, I want to focus for now on a slightly different aspect, one that connects with last week's newsletter and that sits very close to my heart: Talking to teenagers. Or rather, listening to them.

In 2007, which was two years into the research project, one of the cities we were working in became the first municipality in the country to train local police in immigration enforcement—officers were allowed to ask people for their status and papers in any situation, even a routine traffic stop. This all unfolded in the midst of the larger national attempts at immigration reform, and there were a lot of protests all around Southern California. The city walked this policy back pretty quickly, but it caused a lot of fear and distrust in the community. And of course, that meant a lot of kids and teenagers were affected.

I don't know how much time you've spent in a high school recently, but even if you're a parent, it's probably not that much, unless you're also a teacher. We spent a lot of time in those schools, luckily starting two years before all of these issues exploded so publicly. I say luckily for two reasons. Most importantly, it gave us time to build trust, and to remember the value of trust. We couldn't just walk in and start asking kids questions about rules, the law, authority figures, and especially their parents, particularly not if we needed to discuss sensitive issues like immigration status, which ended up being a big part of our conversations. Many kids didn't even know what their parents' status was, because they'd been afraid to ask or their parents had wanted to shield them from worry. Kids were terrified for their families and for themselves, and they wanted to talk to people they could trust, even just to share those fears and feelings. As my dad used to tell me when I was young, trust takes a long time to build and a short time to break, so we had to build and reinforce this trust over time, particularly as outsiders.

The other, somewhat sillier reason, it was good we spent a little time in schools before the shit really hit the fan was it gave me time to deal with the feelings of being back in a high school setting. This is embarrassing but walking in the first few or maybe 20 times reminded me of how awful it was to be a teenager, how deeply and desperately I longed (and failed) to be cool. I had to let that feeling settle, remind myself that not only was I in my 30s, I wasn't there to be cool or popular, or to fit in. I was there to learn.

As an adult, even an adult who was still weirdly worried about being cool and whether a bunch of high schoolers would like her, it can be easy to simultaneously under and overestimate teenagers. Honestly, teenagers are kind of terrifying, especially teen girls. They can be absolutely savage to one another, and to strangers, and I don't even mean the horror stories we see across social media and the news (more on that in a bit). But teenagers are also, you know, teenagers. They often care about stuff that, as an adult, seems incredibly stupid. They think they know everything and sometimes you're like, how can you know everything when you also think and say the dumbest stuff? Like where did you get these ideas? Oh right, from your friends and from the internet.

I recently asked one of my very good friends some advice about interacting with my favorite teenager because this friend has a teen son who's a few years older than my niece. We talk about teens not infrequently, and she's made me laugh more than once talking about reminding herself to take her son's interests or ideas seriously even when they seem goofy. They're important to him. And that's what matters.

This last time, she said the best explanation about teens is: "They need you so much, but they don’t want you." That made me think about the girls I sat with in 2007 in a small classroom, when they opened up to me and my fellow grad student and told us things they didn't even share with most of their teachers. They needed us, even if it took them a long time to be ok with that, and we had to prove to them we were safe and ok to need.

All of this makes me think, of course, about the way we design technology and social media, and the ways tech and internet have completely changed the lives and brains of teenagers. No one thought about respect or trust, or about listening and learning, until it was way, way too late. I feel confident saying this not just because of the work I did at Instagram, but because, as you may remember, I was an advice columnist for teenage boys from about 1998 or 1999 until 2001. As young and dumb as I myself was, that job taught me an enormous amount about teenage boys—both how much more they think about their testicles than you can possibly imagine, but also how much they need someone they can trust and ask for help, someone who will listen and respect them but who won't fill their head with bullshit or dangerous stuff. For 2 1/2 years I read thousands of emails asking for help, and by the end of it some of those emails were from moms begging me to answer their sons' questions because I was the only person their sons would listen to. And no matter how many years go by since I stopped writing it, guys will still track me down to thank me. As one of them said, "I didn't always agree with you or the advice you gave us, but I kept reading you anyway, because you always respected us and took us seriously."

Doing research at Instagram taught me just how savvy teens are. They may have some dumb ideas, but they also know when they're not being respected or taken seriously. That's why they reject so many ideas and products, and why companies like Instagram are often scrambling to catch up. (That's also why Add Yours was such a hit, but this isn't about me, as much as I'd like to make it so!) This is also why the darkest, worst corners have swallowed up so many teenagers. They're looking for a place to fit in, they're following their peers, and they want to do what everyone else is doing. They're trying to find answers for their most embarrassing or stupid-seeming questions, but no one takes them seriously, or they don't know who to trust.

Earlier this week I read a horrifying article from Australia, about gay and bisexual teen boys being lured into violent traps by other teen boys who have been radicalized by an IS terrorist group, the same one behind the Bondi Beach attacks. These boys meet on dating apps and then are taken to distant locations, where they're savagely beaten by other teen boys, who record and disseminate the videos. There are countless reports of teen boys being radicalized in other ways, through virulent misogynistic content from creators like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. And of course we can't forget the Groypers, with far right influencers like Nick Fuentes, who are rapidly recruiting teen boys and young men with racist, antisemitic, and misogynist memes and TikToks.

I know it is not currently the thing to talk about what boys need, particularly in this cultural moment in which Zuckerberg is bringing back masculine energy and girls' futures are being targeted by religious extremists, not only in the US but around the world. But I think the dreaded male loneliness epidemic and the "what's going on with our boys" discourse are both distractions that get the problem wrong and piss everyone off in the bargain. Boys actually do need help, no matter how much they seem to benefit from existing social norms and structures. They also need people they can trust, to whom they can be vulnerable without fear. They need to learn how to treat themselves and the people in their lives, ideally from someone who isn't going to teach them to treat the people in their lives like second class citizens or worse.

I really wanted this newsletter to be about tech. But the more I write it, the more I want to write about what always mattered most to me: People. Us. Doing better for one another, to one another, with one another. I think about how a group of teenage boys with a 24-year-old woman leading the pack learned how to trust and respect one another, and most importantly to listen and to be better humans. We did this in 1999 on a website, in the era of the shock jock and Maxim magazine and Columbine. The cards are stacked against us even more now than they were then, what with endless apps, AI slop, and algorithms. The shock jocks aren't just hateful assholes, now they're violent hateful assholes. But if we could carve out a space then, and if we could make a little difference, why can't we do that now? If a bunch of teenagers could learn how to treat each other with a little more dignity and kindness, what's stopping us adults from trying to do the same?

We made this mess. We can't leave it for them to clean up, because by then it will definitely be too late.

Until next Wednesday.

Lx