Yeah, used to be a high school teacher until pretty recently. A lot of what OP says about stakes (or perceived stakes) is on point, but social media amplifies all of those stressors; I'm sure it's a recuperative outlet for
some, but I don't think that's the average experience.
My teacherly anecdata (from about a decade of teaching) led me to think (in no particular order):
* Anxiety is way more prevalent and central to teen experience than most people realize. Definitely more so than I saw when I was a kid. You could say we use the language of mental health and anxiety to conceptualize experience more these days, and that's true to a degree, but it doesn't fully account for the prevalence or centrality.
* Social media is absolutely an amplifier of the problem. You can really just ask a kid -- they're often very self-aware about it. Many will say something like, "Yeah, I hate it, but you have to be there" or "I hate it but I'm obsessed with it."
* Further to the last point, kids are often a lot smarter about social media than we tend to give them credit for (and often a lot smarter about it than adults). Many are good at compartmentalizing online experience onto different platforms and different public or private or anonymous or real-name accounts -- since they've grown up with it, they've had more impetus to develop adaptive mechanisms. A lot of them create relatively private or close-knit digital spaces to retreat to when the big screaming public square gets overwhelming.
My own kid's a toddler, and I definitely worry about what all of this will look like for him. I want to expose him to technology and teach him to use and understand it, but at this point I'm super leery of exposing him to YouTube/anything with a whiff of social media any time in the foreseeable future.
