Raise the Age For Social Media to 16

Now I’ve been drinking whiskey and the Timberwolves won, and neither of these things happen too often.
I just left the Boldy James record that Felix said I should listen to to check out the most recent episode of Pivot. Their guest, Jonathan Haidt, lays out the clear results of his research that going through puberty on social media is absolute hell. And whatever absolute hell it is for all of us, it’s worse for girls. Statistically worse. Empirically worse. I remember going through adolescence. Lots of joy. Lots of pain. Very few screens. Lots of TV. Lots of phones. Lots of fear. And sadly I thought it was all on some continuum. It was what my dad went through, what my mom went through, what my brother went through, what Felix went through, Rachel, Silas, Melissa, Slim, everyone. Different, but on a continuum. Now to know that people born after 1996 are in a different universe. How do I protect my daughters from it? How did these assholes create a format more addictive than me and my musician friends ever did? I remember being on tour in San Francisco with Dessa probably in 2011. Through my now wife Rachel we had dinner with two really $$$ people who worked at maybe YouTube and Google at the time. Now the jobs have changed, maybe it’s Facebook and Dropbox. But it’s all platforms. But they had the wild money. You still split the bill, but you know it’s just nothing to them. And the thing is, they were right. Putting an ad before the door where everyone goes is immensely more remunerative than having something behind the door that some people want to see.

Are my daughters slowly careening towards a world that will rob them of the human interaction I thrived on. Will they get to spend an afternoon in bed with a girl not knowing if she’s a friend or a girlfriend. Will they get to read something from a friend they think somebody else will never see? Is adolescence ruined? I think of social media as innocuous to me. I’m skipping it right now. I just went to check if Cecil Otter has ever tweeted since all the shit with DOOMTREE hit the fan in 2020 (no, he hasn’t). I read what Christin612 wrote most recently, I read it, I’m back. I read and I come back here and I think. Since pushing twitter a bit away I find my brain is working in different ways, I’m not looking for my brain to fits itself into tweets the way it was just a couple weeks ago. But, my daughters will be facing something different, something insipid, something worse. And isn’t that the biggest failure, to send your children into a world worse than the one you grew up in. The American dream of doing better than your parents was done once my dad landed the job as the President of Macalester. That’s an elite, spectacular job that paid handsomely in the 90s and pays even better now. If the rolling of the dice on my music career landed at a really high level I might take home that $$ for a couple years, but not for a career. But the dice didn’t land that high. I play jazz records in the afternoon. I own a trivia company. My daughters are getting a smaller pillow to land on than I had. But I had a pillow too big. I didn’t need all that pillow. My brother didn’t need all that pillow. I ignored a lot of that pillow, I didn’t use all that pillow. I needed something more than that pillow, I needed honesty about who I was, about who we were, about why I deserved love, why I was okay the way I was, why I should get love.

A subject change: I love sneaking into the world where I get my own minutes. The music is playing, it’s 1:18, I have to wake up at 6:34, brush my teeth, get S. to school, get N. to daycare, find out where the Trivia Mafia meeting is, pack up records at North High, cook dinner, play jazz records in St. Louis Park, play pickleball with the team from Trivia Mafia. But right now, I’ve got great music on the speaker, I’m typing and I’m not afraid. I’m in love with the world. I’m in love with Felix coming over for basketball and talking about KAT’s problems. I’m in love with my brother coming and drinking beers and looking at his phone. I know who I am. I have my friends, I have my goals, and never the two shall meet. The world is so confusing, but my world is beautiful. The work is just trying to do the best you can. Sometimes you’re jealous of Sims, maybe he’s never jealous of you, but you’re just trying to do your best. There’s no quarter in bellyaching. My daughter S. has started talking about S. land. She tells me what is true about is in Sadie land. How things work in S. land. She knows things are different in Sean land. She gets these changes, this mystery, this fiction. There’s no crossroads, there’s no blacks and whites. Don’t let social media change that, let the world be ugly in the same ballpark it always has been. Let being a fifteen year old girl be just as beautiful and horrible as it was in 1922, in 1956, in 1995. Don’t let the stadium change. Stay, stay, stay the same. Don’t let the algorithm eat your you.