During the landmark social media addiction trial that led to Meta’s recent $17.1bn settlement, a therapist testified that she had once asked the plaintiff – a young woman named Kaley, who had been using social media since she was six – what her miracle day would look like: what she wished to come true, if anything were possible.
asserted
anything → lead → what
Kaley replied that she would be prettier.
asserted
she → reply → ?
As a psychoanalyst, I find that exchange devastating in a particular way.
asserted
exchange → find → way
A miracle day is an invitation to engage with the full range of human desire: with what one might accomplish or experience, whom one might encounter or love.
uncertain
one → engage → whom
Kaley’s answer contracted the world and all its possibility into a single preoccupation with her own image.
asserted
answer → contract → image
Kaley’s testimony echoes what I hear from many of my younger patients: teens who are often out of touch with what they want from life, not temporarily undecided, but fundamentally unable to locate a sense of what matters to them.
asserted
what → echo → them
Most also feel consumed by a preoccupation with how they appear – with their bodies, their standing in others’ eyes – that is brutal and unrelenting.
asserted
that → feel → eyes
These struggles are often accompanied by a cluster of symptoms that have come to define the youth mental health crisis: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, self-harm, social withdrawal.
asserted
that → accompany → crisis
Researchers and clinicians have linked these symptoms to heavy social media use, but the discussion has been largely confined to documented behavioral outcomes.
asserted
discussion → link → outcomes
What the public conversation has not sufficiently addressed is what social media addiction does to young people’s inner lives, and specifically, the damage done to their emerging desires and identities.
asserted
addiction → address → desires
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt argued that what you genuinely care about is, in some fundamental sense, what you are.
asserted
you → argue → sense
DW Winnicott, a British pediatrician turned psychoanalyst, arrived at a similar insight through the study of childhood development: desire and identity are inseparable.
asserted
desire → turn → development
For Winnicott, the capacity for genuine desire is not innate but developed, and it develops only when a child is free to follow impulses that arise from within.
asserted
that → develop → within
Winnicott was writing about early childhood, but his account, I’d argue, also applies to the years that follow.
asserted
that → write → years
The child who climbs a fence to see what’s on the other side, who starts a game in the street and finds others drawn in, who keeps pulling books off the shelf until she finds one that addresses her latest curiosity – she is learning that her desires matter, that they can direct her and shape her experience of the world.
asserted
they → climb → world
She discovers not only what she wants, but who she is: her true self, in Winnicott’s terms.
asserted
she → discover → terms
Social media systematically undermines that process.
asserted
media → undermine → process
The trial’s expert witnesses explained how these platforms function at the neurological level: they hijack the brain’s dopamine reward system, holding it in a state of chronic activation.
asserted
they → explain → activation
The work of the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, who identified and named the brain’s primary motivational circuit, adds a crucial refinement: what social media exploits is not the pleasure system but the Seeking system, the forward-reaching drive toward wanting itself, the engine of curiosity.
asserted
exploits → identify → curiosity
What addiction does is fix this system on a compulsive object, stripping desire of its natural range and spontaneity.
asserted
does → fix → range
The platform exploits the Seeking system’s sensitivity to novelty to capture attention and keep it.
asserted
platform → exploit → it
The result is a distorted relationship to desire: wanting that has been severed from its natural objects in the world and fixed on the feed.
asserted
that → sever → feed
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan gave a name to this kind of distortion: jouissance, a corrupted form of desire severed from what genuinely matters and fixed on substitutes that keep it running without resolution.
asserted
that → give → resolution
Such desire – the kind social media addiction produces – no longer orients; it dysregulates, becoming out of control.
asserted
it → produce → control
For some, the response is a relationship to desire built around suppression: of appetite, as in eating disorders, or of sexual and romantic desire – its decline increasingly documented among young people today.
asserted
response → build → people
For others, desire gets channeled into substitute circuits: compulsive shopping, video game playing, online betting – each carrying the felt sense that something is at stake, while pulling desire back into the circuit rather than outward toward the world.
asserted
something → channel → world
The harm of social media goes beyond its hold on attention, though.
asserted
harm → go → attention
The platform also subjects the child to an ever-present observer: making every impulse potentially public and subject to others’ assessment.
asserted
impulse → subject → assessment
For Winnicott, the capacity for genuine desire develops only where a child is free from an evaluative gaze and can follow impulses that arise from her own center.
asserted
that → develop → center
Social media destroys that freedom.
asserted
media → destroy → freedom
What forms in its absence is what Winnicott called the “false self” – a performing self, shaped by the reactions of others.
asserted
Winnicott → form → others
When the emptiness beneath that performance can no longer be ignored, what surfaces is the anxiety of unreality: the distress of someone who has been going through the motions of a life without ever really inhabiting it.
asserted
who → ignore → it
At eight, Kaley posted a video of herself playing an online game as an otter character, singing in a put-on British accent: an act of pure play, entirely her own.
asserted
herself → post → play
Within a few years, a video shows her crying tears of joy at reaching 100 YouTube subscribers – and then, in the same breath, saying she looked fat.
asserted
she → show → breath
A decade later, she had given up her hobbies and old interests, stopped making friends, withdrawn from her family.
asserted
she → give → family
She developed depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia.
asserted
She → develop → depression
She began cutting herself.
asserted
She → begin → herself
She had suicidal thoughts.
asserted
She → have → thoughts
What I find most striking, reading Kaley’s testimony, is the totality of her collapse.
asserted
find → find → collapse
In the space of a decade, a child playing freely became a teenager who wanted to stop living.
asserted
who → play → decade
…and 13 more, not listed.
The Aporia
