High school students are often tackling homework, sports, activities, social life and worries about their future, which is enough to cause stress and lack of motivation. This past year has obviously taken its toll on the population of students in our school. Fatigue and lack of motivation has been more prominent than ever, and it is all due to our ever changing world and the rise of technology in our everyday lives.

The average teen can spend hours on their phone mindlessly scrolling through social media apps, especially TikTok. An app that was originally created for 15 second videos, marketing to everyone’s different interests, but now is a main problem in our society regarding students’ motivation. As the videos are on average 15 seconds, now with updates have reached 3 minute videos, users have been trained to have a short attention span and simply swipe up to move on to something more interesting.

Being in front of a screen is no longer interesting after our past hybrid year where we rolled out of bed and over to a bright zoom screen, not to mention the 5-6 hours teens spend on their phone on average per day. Adding up all of the screen time, homework and routine functions like eating and sleeping, there are no more hours left in the day to have even a second of relaxation. That is vital to surviving high school without becoming a sleepwalker.

Instagram is another social media that adds to teenage stress; commonly used to post pictures for friends to see, but what is now an app for influencers or those who try to be. As a teen, one may spend hours taking pictures, editing them, determining a time to post and keeping up with the comments after. The amount of brain power that goes into the process is insane and not for the faint of heart, yet we continue to stress ourselves out with this world of social media.

As a generation, the material things seem more important than school, as now we can be influencers or youtubers for a living. Why spend time learning calculus when you can post about your daily latte? This kind of thinking is detrimental to our society and won’t help anyone in the long run, it will just hurt us further.

The average student may be stressed out by their school work and feel exhausted but with all of this social media stress, the phrase student fatigue is in all of our vocabularies. We are still children and how much we worry about should not be put on our shoulders.

Teenagers need to focus on school and deliberately separate their thinking mind and posting mind in order to focus for more than 15 seconds at a time. Social media has made the world unrealistic, as we cannot swipe away things we don’t want to see. Unfortunately, school isn’t going away anytime soon, but if you remember the past threats to our social media this year, TikTok just might.