Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, and now TikTok have all ended up inspiring a huge chunk of new users to identity as vague stereotypes associated with mental illnesses or disabilities. Trauma TikTok follows the annoying rise of ADHD TikTok earlier this year.

I assume this is because most social platforms emphasize identity over content, which leads users to convert their identity INTO content, which, in turn, creates endless personality archetypes to connect with each other to. Simply put: On corporate social networks, where you’re expected to share content, everything eventually becomes a Zodiac because you are the content. Though, who knows, maybe this is just a trauma response to being too online.

Interestingly, Soul notes that it is using tech to solve loneliness and that the loneliness exists because of tech:

We have especially attracted young generations in China, who are native to mobile internet and who therefore more palpably experience the loneliness technologies bring.

This captures the double-edged sword of consumer technology. As more of our lives go digital, we more deeply feel the gaps where rich, in-person interactions used to be. Yet technology is also a salve for that isolation, connecting us in new ways to new people.

“Teenagers should be allowed to be boring and normal,” Tenbarge argues, “without having major corporate interests tied to their entire sense of being before their 16th birthday.” There's something so distressing about this soon-to-be-fulfilled future where the youngest digital users can't recall a content-free world with minimal, explicit advertisements, when you didn’t have to be a “real” person to have fun online. Social networks have convinced our FOMO-induced brains that there’s little satisfaction in existing as a shapeless form online, without an identity tied to a landing page or profile.