In Lessons from the Clinic, Kees Haverkamp shares brief observations from his role as CTO. No judgements, but insights drawn from moments that made him reflect on what technology is doing to teenagers and young adults today.
As a child growing up in the rural outskirts of Brabant, my digital world consisted of an old Atari games console and, after much pleading, a slow and expensive internet connection. For young people today, being online is no longer a ‘place’ you go to, but a permanent ecosystem in which their social lives, identity and self-image operate 24 hours a day. Although I have been a technology optimist all my life, in my current role I am seeing increasingly intense patterns that I simply could not have predicted years ago.
When young people start their treatment at our clinic, they have to hand in their phone on day one. Seven or ten weeks without TikTok, without Instagram and without Snapchat. Before treatment begins, they all dread this enormously.
On the first day they indeed find it difficult, the second day it may still feel a little unfamiliar, but after that a sense of calm emerges. In the almost five years I have been working at Yes We Can, I have asked more than 100 young people whether they missed their phone. Not a single fellow (as we call them) has said ‘yes’.
By now, I dare to make the comparison: in ten years’ time we will look back at young people’s social media use in the same way we now look at smoking in the 1950s.
Recent research published in JAMA showed that the mental health of young adults improves within just one week when they stop using social media altogether: fewer depressive symptoms, less anxiety and even better sleep. One week.
This is not a subtle difference; it is a smoke alarm going off.
Throughout my career I have been convinced of the power of an open internet. Freedom to learn, to create and to connect. But in practice I now see a different reality emerging.
Take Snapchat. A platform that on the one hand invests in education about mental health risks, but on the other facilitates an information flow that is so vast, so fleeting and so uncontrollable that no one really knows who might be reading or watching along.
I see it with my own children: photos being sent back and forth all day to dozens of accounts. An ecosystem in which malicious actors, for example through ‘catfishing’, can enter more easily than ever before. As if traces no longer exist: disappearing messages and rapidly changing profiles alternate constantly.
Never before has it been possible to get dangerously close to young people on such a scale. Young people who actually need protection. And this does happen. All too often.
As with previous societal revolutions, we must dare to acknowledge when the balance is off. Snapchat, Roblox, TikTok and similar apps have built an environment that is too fast and too anonymous for young people who still need to learn what healthy boundaries are. We expect them to cope on their own, but that is not a realistic expectation.
On top of that comes a new reality: AI is making the difference between real and fake almost invisible. How is a 13-year-old supposed to distinguish authenticity from digital masks?
Historically, societies have always had to readjust at moments when new technology changed faster than our behaviour could keep up. This is such a moment. Not an era of change, but a change of era, as Jan Rotmans puts it.
I do not have a holy grail. The solution will probably be a combination of awareness, better frameworks and choices such as growing up smartphone-free. Australia recently became the first country in the world to take measures against social media for young people.
And honestly: every young person I speak to enjoys life without a smartphone, and after two days they already stop missing it. It really can be that simple.
