Growing Up Online: What We’ve Learned from Living in the Scroll

By the time I turned 13, I had already seen more content than most adults saw in their first three decades of life. Memes, news, ads, filters, influencers, breakdowns, callouts, cancelations, reunions, and endless “For You” content, all stitched into a feed that rarely pauses. This is what it means to grow up online.

For Gen Z, the internet isn’t something we log onto. It’s the space we grew up in. It raised us, shaped us, challenged us, and in some ways, changed how we see the world and ourselves.

📲 The Feed Became Our Reality

Our feeds were never just entertainment. They were education, self-expression, and sometimes even survival. We learned empathy through TikTok storytimes and found community in comment sections. We followed creators who looked like us, sounded like us, and talked about things no adult in our lives ever dared to bring up.

But the same space that gave us connection also gave us comparison. Constant scrolling meant constant measuring. How pretty, how productive, how “put together” everyone else seemed. The pressure to perform online became a quiet kind of exhaustion. And most of us didn’t even realize it was happening because it was just the background noise of growing up.

🤯 We’re Aware, but We’re Tired

Gen Z is hyper-aware of the internet’s grip on us. We joke about screen time, meme our burnout, and call ourselves “chronically online.” But the truth is, being so plugged in has left many of us mentally drained and emotionally scattered.

We’ve seen global tragedies unfold in real time before finishing high school. We’ve had our identities questioned by strangers in comment sections. We’ve watched the line between real and curated blur until even we forget the difference.

There’s this paradox of being digitally fluent but emotionally tired. We know the algorithm. We just don’t always know how to escape it.

🧠 So, What Have We Actually Learned?

We’ve learned to question what we see, because not everything is real, even if it looks like it.We’ve learned that boundaries are necessary, even if no one taught us how to build them.We’ve learned that some of the best connections can come from strangers across the world.And we’ve learned that sometimes, logging off is the bravest thing you can do.

🧩 The Scroll Isn’t All Bad, But It’s Not All Good

This isn’t an anti-internet rant. We’ve gained a lot from growing up online, like knowledge, community, creativity, and opportunity. But it’s time we get honest about what we’ve lost too.

We’ve lost attention spans, face-to-face connection, and quiet. We’ve lost time we’ll never get back to filters, edits, and endless doomscrolling.

But the good news? We’re not helpless. We’re aware. And awareness is the start of reclaiming control.

✊ Gen Z Has the Power to Reset

We don’t have to accept constant scroll as the default setting. We can use the internet without letting it use us. We can take breaks. We can speak up when something feels off. We can create online spaces that reflect who we are, not who the algorithm says we should be.

Growing up online gave us a lot to carry. But it also gave us the voice, tools, and reach to change how the next generation experiences the internet.

Maybe we didn’t get to choose how we were raised by the scroll. But we can choose what we do with it now.