In the late Aughts (2000s) and early 2010s, I taught a course called “Catholic Bioethics and Ethical Decision-Making” to high school girls at a college preparatory school in Washington, D.C. Every senior was assigned Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” in English class, an ideal reference point for discussing the Church’s moral analysis of biotechnologies dealing with procreation.
The novel let me shift the conversation away from individual reproductive rights — which my students had been conditioned to believe were absolute — toward the dangers of a society that deployed in vitro fertilization enthusiastically.
Suddenly, they could imagine how a technology that promised a good to a particular infertile couple might have far-reaching consequences when used on a mass scale. The Church’s admonitions against surrogacy, cloning, and artificial wombs came across as prophetic in light of the hellscape which was Huxley’s World State.
But while I used the text as a cautionary tale about technologies my students would likely never encounter, they were quietly descending into a dystopia of their own, thanks to a pocket-sized tool that was reshaping what it meant to be human.
As the first generation of young women to come of age with smartphones, they became progressively ensnared by apps and advertisers that kept them staring at screens during their most formative years.
Like “soma,” the drug administered to everyone in “Brave New World,” smartphones could dissolve every experience of discomfort, boredom, and anxiety into a pleasant haze — stripping away the impulse for reflection and real-world connection.
Girls got soma-like dopamine hits from online affirmation and consumption, but they also crashed into extreme lows as they measured themselves against unrealistic ideals. They sought counsel from strangers instead of the families and local communities crumbling before their eyes.
Most of us — their teachers and parents — had no idea what this technology was doing to the developing mind, body, and soul. But we can no longer claim ignorance. Research by America’s most prominent techno-skeptic, psychologist Jonathan Haidt, has shown how we spent roughly 15 years “overprotecting kids in the real world and underprotecting them online.”
Now one of Gen Z’s own, awake from the smartphone fog, is telling her story and that of her peers. Twenty-six-year-old British writer Freya India is the author of “GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything” (Henry Holt and Co., $29.99). It’s a book so dark you wish it were fiction.
Her observations have the quality of a dystopian heroine waking up mid-story, questioning what everyone around her accepts as given: Is every negative emotion a sign of mental illness? Why are young girls getting so much cosmetic surgery? Should we be working ourselves to death? Is it unrealistic to ask a romantic partner not to consume pornography? Do we need to post everything we do, feel, or think? Why are young people so scared of adulthood?
India’s argument: “Modern digital technology amplifies the age-old anxieties adolescent girls have always felt.”
The difference is that “every worry a girl has can be monitored, categorized, and monetized: from hating the shape of her nose to fearing she might have a mental health disorder to distrusting her boyfriend,” writes India, also a contributor to Haidt’s “After Babel” Substack.
Smartphones and social media turned people into products and taught young women to treat others the same way. They turned their cameras around and then turned inward, becoming lonelier and more fearful than ever.
India’s book is essential for parents of Gen Alpha girls (born 2010 to 2024) trying to do things differently now that the dangers are documented. But it should also be required reading for anyone employing, working with, educating, or ministering to the previous generation, Gen Z.
“Girls” takes an empathetic, rather than judgmental, approach. Who can fault their performative bent when they have been smiling for their parents’ cameras since their birth and building brands for others? How can we criticize their delayed entry to adulthood when they have had GPS trackers on their phones for so long, and we put porn in their pockets?
Marrying personal reflection to research, India shows how young women were collectively conditioned to document every experience, believe products were the solution to their problems, mistake ordinary human emotions for mental illness, and reduce morality to online virtue-signaling.
The book cites statistics revealing the staggering sums of money poured into this global campaign to reach girls everywhere.
While young women have always analyzed their looks, never before have they gone to such lengths to change them. In 2021, 85% of adolescent girls reported altering their appearance with filters or apps like FaceTune, distorting their self-image and leading many to get cosmetic procedures to better resemble the filtered version of themselves.
The pressure to open up online about mental health, meanwhile, exacerbated existing struggles or suggested them in the first place — and the more a girl shared or searched, the more such content was fed to her.
Done, a company distributing ADHD medication, spent $3.4 million on TikTok ads from January to July 2022, teaching girls to look for signs of the disorder, including “talking a lot.”
Young women are beginning to realize they “have overshared, overanalyzed, and been overdiagnosed,” India writes. “Many have been overmedicated, with consequences that could last a lifetime.”
She is sober about what her generation lost: a “sense of belonging,” a rootedness in something bigger than themselves; moral guidance from authorities, even as they drown in advice from experts; and finally themselves, confused about who they are, what they desire, and what makes for a happy life.
To parents, grandparents, and other adults she pleads: “If you don’t give her guidance, influencers will. If you don’t teach her about love, Tinder will. If you don’t tell her what she is worth, FaceTune will."
India recognizes that religion can help protect them from the destruction. While her generation is the least religious on record, many are beginning to recognize its value.
But Christianity should not be equated with Christian content, she warns elsewhere. Apps are no substitute for getting young women through the doors of a church so that they can have a real, embodied experience of the God who loves them.
At perhaps the most crucial moment of their development, we gave girls simulations of the human experience instead of the real thing. We can’t yet comprehend the ripple effects of this experiment — or how many future generations we’ll even have, since so many of these young women do not desire children.
The devil’s first lie made Eve doubt God. This one has made girls doubt themselves, their loved ones, and their dignity. It’s been catastrophic.
India believes it’s not too late to repent of what we’ve done. Her book asks us to do so on behalf of a generation of girls who were sacrificed to gods of progress and predatory capitalism.
