Gen Z is Pioneering a New Understanding of Reality

A polar bear The video has millions of views. Set a piano beat that’s all over the place TikTokit shows a lone bear swimming in the middle of an iceberg that is moving very far. The comment section is overflowing with teenage sadness, anger, and helplessness.

Next to my laptop is the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Same subject, different environment. The measured language of climate science is very different from what TikTok has released. They all have truth, but they vary greatly in human understanding.

Gen Z, the first generation to spend their early years in the era of cell phones, has developed a very different relationship with reality.

Starting in 2010, researchers in several countries began documenting a sharp rise in youth anxiety, depression, loneliness, self-harm, and social withdrawal. Large survey data from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Europe showed similar trends emerging between 2012 and 2014. This period coincided exactly with the time when cell phones, front cameras, and algorithmically controlled platforms became a major part of young people’s lives.

A study using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future study, and similar global mental health datasets found a significant increase among girls with depression, sleep disturbances, and chronic sadness and hopelessness. The researchers also noted a decrease in face-to-face interactions and a significant increase in the amount of time spent online.

But the profound change was not only psychological. It was cultural and informative. When people’s lives enter platforms designed for communication, exposure, and emotion, questions of truth are filtered through identity, sensitivity, and social validation rather than through a system of knowledge, authority, and debate. Apart from changing what young people eat, social media has also changed the way they interact with reality. This shift, from a socially shared truth to an established and systematically determined truth, lies at the heart of the future of truth.

“Our reality,” says Emma Lembke, “is driven by a profit-driven economy that prioritizes engagement over health.” Lembke is the director of Gen Z Advocacy at the Sustainable Media Center, a nonprofit I donate to that brings together a diverse group of people to protect children from the negative effects of social media. He has spent many years organizing young people on these issues, following platform practices, and building partnerships between researchers, lawyers, and youth activists. For him, this is not an invisible threat. It is the daily life of his generation.

The dangers are no longer fake news. Thanks to AI, it is possible to create fake reality on a large scale. Immersive videos, man-made voices, and fake news are blurring the line between what is real and what is not faster than people can change.

Fully AI-powered people, with faces, voices, backstory, and millions of followers are already working on Instagram and TikTok, unknown to the public. Gen Z did not bring this problem. They took it. And they’re walking without a map, food inside that has no reason to tell them what’s real. For Gen Z, whose understanding of the world has already been filtered through an algorithmic diet, virtual reality often comes across as conditioned, ideologically embellished, and overextended.

New York University professor and media critic Scott Galloway did not comment on how AI and algorithmic platforms are changing reality for Gen Z. He says that AI-driven platforms like Facebook and TikTok are not social media. They have become engines of influence capable of shaping what millions of young people see, believe, fear, and ultimately accept as reality.

At the heart of Galloway’s critique is the idea that dating has replaced human reasoning as the basis for organizing information on the Internet. Platforms are optimized not for accuracy, empathy, or discussion but for interest and emotion. “They’re not crawling the real world; they’re not crawling what’s best about us,” he said during a meeting with Lembke at the Sustainable Media Center. “They’re crawling the comment section.”

This discrepancy between psychological phenomena and reality is particularly evident in the case of climate change. Climate activist Xiye Bastida, one of Gen Z’s most visible voices on global climate change, has said that social media allows young users to see climate change through people’s stories and personal stories, creating an understanding of the problem that feels very different from reading scientific reports alone.