Your social media isn't your anxiety (or your cure)
Marina Mammoliti argues in Infobae that youth anxiety isn't explained by screens alone.
What if the problem isn't the scroll? In an Infobae article, Marina Mammoliti suggests that the rise in youth anxiety isn't explained by social media alone, and your anxiety doesn't fit into a single explanation.
The scroll isn't the only culprit
I'm glad this conversation is opening from another place, because we've spent years blaming screens. And screens have their part. But behind the scroll there are older things: loneliness, performance pressure, and an identity without roots.
Think about how it looks. You spend hours connected and yet no one knows you're struggling. Your grades, your job, your English, your body: everything becomes a measurement. And if you fail, you feel like you're not the only one failing.
«The phone doesn't create that emptiness. It covers it.»
That's where the weight many young Hispanics don't talk about shows up. Growing up between two cultures already demands too much: translating, holding it together, representing. The message that slips in is that you can't afford to be doing badly.
The phone doesn't create that emptiness. It covers it. It covers it with noise, with comparisons, and with a community that shuts off when you lock the screen.
An identity that isn't measured
Here Scripture is more honest than many speeches. It doesn't promise a life without anxiety. It promises a place to leave it: "casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you" (1 Peter 5:7, ESV).
And it says something no app can say: your worth didn't start when someone approved you. "I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14, ESV).
That's not a self-help slogan. It's a statement about who made you, and that's why it holds up on the days you don't perform.
Faith and science don't compete either. If anxiety is taking away your sleep, your appetite, or your ability to study, seeking a mental health professional isn't a lack of faith. Prayer accompanies; it doesn't replace treatment.
Where I'd nuance it
First: I think it's right to look beyond screens, but reducing everything to culture also falls short. There are biological conditions, family histories, and contexts of migration or violence that no habit change can fix.
Second: let's not turn this into a generational fight. I've heard young people in Chicago and Santiago say they can't tell their parents how they feel. And I've heard parents who work twelve hours to give them something they didn't have. No one in that scene is the villain.
Third, and this goes for the church: if the only message an anxious young person hears is "pray more," we're going to lose them. Not for lack of faith, but for lack of space to be honest.
Before you sleep, name out loud the burden you're carrying. Just one. Then pray 1 Peter 5:7 in your own words. And if that burden has been with you for months, tell a trusted adult, a health professional, or your pastor. In an emergency, call your country's emergency services.
Anxiety isn't overcome by willpower, and your faith isn't measured by how calm you look.
What is that thing your phone covers up that no one in your church has asked you about yet?
