Today’s column (gift link) is about recent legal and political blowback against social media companies. But here I’ll start a little further back. In middle school, I wrote a humor column about the injustices of hall pass policies on a piece of notebook paper. At the time, I did so for my own reasons, mostly to extract something gnawing at the inside of my head.
But then a friend grabbed the paper and read it. He laughed and wrote “ha ha” on the bottom of the page. Some other kids got curious and the thing made its way around the classroom. When I finally got it back, there were all kinds of positive comments scribbled in the margins, some of them penned in the distinctive script of girls.
So that’s how I became a writer. Most writers start out like this. You need the compulsion to write and thirst for approval. One or the other keeps you going every day. Your inner world, perhaps more roiled than the average person’s, finds relief through expression. And then writers watch private thoughts become a public commodity: assayed for weight, grade and value. We hate it, but we also love it. In time, we need it. Perhaps it is no coincidence that these qualities correlate with mental illness, addiction and personality disorders. We are writers. Form is function.
I sometimes used to joke with students that my notebook column was really a sort of proto-Facebook. When social media became a regular thing, everybody was getting high off the likes. But just like the old pit parties at my Iron Range high school, some of us just couldn’t come back down.
As a professional writer, I saw social media as another avenue for expression, and a potential source of new readers. But the mechanism became much more than a tool for so-called content creators. If my desire and ability to write was a way to work out my problems, social media became a massive mental health project, not only for me, but everyone who joined. Not everyone can write compelling bullshit the way writers can, so people started identifying with other people’s bullshit, passing these thoughts off as their own to have the same experience. Memes made this even easier. Why bother with paragraphs? Put that shit straight into your veins.
Now, perhaps too late to do much good, people are realizing the relationship between social media and the spiraling mentality of addiction. Not only the physical addiction to looking, looking, looking, but the mindset that supports the whole enterprise. Writers have problems, believe me, but most of us write to scratch an itch, solve a problem or achieve a goal. When you take away that purpose, and leave only the ego and attention-seeking, you get what we’ve now got.
So, yes, we do have a mental health crisis that is *related* to social media, and yes I’ll join in the chorus of people saying that it is uniquely bad for kids. Of course social media companies are exploiting human weaknesses and American institutions for profit. They’re not the first to do so. But the real problem, the one that we’ve got to address, can’t be fixed by anyone but ourselves.
Read “Improving kids’ mental health will take more than social media lawsuits” in the Thursday, April 2, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.
