It’s the first Youth Updates of the year, and it’s time to unpack some elements of youth culture and the issues they face.
Hannah and Beth are joined by their first guest of the year; Nicola Morrison. Nicola is a former BBC correspondent and recently released her autobiography ‘Victory Is My Name’ – a story of her journey with mental health as a young adult and the challenge she faced. She shared with us three things that she sees going on in youth culture.
Note: Below is a summary of our conversation. For the full and unredacted conversation, please listen to our podcast!
DIGITAL WORLD: Social Media
Nowadays, our young people are confronted with 24-hour cycle news basically. There’s so much that they’re bombarded with. There’s so many messages. You can scroll and find yourself going through every myriad of emotions in the space of two minutes. And people are online for hours a day.
The messages [they’re hearing] are aesthetic perfection, popularity, and to go viral, have loads of followers and loads of likes. And that’s really hard for young people. The stakes are continually growing and getting higher and higher, and there’s just so much pressure when it comes to social media.
When speaking to some young people for one of the 2024 podcasts, they said one of the biggest things about social media was that you can never get away from it or fully switch off.
Whether that’s to do with people at school and bullying, or whether it’s the general pressure of it all – it’s a continual force.
It used to be that bullying mostly happened when young people were at school, between 8.45 and 3.30, and then you went home. It doesn’t mean it was great or it was easy, but you did get to go home. However, now there’s no switch off button. And there’s this thing of FOMO as well. Young people don’t want to be left out. Furthermore, your social group can completely ostracise you if you’re not in the loop, or you’re not at the latest social gathering. But ultimately, not getting to switch off is really dangerous for young impressionable minds.
People might ask why young people don’t just opt out of it all, but this is how they were raised; this is [social media] where life is for them. That’s where life and community and stuff like that is found. So, opting out of that almost feels like that’s not an option.
The link between social media and consumerism:
I think there’s definitely a mindset that connection is now something that can be a commodity.
People are now things you collect online, and they seemingly raise your value and your worth. It’s not always about being relational or actually having authentic relationships.
Social media is where their life is and where they find community, but it’s becoming something that is translating into value; ‘value of me’. And that’s really pressurising. It’s another potential area for young people to feel lonely and they say this is the loneliest generation. It’s almost like the appearance of connection is made to seem more important than actual connection. It’s like the appearance that you’re well connected or that you know lots of people is almost deemed as more important than actually having deep connections in your own life.
Young people want to be seen and that’s ultimately where it comes from. People want to be seen, and they want to matter. And they’ve decided that this is a platform, this is a way that they will go down in history and be remembered. Without Jesus, that becomes a slippery slope, because as mentioned in Nicola’s book, these metrics are always shifting and moving. And how discombobulating is that for a young person? Wondering “what do I have to do to be valid and matter today?” Because today, this is what it is and tomorrow it’s something else.
Whereas the truth is that a person’s intrinsic value that they just have, because of who they are, never changes from Jesus.
ISSUES: Peer Pressure
In relation to peer pressure linked to being a Christian, Nicola wanted to encourage young people that ultimately this walk is sometimes lonely. And it’s sometimes lonely because you don’t go with the crowd and it’s counter-cultural to how we may want to live our lives. We may want to be popular, to be liked, and to please people. And so, being told that, as a Christian, the walk can sometimes set us apart, is quite scary.
Nicola continued to share a personal story:
When I became a Christian at 18, I remember sitting in my common room and it was the first time I felt hostility from my friends because I was reading my Bible. They were non-Christians and they would say, oh, why are you fasting? And I’d say, oh, because I want to take time to hear from God. And they became quite aggrieved by that.
They weren’t happy. And obviously there was something more spiritual going on there. But it really felt quite hard for the first time that I was being ultimately rejected by my friends because of what I believed.
And if I had just been talking about our latest pop video that we all enjoyed or the latest club that we were going to at the weekend, I would have been accepted and it would have been fine. And I ultimately realised I was setting myself apart, standing out, being a peculiar person, all the things that Scripture tells us we will be. But when they’re lived experiences, it’s much harder to do.
Peer pressure is real and it’s part of the ecosystem of being a young person. As a teenager, often friends seem more important than family in some ways. Peer pressure also links to the developmental stage they are at – the time when they are figuring out who they are with a separate identity to that of their parents and they begin to actively look around them to figure out how to navigate life and be a human being.
Furthermore, it’s rare that peer pressure is rooted in the surface level ask of doing a certain thing or acting a certain way but from wanting to be seen and loved and accepted. Human beings have an intrinsic desire to belong. Young people are looking for places and spaces to belong and be accepted, and if they don’t have the right environments or friends, that can be a slippery slope because ultimately that’s why gangs are formed, because people just want to belong.
Young people don’t necessarily get together and say, let’s go and do crime. They form belonging with the wrong crowds and that happens as a result. But ultimately, they just want to belong.
ISSUES: Belonging
Nicola shared from her own experience of struggling to feel like she belonged and how she faced being ‘othered’ – especially in light of her heritage and identity as a person of colour before unpacking the topic of belonging further.
It’s important that young people allow the Bible, scripture and God to speak into how they are carved in His image, belong to Him and are fearfully wonderfully made. The external pressures and benchmarks of what makes you belong or not shifts continually in the culture around us, but God’s truth doesn’t shift.
As an adult, most of the time you can understand that, and you can come to terms with who you are and how God made you and the things that you do love about yourself and all of that, but when you’re younger, that is just so hard to get your head around. And you’re being bombarded by all of these images, and often the things that are pointed out are how you’re different, rather than areas of similarity. As a child or as a young adult, you’re still so impressionable and you’re figuring life out, so you’re looking out to the world. Therefore, it’s so important that young people have a foundation first of who they are and who they belong to.
Young people have to go back to their maker and say “why did you make me this way? What are you trying to teach me? I believe you didn’t make a mistake. I’m not flawed, so why am I designed? Why am I made this way?” As opposed to looking to the world to answer those questions.
Word Of The Month: Cooked
Cooked – Dual meaning, depending on the context, of either the same vibes as ‘We’re done for’ or that someone has done something exceptionally well.
Eg. “Our teacher just saw us skip class. We’re cooked.” or on seeing an amazing art piece ‘Someone cooked here’.