This week I walked through Social Studies, Lauren Greenfield's exhibition at Fotografiska Berlin. Afterwards I needed a hot chocolate, and then a long walk.

As a Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapist, I work with many people in their twenties. We talk about self-esteem, long-term goals, saying no, and accepting themselves as they are. The exhibition put pictures to things my clients describe to me almost every week.

What the exhibition shows

Between 2021 and 2023, Greenfield spent 150 days with thirty teenagers from Los Angeles. They let her into their phones: their feeds, texts and photos, more than 2,000 hours of screen recordings. The result is a five-part documentary series and this exhibition, where the six-inch screen is blown up to the size of a human body.

A few pieces from the exhibition:

Ivy got her first Instagram in third grade. Her feed, printed on the wall, is a grid of pastel cupcakes and rainbow cakes. And in the middle of all that sweetness sits one picture that no child should have been shown. Ivy calls it "seeing the world outside the bubble I was raised in."

Jack, 18, paid for his BMW by throwing invite-only "Instagram parties" and selling his content. Other teenagers followed his party page and hoped he would put them on the guest list.

Relationship Goals collects the couple selfies young people post. The wall text adds a quiet number from the Survey Center on American Life: only 56% of Gen Z adults say they had a romantic relationship as teenagers, compared with 76% of Gen X and 78% of Baby Boomers. Many young people are measuring their love lives against pictures of relationships they haven't yet had the chance to live.

Sofia, one of the participants, puts it better than I can: "Growing up means f***ing up, and that's how we learn. But to have our f***-ups in a form that is so public and so permanent, because it doesn't go away … It is so scary that we are being allowed to actually do this."

In her closing note, Greenfield writes that almost all the teenagers were nostalgic for their parents' youth. If they could wave a magic wand and get rid of social media, they would.

Feeds that farm feelings

As expected, nobody blame the teenagers, as platforms are built for profit. The longer we stay, the more they earn.

According to a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health study quoted on the wall, six large platforms earn nearly 11 billion US dollars a year in advertising from American users under 18.

Calm content does not keep us scrolling. Strong feelings do. A Yale study of 12.7 million posts found that people who got more likes for outraged posts went on to post more outrage.

In my own words: the feed farms feelings. Anger, envy, shock, the fear of missing out, and the small shame of a post that got fewer likes than expected.

In between come little rewards: a funny video, a like, a message. They arrive at unpredictable moments, the same principle that keeps people at slot machines. Psychologists call it intermittent reinforcement. I think of likes as the empty calories of social interaction. They soothe for a moment, but they don't nourish.

Comparing upwards, to the whole world

Milenials and earlier generations compared themselves horizontally: with classmates, neighbors, the cousin with better marks. It still was hurtful sometimes, but the circle was small and real.

Today's teenagers compare vertically. Their circle is the most beautiful, richest and most successful sliver of the planet, edited and filtered, and it lands in their pocket every few seconds. A twenty-year-old in a Lamborghini is one swipe away from a classmate's lunch.

I keep wondering how differently this lands depending on where you grow up. I grew up in Ukraine. For a teenager there today, a twenty-year-old buying a Lamborghini can feel so far from local reality that it's almost a film. Social comparison research suggests we compare most painfully with people who seem similar to us, so a distant fantasy may sting less than a classmate's perfect weekend. But it can also quietly teach that real life happens somewhere else.

In Germany, many of us like to believe childhood is still a bit more analogue. The numbers say we are not immune, if would growing in here too. A 2025 DAK study estimates that about one in five 10- to 17-year-olds uses social media in a risky way, and 6.6% show signs of addictive use. Across Europe, the WHO's survey of almost 280,000 adolescents found that problematic social media use rose from 7% in 2018 to 11% in 2022, and was higher among girls (13%) than boys (9%).

The screen is the same everywhere. What a young person sees in it depends on what they see around them.

Why loving families are not a force field

Many of my clients grew up in warm, supportive families, and still the feed shaped how they saw themselves. That used to puzzle me. Now I think it makes sense.

Adolescence is when we turn from our parents towards our peers to find out who we are. That is how it should be, let´s call it healthy. But today the peer group, includes an algorithm, no parent can see, and an audience that never goes home. A loving family softens the impact. It can't be in the room every time the phone lights up.

Research also suggests the effect is not the same for everyone. A Brigham Young University study that followed teenagers for eight years found that heavy use was linked to more depressive symptoms mainly in those who were already anxious, bullied, very reactive to stress, or living with hostility at home. A large UK study found sensitive windows around ages 11 to 13 for girls, 14 to 15 for boys, and again around 19, when many young people leave home. From my practice I would add perfectionists, people who are very sensitive to rejection, and anyone who learned early that love has to be earned.

Social media is rarely the only cause. One note on the visitors' wall said it clearly: it can make things worse, but the roots usually go deeper. That matches what I see. The feed often finds a crack that was already there and makes it wider.

The inner "should"

This is the part that touched me most.

I feel sorry for the young people who, instead of being free to play, have fun and explore themselves by making mistakes, were pressured to mimic success, beauty standards and relationship goals, often before they had any idea how to do those things.

In CBT we call the rules that grow from this should statements. "I should look like this." "I should have my career figured out by 22." "I should have a relationship like theirs." "If my post doesn't get enough likes, something is wrong with me."

The trouble with a "should" is that it moves the finish line. By the time you reach one goal, the feed has already shown you the next. So instead of achievement and satisfaction, there is a constant sense of being behind. Underneath, a quiet belief forms: I'm not enough as I am, and everyone else has found the secret.

On my opinion, the feed trains several common thinking traps at once. We compare our inside with other people's outside. We mind-read ("they all think I'm boring"). We think in all-or-nothing terms ("perfect or worthless"). And we start to measure our worth in numbers.

What helps, in my practice

The good news is that these patterns are learned, and what is learned can change. This is what usually helps my clients:

• Catch the should. After a bad scroll, write down the "should" behind the feeling and ask: whose voice is this? Mine, my parents', or the feed's?
• Check the evidence. What do I really know about this person's life, beyond twelve photos? What would I say to a friend who believed this about herself?
• Run a small experiment. Post something and don't check it for 24 hours. Mute the ten accounts that make you feel small for one week, and notice your mood.
• Bring back play. Do something badly on purpose: a dance class, a drawing, a language you're terrible at. Mistakes made offline are allowed to stay private.
• Choose people over profiles. In Greenfield's group sessions, held without phones, Cooper said she had never had such deep conversations. Talking face to face is a skill, and it grows with practice.
• Set boundaries, not punishments. Less screen time works best as a kind boundary: no phone in the bedroom, or the first hour of the morning offline. In one small experiment, students who limited each app to 10 minutes a day for three weeks felt less lonely and less low.
• Practise calm. In hypnotherapy we rehearse feeling steady and enough, so the nervous system has somewhere to come back to when the feed pulls.

Adults are not immune either. Our identity is usually more settled, so the feed tends to shake us less. But many of my adult clients know the 2 a.m. scroll and the quiet comparison with old classmates very well. The difference is that we adults built this world. The young people were born into it.

On the last wall, visitors leave handwritten notes. Some became my favorite, like this one:

"Remember, your grass will never get greener by focusing on someone else's lawn. And sometimes, you might compare your lawn against someone else's without realizing that their grass isn't even real. It was never about grass."

"They benefit from you hating yourself. F*** that. Fight back."

"Lebe dein eigenes Leben & Analog ist geil!" (Live your own life, and analogue is great!)

If you're in your twenties and recognise yourself here: you are not behind. You are growing up on a harder playground, and you can still learn to feel good about yourself.

For further reading, if you are interested, same as me: the exhibition's book table had Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Pamela Pavliscak's All the Feels: How to Stay Human in the Digital World, and Greenfield's earlier book Thin. Next to them lay Hans Neubert's business bestseller Der Social Media Faktor, a reminder that the same tool sells and shapes us.

Social Studies is on at Fotografiska Berlin until 12 January 2027.

#SocialStudies #LaurenGreenfield #GenZ #SelfEsteem #MentalHealth #CBT #Berlin