The silent generation: When speaking out feels Scary!

Have you ever had a thousand things to say, but felt yourself freeze the moment you were supposed to open your mouth? You are not alone. And it is not your fault.

After the pandemic, something cracked deeply in the way young people communicate with each other. What seemed like a smart and safe adaptation, talking through screens, messages, emojis, has gradually turned into a dangerous boomerang, increasingly obstructing and reshaping human relationships in worrying ways.

Why? Because our young people are losing the ability to put themselves out there and build real relationships, with real people, face to face.

We see it every day: more and more teenagers are giving up outdoor activities, avoiding time with peers, withdrawing from real life. Not out of laziness, but out of fear; fear of rejection, of not being good enough, of not being able to communicate in the "right" way to feel accepted.

In adolescence, acceptance is not a whim: it is a deep, genuine need. The uncertainty of not having the "right qualities" to belong to a group is often the main cause of self-isolation. And when that uncertainty collides with unguided social media use, the weight of it can become very hard to carry.

The spread of social media without adequate preparation has caused trauma that is sometimes very serious. In the rush to create serial consumers of digital content, childhood was left unprotected, and adolescence even more so, a stage of growth during which the human brain is already facing changes that are, in themselves, overwhelming.

Accounts are often opened with parental permission, but without any real oversight of the content young people are consuming. In the early years of multimedia content, providers were called upon to install filters to protect minors. Today that call has grown very faint, and only recently have some countries decided to set limits on social media access.

But it is not enough. Platforms like YouTube are accessible with virtually no age restrictions, and even where controls exist, young people, who have grown up with technology at their fingertips, can often bypass them with ease.

Artificial Intelligence Changes the Rules

The issue becomes even more urgent today, with the increasingly massive use of AI in the creation of images and text. What you see online is not reality: it is a constructed, optimised product, often artificially generated, designed to be consumed and to shape perceptions and behaviours.

The relentless pace at which digital devices deliver information, a continuous, near-instantaneous flood of content and visual stimuli, clashes directly with the still-developing adolescent brain, which has not yet built the cognitive tools needed to sort, filter, and critically assess what it receives. Without proper guidance on how to verify the authenticity of content, this mismatch risks generating dangerous behaviours and equally dangerous distortions in how young people perceive the real world. And it is worth remembering that this applies to adults too: no one is immune to manipulation if they have not learned to recognise it.

So What Can We Do? Start with Education!

The answer is not to switch everything off. It is to educate, genuinely, and consistently. It means explaining clearly that what is seen online does not reflect reality, but is a product designed to be consumed according to very specific logics. It means developing a critical eye, one capable of deconstructing content rather than absorbing it passively. Only through critical awareness can our young people learn to protect themselves.

There are concrete, creative actions that can help reconnect the threads of genuine communication; among peers and within families:

Create a personal blog about your own emotions and desires, because inside every teenager there are deep thoughts, often unexpressed, that deserve space and real words Produce videos with self-chosen content, becoming creators rather than just consumers Learn to recognise AI-generated texts and images, developing critical digital skills Rediscover analogue photography, a roll of film, the light, the waiting: a way to look at the world again through your own eyes, recovering colours, nuances and even scents that seem forgotten, but are there in our memory if we go looking for them Slow down and rediscover the pleasure of real conversation, in person, without a screen, because dialogue between human beings has a value no algorithm will ever be able to replicate

A Word for You, Reading This...

If you recognise yourself in what you have read, if you find it easier to write than to speak, if the online world feels more manageable than the real one, there is nothing to be ashamed of. It is a feeling that countless young people share in silence.

This space exists precisely for that reason: to explore together what is happening inside you, with curiosity and without judgement. AI can be a useful tool. But your voice, the real one, the one that sometimes grows quiet, is worth infinitely more.