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> Adolescents are horrible at consequence extrapolation: it's why they're famously risk hungry and blasé about doing stuff grownups would be terrified of. Why they never think they'll be the ones who die or get pregnant or fail.

With that in mind, I think the worst effects of smartphones/social media/etc are yet to come.

Kids these days broadcast every last embarrassing detail of their lives all over the internet, and smartphones make it possible to do so conveniently from any location, so there's no time to reflect or consider whether it'll come back to bite you. When these kids grow up and realise the extent of the embarrassing (or possibly incriminating) information they've shared about themselves (and how little control they have over that data), it's going to hurt.

Whether smartphones themselves have 'destroyed' a generation is debatable, but the combination of smartphones and social media is certainly going to cause some mental health issues in the future (if it hasn't already).