During the social media addiction litigation that produced Meta’s $17.1bn settlement, a therapist testified that she had asked the plaintiff — a young woman called Kaley, who had been on social media since she was six — what her miracle day would look like. If anything were possible, what would she wish to come true? Kaley said she would be prettier.
Robin Kirman, a psychoanalyst writing in The Guardian, finds that answer devastating for a specific reason. A miracle day is a question about the full range of human desire: what you might do, whom you might love, what you might see. Kaley’s reply folded the entire world into a single preoccupation with her own image.
Her argument is that the public conversation about youth mental health has been looking in the wrong place. Researchers and clinicians have linked anxiety, depression, eating disorders, self-harm and social withdrawal to heavy platform use, but the discussion has stayed with documented behavioural outcomes. What has gone unexamined, she writes, is the damage to young people’s inner lives — specifically, the damage to their emerging desires and identities.
Desire is developed, not given
Kirman builds the case on DW Winnicott, the British paediatrician turned psychoanalyst, for whom desire and identity are inseparable. The capacity for genuine desire is not innate; it develops, and it develops only when a child is free to follow impulses that arise from within, and free from an evaluative gaze.
The child who climbs a fence to see what’s on the other side, who starts a game in the street and finds others drawn in, who keeps pulling books off the shelf until she finds one that answers her latest curiosity — she is learning that her desires matter and can direct her. In Winnicott’s terms she is discovering her true self. Where the evaluative gaze is constant, what forms instead is the false self: a performing self shaped by other people’s reactions. The distress that surfaces when the emptiness beneath the performance can no longer be ignored is what he called the anxiety of unreality.
Harry Frankfurt supplies the philosophical hinge the argument turns on: what you genuinely care about is, in some fundamental sense, what you are.
The Seeking system, captured
The trial’s expert witnesses described platforms hijacking the dopamine reward system into chronic activation. Kirman adds a refinement from the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, who mapped the brain’s primary motivational circuit. What social media exploits, she argues, is not the pleasure system but the Seeking system — the forward-reaching drive toward wanting itself, the engine of curiosity. Addiction fixes that system on a compulsive object, stripping desire of its natural range and spontaneity.
She gives the result its psychoanalytic name: jouissance, Lacan’s term for desire severed from what genuinely matters and fixed on substitutes that keep it running without resolution. Desire of that kind no longer orients; it dysregulates. In some people the adaptation is suppression — of appetite, as in eating disorders, or of sexual and romantic desire, whose decline among young people is increasingly documented. In others it is substitution: compulsive shopping, video games, online betting, each carrying a felt sense that something is at stake while pulling desire back into the circuit rather than outward into the world.
What the symptom list can’t explain
Kaley’s trajectory, as the trial documented it, ran from an eight-year-old posting a video of herself playing an online game as an otter character and singing in a put-on British accent — an act of pure play, entirely her own — to a few years later crying with joy at 100 YouTube subscribers while in the same breath saying she looked fat. A decade on she had given up her hobbies, stopped making friends, withdrawn from her family, and developed depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, self-harm and suicidal thoughts.
Kirman’s objection is that social comparison plus addiction cannot explain what connects those symptoms or what lies at their root. What she reads in the story is the loss of something more basic than self-regard: the sense of oneself as a desiring subject, whose curiosities and ambitions might have produced an identity beyond how one appears. Genuine desire, she notes, requires a kind of self-forgetting — absorption in what one pursues — and the platform made that impossible. Attention turned inward, then against the self.
The essay is not an argument against holding the platforms responsible; Kirman treats the settlement as evidence the harm is being taken seriously. Her claim is about what comes after. Helping young people who want to stop hurting themselves, she writes, will take more than the symptom management mostly on offer. It will take the slow, patient work of rebuilding the conditions in which desire can come alive — and that work has barely begun.