This article started, as most evidence of civilisational decline does, on Instagram.
Specifically a post from Niebezpiecznik.pl — the Polish cybersecurity outlet with an unfortunate habit of finding things that make modern life feel like a terms-and-conditions agreement with reality itself.
The screenshot was simple enough.
A private school. Two fee structures for the school year.
One price if you agreed to the publication of your child’s image.
Another if you did not.
The difference?
10%.
In black and white, with all the dead-eyed administrative serenity of a parking fine: your child’s face, monetised at the point of pay-to-play. Not with ring lights and a mother calling it “a creator journey.” Not with an influencer contract and a merch deal. Just quietly, institutionally, in the font of a utility bill.
Which somehow made it worse.
Because the problem here isn’t simply privacy — although really the only thing stopping a school profitting off your child’s biometric data is a line of fineprint — it’s not even just consent, though that’s obviously part of it.
It’s the casual normalisation of a much stranger idea — that a child’s image is a negotiable asset before the child has had any meaningful chance to establish who they are.
Your child’s face has a market rate.
It’s 10% off.
Your Child’s First Brand Deal
The bleakest part of this isn’t even the discount.
It’s the fact that the child in question almost certainly has no meaningful veto power.
They may hate the photo. They may feel awkward in it. They may be represented in a way that feels false, smug, embarrassing, or painfully unlike how they understand themselves. They may be bullied over it. They may simply not want their face used to sell the institution they happen to attend and perhaps even quietly despise.
And none of that is likely to matter very much, because adults are remarkably good at treating children’s discomfort with images as trivial.
It’s just a school photo.
Just a nice picture.
Just marketing.
Just don’t be silly, just smile.
Except it isn’t.
At that age, visibility is never neutral. It’s social currency. It’s hierarchy. It’s exposure. It’s the raw material from which peer judgement gets made.
A child doesn’t experience an image of themselves the way an administrator does. They experience it from the inside out, with all the volatility, insecurity, and half-formed self-consciousness that comes with being young. Which means a “harmless” promotional photo can land very differently on the person trapped inside it.
That is the smaller cruelty.
The larger one is what it reveals.
Because this is not just about a school overreaching. It’s about something much broader: individuation is increasingly being outsourced.
Parents, schools, platforms, and brands all seem to want the same thing from children now: that they be presentable before they are fully formed. Legible before they are self-authored. Marketable before they are mature enough to decide how they want to be seen.
Identity used to be something you stumbled into through friction. Bad haircuts. Awkward phases. Embarrassing choices. Trying on selves that didn’t fit and discarding them in private.
Now it is increasingly pre-managed.
Pre-packaged. Pre-approved. Externally affirmed.
A child learns, very early, not how to become themselves, but how to be seen correctly.
And that is a very different education.
Greige, Decision Fatigue, and the Inheritance of Flat Identity
My Mom made an observation recently that I haven’t stopped thinking about.
She commented on how uniformly Gen Z often seem to dress now.
Black sweatpants. White hoodie. Plain T-shirt. The visual language of please do not ask me to perform a fully resolved self today.
It is easy to dismiss that as laziness, bad taste, or terminal sameyness. I don’t think that’s right.
A better read is fatigue.
Decision fatigue. Stimulus fatigue. The kind that builds when every part of life now arrives as a choice, a feed, a performance, a low-level audition. Psychologists have been warning for years that too much choice can deplete people rather than liberate them. Social-media research has been circling the same point from another angle: overload, especially information and communication overload, is associated with fatigue in younger users.
Digital environments don’t just offer choices. They produce saturation. Research on social media usage has found that information overload and communication overload are both directly correlated with fatigue in young users.
In a sense the black-sweatpants-white-hoodie silhouette becomes an armor of defensive minimalism.
A uniform cuts decisions.
A uniform lowers exposure.
A uniform stops the world asking quite so much of you.
When everything is performative, flattening yourself can feel like self-defense.
But this is where the conversation usually gets stupid, because someone inevitably says: social media did this.
Maybe partly. But that explanation is far too tidy, and more importantly, it lets everyone older off the hook.
Because the parents are not standing outside the machine, nobly horrified by what it has done to their children.
They are inside it too.
Corporate life rewards the same things this aesthetic expresses: neutrality, presentability, low-friction taste, nothing too loud, nothing too individuated, nothing likely to complicate the pipeline. And when adults spend enough years inside those systems, the flattening does not stay at the office. It comes home with them, with research evidencing parental stress and burnout consistently effecting children’s well-being and behaviour.
This is where greige enters the chat space.
Greige is not just a colour palette. It’s a coping mechanism with a Pinterest board.
It is the domestic aesthetic of overstimulated adulthood: soft edges, neutral tones, nothing abrasive, nothing messy, nothing too particular. Safe aspiration. Corporate calm brought into the home and marketed as taste.
Then we act surprised when children raised in such an atmosphere reach for the same logic in their own self-presentation.
Gen Z are the first generation to grow up fully downstream from parental burnout, institutional image management, chronic digital overload, and the quiet expectation that you should be legible before you are fully formed.
Which means the plain hoodie may not be an absence of identity at all.
It may be what identity looks like when expressing oneself feels too taxing.
Ambient Behaviour, Convenient Villains, and the Myth of “Social Media Did It”
A California jury has just handed Meta and Google a brutal symbolic loss, finding them liable in a social media addiction case and awarding $6 million in damages to a young woman who argued Instagram and YouTube harmed her mental health through addictive design.
And predictably, that ruling has been metabolised into the laziest possible takeaway—
The algorithm is making everyone dumb.
Neat.
Satisfying.
Morally convenient.
This is the point where I part company with the pearl-clutching consensus.
I grew up around technology early. Very early.
My first contact with a computer was around the age of four, on my parents’ Apple Macintosh, dragging pieces of a world map puzzle into place. Then came the CD-ROM era. Then the internet at nine. By eleven, I had essentially unsupervised access. At twelve, a mobile phone and an email address. At fifteen, the early social web — now defunct T-Blog. Then MySpace. By sixteen, I had a Sony Ericsson K310i with a primitive Facebook app that was really just a hyperlink dressed up as destiny.
So no, I am not especially persuaded by the theatrical claim that the mere presence of tech in young hands explains everything.
Because by the early 2000s, plenty of us already had phones in our pockets. By the mid-2000s, many of us had internet on those phones too. And yet, in my experience, there was no great classroom epidemic of people scrolling through nonsense under the desk every five seconds.
Not because we were morally superior. Not because the technology was harmless. Simply because there was still an understood code.
Establishing an Identity of Self in a “Who’s Loudest” Hellscape
Having emerged from the primordial cosmic soup, the most important question you can ask yourself is — who am I?
What values and code of personal conduct should I adhere to?
If a person has some stable sense of themselves, they are more likely to develop an internal code for how to behave across contexts.
School is, allegedly, currently for this.
Home used to be for that.
Public is different from private. Not perfectly, not rigidly, but enough to move through the world without requiring constant external correction.
If that self is weakly formed, behaviour becomes ambient rather than authored.
It becomes situational. Externally cued. A response to whatever is loudest, nearest, most rewarding, most socially legible in the moment.
Which is where phenomena like the so-called Gen Z stare, contextual awkwardness, or that strange flatness in social conduct start to look less like pathology and more like underdeveloped self-positioning. Not madness. Not moral collapse. Just a shaky internal script.
And this is exactly why blaming a broadly facelss leviathan like Facebook is so convenient.
Because if the platform is the villain, then everyone else gets to stay innocent.
The app did it. The algorithm did it. The feed did it.
Which is a very comfortable story if you’d rather not ask what happened before the phone entered the child’s hand.
This is the part where I always come back to the same question:
Is it really Krispy Kreme’s fault that you’re pushing that tenth doughnut in your face?
Obviously temptation matters. Design matters.
Addictive systems are real. Platforms are not neutral, and I’m not pretending otherwise.
But temptation is not the same thing as total responsibility.
A child with boundaries, modelling, and some meaningful chance to individuate will still be tempted by compulsive systems, but they are less likely to disappear entirely into them. A child with no internal code, no authored self, and no room to develop one is far more vulnerable.
That is the real difference.
Platforms do not create those weaknesses ex nihilo. They exploit them. They scale them. They monetise them.
But first, someone has to hand over a person who has never properly been allowed to become one.