I suppose I should explain myself.

As I often tell my Year 10 English students, a classic plot often begins with an exposition. That is, we must first establish what is "normal" in order to differentiate it from the rising action and climax of a story.

My exposition:

• I'm a white, female Australian living in western Naarm/Melbourne.

• I turn 30 in about 3 months, something that has caused an unsurprising and cliched level of life and self reflection.

• I am recently married to the undoubtable love of my life (and I mean very recently, just over 3 weeks ago!).

• We have a delightful life together, a rented home in the inner city suburbs, and a shaggy, scruffy, beautiful black dog.

• No matter how perfect life is or can be, I'm always striving forward.

The rising tension of our Aristotelian plot is my impending 30th birthday, and the huge events that the next decade of my life will bring. But equally, it's also the dissatisfaction with the way I live life now, as a 29 year old. An ill-fitting career, feeling lost and unsure, with an escapist attitude towards my own short, singular life. It's easier to scroll through social feeds than try my hand at cultivating fulfilment. It's easier to let my mind go to unchallenged, consuming reductionist online content, than challenge it with reading from paper books. It's easier to do work I don't enjoy, than face the prospect of making more wrong decisions. I can't help but feel a lot of these issues, while not being directly related to social media, are not helped by my use of it. I have come to wonder: who would I be with more mental space? What would I care about without the influence of algorithms? What would I do with more time?

Being a high school teacher brings the impact of apathetic dispositions towards technology and social media into particularly sharp focus. I worry for my students. They're 15, turning 16, a vital, fundamental time in everyone's lives. But here they are, living in a state of constant fear and anxiety directly derived from a life surveilled from the moment of conception to present. They struggle in social interactions (especially code-switching when speaking to adults), in taking risks, in focus, reading, literacy, expressing themselves, and worrying. Mostly, they worry. They suffer constant anxiety over what people think of them, how they come across, who knows or will find out who they are. To me, Gen Z is defined by their gallows humour; they truly feel as if they are on the edge of the abyss and have nothing to offer but a joke and a selfie.

If I am honest, I worry for my students because I see so much of myself in them. I see, and know, that their sense of apathy and emptiness isn't something that they'll just "grow out of" without conscious effort. I believe, or sense, that their sense of self is stifled by fear and insecurity, more than any generation before, and that will have an intense impact on their futures. And it all comes down to the fact that they live their lives almost entirely online; and some even value their online selves more than the version uploading and curating their digital persona. Perhaps I'm the same. Perhaps I am also stifled by fear, insecurity, comparison and consumerism, fed directly into my sensitive little brain by the bright blue-toned light of my phone screen.

Where is this all leading? To change, I can only hope. I have very little hope for change on a macro scale (my husband literally called me cynical in his wedding vows), but I can put effort in to cultivating hope in my own life. Micro scale, I can start taking steps to living a life I'm happy to take into my 30's, happy to bring children into, happy to share with my deserves-only-the-best husband.

First step, recognition. I acknowledge there is a problem.

Second step, decide what to do about it. This is the climax point in our plot diagram. I've got plans to give up social media entirely in the next couple of months. That's why I've made this blog; a place to muse, reflect and archive away from major social platforms; away from follows, likes, stories, reels, ads, suggested posts, messages, algorithms, billionaire tech-bro bosses and most importantly, my existing relationship with social media. I am going to start fresh. I'm going to stop the routine I've been repeating for 18 years, step back and look at it with clearer eyes.

I've always been someone who processes through writing. I could, of course, write this somewhere privately instead of ironically on the internet. But, honestly, I'm not ready yet to investigate my choice to do it here and not in a hand-written journal. That may take a few more years of therapy, and a few hundred more self-processing blog posts.

See you there.