Probably a combination of standardized testing, perceived looming economic/environmental/social upheaval, and feedback loops between blind optimization of social media engagement metrics and unwitting narcissism.
I found that social media let me to regularly compare myself with friends, and feel like I was also being evaluated... after explaining why I shut down my accounts, I learned many of my friends felt similarly.
It doesn't help that everyone's social lives are a clixk-away. When someone's feeling down, they can passively scroll through "evidence" supporting those emotions - compared to talking to people, or even imagining their lives (actively thinking).
Plus how every company seems to insist on only hiring the best or the rest, no middle ground; either you're a top genius working at hip startups and/or the engineering department at the big internet megacorporations, or you're doing the modern equivalent of a McJob, that is, Uber driver (if you're lucky enough to have a car), delivery guy, warehouse order picker that needs to pee in bottles on the go to get the targets the computer is telling you to reach.
I found that social media let me to regularly compare myself with friends, and feel like I was also being evaluated... after explaining why I shut down my accounts, I learned many of my friends felt similarly.
It doesn't help that everyone's social lives are a clixk-away. When someone's feeling down, they can passively scroll through "evidence" supporting those emotions - compared to talking to people, or even imagining their lives (actively thinking).