What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen

by Kate Fagan

millions of other parents hadn’t yet considered how the Internet might be affecting their kids, how it was fostering an increased dependence on outside validation, and consequently a decreased ability to soothe themselves.

But then you get to college, and suddenly you’re out of rungs and that ladder has turned into a massive tree with hundreds of sprawling limbs, and progress is no longer a thing you can easily measure, because there are now thousands of paths to millions of destinations. And none are linear.

Recognize that empathy might be in short supply. Educate yourself about mental health. And consider the idea that not every struggling teammate is weak.

One study found that an average high school student today likely deals with as much anxiety as did a psychiatric patient in the 1950s.

We’re suffering because everything we do is filtered through a lens of consumerism. We see ourselves as “products” to be “branded” and “marketed” in all venues of our lives: social, romantic, and professional. This has been a mindset inculcated into us from an early age.

EVERYTHING we do is seen as instrumental towards marketing ourselves for the college admission boards, or for the job market, or to help us rush a fraternity or sorority, or to help us win friends, or to help us be a more attractive potential partner. You see the capitalist worldview has infiltrated our psychology, and our sense of self-worth. And it is toxic. It results in fear of being ourselves and following what we really want to do. It results in micro-managing every aspect of our lives to best effect

It results in constant comparisons with our peers (which causes depression) and catastrophizing of any potential dent to our marketability (which results in anxiety). Essentially, it results in a dehumanized mindset.

Exactly when do our young people have time to develop their own sense of self? When are they able to be alone, to understand how they think, what they really want—without the pretense of how it might look on a college application?

She refers also to evidence that the pursuit of extrinsic goals at the expense of intrinsic goals correlates with anxiety and depression. It seems reasonable that this would be true.

As scholar William Deresiewicz has written, we have created a generation of world-class hoop jumpers, of “excellent sheep,” of young people who know what they’re supposed to say, but not necessarily why they’re saying it. We’re teaching young people what to think, but not how to think.

Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 “friends” that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.

Comparing your everyday existence to someone else’s highlight reel is dangerous for both of you.

In December 2016, The New Yorker posted an article by Jia Tolentino, “The Worst Year Ever, Until Next Year.” In it, Tolentino addresses the potential, yet still unknowable, problems created by digital consumption. “There is no limit to the amount of misfortune a person can take in via the Internet,” she writes. “And there’s no easy way to properly calibrate it—no guidebook for how to expand your heart to accommodate these simultaneous scales of human experience; no way to train your heart to separate the banal from the profound. Our ability to change things is not increasing at the same rate as our ability to know about them. No, 2016 is not the worst year ever, but it’s the year I started feeling like the Internet would only ever induce the sense of powerlessness that comes when the sphere of what a person can influence remains static, while the sphere of what can influence us seems to expand without limit, allowing no respite at all.”

Throughout human history, we have soothed ourselves by creating, by mining our brains and hearts, turning pain into thoughts, thoughts into art. Now we are tethered to a steady hum of the superficial, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to disconnect, to turn inward, away from that buzz. Even our sense of time has shape-shifted, because everything can be accessed instantaneously. It’s not hard to see, when viewed through this lens, that carefully considered responses are being replaced by knee-jerk reactions.

In her book Alone Together, Sherry Turkle writes that young people “prefer to deal with strong feelings from the safe haven of the Net. It gives them an alternative to processing emotions in real time.”

Efficient communication does not mean effective communication. Our perception of efficacy is dependent on our desired outcome. We communicate for many different reasons: sometimes merely to make plans, sometimes out of boredom or duty, and other times because we are struggling and need compassion and empathy. Most worrisome are the ways social media complicates or reduces our ability to reach one another when we’re in distress.

In which way do we view imperfection? And, again: Notice how close perfection is to despair.

A never-ending struggle: watching your child fumbling, forging a path, becoming an adult, and not being sure when they need you to hug them and keep them safe, and when they need you to let them be.

If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are. —Montesquieu

We put time into our social media because we believe that it affords us the unique opportunity to fashion our own identity. We care about the images we post and the lines we write underneath those images, because it’s all part of reflecting who we are and constructing who we want to become. Would you put more time, or less, into a post if you knew it was your last? Would you want the image and words to be perfect, an ideal lasting representation of you, or would you quickly recognize the futility of the pursuit, that the whole thing was a mirage merely reflecting distorted images of the real world? And would you instead spend your time absorbing the world itself?

Anticipation allows us to be in two different moments at once. But it is often a zero-sum game: we steal from one to fuel the other.