You open Instagram to like your friend’s post and the first thing you see is another devastating news story. You feel sad for a moment, but then accidentally refresh and see an adorable video of a puppy. You’re unable to process the terrible thing until you’re lying in bed, trying to fall asleep. Rinse and repeat.

For Generation Z, this is the only thing we’ve ever known. The 24-hour news cycle, while only emerging in the last few decades, has changed how we perceive the world.

There is no longer morning or nightly news, like there was a mere 15 years ago; there’s just news, developing every minute of every day. It seems that every time I look at the news, there’s some breaking story about some natural disaster or some new executive order.

And instead of truly soaking in the story and grappling with the gravity of it, I am forced to divert my attention back to my homework and be left with a lingering sense of dread.

Because of this, it’s no surprise that anxiety and depression rates are so high in our generation; there is quite literally no escaping the horrors of our world.

We are constantly faced with awful stories that make it seem like the world as we know it is ending.

You can’t even casually scroll through social media without seeing screenshots of President Donald Trump’s tweets insulting one group or another. If any former president had said on live television the things that Trump tweets, their career would be over.

In a similar vein, there are so many things happening all of the time that if Watergate or the publication of the Pentagon Papers happened today, it wouldn’t even make front headlines. When scrolling through national news sites, you can’t find anything about either of Pete Hegseth’s leaked Signal messages. The second leak literally happened one month ago; we should still be talking about it.

At the same time, it’s hard to still be talking about something that happened a month ago when birthright citizenship is being judged under the Supreme Court, tariffs are skyrocketing and ICE is arresting our neighbors.

Part of the responsibility falls on us; we can’t focus on all of the problems at once and therefore feel helpless. Instead, we need to dig deeper into some stories, talk to other people about it and get involved in the causes we care about the most.

After clicking on a link to a full article about upcoming Supreme Court cases, you go to close out the app and then remember: you never liked your friend’s post.