The "Everyone Is Twelve" Theory

Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. All right. A hot new internet theory has dropped, everybody. And it kind of explains everything. The theory is everyone on the internet is 12. Let me read this to you. This was posted on X about six months ago. Working on a new unified theory of reality that I'm calling everyone is 12 now. I'm strong and I want to have like 50 kids and a farm. Of course you do. You're 12, dude. I don't want to eat vegetables. I think steak and french fries are the only meal. Hell yeah, homie. You're 12. Maybe if there's a crime, we should just send in the army. Bless your heart, my 12-year-old buddy. Everybody is 12 is... Probably the first unified theory of internet culture that I have seen in at least 10 years that seems to explain everything. From trad wives to dirtbag woke leftists, from tech bros to biohacking wellness influencers, from slimy senators to retard maxing TikTokers, the I am 12 theory kind of indicts everybody and calls us out on our completely juvenile behavior online. My name is Mark Manson. I'm a three-time number one New York Times bestselling author, and I have been teaching psychological principles and concepts to help people improve their lives for almost 20 years now. And I am 12, and you're about to find out why. But seriously, in this video, I actually want to dig into this theory because I think there's something here. Because I think once we start digging into the actual psychology and neuroscience of why this seems to be happening and what it potentially means for our culture and society, I think there's a lot to learn from it. and potentially we can inoculate ourselves from it and try to be a little bit better than a 12 year old. Pretty much any time you want to talk about culture, media, society, you have to quote Marshall McLuhan. So Marshall McLuhan was a philosopher from the 1960s. He studied media in general, television in particular, and he's most well known for a famous quote that you've probably heard. which is the medium is the message. His point was that the content of media is not actually what matters or what influences people. His argument was that every form of media interacts with our brain in a particular type of way. And the way that it interacts with our brain helps reshape our brain. And so the actual form of the media is what matters. The content inside that form is less important. For example, the printing press, it didn't just... spread ideas across Europe. It actually produced a new type of human being. It produced a human being that could sit alone in a room for four to six hours at a time, consuming hundreds of pages of written material, thinking deeply about it, drawing linear causation between multiple things, taking perspectives of other human beings that they've never met. And the result was the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. The important point here is that every dominant medium in history has reshaped the minds of the population receiving it, and that is because they are receiving it for multiple hours a day for years and years on end. McLuhan actually had a better quote about all this, which for some reason never gets repeated, but he said, we shape our tools and then our tools shape us. Oral culture made people communal, ritualistic thinkers. They stored their memories and myths and stories that got passed down through generations. Prints made solitary, rational, sequential thinkers. TV made people passive, reactive, image-driven thinkers. And now we have a brand new medium that's making us all 12. So fast forward, it's 2018. Let's call it the TikTok moment. TikTok, at the time called Musical.ly, combined a number of previous innovations and then added one unique innovation of their own to create a completely new medium that very quickly has swept across the entire planet. So the important thing to understand about social media is that prior to 2018, social media was actually social. It was very much about who you followed, who your friends were, what the celebrities that you cared about were doing. It was you opted into the information and content that was going to be sent to you. It wasn't decided for you by an algorithm beforehand. And so the first of the most consequential innovations was the newsfeed in 2006, this kind of infinite scroll of information updating you about everything, about every person you know or care about. The second big innovation was the short form video, which came out with Vine in 2013. Vine obviously died because it didn't really have the infrastructure around it to proliferate as widely as TikTok has. But what TikTok did is they took the infinite newsfeed scroll, they took the short form video of Vine, and then they added what has become known as the For You Feed. So the For You Feed is not social media, it's interest media. Basically what TikTok figured out is they said, you know what? It doesn't matter who you know. it doesn't matter who you want to follow. We can figure out better what you want to see than you and your friends can. And so the TikTok algorithm started showing people stuff from people they've never heard of, people on the other side of the world that they've never seen, that they're never going to meet. Everything was optimized around attention, engagement, and pure interest. Now it's hard to overstate how much The TikTokization of everything has just conquered the world. I mean, you're watching this on YouTube right now. YouTube has become dominated by short form video media. I have to spend fucking way too much of my life shooting short form videos when I'd rather be sitting at a desk talking to you like this. But this is the world we live in. I have some pretty insane stats that I looked up. So the average 20 year old is now spending three hours a day watching short form videos. That amounts to over 200 individual videos every single day. In aggregate, Americans spent over 200 billion hours. watching short form video last year. Short form video is now the second most watched medium on the entire planet behind classic television. And if you're looking at people under the age of 30, it is the most watched format across the planet. So this is becoming the default way that we are organizing information across society. It's becoming the default way that we ingest information from society around us. And it is becoming the default way that our brains approach and think about information. So there's one aspect of this that is bad, which is that it kind of removes agency from you. In many ways, it makes you an even more passive viewer than television does. Because I mean, at least when you're sitting down to watch television, you're like looking at different shows and trying to decide if you want to change the channel or not. Whereas on TikTok, the videos just keep coming and you have no idea what's coming next. You have no control over it or you have very, very little influence over it. It's just. TikTok is deciding for you, there is zero agency in this form of media consumption. But there's a more subtle problem with this as well, which I have never really seen talked about anywhere. And that is this, is that it removes people's sense of taste. Because TikTok and the social media platforms are offloading your need to decide anything, they are essentially encouraging you to outsource your opinions to them. because they have the data on what you like and don't like. So why should you worry about what you like and don't like? They have the data on what you believe to be true and to not be true. So why should you think about what you believe to be true? The second issue with this new medium is that it's only 10 to 60 seconds. The truth is, is that when you have something that short, there is no room for setup. There's no room for character arc. There's no room to build tension. There's no room for ambiguity, mixed messages, subtle themes, motifs. Pretty much everything that makes art interesting and impactful in people's lives, you simply don't have enough time to create any of it in a format that is that short. the only content that ends up passing any of the filters and getting distribution is content that can emotionally resolve itself within 20 or 30 seconds. And let's be honest, anything that can emotionally resolve itself in 20 or 30 seconds is probably the emotion of a 12 year old. The third factor is that short form platforms are basically dopamine casinos. It is the exact same variable reward structure that you get from a slot machine. The thing that makes gambling addictive is that you don't know if you're gonna get something good or something bad the next time you put a coin in. It's that variability of the outcome that keeps you coming back more and more and more because it allows your brain to justify to itself, let's just do one more spin. You know, I'm on a bad run. Let's try one more time. And TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, they take advantage of the exact same functionality going on in our brains. It's like, well, that last video was boring and that one pissed me off, but you know what? Let's watch one more. Let's see what happens. And so you scroll again, and then you scroll again, and then you scroll again. There's a real deterioration of executive function, attention span, all sorts of things that comes along with this, which we're going to get into in a minute. And then the fourth factor that is reshaping our brains is the fact that all of this is infinite and on autoplay. Again, you are not opting in to watch the next video. You have to opt out. of watching the next video. And it turns out that opting into something and opting out of something once you're already doing it, these are two very different behaviors psychologically speaking. There's kind of an inertia to our mind in that we tend to keep doing what we're already doing. And so once we're already in that narrow path of like, well, I guess I'll just watch one more video. It takes a certain threshold of willpower, attention, and energy to get us. out of doing that much more so than it takes us to get into doing it so every single one of these design decisions does the same thing it essentially affects our brain in a very predictable way and we're already seeing this show up in a lot of research this episode is brought to you by better help If you feel like you're stuck being a 12 year old, maybe you need therapy. BetterHelp is the largest provider of teletherapy nationwide. They serve tens of thousands of people. They've been around for years and they provide an incredible service to everybody who wants to improve their mental health. Now, the great thing about BetterHelp is that when you sign up, you get an onboarding assessment and they personally match you to your therapist based on what you're going through, your personality, your situation, and the context. And best of all, if you don't like your therapist, you can switch at any time. There's absolutely zero pressure or zero cost for doing so. I started going to therapy in my mid-20s. It was one of the best and most useful things I ever did. And honestly, I wish I had done it sooner because I would have been a little bit less of an idiot and would have stopped acting like I was 12. All of the therapists on BetterHelp's platform have been thoroughly vetted and they have over 7,000 reviews on Trustpilot with a 4.5 rating. So you know you're getting the best quality care anytime, anywhere. So if you want to get started with therapy, you can use the link below to get started today. Get 10% off your first month. Tell them Mark sent you, stop acting like a 12 year old. So the simplest way to describe what this is doing to us is that it is offloading all of our resources out of our prefrontal cortex. So a quick neuroscience lesson for all you kids out there. This is a brain. This part in the front is called your prefrontal cortex. And this is the most modern... resource heavy part of your brain. It controls executive function, it controls your decision making, it controls your long-term planning, it controls your ability to consider other perspectives, conflicting viewpoints. Basically all the things that make a human a human and not just an animal happens in your prefrontal cortex. But the problem is... is that your prefrontal cortex is metabolically very expensive. It takes a lot of energy for it to work. So our default from Mother Nature is to always be very stingy with our metabolic resources, right? We don't want to think more than we have to, and we don't want to have to plan more than we have to. So anytime our environment gives us an easy off ramp to not use our prefrontal cortex, we tend to take it. And in terms of off-ramps to using our prefrontal cortex, there has never been a bigger, wider, and more enticing off-ramp than short-form video. And people are taking that off-ramp by the billions, literally. And there's some real repercussions to this. Your self-regulation just atrophies. So typically, the response of a healthy adult is that there's a stimulus. you evaluate that stimulus, and then you choose your reaction to that stimulus. That middle step there though, that evaluation of the stimulus, that is what your prefrontal cortex is doing. So if you have chosen that off-ramp and you're just saying, fuck it, fuck the prefrontal cortex, who needs to bother? You're just going straight from stimulus to reaction. with no evaluation in the middle. And interestingly, when you lose that capability to evaluate what you're experiencing, you lose a lot of things. You lose the ability to be patient. You lose the ability to be bored. You lose the ability to sit with ambiguity or sit in tension. You lose the ability to reevaluate your prior assumptions or to maybe change your mind about something. In many ways, you lose your attention span as well because you just become a stimulation junkie. And in many ways, everything I've just described, all of those skill sets that you lose, the patience, the ability to withstand boredom, the ability to withstand ambiguity, the ability to evaluate what you're experiencing in the moment, psychologically speaking, these are very much the definition of adulthood. Like they are literally the difference between an adolescent and somebody who's like fully grown and matured. But meanwhile, the other interesting aspects of. the TikTokization of everything is that it very much maintains our social and emotional functionality that's happening under the surface. So while the infinite feed may numb your ability to reevaluate some of your assumptions or sit with boredom for a long period of time, it does not numb your sense of status, your sense of tribe, in-group, out-group, identity, or say your anxiety of how that identity is performing within the in-group. In fact, because the algorithm is learning what engages you the most and feeds you more content that will engage that emotion, it is probably amplifying that sense of status and that sense of in-group and out-group. So this is... the genius of the everyone is 12 theory. See, because a six-year-old hasn't developed a social status radar yet. A six-year-old has no concept of in-group and out-group and personal identity. Meanwhile, a 16-year-old has at least some executive functioning. They can plan ahead. They can take on perspectives of others, even if they're still not very good at it. But a 12 year old is in the exact sweet spot where the social emotional machinery is fully online. Status matters intensely. Identity has to be declared. Tribes have to be picked. Every slight is existential. Yet the prefrontal cortex that would regulate all of this is still years from maturity. Being 12 is not. Childish. 12 is just unregulated social cognition. The hardware for caring is running at full capacity, but the hardware for pausing and thinking about caring has not been installed yet. And that is exactly the cognitive profile that the 4U feed selects for in adults. It's not childishness. It's not stupidity. It's something much more specific and disturbing. The feed preserves and amplifies your social brain while completely kneecapping your executive functioning and your higher brain. And so what you have left in senators, billionaires, famous musicians, Nobel laureates is the developmental profile of a seventh grader. They still have the vocabulary. They still have all the impressive credentials. But what they've lost is the part that used to sit between feeling something and then saying it out loud. So I want to take a quick detour for just a second because this is YouTube. And I know there's a lot of productivity nerds on YouTube. And I just want to say I'm old. I've been around for a while now. Gather around, kids. Let me give you a little bit of a history lesson. So it's funny because when I was younger, when I was probably the average age of people who watch this channel, the productivity advice was quite different. So I'm talking, this is back in the day, like David Allen, getting things done. Everything was about like systematizing and organization structures and different system hacks. It was actually. more maximalist and that there was the underlying assumption was always that there's some system or hack or tool that you had to add to your productivity stack that you just you didn't know about yet and and we were going to teach you what's interesting now is that most productivity content most make money content uh for this generation in this day and age it's all about removing things right it's about digital detoxes. It's about getting rid of distractions and negative influences. It's about scheduling deep work periods and time blocking your calendar and protecting your time. It's about raw dogging flights and long car rides and maximizing the utility of every minute that's being spent. And in some cases, it's foregoing a smartphone entirely for periods of time. You've got all these guys posting content about monk mode and dark mode and like I sit in a dark room with my laptop 16 hours a day bro with lots of creatine i warned you i was old while this productivity advice is all good and accurate to me it kind of approaches the symptom of the problem and not the problem itself because the real problem is actually a cultural problem it is the underlying substrate of our attention and the information that we work with every single day. And to my knowledge, nobody is addressing this underlying cultural problem or very few people are. I think Derek Thompson at The Atlantic is doing it left and David Brooks at The New York Times is doing it on the right. But like other than them, I don't really see anybody pointing to the fact that everyone is acting like they're 12 and noting that that is an issue. And the reason it's an issue is because the way culture works is that whatever the prevailing ethos of the culture, like if the prevailing ethos of our culture is to act like you're 12. then we are all socially incentivized to act like we're 12. That's what we get rewarded for. That's what gets us distribution. It's what gets us attention. It's what gets us sympathy. And it's what gets us connection. And so while it's easy to focus on how your phone fucks up your productivity or how getting off TikTok improves your attention span so you can read more books, I do think there is something deeper at work here, which is simply that we need to elevate the social status of being an adult again. Because the feed didn't just make everyone 12, it made being 12 aspirational. Like if you look at what gets rewarded culturally right now, impulsivity is considered authenticity. Not having the filter is considered keeping it real. Emotional outbursts are considered passionate. Dunking on strangers is justice and accountability. So we've rebranded every adolescent impulse as a virtue and every adult capacity is seen as being boring, uptight, fake, or giving boomer, as the kids say today. But for most of human history, maturity was the flex. The Stoics didn't frame self-regulation as deprivation. It was power. The person who could sit in discomfort without reacting. own the whole room. Samurai culture, monastic traditions, even old school hip hop. There was a long lineage where discipline, composure, restraint were the highest status signals. You weren't cool despite your self-control. You were cool because you had self-control. And this is as true as ever today, but it just seems to get completely missed by the social media hive mind at large. Ultimately, the algorithm can't monetize the things you didn't say. It can only monetize the things you did. So the entire incentive structure of public life now, it selects for the loudest, most reactive, most unfiltered versions of you and me. And then it calls it courage. It calls it success. And the result is that we now live in a culture where the president of the United States posts images of himself pooping on people and left-wing protesters with tomato soup extort school speakers for $10 at a time. This is 12-year-old behavior writ large, defining and driving our entire culture because it's the winning strategy for attention and attention is the only currency that matters. I have a dream chat that one day... people will be able to hold two contradictory ideas in their head without it feeling like a hostage situation. That a person will be able to say, I was wrong, and it will cost them nothing. That they won't be canceled by some mob on some platform. I have a dream, chat, that one day, in a room full of noise, the coolest person will be the one who hears something outrageous and doesn't say anything. Because they understand that they don't have to have an opinion. that they probably are not well informed because they don't need to vomit every feeling into the air the second it arrives. I have a dream chat that one day our children, regardless of follower count, will encounter another human being and judge them for being interesting before judging them for being correct or incorrect, for being based or being cringe, for being an ally or being problematic. That curiosity will show up before judgment does. That their self-worth will not be duct taped to a tweet that they sent in 2011. I have a dream, chat. And if you made it this far into this video and are still able to pay attention to it, I'm guessing you have that dream too.

Let our sponsor BetterHelp connect you to a therapist who can support you - all from the comfort of your own home. Visit https://betterhelp.com/markmanson and enjoy a special discount on your first month. #sponsor​

A new theory has hit the internet and it explains why everyone you meet online seems to act like a babyraging pre-teen. It's the Everybody is Twelve Theory and believe it or not, it's not just a meme. In this video, I break down the psychology and neuroscience of doomscrolling and why it's nudging us all into acting like stupid 7th graders.

For practical, science-based advice each week that might change your life, sign up for my newsletter here:http://bit.ly/3JRg3NX

Written & Directed by Mark Manson
Edited by Michelle Hsieh
Director of Photography Jess Choi
Thumbnail by Jonathan Sippel