[Kaderin Triste]

Originally Posted by Coda

This is more normal than you might realize, especially at your age. The general path of human social development is relatively consistent from person to person, although the details and timing vary.

Babies aren't born with an ability to distinguish themselves from the world around them. It's some time late in toddlerhood that most children begin to understand that other people have identities in their own rights. For most of childhood, then, a child's identity is tightly bound up in the concrete facts of day-to-day life. It isn't until the teenage years that humans start to develop a personal identity independent of one's parents and the social constructs they're forced into like school and family.

Teenage angst and rebellion come as a result of this growing drive (both internal and external) to develop one's own identity. You realize how much your life is out of your control as you start to build up a sense of personal agency, but your outlets for self-expression are limited. You naturally want to become your own person instead of what the authority figures above you want from you.

One of the easiest ways a teenager can express their own agency is to choose who to associate with, and it's only natural to seek out similar people. With little personal background established yet but an undeniable urge to define oneself, it's only natural to latch onto those things that you see in your social group.

That's not going to change until you start getting some real agency in your life -- when you're able to make meaningful choices about yourself and your future, when you're not directly dependent on other people to make it possible to get by. Getting out of the house for college is a very common time for this to happen in the western world.



It's not just normal -- it's instinctual, a part of how humans build societies.



This is why I started wearing a smartwatch. People have a lot less of a problem with you glancing at your wrist instead of pulling out your phone, even if you're doing the exact same thing. Music controls and time checks are trivial, and most smartwatches have the ability to send canned responses to text messages.

Unfortunately it's too little too late for a smartwatch since I can't even have my phone on me at all amymore and since smartwatches don't play music themselves, but just control music on the phone so...
Plus most smartwatches that I can actually afford generally don't have those features or don't work properly because they're cheap knockoffs of the expensive name brands. Granted I've only bought 2 ever. 1 was basically just a digital watch/pedometer combo, which also was supposed to monitor sleep and heart rate, which it did. Badly. It measured my resting heart rate as bouncing between 65ish to 185ish.
The second one I bought wouldn't even connect to my phone.