2010s: Better experienced as a child, teen or an adult?

I have mixed feelings about being a 2010s teen, and I've been a teen in all eras of the 2010s (early, mid, late).

I love that finding out my identity at a young age was much easier thanks to the internet. Getting my first smartphone at age 12 was both a blessing and a curse, ultimately it would become an extension of myself. I remember being 14, making dozens of playlists on Spotify with random titles for every mood I had. When Lorde first became big it seemed like we finally had the first spokesperson of our generation.

Vine was monumental to my generation's adolescence, it being the backbone of a lot our current humor and aesthetic. Pop music got moody, tropical, and more intertwined with Hip Hop than ever. Then in mid 2016, Lemonade by Beyoncé suddenly dropped, it seemed like everyone at school was talking about it. It didn't seem like it then but this was one of the defining eras of my teenhood. When Trump won presidency, it seemed like yet another confirmation that the world really ended in 2012 and we're just ghosts living in an everdream. Finally, emo-rap started dominating the charts and Gen Z had gone mainstream. XXXTentacion died, then a few weeks later so did my teen years. I was now no longer a teenager.

But in the background of it all was this constant drone of anxiety, melodrama, and dread.