Perhaps to a nihilist maybe that's not a bad thing, but to most that's neither good nor nihilism. This is a serious problem.
Last I knew, kids were still largely growing up in schools where being smart is dumb and prosecuted through bullying. That’s sufficient for mass depression to climb when the rest of life becomes more stressful. I.e. people really are having a hard time finding actually good work that provides health care and a steady paycheck and decent work environment. The opioid crisis has fallouts, in addition.
Most of what I just said was said by the hippies in the 60s.
Americans seem to bring guns to church to shoot church goers. They bring guns to cinemas to shoot patrons. They leave guns in their car's back seat so their infant can accidentally shoot them through the back of their own head.
I think the example of gun violence has a solution found outside the topic of teen depression.
Gun ownership and the romanticism around the 'right to bear arms' in the US is a whole deluded issue in itself.
You mean basically every society ever?
Children like to think they're special. Parents of children like to think their child is special. And we're doing more than ever to try to convince children that they're special. But reality is not so kind. The vast majority of people, by definition, are not special and never will be. The internet emphasizes this truism. Whether your personal desire is intelligence, strength, beauty, music, or some other skill - the internet will emphasize that, even for your age, you suck.
That explains the useless part at least. As for joyless, I think the huge number of apps designed to give you that constant burst of something, ostensibly dopamine, that gives that feeling of joy (and more importantly from their perspective, addiction) is something that I think will have, almost with complete certainty, unforeseen consequences. Look at casinos and you see people that who are 'happily' inserting their pennies and pulling the rod - yet they look, and mostly are, completely miserable. Their addiction we consider negative because money is directly involved, yet is the addition to notifications, numbers, and all the sort of bells and whistles modern social sites use to trigger addiction truly that different? If anything, the insidious nature of it all makes it seem even worse.