The internet is 23 years old. And it’s acting exactly like a 23-year-old. Restless. Burnt out. Hyper-online but craving real connection. Swinging between idealism and exhaustion. Questioning everything it used to believe. We’ve spent years blaming platforms for the chaos. But what if the behavior isn’t a glitch? What if this is developmental psychology playing out at internet scale? We mapped the history of the social web to human growth stages: infancy, childhood, adolescence, emerging adulthood. And suddenly every cultural whiplash makes sense: - the pile-ons - the moral purism - the burnout - the retreat to group chats - the AI self-reflection - the collective “what now?” The internet isn’t collapsing. It’s growing up. And the next stage is far more optimistic than people think. Swipe → for the full timeline. It might change how you interpret every platform moment happening now and reshape how you think about where we’re headed next.