Veteran Teachers: Apathy crisis?

I am a fairly young high school teacher (25F), and it’s hard for me to tell if high schoolers now are particularly disengaged or if I am just now developing my prefrontal cortex enough to how scary the apathy is. We had smartphones in high school (graduated 2017), but I rarely remember being on them at school unless it was to take pictures.

Now, half my juniors don’t have their driver’s license because they “don’t see why” they would need to drive themselves somewhere or are too anxious to get behind the wheel at all (we live in a very rural area where having a license is the sole ticket to freedom). When I have seniors for study hall they are genuinely mute the entire class period, and only stare at their own phones the entire time, not even engaging with the same device together (we have a very lax school phone policy). That’s not even beginning to go into what it’s like trying to get them to engage in real class, lol.

I hear the argument that the state of the world inherently breeds nihilism, which I don’t disagree with, but certainly it was similarly scary in 2017 as well, and while I remember being worried about Trump, the climate, etc., there seems to be something else going on.

Veteran teachers, was this the case 10 years ago and I was just oblivious as a teen myself? Or, if this is new, when did you begin to notice the shift? What is the biggest change in the last ten years of teaching for you? Sincerely, trying to figure out who is crazy