A Talk with Keegan Lee

Keegan Lee is an author, public speaker, and tech ethicist. She is a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying psychology and English literature, and she has spoken with students, educators, and policymakers about digital wellness. Her published work includes co-authoring 60 Days of Disconnect with clinical psychologist Dr. Bilal Gandor. She has also been recognized with grants and mentorship connected to Netflix’s The Social Dilemma and TikTok’s Safety by Design team, named a James R. Copland and Lillian G. Copland Scholar, and included by People magazine among seven “Girls Changing the World” in 2024.

On August 1, 2025, Heroes Around Me hosted her for a live interview moderated by Molly Yan of the Events Department. Students and family members joined from more than one country. Keegan described getting a phone in seventh grade, using Snapchat and Instagram for validation, and deciding on her sixteenth birthday to delete social media for 60 days and keep a journal. That journal became the book: her entries beside Dr. Gandor’s scientific perspective. Writing it took about two and a half years, overlapping high school, and she said the hardest part was staying intentional while still wanting to be a teenager.

She does not argue that technology is simply bad. Her point in the interview was that social media is staying, and the work is to find a middle ground: short breaks, time limits, or making the apps harder to open, such as using them only on a laptop. She talked about a mother who thanked her after a talk because a son was online all the time, and about peers who tried their own short breaks. Asked who the hero in her life is, she named her father, an entrepreneur who taught her to keep going after failure and to ask for help.

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