The Anxious Generation

If you have ever thought to yourself 🤔 “you know, I might have a social media problem,” please take a pause from reading this and raise your hand.

If I could actually see you all right now, I imagine we’d have near unanimous consent.

Look, I consider myself someone who is reasonably self-aware and self-disciplined yet on many occasions I’ve caught myself wasting time scrolling social media feeds, compulsively reaching for my phone to check social media whenever there’s a lull in the action…etc. I’ve even installed and uninstalled the various apps on my phone several times. There’s no question that these technologies are addictive and dangerously so.

If this is true for all of us, imagine what it’s like for our kids.

What’s funny, or rather, scary about social media is that it’s yet another big, societally critical issue that is hiding in plain sight, like civic apathy, alcohol and drug addiction, the national debt and other such things. For some reason, we’d rather lie to ourselves than do the hard work of confronting the truth about social media. 

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“The Anxious Generation” is a well-researched, impassioned call to arms against what author Jonathan Haidt calls the “phone based childhood” and a book well worth a read in its entirety. Haidt is a moral psychologist, educator, and the author of several very important books. He’s most famous for his (sometimes controversial) 2018 book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” which he co-authored with Greg Lukianoff. This one is also worth a read.

The Coddling is essentially a clarion call about 3 really bad ideas that have been spreading around our country and particularly so in our schools and Universities:

1. That which doesn’t kill you makes you weaker

2. Always trust your feelings

3. Life is a battle of good people against evil people.

I mention these because they are relevant background to Haidt’s argument in the “The Anxious Generation” and I happen to think he’s right.

Anyway, if I was concerned about phones and social media when I picked up the book, now I’m terrified.  Apparently, these technologies have had disastrous consequences for our youth. The data is just staggering. First of all, kids are spending something like 40-50 hours per week on devices and getting on average 10-11 push notifications per hour! You don’t need a PHD in psychology to know this is bad news. Secondly, since the advent of social media, there’s been a huge uptick in mental health problems for kids, particularly with anxiety and depression. Suicides and suicide attempts are also up meaningfully as is addiction. Kids are reporting lower levels of happiness, more fear, and less hope for the future. The charts all look the same, a massive spike upward that starts literally at the exact time social media started spreading around the world. 

So, what’s going-on here? 

It’s important to note at the outset that not all screen time is created equal. From the data we have it looks like video games, TV shows, and even YouTube videos are not really all that problematic for childhood development. Obviously, it depends on what kind of games, shows, and videos we are talking about here. There is clearly all sorts of content that is inappropriate and damaging. But assuming we are talking about age-appropriate stuff, general screen time doesn’t seem to be that bad, accept in extreme cases. This is good news for all my parent friends out there worried about ruining their kids with screen time.

It’s phones and social media that are the real problem here. The simple fact that phones are portable and come equipped with access to the Internet and ingeniously designed attention-grabbing features like push notifications makes them dangerous. A kid walking around with a smartphone, literally the most powerful attention-capturing device ever invented, just doesn’t stand a chance. With social media, it’s about the like button and other social comparison features and what those can do to psychologically vulnerable kids. 

The thrust of Haidt’s argument is that because of the unique dynamics of childhood psychology, kids are simply not equipped to effectively engage with smartphones and social media. Neither are adults, by the way! He points out that as kids we come equipped with two powerful learning systems:

1. The conformist bias, where we learn by copying whatever is most common

2. The prestige bias, where we learn by copying whoever is most accomplished or prestigious

He draws on Durkheim’s social electricity theory and argues that our entire psychological circuitry is based upon an evolutionary process involving synchronous, face-to-face physical interactions.  This is what we most need. What we get with social media is literally the exact opposite—asynchronous and digital—and our brains are simply not capable of effectively interacting in that environment. 

Haidt also argues that the culture of safetyism and overprotective parenting that emerged over the last several decades has made the problem worse. This is a phenomenon that has been well documented—think helicopter parents, over-programmed and scheduled kids, no free play, no chores, no responsibility, no risk, overly safe (boring) playgrounds, parents getting criminally prosecuted for childhood endangerment for letting their kids roam free…that kind of thing. Haidt’s point is that when you couple this with all the issues of the phone based childhood, you get a toxic soup severely detrimental to childhood development. 

What we know about kids is that a key to their development involves taking risks and experimenting with independence and responsibility in safe environments. The only way to do this is through play together with other kids, ideally with minimal parental direction. So, as a kid, if your parents simply won’t let you or you are busy spending all day on the phone, you are going to miss out on something critical to your growth. 

According to Haidt, the phone based childhood causes 4 foundational harms:

1. Social deprivation

2. Sleep deprivation

3. Attention fragmentation

4.  Addiction

Considering that in my own adult self-assessment, it was all too easy to check all 4 off, I think this list is spot on! The question we need to ask ourselves is: are we using the phone or is the phone using us? This is particularly critical when you consider that we’re on the verge of things like brain implants. How sure are we that that is a good idea? 

What really blew my mind was Haidt’s discussion of the rise sociogenic epidemics—i.e. sudden increases in psychological illnesses with no apparent physical or environmental connection. The most famous of these is from 2021 when a video of a person with Tourette syndrome went viral on TikTok and there was a huge spike in people experiencing Tourette symptoms. If that doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what will. The potential for technologies like these to be turned against us and used as agents of control and mental manipulation is very real. It’s one thing to mess with our vulnerable psychological makeup to get us all to waste our time, click on ads, and buy stuff we don’t really don’t need or want, but if this is possible, what else is?

The really disheartening part of this story is that it looks like these technologies were deliberately designed to prey upon the psychological vulnerabilities of young people. How is this any different than Purdue pushing opioids? To think that the profit motive is so strong in our system that people would unleash these technologies out in the world without compunction is disturbing to say the least!

Despite all this, there’s an optimistic ending to the story here. Unlike most of the issues we examine in Profit+, there are actually some easy ways we can address this problem. Haidt highlights 4 big ideas, none of which cost any money!

1. No smartphones before high school

2. No social media before 16

3. Phone-free schools

4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.

On the legal and policy front, he also argues that we should increase the age of digital consent from 13 to 16 and force companies to actually properly verify the age of visitors/users.

I like all these ideas, will be implementing them in my own household, and pushing for them in my community. We cannot just stand back and let these powerful technologies continue to hurt our kids. I hope you all will join me in this!

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