"We are forever elsewhere"
Jonathan Haidt's "Anxious Generation" - the kids aren't alright, but neither are we
“We are forever elsewhere.”
-Sherry Turkle, MIT professor, quoted by Jonathon Haidt in The Anxious Generation
Unless you’ve been entirely offline or avoiding all news outlets, you’ve heard about Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation.1 In this book he makes the compelling and convincing case that the current mental health crisis among adolescents and young people (in particular) can be directly traced to the introduction of the smartphone and most importantly, social media. I’m not going to spend my time convincing you that this is the case. Suffice to say, I think he’s right. Haidt’s methodology is solid and he has the numbers to back it up.2
Though Haidt is a social scientist with solid evidence behind his claims, I was already a believer. He didn’t have to convince me. I’m tired of tip-toeing around the issue, so I’m just going to come out and say it…3
I think social media is bad.
I think it is bad for our health - emotionally, spiritually, physically. I think it is bad for our culture, for our art, and for our sense of self. I think it fuels conspiracy theories and polarization and robs people of inordinate amounts of time they will never get back. I think social media is a portable slot machine that has manipulated every single dopamine sensor in your brain and every evolutionarily-designed compulsion you have toward peer mirroring and social cohesion and mimetic desire and consumed it into a gaping, endless consumer-driven loop that inspires conformity and group-think.
“Social media platforms are […] the most efficient conformity engines ever invented.”
The Anxious Generation (pg. 59)
I also think that if we were in a Marvel movie the Silicon Valley CEOs would be the obvious villains, with their shiny promises and immortality aspirations and crush-all-end-all monopolies. I don’t think Meta cares about you. I don’t think Elon Musk does either. So, no, I don’t think they are going to try to protect your mental health (or your kids’). I think money is king and that’s the end-world capitalism game we’re playing now.
Does it sound like I’m writing to you from a bunker in the woods? I swear I haven’t gone rogue. I’m a modern gal just like you, writing on my laptop in bed, Spotify writing playlist on, Whatsapp notifications dinging. But I’m also a mother of two young kids and I’m trying to grapple with this shifting sands world all around us.
Jonathan Haidt’s book is about kids and teenagers and what an encounter with social media can do to a young mind during what he calls a ‘sensitive period’ - essentially periods of time when certain neural pathways are being formed permanently. These periods are primarily during our youth and it’s why we all end up in therapy talking about the things that happened to us in childhood and adolescence. These formative years, the experiences with our parents and our peers, are the playbook we draw from (for better or worse) for the rest of our lives.4
So what happens if during that time your sense of reality is warped by 10 second TikTok videos? What if all that time on social media5 means that you aren’t having the essential in person experiences we all need to grow into healthy, functioning adults? One look at Gen Z will tell you. It’s not good.
It’s also why I find the argument for introducing tech to kids because “that’s the world we live in” to be incredibly unconvincing. Odds are your kids will use a phone and a computer and all sorts of technology someday (though who knows, I still think a tech apocalypse could happen sooner rather than later…) - but it’s very different for someone to use these things after an uninterrupted period of growth in the real world during childhood and adolescence.
You can always learn to type. You can’t always learn how to think.
So Jonathan Haidt’s book is incredibly important when it comes to understanding the ongoing mental health crisis for our kids. I appreciate his calls to action and I hope many, many parents take his advice and advocate for phone-free schools and lobby lawmakers to enforce an age minimum of 16 for social media sites. This is so important. But as I have started to read this book I can’t help but see that this is not just about the kids.
As ‘an older millennial’ I was spared most of the effects Haidt lays out for teens - as he points out, having AIM and a family desktop didn’t seem to harm kids in the same way.6 So I think it’s fair to say that for us ‘older folks’ we do have a bit of an advantage here. We have that vibrant childhood self and brain preserved deep down somewhere… It may take a full social media detox and a Herculean effort when it comes to putting in healthy boundaries with our smartphones, but we can get back to that place. We have childhood memories of playing tag with our friends and climbing trees and school dances and first kisses and getting into trouble out in the real messy, beautiful, awful world.
Many kids don’t have that now. As Jonathon Haidt pointed out in a recent podcast interview, teenage boys and young men were (until very recently) the most likely group to find themselves in the emergency room for unintentional injuries. No one is probably surprised to hear this! But now, this age group is actually so much less likely to get injured that you are more likely to find a 50 year old man in the emergency room for a broken arm than an 18 year old. They are actually even less likely to get injured than teenage girls!
On the surface this sounds like good news - great, less kids getting injured! But then you hear the other statistic - this same group of teenage boys and young men is now much more likely to commit suicide. Less broken bones, more suicide. What do we choose?
There is a book by Mary Eberstadt, Primal Screams, that I think of so often.7 I think of it because Eberstadt looks at the human being as a human animal8 and I find this incredibly helpful. She says that the behavior of human beings in the 21st century is incredibly strange - if we were observing the same behaviors in animals in a zoo, we would be be concerned and perplexed. We would immediately think something in their environment was very, very wrong.
So often when I find myself at an impasse in life, when something that I thought would be easy turns out to be incredibly hard, I look at the circumstances. And many times I’m struck by how ‘unnatural’ they are, how opposed they are to my basic, instinctual, human-animal needs and how my zoo-like life in the matrix-internet-connected world is so far from the breathing, thinking, needing body I occupy.
Jonathan Haidt employs a similar methodology, laying out what children have evolutionarily developed to need in adolescence - free play, attunement, physical risk taking, social learning, healthy attachments - and how the smartphone and social media has fundamentally disrupted this vital biological process.
As I say, I think this a book about more than the kids. It’s about all of us. Because we have all been ‘disrupted’ - and I don’t just mean by the more than 200 notifications the average teen gets on their phone per day9 - but disrupted on some sort of basic, human level when it comes to who we are and what we are meant for.
This is not the end of an essay, but the beginning of a conversation I hope to continue as I read through Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation. As I encounter concepts the book applies to kids and adolescents I will broaden the discussion to society at large to see how the harms of social media and technology generally are playing out beyond these age groups.
In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts and how these ideas strike you.
I’ll leave you with the words of
, an admirable warrior against ‘the Machine’ -“Yes there were giants in the Earth. It was real, all of it. All of the stories they told you when you were a child, they were all true. Imagine that. Imagine if adulthood is the fairy tale and childhood is the reality. Imagine giants’ graves all over the land and the motorways roaring past them and it is the motorways which are the romantic lies.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Beast
What is the truth? What is the dream? What is the reality? Where is the line?
“To know that one is dreaming is to no longer be perfectly asleep.” - C.S. Lewis
The fact that I was able to justify buying this book as soon as it came out (Thriftbooks and the library are usually the way I get my books) is solely because of paid subscribers. Thank you sincerely so much for supporting the work I do. If you found this essay thought-provoking and would like to read more about the intersection of technology with wonder, religion, literature, and art, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support the work I do.
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Seriously, kudos to his marketing/promotions team, they are on it!
Buy the book or peruse his excellent Substack, After Babel, to learn more about the specifics.
Really, I’m here for the nuance - as I wrote, It’s Okay to Like the Internet - and it’s also okay for you to defend social media, and for me to lampoon it. Onward!
I know, like we need more pressure as parents!
Around 20 hours a week for teenage girls - literally a part-time job.
Still, I will tell you I don’t think it was great. We all got into plenty of trouble with our minimal online access and the drama of MySpace ‘Top Friends’ was enough that I am absolutely horrified to think what it would be like to be a teenage girl right now having to navigate SnapChat and TikTok and Instagram and a constant rotation of followers and haters and likes and DMs… I simply cannot imagine.
It’s an imperfect book with some excellent arguments - worth the read.
She’s a Catholic so clearly she’s thinking ‘natural law’ here as well, of course.
Very interesting and well thought out summary and response. I'm a younger millennial and I got a smart phone around 9th grade and made a Twitter account around the same time. I look back and see that I was half in the real world and half online. Definitely stunted. When I entered college, I left the virtual world and it was eye-opening and so many good times were had. I can't get my childhood (14-17) back. But, I definitely monitor my sons tv time (only screen he's allowed).
I noticed commentators says that we are being alarmist about social media/smart phones, but I think they don't understand, if tech can completely wreck older teens/adults lives, do the younger kids stand a chance?
Anyone can choose what to do with their own children, just don't come crying when the research was there and said hey, monitor your kids screen time and social media usage.
Great summary, Katie. I'm not sure how many times we need to hear this message before it truly sinks in, but the more times, the better! Even as an adult who believes wholeheartedly with the message of this book, I feel burdened by the practical aspect of disconnecting. It's so intertwined with how life is lived in 2024 that it can feel overwhelming to figure out how to do work, and marketing, and even certain friendships when everyone else is "plugged in." I think the more conversations and brainstorming, the better. So thanks for discussing!