Jonathan Haidt on the Anxious Generation

Young people feel a lot of pressure today. When I say to my students ‘okay, you tell me you're on TikTok and social media for four or five hours a day, why don't you get off?’, they all reply in the same way. They don't talk about the benefits of it. They say, ‘I can't because everyone else is on it’. As a social psychologist I’m very tuned in to the way we affect each other like that. I study how people influence each other, how we have a lot of built-in software, you might say, for how we position ourselves in society, how we seek prestige. A lot of this is shaped by culture, but there are some very powerful evolved systems in there.

Human beings care about reputation. We are an ultra-social species. We live or die or succeed based on what other people think of us. This was especially true in ancient times, when if you weren’t in with the group, if you were annoying people and they expelled you, you were dead.

So we have a lot of deep wiring to manage our reputations and it is especially powerful in teenagers. When you're a kid, you're playing, it's fun, it's not about your reputation. But gradually, things get more serious.  You get cliques, and you get exclusion, and you get mean girls, and suddenly, it's all about, who's in, who's out. Adolescents are very insecure, very concerned about their reputation.

Networks are very useful things for adults. And technology helps us network. Kids don't need to network. Kids need to develop friendships. And what they really need is a small number of close friends. If a child has a couple of close friends, even one best friend, they're probably fine. So what happened?

In 2010, millennials had flip phones, which they would use to text each other to get together and do stuff. Then everything moves online and suddenly everyone has a smartphone, which takes up five to ten hours of their day (see the graphs in my book). Time spent with friends plummets. By 2019, before COVID hit, teenagers were almost fully socially distanced. They had given up most of their time with friends. Is this going to warp their development? Absolutely.

There were no significant trends in mental health stats from the late 90s onwards, then all of a sudden, around 2013, it's as though someone turned on a switch and girls all over the English-speaking world started checking into psychiatric emergency wards. If it were the destigmatization of mental health that was driving these changes, then what we would see is a gradual change since the 1990s. It wasn’t. This correlational evidence is what first alerted me to the impact of social media: maybe something else had changed around the world.

I teach a course at New York University. My undergrads are wonderful. As we talk, I learn what their lives are like. We had a conversation a couple of weeks ago about the interstitial moments, that is, the pauses between other activities like waiting for the lift, or going to the bathroom, or waiting in line, little pockets of one to sixty seconds in your life. Those used to be times when you would do nothing. You would just be with your thoughts and your brain could process things. Many of my students have essentially zero minutes in which they do that. Again, half of Gen Z say they're online almost all the time. So many members of Gen Z have never gone ten minutes without stimulation coming in. I think this is devastating to creativity and to serenity. The brain was not designed to work this way. And I think it's malfunctioning when you stuff it full of content all day long.

The major obstacle I saw prior to publishing The Anxious Generation was a sense of resignation. People who say, oh, the train’s left the station. To which I say, no: we can actually change this. The world that we have is completely toxic for children. It's doubled the rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, self-harm. So we have to change the world. The phone-based childhood only came in twelve years ago. We can roll it back, we just have to work together.