The Anxious Generation
Book Review (Jonathan Haidt)
I have been at war with my phone for a long time. Probably ever since I got a mobile phone somewhere around 2004 or so. Back then it was not such a problem, phones then were pretty dumb. I don't remember getting a smart phone - I was not enough of an early adopter, or rich enough, to be at the leading edge of that change. But life changed with smart phones, and mostly in ways that made things easier, but us dumber.
I count myself fortunate to have grown up at the right time. Old enough to have a childhood dominated by books, young enough to have rode the first wave of the internet. Still alive to experience many of the benefits of the internet age.
Jonathan Haidt's new book, which is making all sorts of waves and garnering lots of publicity, is driven by offering a double-barrelled answer to a bedevilling question.
The question is this: when you look at mental health data for adolescents, things got dramatically bad1 from around 2010, for people born around 1995 or later. Why?
The answer that Haidt argues for, both elegantly and with a considerable wealth of data behind it, is twofold.
Part A: The decline of a play-based childhood. Tracking from the 90s in particular, we have overprotected children in the real world, giving them less play time, exposing them to less risk, and giving them less independence. Haidt argues that particularly during childhood and most of all adolescence, kids need exposure to real world interactions and risk, in order to grow into capable adults. Safetyism, the overriding prerogative to keep kids from anything that could possibly endanger them, actually creates kids who turn into adults unable to handle anything.
Part B: The combination of smart phones, always-on internet, the rise of social media, all combined with part A, to make 'the Great Rewiring'. This is what Haidt calls about how a phone-based childhood rewires adolescent brains, and it's what we see from 2010 onwards. In particular, he describes four foundational harms: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.
I was born too early for smartphones to have ruined my adolescence; plenty of other culprits. But the reason I am still at war with my phone is primarily attention fragmentation. That probably affects me more than anything. It's why my phone and computer have all sorts of self-imposed controls on them to keep me on track and off social media.
Anyway, back to Haidt. In two subsequent chapters he works through the data for specifically why social media (instagram and tiktok above all) are more harmful for girls than boys; and why boys have a different profile of harm. This does play into gender differences: girls are more wired for communion (social integration, cooperation, empathy, etc), boys for agency (efficiency, competency, assertion, individuation and self-expansion). And so, on average, girls are more affected by visual social comparison, their aggression is more relational, they more easily share emotions and disorders, and are more subject to predation and harassment.
The chapter on boys interacts and intersects with Richard Reeves’ book, as you might expect. Haidt argues that the problem with boys (in terms of the Great Rewiring), is that as society has become more difficult for boys to exercise agency, due to safetyism and other factors, so that more and more boys and men feel like they cannot live meaningful, successful lives, at the same time the virtual world consumes boys by playing/preying upon those same psychological features. It's why pornography and video games are the things that hook them: instead of meaningful connections in the real world, and meaningful agency in life, they can achieve self-satisfaction and great accomplishment, all from their bedroom. There's no need to go outside.
Perhaps the most surprising chapter in this book is number eight, if only because Haidt is an atheist. But he's an atheist who has done a lot of research and writing on moral psychology and social science. And his argument in this chapter is that phone-based life is spiritually harmful, even if you don't believe in God or have any regard for religion. And so in this chapter, he draws upon sociology, psychology, and 'wisdom from ancient traditions', to show how phone-based life works against "counteracting six spiritual practices: shared sacredness; embodiment; stillness, silence, and focus; self-transcendence; being slow to anger, quick to forgive; and finding awe in nature." (p.202)
The great difficulty about the problems that Haidt raises is that they are collective action problems. It's all very well and good for me to try to change my own phone usage pattern, and make decisions for my daughter, but these will be minimally effective unless there is broader societal change.
I saw a collective action problem in operation the other day. A major road with traffic lights out, and an intersecting road. There was no way people from that intersection could turn onto the major road, unless drivers on both sides, and 4 lanes, all decided to come to a standstill for a while to let them. And there was no way that was going to happen without intervention.
So, too, the phone problem. Which is why the final quarter of this book is full of proposed action for governments, tech companies, schools, and parents. The four key reforms that Haidt argues for:
No smartphones before 9th grade
No social media before 16.
Phone-free schools
Increased unsupervised play and childhood independence
I've really only given a very bird's eye view of this book; there's plenty of nitty gritty detail in it, and even more on Haidt's substack. And yet it is a huge and provocative topic. We know, we know that tech companies have and are willingly and recklessly exploiting human psychology, and teens and children, to make people more addicted and to act in ways that are for the company's benefit and the users' harm. This is simply the world we live in. And the longer we go on, the more apparent the harms are, but not the solutions. Here is a book that makes a cogent argument for why and how the harms are, and articulates a genuine way forward.
Addendum:
It should surprise no-one that a book written at a popular level with a broad reach, broad claims and solutions, generates a lot of discussion, and critique. Haidt and his team do respond to a lot of the counter-arguments on their substack. There is genuine debate and critique about his overall thesis as well. Here’s one post from a tech blog that I read. What’s not really debated, is that there is a mental health crisis among teens and Gen Z.
I think this is why the Amish way makes a lot of sense. Let me clarify what I mean. The general practice among the Amish is that new technologies are trialled, and then the eldership makes a decision about whether they are good for the community. It’s why you end up with some very weird mismatches about what’s allowed or not allowed in any given community. But the principle is conservative - they test the effects of technology on the community.
Our broader society does anything but - we let technology and corporations drive the agenda and then try to pick up the pieces. Which is why making deliberate and group-level choices about technology usage is just by itself counter-cultural. It’s why I’m on a one-person crusade to encourage those around me to use paper bibles at church and in home groups.
Measured primarily by Anxiety and Depression; but also self-harm, and suicide.