Non-fiction: Review of The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

I am Gen X. I know what it's like to have a land-line telephone in the house. I had thousands of negotiations with my teen sister, who gets to use that phone and when. And nowadays, I know what's it's like to have a smartphone, to be able to connect any time, almost anywhere—not only to a person, but to the collection of human knowledge and advertizement, for better and worse. But my two children, 7 and 9, don't have this perspective. They know only a smartphone world. And they are the first generation to have such a perspective—the guinea pigs of the human race. Jonathan Haidt, in his 2024 book The Anxious Generation, asks us to take a closer look at the experiment.

The trigger for The Anxious Generation were the spikes in teen anxiety and depression Haidt and his team observed post-2009/2010 til now. Looking deeper into the data, Haidt, a social psychologist, was particularly interested in identifying the potential causes. After all, nobody wants the future leaders of the world to enter adulthood with significantly higher chances of depression.

The graphs and statistics do not paint a pretty picture: mental disorders among teens are skyrocketing. From Haidt's perspective, the evidence points toward changes in parenting culture post -1990 and smartphones. But for the skeptic, the person who believes data can be manipulated to present whatever picture is needed, Haidt went a step further. He set out to find contradictory data, data which would indicate that the source of the problem is beyond those causes. Perhaps changes to economy? Perhaps COVID? Perhaps environmental problems? Perhaps mass media? But from Haidt's research, there is nothing else out there, and he challenges the skeptics accordingly: come up with a better source to the results we are seeing? Come up with a better hypothesis why our youth, regardless US or Africa or Asia or Europe, have increasingly poor mental health.

To be clear, Haidt's data does not indicate a guarantee of anxiety and depression via smartphones, rather significantly increased chances compared to prior generations. In other words, Haidt does not paint Apple or Android as horned demons to burn in effigy. He acknowledges the benefits technology brings to our lives. What he is critical of, or what he would likely say the data points to, is a question of consumption, what he calls the cost of opportunity. If teens are spending 20-40 hours per week finger-fucking a screen, what are they not doing? At what cost is that time and what is the return-on-investment?

Haidt's data depends largely on gender. Girls tend to spend more time on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc), which means pressure to keep up with the conversation, i.e. keeping your phone glued to your hip and respond as top priority. This can be during class-time or at the expense of face-to-face interaction. And to maintain high standards—or at least the appearance thereof (beauty, luxury, etc.). Girls unable to keep up feel anxious, which leads to depression. Boys tend toward video games and porn. For boys who spend too much time playing video games and not enough time doing something constructive in the real world, the result can be a sense of purposelessness, of wandering aimlessness, that life doesn't have value without a controller or mouse in hand. And porn is worse. Making the most pleasurable bits immediately available, it bypasses the development of social skills that lead to meaningful relationships. Boys are meant to be the initiators of conversation with girls, something the current generation does less and less with Pornhub at their fingertips.

But where certain tech advantages are recognized, Haidt does not shy away from pointing a finger at certain tech companies, companies like Facebook, Instagram, Pornhub, etc. Their stated goals are to create technology that has the greatest chance of capturing eyes, then clicks. Their desired end-state is people ensconced and spending time in their tech, watching ads and spending money. Haidt rightfully points out that we are no longer the client in the eyes of most big tech. We are the product, the end point, the zombie-scrolling result.

In response to the data Haidt offers an excellent breakdown of rational, common sense changes (OS updates!) that both parents and governments can roll out in an effort to decrease the negative trends among youth. He advocates parents to create play-based childhoods for their children as opposed to phone-based. Inherent to this are a number of good ideas I will not spoil here. For governments and regulatory agencies, he argues for tighter age restrictions, better age-checking technology, more transparency from tech companies, bans on phones during school time, and other things. Nothing radical, it's all common sense stuff.

Before closing this review, it's worth recognizing a major sub-theme that Haidt develops in The Anxious Generation, and the paradox inherent to it. Believing it began in the late '80s, Haidt highlights safety-ism, aka, the increased number of blockers and walls parents put up in front of their children in the name of safety. Hhaidt argues parents have become more protective in the real world, limiting their children's freedom in public. And yet at the same time, many allow their children complete freedom in the online world. Where parents are afraid of predators on their streets, most such evil exists today online—a red flag if ever there were. He paints a nice metaphor in which some parents allow strangers online to look through their children's “bedroom window” (i.e. social media) yet prevent them them from playing outdoors to keep them away from such predators. Strange, that.

In the end, The Anxious Generation is the proverbial hand-in-the-air for a group of people trying to find their way through a jungle. Wait everybody, are we going in the right direction? Let's check our bearings. The book is that reality check, as well as a finger pointing in a direction that seems better. Yes, that finger is pointing back the way we came to a large extent. But considering we can see danger lying ahead, is it not better to take that step back and reconsider? Haidt quite convincing, I'm sure the guinea pig would say the same thing.