Book review: The Anxious Generation
Required reading for parents and anyone who wants to understand how society in 2024 operates
Key takeaways
1. The Great Rewiring of Childhood: The advent of smartphones and social media has fundamentally altered the childhood experience, transitioning from a play-based to a phone-based paradigm. This shift has had catastrophic effects on mental health, educational outcomes, and social competence, particularly among Generation Z.
2. Race to the Bottom of the Brainstem: Large internet companies exploit human psychology to maximize user engagement and advertising revenue. Social media platforms, designed to trigger dopamine releases with features like the like button, have created addictive behaviors, leading to societal consequences such as declining friendships, increased loneliness, and fragmented attention spans.
3. Policy Solutions: Haidt proposes practical solutions to mitigate the mental health crisis induced by social media. These include delaying smartphone usage until high school, restricting social media access until age 16, removing phones from schools, and promoting unsupervised play and independence during childhood.
Related articles
Taking a blow torch to Big Tech
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt. Penguin Press, 2024, 400 pp.
US history is full of episodes that we now look back on as barbaric. Before the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, it was common for milk to be diluted with water and have plaster or chalk added for color. Before widespread automobile safety laws, the fatality rate from motor vehicle accidents was 10x higher than today (15+ deaths per 100 million miles vs. 1.5 deaths). Cigarettes and tobacco were marketed to children until the mid-20th century.
The widespread adolescent use of social media and smartphones, what Jonathan Haidt calls the phone-based childhood, will be another example of an unsafe practice regulated by society. In his book, Haidt summarizes a growing body of evidence and makes the case that smartphones are profoundly altering childhood, what he calls the Great Rewiring, and altering the development of children’s brains. In this post I’m going to summarize the key elements of Haidt’s argument, discuss the social harms caused by the phone-based childhood, and put forward several easy policy suggestions America should enact right away.
For this article, I’ll use names for generational cohorts. These are:
Boomers: Born 1946-1964
Influenced by the post-war economic boom, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War, they are known for their strong work ethic and desire to change the world.
Generation X: Born 1965-1980
Grew up with the rise of personal computing, economic fluctuations, and the end of the Cold War, leading to values of independence and entrepreneurial spirit.
Millennials: Born 1981-1996
Shaped by the internet, the 2008 financial crisis, and globalization, they prioritize values like flexibility, technology use, and social values.
Generation Z: Born 1997-2012
Defined by social media, the climate crisis, and technological innovations, they are seen as the most internet-savvy, socially conscious, and diverse.
Generation Alpha: Born 2013-present
The first generation wholly born in the 21st century, characterized by further advancements in technology and AI, and a world shaped by pandemic influences.
The Great Rewiring of Childhood
For most Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials, their childhood was defined by lots of free play and minimal technology. As a Millennial, I remember playing the video game “Snake” on a Nokia cellphone shaped like a brick in high school, then the height of technological progress. Then in 2007, the iPhone was released and by the 2010s, social media apps like Instagram and front-facing smartphone selfie cameras became ubiquitous.
For many in Generation Z, the 2010s coincided with their puberty, a particularly delicate time in adolescent development when the brain is extremely plastic and susceptible to influence. What Haidt terms the play-based childhood became the phone-based childhood, with very negative consequences. To develop properly, children’s brains need lots of real-world social interaction and risk taking, none of which could be found online in the increasingly virtual world’s children inhabited.
The results for mental health outcomes, educational test scores, and general social competency have been catastrophic. There are many graphs, data, and studies that all show the same thing: beginning in the 2010s, across the Western world, something changed for the worse in childhood development. Haidt goes through all these data rigorously and makes the case that social media is the only plausible cause. For this article, I’ll present one chart that summarizes the problem:
Race to the bottom of the brainstem
Large internet companies like Meta (parent to Facebook and Instagram) are incentivized to maximize user time spent on their apps to maximize advertising revenue. Given that many of the founders of these tech companies were hackers, they are very aware and adept at exploiting human psychology. In particular, the like button was designed to exploit deep, evolutionary instincts in the brain to keep users engaged on the platform. Every like releases a tiny hit of dopamine to the user, over time creating an addiction. The entire advertising-based business model incentivizes platforms to create apps that hook users, the earlier the better.
Social harm
Go to an airport in 2024 and you’ll hear mostly silence, with people hunched over their smartphones and in clusters around electrical plug-ins. In college classrooms before a lecture, kids silently scroll on their phones, eschewing conversations, friends, and flirting. On busy subway trains, observe everyone glued to their screens and ignoring their surroundings. Smartphones have profoundly altered society, and as a result friendships are falling, loneliness is increasing, risk-taking is declining, and attention spans are being fragmented. The fertility rate is even falling because young people aren’t dating or entering relationships.
In Silicon Valley, a town famous for young entrepreneurs, there aren’t any major founders below age 30. Here is an excerpt from an interview between two Millennial founders in tech:
Patrick Collison: When we first met, 15 or so years ago, Mark Zuckerberg was preeminent in the technology industry and in his 20s. And not that long before then Marc Andreesen was preeminent in the industry and in his 20s. And not that long before then, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and so forth. Generally speaking for most of the history of the software sector, one of the top three people has been in their 20s. It doesn’t seem that that’s true to me today.
Sam Altman: I’m obsessed with this problem. It’s not good. Something has really gone wrong. There’s a lot of discussion about what this is, but, like, where are the great founders in their 20s? It’s not so obvious... I hope we’ll see a bunch, I hope this was just a weird accident of history, but maybe something has really gone wrong in our educational system or our society or just like how we think about companies, and what people aspire to, but I think it is worth significant concern and study.
Policy solutions
Haidt gives many specific examples of possible solutions to the social media induced mental health crisis and they are all low cost and easy to quickly implement. They can all be categorized in four main pillars, which are:
1. No smartphones before high school
2. No social media before age 16
3. Eliminate phones from schools
4. More unsupervised play and independence during childhood
I knew this subject was important before reading this book, but Haidt made me realize it’s perhaps the number one social problem today. I recommend The Anxious Generation to any parent and anyone trying to understand modern America.
