The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

by Jonathan Haidt

They found that happiness tends to occur in clusters. This was not just because happy people seek each other out. Rather, when one person became happier, it increased the odds that their existing friends would become happier too. Amazingly, it also had an influence on their friends’ friends, and sometimes even on their friends’ friends’ friends. Happiness is contagious; it spreads through social networks.

Depression was significantly more contagious than happiness or good mental health.

depression spread only from women. When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male and female) by 142%. When a man became depressed, it had no measurable effect on his friends.

the fact that gender dysphoria now often appears in social clusters (such as a group of close friends),[71] the fact that parents and those who transition back to their natal sex identify social media as a major source of information and encouragement,[72] and the fact that gender dysphoria is now being diagnosed among many adolescents who showed no signs of it as children[73] all indicate that social influence and sociogenic transmission may be at work as well.

A high school girl named Nina tells Sales, “A girl who sends naked pictures, she’s a slut, but if a boy does it, everyone just laughs.”[80]

Digital substitutions for real-world social engagement reduce the drive to be social but don’t satisfy emotional needs.

regarding friendship for girls, “quality trumps quantity.”

The happiest girls “aren’t the ones who have the most friendships but the ones who have strong, supportive friendships, even if that means having a single terrific friend.”[82]

This is the great irony of social media: the more you immerse yourself in it, the more lonely and depressed you become. This is true both at the individual level and at the collective level.

Girls in virtual networks are subjected to hundreds of times more social comparison than girls had experienced for all of human evolution.

Two major categories of motivations are agency (the desire to stand out and have an effect on the world) and communion (the desire to connect and develop a sense of belonging).

Boys choose more agency activities; girls choose more communion activities. Social media appeals to the desire for communion, but it often ends up frustrating it.