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

by Jonathan Haidt

By designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale.

Of course, there is an enormous difference between the big social media companies today and, say, the big tobacco companies of the mid-20th century: Social media companies are making products that are useful for adults, helping them to find information, jobs, friends, love, and sex; making shopping and political organizing more efficient; and making life easier in a thousand ways. Most of us would be happy to live in a world with no tobacco, but social media is far more valuable, helpful, and even beloved by many adults. Some adults have problems with addiction to social media and other online activities, but as with tobacco, alcohol, or gambling we generally leave it up to them to make their own decisions.

While the reward-seeking parts of the brain mature earlier, the frontal cortex—essential for self-control, delay of gratification, and resistance to temptation—is not up to full capacity until the mid-20s, and preteens are at a particularly vulnerable point in development.

we know that what causes generations to differ goes beyond the events children experience (such as wars and depressions) and includes changes in the technologies they used as children (radio, then television, personal computers, the internet, the iPhone).[11]

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and—as I will show—unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness—perpetually—to managing what became their online brand.

They spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in embodied social behaviors that are essential for successful human development.

Virtual interactions with peers do not fully compensate for these experiential losses. Moreover, those whose playtime and social lives moved online found themselves increasingly wandering through adult spaces, consuming adult content, and interacting with adults in ways that are often harmful to minors.

My central claim in this book is that these two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.

The key factor is the commitment required to make relationships work. When people are raised in a community that they cannot easily escape, they do what our ancestors have done for millions of years: They learn how to manage relationships, and how to manage themselves and their emotions in order to keep those precious relationships going.

I explore the reasons why good people are divided by politics and religion, paying special attention to people’s needs to be bound into moral communities that give them a sense of shared meaning and purpose.

that we sometimes need to protect children from harm even when it inconveniences adults?

Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.

Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind.[20]

Adults in Gen X and prior generations have not experienced much of a rise in clinical depression or anxiety disorders since 2010,[21] but many of us have become more frazzled, scattered, and exhausted by our new technologies and their incessant interruptions and distractions.

anyone who wants to understand how the most rapid rewiring of human relationships and consciousness in human history has made it harder for all of us to think, focus, forget ourselves enough to care about others, and build close relationships.

Fear is arguably the most important emotion for survival across the animal kingdom. In a world rife with predators, those with lightning-fast responses were more likely to pass on their genes. In fact, quick responses to threats are so important that the brains of mammals can trigger a fear response before information from the eyes has even made it to the visual centers in the back of the brain for full processing.[15] This is why we can feel a wave of fear, or jump out of the way of an oncoming car, before we’re even conscious of what we’re looking at. Fear is an alarm bell connected to a rapid response system. Once the threat is over, the alarm stops ringing, stress hormones stop flowing, and the feeling of fear subsides.

While fear triggers the full response system at the moment of danger, anxiety triggers parts of the same system when a threat is merely perceived as possible. It is healthy to be anxious and on alert when one is in a situation where there really could be dangers lurking. But when our alarm bell is on a hair trigger so that it is frequently activated by ordinary events—including many that pose no real threat—it keeps us in a perpetual state of distress. This is when ordinary, healthy, temporary anxiety turns into an anxiety disorder.

It is also important to note that our alarm bell did not just evolve as a response to physical threats. Our evolutionary advantage came from our larger brains and our capacity to form strong social groups, thus making us particularly attuned to social threats such as being shunned or shamed. People—and particularly adolesc...

“How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me all the uses of this world,” said Hamlet,[18] immediately after lamenting God’s prohibition against “self-slaughter.” For a diagnosis of MDD, these symptoms must be consistently present for at least two weeks. They are often accompanied by physical symptoms, including significant weight loss or weight gain, sleeping far less or far more than normal, and fatigue. They are also accompanied by disordered thinking, including an inability to concentrate, dwelling on one’s transgressions or failings (causing feelings of guilt) and the many cognitive distortions that CBT tries to counteract. People experiencing a depressive disorder are likely to think about suicide because it feels like their current suffering will never end, and death is an end.

As the MIT professor Sherry Turkle wrote in 2015 about life with smartphones, “We are forever elsewhere.”[33]

People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.

Everything may seem broken, but that was just as true when I was growing up in the 1970s and when my parents were growing up in the 1930s. It is the story of humanity. If world events played a role in the current mental health crisis, it’s not because world events suddenly got worse around 2012; it’s because world events were suddenly being pumped into adolescents’ brains through their phones, not as news stories, but as social media posts in which other young people expressed their emotions about a collapsing world, emotions that are contagious on social media.

“play requires suppression of the drive to dominate and enables the formation of long-lasting cooperative bonds.”[7]

These interactions generally have the contrasting features of the virtual world: disembodied, asynchronous, one-to-many, and done either alone or in virtual groups that are easy to join and easy to leave.

It’s as if we gave our infants iPads loaded with movies about walking, but the movies were so engrossing that kids never put in the time or effort to practice walking.

Such games have no explicit goal or way to win. They are pleasurable because they use the ancient power of synchrony to create communion between unrelated people.

Anthropologists have long noted that collective rituals are universally human. The European explorers of the 16th and 17th centuries found that on every continent, communities performed rituals in which everyone moved together to drumming, chanting, or beat-heavy music.[18] Such rituals were widely said to renew trust and mend frayed social relations. The great sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote about the “social electricity” generated by such rituals;[19] he thought rituals were essential for fostering a sense of communion and belonging.

Synchronous, face-to-face, physical interactions and rituals are a deep, ancient, and underappreciated part of human evolution. Adults enjoy them, and children need them for healthy development. Yet the major social media platforms draw children into endless hours of asynchronous interaction, which can become more like work than play.

But on a social media platform, a child can scroll through a thousand data points in one hour (at three seconds per post), each one accompanied by numerical evidence (likes) and comments that show whether the post was a success or a failure. Social media platforms are therefore the most efficient conformity engines ever invented.

The sequential introduction of age-appropriate experiences, tuned to sensitive periods and shared with same-age peers, had been the norm during the era of play-based childhood. But in a phone-based childhood, children are plunged into a whirlpool of adult content and experiences that arrive in no particular order.

By building physical, psychological, and social competence, it gives kids confidence that they can face new situations, which is an inoculation against anxiety.

a healthy human childhood with a lot of autonomy and unsupervised play in the real world sets children’s brains to operate mostly in “discover mode,” with a well-developed attachment system and an ability to handle the risks of daily life. Conversely, when there is society-wide pressure on parents to adopt modern overprotective parenting, it sets children’s brains to operate mostly in “defend mode,” with less secure attachment and reduced ability to evaluate or handle risk.

Two Basic Mindsets Discover mode (BAS) Scan for opportunities Kid in a candy shop Think for yourself Let me grow! Defend mode (BIS) Scan for dangers Scarcity mindset Cling to your team Keep me safe!

There is no way to live with other humans without conflicts and deprivations.

happiness cannot be reached by eliminating all “triggers” from life; rather, happiness comes from learning to deprive external events of the power to trigger negative emotions in you.

Phobias are concentrated around a few animals and situations that kill almost nobody, such as snakes (even tiny ones), tightly enclosed places, the dark, public speaking, and heights. Conversely, very few people develop phobias to things that kill many modern people, including cars, opioids, knives, guns, and junk food.

Children need to swing and then jump off the swing. They need to explore forests and junkyards in search of novelty and adventure. They need to shriek with their friends while watching a horror movie or riding a roller coaster. In the process they develop a broad set of competences, including the ability to judge risk for themselves, take appropriate action when faced with risks, and learn that when things go wrong, even if they get hurt, they can usually handle it without calling in an adult.

We are embodied creatures; children should learn how to manage their bodies in the physical world before they start spending large amounts of time in the virtual world.

It’s hard to hurt yourself on these things, which means children don’t learn much about how to not get hurt.

adolescence is not necessarily an especially stressful time. Rather, it is a time when the brain is more vulnerable to the effects of sustained stressors, which can tilt the adolescent into mental disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, depression, eating disorders, and substance abuse.

Of course, using a smartphone is an experience. It is a portal to the infinite knowledge of Wikipedia, YouTube, and now ChatGPT. It connects young people to special-interest communities for everything from baking and books to extreme politics and anorexia.

In fact, smartphones and other digital devices bring so many interesting experiences to children and adolescents that they cause a serious problem: They reduce interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience. Smartphones are like the cuckoo bird, which lays its eggs in other birds’ nests. The cuckoo egg hatches before the others, and the cuckoo hatchling promptly pushes the other eggs out of the nest in order to commandeer all of the food brought by the unsuspecting mother.

Evidence for the idea that children need rites of passage comes from the many cases where adolescents spontaneously construct initiation rites that are not supported by adults in the broader culture. In fact, anthropologists say that such rites come about precisely because of a society’s “failure to provide meaningful adolescent rites of passage ceremonies.”[12]

In the real world, it often matters how old you are. But as life moved online, it mattered less and less.

Once a child gets online, there is never a threshold age at which she is granted more autonomy or more rights. On the internet, everyone is the same age, which is no particular age.

“The one impulse, out of many accidental ones, which leads to pleasure, becomes strengthened and stamped in.” He said that animal learning is “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness.”[1]

the rapid spread of high-speed internet (reaching 61% of American homes by January 2010[9]) made it easier for everyone to consume everything quickly.

they encouraged one-to-many public performances in search of validation, not just from friends but from strangers.

So even if the average teen reports “just” seven hours of leisure screen time per day, if you count all the time that they are actively thinking about social media while multitasking in the real world, you can understand why nearly half of all teens say that they are online almost all the time.

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of . . . life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”[16]