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

by Jonathan Haidt

For many years, the psychiatric community treated hikikomori as a uniquely Japanese condition.[22] But in recent years, some young men in America and elsewhere are behaving like hikikomori. Some young men have even taken both the Japanese word and “NEET” as tribal identifiers.

When I began examining boys’ mental health trends for this book, I came across a striking finding. Throughout my research career, it has been common knowledge that as adolescents reach puberty, boys and girls exhibit distinct patterns in their mental health challenges. Girls typically exhibit higher rates of internalizing disorders like depression and anxiety, turning their emotions and suffering inward. Boys, on the other hand, tend to exhibit higher rates of externalizing disorders, turning their emotions outward and engaging in high risk or antisocial behavior that often affects others, such as drunk driving, violence, and drug abuse. But around 2010, something unprecedented started happening: Both sexes shifted rapidly toward the pattern traditionally associated with females. There has been a notable increase in agreement with items related to internalizing disorders (such as “I feel that I can’t do anything right”) for both sexes, with a sharper rise among girls as you can see in figure 7.2. At the same time, agreement with items related to externalizing disorders (such as “how often have you damaged school property on purpose?”) plummeted for both sexes, more sharply for boys. By 2017, boys’ responses looked like those from girls in the 1990s.

A nationally representative study found that fall-related fractures (e.g., broken fingers and wrists) decreased slowly and steadily, among boys and girls, from 2001 to 2015, but there was one group that stood out—boys ages 10–14 showed a sharp drop after 2009. This suggests a sharp drop in doing things that could lead to a fall, such as riding bicycles over jump ramps, or climbing trees.[30]

In the 2000s, everything got faster, brighter, better, cheaper, and more private. The arrival of Wi-Fi technology increased the utility and popularity of laptop computers. Broadband high-speed internet spread quickly in this decade, making it much easier to watch videos on YouTube or Pornhub and play highly engaging online multiplayer video games on the newly released Xbox 360 (2005) and PS3 (2006). These internet-connected consoles enabled adolescents to sit alone in a room, playing for extended hours with a shifting set of strangers from around the globe. Prior to this, when boys played multiplayer video games, the other players were their friends or their siblings, sitting next to them and sharing excitement, jokes, and food. As adolescents of both sexes got their own laptops, cell phones, and internet-connected gaming consoles, everyone was increasingly free to retreat to private spaces and do as they pleased. For boys, this opened up many new ways to satisfy their desires for agency as well as communion. In particular, it meant that boys could spend much larger amounts of time playing video games and watching pornography while alone in their bedrooms. They no longer had to use the family desktop computer or gaming console out in the living room. But did this new lifestyle—sitting alone in a room while interacting virtually—really satisfy their needs for either agency or communion?

With a smartphone in every pocket, companies quickly pivoted to mobile apps, offering adolescents endless high-stimulation activities. Video game producers, pornography providers, and social media platforms adopted free-to-use, advertising-driven strategies.[32] Games also instituted pay-to-progress options—business decisions that tapped players’ wallets (or parents’ credit cards) directly—and got kids hooked.

The problem is not just that modern pornography amplifies the risk for porn addiction, but that heavy porn use can lead boys to choose the easy option for sexual satisfaction (by watching porn) rather than trying to engage in the more uncertain and risky dating world.

Some research has demonstrated that video game use is associated with increased cognitive and intellectual functioning, such as improved working memory, response inhibition, and even school competence.[48] One experiment found significant decreases in depression symptoms when an experimental group was assigned to play 30 minutes of video games three times a week for a month.[49] Other studies have found playing games cooperatively can induce players to cooperate outside the game.[50]

one systematic review of studies conducted during the COVID pandemic found that video game use sometimes mitigated feelings of loneliness in the short run, but it put some users into a vicious cycle because they used gaming to distract themselves from feelings of loneliness. Over time they developed a reliance on the games instead of forming long-term friendships, and this resulted in long-term stress, anxiety, and depression symptoms.[52] Building in-person relationships was, of course, difficult during COVID, but these findings are consistent with findings linking loneliness and problematic video game use from before the pandemic.[53]

Using a different set of criteria, a 2018 meta-analysis[60] found that 7% of adolescent boys can be classified as having “internet gaming disorder.” That diagnosis requires “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of a person’s life.[61] (The rate for adolescent girls was estimated to be just above 1%.[62])

The second major harm associated with video games is that they impose a large opportunity cost; they take up an enormous amount of time. Common Sense Media reported in 2019 (before COVID) that 41% of adolescent boys play more than two hours per day, and 17% report playing more than four hours per day.[64] Just as with girls who devote that much time to social media, the time has to come from somewhere.[65] Those heavy gamers are missing out on sleep, exercise, and in-person social interaction with friends and family.[66]

In 2000, 28% of 12th-grade boys reported that they often feel lonely. By 2019, that had risen to 35%. This is symptomatic of a broader “friendship recession” among men in the United States. In the 1990s, only 3% of American men reported having no close friends. By 2021, that number had risen fivefold, to 15%. A different survey in 2021 asked Americans whether there was “someone you talked to within the last six months about an important personal matter.” Young men fared the worst on this question: 28% of them said no.[67] Of course, these survey questions can’t prove that the arrival of online gaming in the 2000s caused the national increase in male loneliness, but they cast doubt on any suggestion that when boys and young men entrusted their social lives to video game companies, they entered a golden age of social connection.

That, I believe, is what has happened to Gen Z. They are less able than any generation in history to put down roots in real-world communities populated by known individuals who will still be there a year later. Communities are the social environments in which humans, and human childhood, evolved. In contrast, children growing up after the Great Rewiring skip through multiple networks whose nodes are a mix of known and unknown people, some using aliases and avatars, many of whom will have vanished by next year, or perhaps by tomorrow. Life in these networks is often a daily tornado of memes, fads, and ephemeral micro-dramas, played out among a rotating cast of millions of bit players. They have no roots to anchor them or nourish them; they have no clear set of norms to constrain them and guide them on the path to adulthood.

Boys and girls have taken different paths through the Great Rewiring, yet somehow they have ended up in the same pit, where many are drowning in anomie and despair. It is very difficult to construct a meaningful life on one’s own, drifting through multiple disembodied networks.

So now I want to ask: Does the phone-based life generally pull us upward or downward on this vertical dimension? If it is downward, then there is a cost even for those who are not anxious or depressed. If it is downward, then there is spiritual harm, for adults as well as for adolescents, even for those who think that their mental health is fine. There would also be harm to society if more people are spending more time below zero on the z axis. We would perceive a general society-wide degradation that would be hard to put into words.

We could create healthier environments for ourselves and our children if we could reconnect with the rhythms of the calendar and of our communities. This might include taking part in regular religious services or joining other groups organized for a moral, charitable, or spiritual purpose. It could include establishing family rituals such as a digital Sabbath (one day per week with reduced or no digital technology, combined with enjoyable in-person activities) or marking holidays together consistently, ideally with other families. All such practices would endow time and space with some of the social meaning they have lost.

A healthier way to live would be to seek out more in-person communal events, especially those that feel as though there is an elevated or moral purpose and that involve some synchronous movement, such as religious services, or live concerts for some musicians with devoted followings. Especially in the years after COVID, many of us would benefit from changing habits adopted during the pandemic and not always choosing the easy, remote option. Sports are not exactly spiritual, but playing them depends on some of spirituality’s key ingredients for bonding people together, like coordinated and collective physical movement and group celebrations. Research consistently shows that teens who play team sports are happier than those who don’t.[9] Humans are embodied; a phone-based life is not. Screens lead us to forget that our physical bodies matter.

When people practice silence in the company of equally silent companions, they promote quiet reflection and inner work, which confers mental health benefits. Focusing your attention and meditating have been found to reduce depression and anxiety.[11] You don’t need to become a monk or join a monastery; many ordinary people gain these benefits by taking a vow of silence for a day, a week, or more as they join with others on meditation retreats. Even brief sessions of mindfulness meditation—10 minutes each day—have been found to reduce irritability, negative emotions, and stress from external pressures.[12] In fact, mindfulness practices, originating in the spiritual realm, have now been routinely introduced into psychiatric and medical practice with growing empirical evidence to support their efficacy.[13]

The phone-based life makes it difficult for people to be fully present with others when they are with others, and to sit silently with themselves when they are alone. If we want to experience stillness and silence, and if we want to develop focus and a sense of unified consciousness, we must reduce the flow of stimulation into our eyes and ears. We must find ample opportunities to sit quietly, whether that is in meditation,[16] or by spending more time in nature, or just by looking out a car window and thinking on a long drive, rather than always listening to something, or (for children in the back seat) watching videos the whole way.

When the DMN is quieter, we are better able to deeply connect to something beyond ourselves. What does social media do to the DMN? A social media “platform” is, almost by definition, a place that is all about you. You stand on the platform and post content to influence how others perceive you. It is almost perfectly designed to crank up the DMN to maximum and pin it there. That’s not healthy for any of us, and it’s even worse for adolescents.[20]

To experience more self-transcendence, we need to turn down the things in our lives that activate the profane mode network and bind us tightly to our egos, such as time on social media. We need to seek out conditions and activities that have the opposite effect, as most spiritual practices do, including prayer, meditation, mindfulness, and for some people psychedelic drugs, which are increasingly found to be effective treatments for anxiety and depression.[22]

Nonetheless, religious injunctions to be slower to judge and quicker to forgive are good for maintaining relationships and improving mental health. Social media trains people to do the opposite: Judge quickly and publicly, lest ye be judged for not judging whoever it is that we are all condemning today. Don’t forgive, or your team will attack you as a traitor.

Awe causes “shifts in neurophysiology, a diminished focus on the self, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and a heightened sense of meaning.”[32]

One can certainly feel some kinds of awe while using a smartphone. Indeed, you can watch endless YouTube videos about people who performed heroic deeds (moral beauty). You can find the most extraordinary photos and videos ever taken of the world’s most beautiful places. These experiences are valuable. But as we’ve seen before, our phones drown us in quantity while reducing quality. You watch a morally elevating short video, feel moved, and then scroll to the next short video, in which someone is angry about something. You see a photo of Victoria Falls, taken from a drone that gives you a better view than you could ever get in person, and yet, because the entire image is displayed on a screen the size of your hand, and because you did no work to get to the falls, it’s just not going to trigger as much awe as you’d get from hiking up to a much smaller waterfall yourself. If we want awe to play a larger and more beneficial role in our lives, we need to make space for it. As a result of doing my own awe walk the same week my students did them, I now take my AirPods out of my ears when I’m walking in any park or natural setting. I no longer try to cram in as many audiobooks and podcasts, at 1.5 times normal speed, as my brain can receive. As for our children, if we want awe and natural beauty to play a larger role in their lives, we need to make deliberate efforts to bring them or send them to beautiful natural areas. Without phones.

Why would anyone treat their customers that way? Because the users are not really the customers for most social media companies. When platforms offer access to information or services for free, it’s usually because the users are the product. Their attention is a precious substance that companies extract and sell to their paying customers—the advertisers. The companies are competing against each other for users’ attention, and, like gambling casinos, they’ll do anything to hold on to their users even if they harm them in the process.