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

by Jonathan Haidt

Part of defining the self comes from successfully integrating into groups; part of being attractive to groups is demonstrating one’s value as an individual with unique skills.[30] Researchers have long found that boys and men are more focused on agency strivings while girls and women are more focused on communion strivings.[31]

But for adolescent girls, the stakes are higher because a girl’s social standing is usually more closely tied to her beauty and sex appeal than is the case for boys. Compared with boys, when girls go onto social media, they are subjected to more severe and constant judgments about their looks and their bodies, and they’re confronted with beauty standards that are further out of reach.

Girls are especially vulnerable to harm from constant social comparison because they suffer from higher rates of one kind of perfectionism: socially prescribed perfectionism, where a person feels that they must live up to very high expectations prescribed by others, or by society at large.[39] (There’s no gender difference on self-oriented perfectionism, where you torture yourself for failure to live up to your own very high standards.) Socially prescribed perfectionism is closely related to anxiety; people who suffer from anxiety are more prone to it. Being a perfectionist also increases your anxiety because you fear the shame of public failure from everything you do. And, as you’d expect by this point in the story, socially prescribed perfectionism began rising, across the Anglosphere nations, in the early 2010s.

Researchers in France exposed young women either to media photographs of very thin women or to media photographs of average-sized women.[41] They found that the young women exposed to images of very thin women became more anxious about their own body and appearance. But here’s the surprising thing: The images were flashed on a screen for just 20 milliseconds, too fast for the women to become consciously aware of what they had seen. The authors conclude that “social comparison takes place outside awareness and affects explicit self-evaluations.”

But because girls have stronger communion motives, the way to really hurt another girl is to hit her in her relationships. You spread gossip, turn her friends against her, and lower her value as a friend to other girls. Researchers have found that when you look at “indirect aggression” (which includes damaging other people’s relationships or reputations), girls are higher than boys—but only in late childhood and adolescence.[46]

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.

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 authors surmise that the difference is due to the fact that women are more emotionally expressive and more effective at communicating mood states within friendship pairs. When men get together, in contrast, they are more likely to do things together rather than talk about what they are feeling.

Sociogenic” means “generated by social forces,” as opposed to biological causation.) Boss noted that there are two variants that recur throughout history. There is an “anxiety variant” in which abdominal pain, headache, dizziness, fainting, nausea, and hyperventilation are the most common symptoms, and there is a “motor variant” in which the most common symptoms are “hysterical dancing, convulsions, laughing, and pseudoseizures.” These “dancing plagues,” as they are called by historians, occasionally swept through medieval European villages, leading some townspeople to dance until they died from exhaustion.[57]

Second, there is “prestige bias,” which is the social learning rule I described in chapter 2: Don’t just copy anyone; first find out who the most prestigious people are, then copy them. But on social media, the way to gain followers and likes is to be more extreme, so those who present with more extreme symptoms are likely to rise fastest, making them the models that everyone else locks onto for social learning.

This process is sometimes known as audience capture—a process in which people get trained by their audiences to become more extreme versions of whatever it is the audience wants to see.[59] And if one finds oneself in a network in which most others have adopted some behavior, then the other social learning process kicks in too: conformity bias.

Increasing freedom of gender expression and growing awareness of human variation are both forms of social progress. But 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.

You know those stories about middle-aged women who befriend adolescent boys on gaming platforms and then send them money and ask for pictures of their penises as a prelude to meeting for sex? Neither do I.

Both sets of cognitive adaptations influence mating and dating today, but the male set makes men more likely to use coercion, trickery, and violence to get sex, and to focus on adolescents as their targets.[75]

Social media, as it is commonly used by teens today, increases the quantity of social connections and thereby reduces their quality and their protective nature.

If we’re dividing the hours of the day and our mindshare between more and more relationships relative to the past, we’re almost certainly investing less in each individual relationship. Digital substitutions for real-world social engagement reduce the drive to be social but don’t satisfy emotional needs. . . . I think this created a really powerful trap: this form of interaction superficially satisfied the drive to connect with other people, but that connection was shallow, immaterial, unsatisfying. The human impulse to see other people was dulled without accessing the reinvigorating power of actual human connection.[81]

When everything moved onto smartphones in the early 2010s, both girls and boys experienced a gigantic increase in the number of their social ties and in the time required to service these ties (such as reading and commenting on the posts of acquaintances or maintaining dozens of Snapchat “streaks” with people who are not your closest friends). This explosive growth necessarily caused a decline in the number and depth of close friendships,

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. When teens as a whole cut back on hanging out and doing things together in the real world, their culture changed. Their communion needs were left unsatisfied—even for those few teens who were not on social media.

Girls in virtual networks are subjected to hundreds of times more social comparison than girls had experienced for all of human evolution. They are exposed to more cruelty and bullying because social media platforms incentivize and facilitate relational aggression. Their openness and willingness to share emotions with other girls exposes them to depression and other disorders. The twisted incentive structures of social media reward the most extreme presentations of symptoms.

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

“What the economy requires now is a whole different set of skills: You need intelligence, you need an ability to sit still and focus, to communicate openly to be able to listen to people and to operate in a workplace that is much more fluid than it used to be. Those are things that women do extremely well.”[7] She notes that by 2009, “for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who continue to occupy around half of the nation’s jobs.”[8]

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.

As traditionally “manly” skills and attributes became less valued, economically and culturally, and as the culture of safetyism grew, the virtual world stepped in to fulfill these needs directly, though not in a way that promoted skills needed for the transition to adulthood.

Evolution makes things alluring and rewarding (with a little pulse of dopamine) only when—over thousands of generations—striving for those things caused individuals to leave more surviving offspring than individuals who felt no such desire or made no such effort. Sexual attraction and mating are areas of life where evolution has left us lures and strong strivings.

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. Additionally, there is evidence that heavy use can disrupt boys’ and young men’s romantic and sexual relationships.

For example, several studies indicate that after watching porn, heterosexual men find real women less attractive, including their own partners.[39] Compulsive pornography users, who are predominantly men, are more likely to avoid sexual interactions with a partner and tend to experience lower sexual satisfaction.[40] In a 2017 meta-analysis of over 50 studies collectively including more than 50,000 participants from 10 countries, pornography consumption was “associated with lower interpersonal satisfaction outcomes in cross-sectional surveys, longitudinal surveys, and experiments.” Importantly, the relationship was only significant among males.[41]

Porn separates the evolved lure (sexual pleasure) from its real-world reward (a sexual relationship), potentially making boys who are heavy users turn into men who are less able to find s...

For example, 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]

(I note that researchers are divided on whether gaming addiction is its own disorder or if the behaviors are indicative of underlying disorders like depression or anxiety.[57]

Unlike free play in the real world, most video games give no practice in the skills of self-governance.

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]

Boys thrive when they have a stable group of reliable friends, and they create their strongest and most durable friendships from being on the same team or in a stable pack, facing risks or rival teams. Virtual packs create weaker bonds, although today’s increasingly lonely boys cling to them and value them because that’s all they have.

He wrote that when we feel the social order weakening or dissolving, we don’t feel liberated; we feel lost and anxious: If this [binding social order] dissolves, if we no longer feel it in existence and action about and above us, whatever is social in us is deprived of all objective foundation. All that remains is an artificial combination of illusory images, a phantasmagoria vanishing at the least reflection; that is, nothing which can be a goal for our action.[68]

It is very difficult to construct a meaningful life on one’s own, drifting through multiple disembodied networks.

I think I can best convey what is happening to us by using a word rarely used in the social sciences: spirituality. The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.

(I should point out that I am an atheist, but I find that I sometimes need words and concepts from religion to understand the experience of life as a human being. This is one of those times.)

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.

This is one of the founding insights of sociology: Strong communities don’t just magically appear whenever people congregate and communicate. The strongest and most satisfying communities come into being when something lifts people out of the lower level so that they have powerful collective experiences. They all enter the realm of the sacred together, at the same time. When they return to the profane level, where they need to be most of the time to address the necessities of life, they have greater trust and affection for each other as a result of their time together in the sacred realm.

In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things. Nothing ever closes, so everyone acts on their own schedule.[4]

Everything is profane. Living in a world of structureless anomie makes adolescents more vulnerable to online recruitment into radical political movements that offer moral clarity and a moral community, thereby pulling them further away from their in-person communities.

Meditation helps to calm the monkey mind. Over time, the nature of conscious experience changes, even when one is not meditating. Studies on Buddhist monks suggest that their intense meditation practices alter their brains in lasting ways, decreasing activation in brain areas related to fear and negative emotionality. That’s a sign that they have come to live in the openness of discover mode, rather than in the guardedness of defend mode.[10]

Self-transcendence is among the central features of spiritual experience, and it turns out that the loss of self has a neural signature. There is a set of linked structures in the brain that are more active whenever we are processing events from an egocentric point of view—thinking about what I want, what I need to do next, or what other people think of me.

The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.[25]

Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.”[38]

Social scientists have long studied traps where each individual does what she thinks is best for herself (such as overfishing in a local pond), even though, when everyone makes the same choice, it leads to a bad outcome for all (the pond stops producing any fish). If the group could coordinate (such as by setting a limit on how many fish each resident can take), the long-term outcome would be far more fish for everyone. These traps are called collective action problems (or sometimes social dilemmas).

Some of my suggestions are more challenging because they require legislative changes, and, in the United States, political polarization makes it difficult to do anything. But even in the U.S. Congress, protecting children from online harms is one of the few promising areas for bipartisan agreement. If we can understand the nature of collective action problems, we can push for legislation that is targeted at breaking traps and changing incentives.

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.

Younger users are particularly valuable because the habits they form early often stick with them for life, so companies need younger users to ensure robust future usage of their products.

But given the longstanding paralysis of U.S. Congress, it has fallen to individual states and governors to try to protect the children in their states from predatory online practices.

Design changes—such as setting privacy preferences to maximum by default—don’t give an advantage to either side of the political spectrum. When TikTok limited the ability of teenagers to be contacted by strangers via direct message[17] in response to the U.K. code, or when Facebook pulled back on how advertisers could target underage users with personalized ads,[18] these changes were “viewpoint neutral.”[19]

What is the right age of internet adulthood? Note that we are not talking about the age at which children can browse the web or watch videos on YouTube or TikTok. We’re talking only about the age at which a minor can enter into a contract with a company to use the company’s products. We’re talking about the age at which a child can open an account on YouTube or TikTok and begin uploading her own videos and getting her own highly customized feed, while giving her data to the company to use and sell as it says it will do in its terms of service.