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

by Jonathan Haidt

I have found that Gen Z has several great strengths that will help them drive positive change. The first is that they are not in denial. They want to get stronger and healthier, and most are open to new ways of interacting. The second strength is that they want to bring about systemic change to create a more just and caring world, and they are adept at organizing to do so (yes, using social media). In the last year or so, I’ve been hearing about an increasing number of young people who are turning their attention to the ways the tech industry exploits them. As they organize and innovate, they’ll find new solutions beyond those I propose in this book, and they’ll make them happen.

Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development.

Durkheim argued that Homo sapiens could just as well be called Homo duplex, or two-level man, for we exist on two very different levels. We spend most of our lives as individuals pursuing our own interests. He called this the realm of the “profane,” which means the ordinary day-to-day world where we are very concerned about our own wealth, health, and reputation. But Durkheim showed that nearly all societies have created rituals and communal practices for pulling people “up,” temporarily, into the realm of the sacred, where the self recedes and collective interests predominate.

Durkheim called this state of energized communion “collective effervescence.”

In contrast, transient networks of disembodied users, interacting asynchronously, just can’t cohere the way human communities have from time immemorial. People who live only in networks, rather than communities, are less likely to thrive.

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.

DeSteno notes that synchronous movement during religious rituals is not only very common; it is also an experimentally validated technique for enhancing feelings of communion, similarity, and trust, which means it makes a group of disparate individuals feel as though they have merged into one.[6]

Those seeking spiritual growth are well served by separating themselves from the noise and complexity of human interactions, with their incessant words and profane concerns. 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]

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.

Self-transcendence is among the central features of spiritual experience, and it turns out that the loss of self has a neural signature.