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

by Jonathan Haidt

The designers had not realized that young trees need wind to grow properly. When the wind blows, it bends the tree, which tugs at the roots on the windward side and compresses the wood on the other side. In

“antifragile” to describe things that actually need to get knocked over now and then in order to become

As the Stoics and Buddhists taught long ago, 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. In

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,

“keep them as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.”[27]

People can’t really multitask; all we can do is shift attention back and forth between tasks while wasting a lot of it on each shift.[47]