> Jack, in response #1, argued that Gen Z is “the most mature generation in history” precisely because the internet gave them access to such horrible stuff:
>
>“…I’d actually argue that exposure to these things poises us to handle stress better than previous generations.”
Jack may think that, but he's making a testable, falsifiable claim here that is in fact easily falsified by testing it against the data. Gen Z is *incredibly* emotionally fragile compared to previous generations. So it's worth asking, why is Jack's perception of how this should work for his generation so thoroughly at odds with the facts of the matter? What is the distorted mirror he's looking through that gets his perceptions so completely wrong?
I think what is really complicated about asking Gen Z to analyze how their situation has impacted them is that they have nothing to compare their experience to. It's like that old joke where you ask the fish "how's the water?" and the fish responds " water? what's water?". I work in this field and always find it useful and interesting to hear what young people have to say about the effects of life online, but I am also very skeptical of the "self- reported" data coming from those who have no experience of what joy, self-knowledge, connection might feel like had they grown up without the filtered reality of the internet and social media.
As someone close to Gen Z in age (1994), them calling themselves “the most mature generation in history” is such a fitting example of how people growing up today completely lack perspective. “Ah yes, we are the most enlightened ones.” It’s like they internalized themselves as being at the end of some long journey of progress. It’s so delusional, really.
One must wonder if Western Europeans felt similarly at the turn of the 20th century before their world imploded in 1914.
It seems they did. For example, the Titanic (1912) was thought to be unsinkable because of their advanced technology, so lifeboats were unnecessary. They were sure of themselves right up until it hit the iceberg.
Actually, in a documentary they explained that there were some who exercised prudences, care and wisdom, but the "Greedy merchants" soul prevailed and they decided to cut down the numbers of lifeboats because they were "view inhibiting" and "people don't pay to see a bunch of lifeboats". This is were AI beats us. We just don't seem to learn much from the past plus humans are gullible by design, two features which should make us exercises tons of caution in any endeavor let alone endeavors involving exponential technology and effects at world scale [it used to be a European default attitude, before Zucki & Co proceeded with mass brains implants and Earth population homologation downward]
from what I've read (a perspective created mostly by journalists, politicians and intellectuals for the most part): the rising generation of the start of the 20th century had been blessed with the benefits of science, technology and a level of freedom and sophistication unprecedented in history, even their parents and grandparents seemed like fossils sticking around after the death of an ancient civilization, and they were going to create a New World; and what better way to bring that world into existence than through a nice quick war (be done by Xmas!) where the winners would reveal their Hegelian historical destinies, and the losers would accept their subordinate status in a new imperium.
Well, those illusions came with a price tag of a few million dead bodies, hopefully when this generation gets smacked in the face with reality, it won't require a hecatomb of corpses.
(my guess is that 9/10 of them will go quietly into the digital panopticon, happily aping the crowd and never knowing otherwise.)
Here in Italy, WWII created the similar situation with the economic boom that flooded American lifestyle liberal values in our traditional conservative cultures with the invention of the "YOUTH" and export of mass consumerism. By late 60s parents and grandparents, as you nicely described, also seem like "fossils sticking around after the death of an ancient civilization".
THE DIFFERENCE, is that the influence was never so "personalized", pervasive, and addictive as today. Furthermore, this influence did not extract them from observable reality to turn them into virtual-worlds addicts. It didn't target young children (millions of them), it didn't torture them and push them to self-loathing. It didn't prevent youth to develop the enzymes necessary to metabolize life and experience happiness: feel love, care for others, think in nuances, ....
Simon Sinek in his insightful book "Leaders eat last", explains that from an evolutionary perspective it is the balance between "Selfish hormones (dopamine/endorphine) and selfless hormones (oxytocin / serotonin) that made it possible for cooperation to take place and to populations to thrive together. When you have bombardment of dopamine that slowly inhibits the production of serotonin (endocrinologist Prof Robert Lustig) generations are stuck in the digital limbo or a cruel version of the world envisioned by Irina Levin in the dystopic novel "This perfect day" -
My guess is that, unless something changes fast, with AI at work to build on the devastation brought by Social media & Co , your guess is very optimistic scenario.
Moderate optimism is good. I'm afraid if there's a place where we can spot harmony these days...it's in the rhythm all democracies are falling and being eaten up by the "Evil Tech"
True Josie, and the same can be experienced wherever Social Media have put there hands on children, but with a technology that flattens people on the present (conveniently) and downplays (to use an euphemism) the importance of history (let alone the wisdom that could stem from it!) I don't know if we can entirely blame them. There arrogance may come from "a sense of entitlement" that the Social Media driven "victimhood" culture , or dopamine overdoses self-aggrandizing effect or who knows, but are they those who had the naivety (or malignity) to pass and not amend in time SECTION230? Through Social media and the Internet, it seems we gave up adulthood just when they needed us to be adult the most ... 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, ... many alarm bells sounded, with children [today in their 20s] blatantly crying for our help, where were we? Were we listening to our gut feeling, our intuition telling us that something was not right?
It was ok to be naive in 1996 with only 8% of Americans on the Internet, but not later. Somebody made a bargain with the Devil (not sure this translates well in English)
Not to the degree and the extent that it does when it is not submitted to the rule of law. Especially, when it involves a super powerful new technology that is obscure and pervasive.
Jake mistakes "I've seen lots of bad stuff on YouTube" with "I'm mature enough to deal with the bad stuff on YouTube". If Jack's statement is true, Gen-Z likely has a mild form of PTSD. PTSD makes someone incorrectly gauge risks and respond out of proportion to stimuli. From outside: that would look a lot like fragility.
Yeah, I know... old guy asserting that the kids are just mentally ill these days. But that doesn't make it untrue!
I wasn't trying to trivialize PTSD at all guys. I have a very mild case of it due to some extremely physically painful experiences when I was a kid. (No, no one abused me, it was just congenital medical problems, but they were extremely painful.) To this day there are a handful of stimuli to which my reactions look completely insane to any person not knowing my history.
While certainly not comparable to combat stress PTSD at all, if TikTok can give kids facial tics, Tumblr can convince girls they're boys, and social media use can cause anxiety and depression severe enough to need pharmacological treatment... I don't it's a stretch to say that swimming in violent and sexual stuff on YouTube or Pornhub could cause mild PTSD.
I've been studying psychology for 35+ years. I agree many of the kids are mentally ill, the most common illnesses among them are anxiety, depression, and narcissism, a personality disorder. A key point to personality disorders: they are highly intolerant to ideas that are different than theirs, and they can easily get verbally or physically abusive when confronted with a new idea. Because a narcissist is deeply insecure, and will often create a facade, a fake reality around them, and social media simply helps them do that. And any facts someone sends to a narcissist threatens their facade, and thus their fake manufactured self. They hate their real self so much they rely on their manufactured self.
One problem, shown by another study, is Gen Z and Gen Y has a habit of feeding their own anxieties, which makes them worse. There's a difference between venting online, and feeding the illness. Feeding the illness is when this venting becomes more than a habit, it becomes a daily necessity.
Venting is supposed to be part of the process whereby the individual can "let go" of the negative emotions. And thus finish the path of processing the event and the emotions associated with it.
p.s. I have also seen this in real time on forums.
Do you think a young child, say under 10, would be traumatized by stumbling upon extreme pornography, graphic mutilation/execution (ISIS, cartels) videos, and other refuse of the internet such as "2 girls 1 cup" or "1 guy 1 screw driver"?
If these aspects of the internet are foreign to you, I would argue that it is exactly this disconnect (the digital nativity of Gen Z) that is part of what makes the internet so much more harmful for them. Unfortunately, youth of my generation and later are able to find and expose themselves to things on the internet that older generations cannot even imagine. It is like Jon noted at the start of this post, Gen Z has an insular online existence that is not even visible or comprehensible to their elders.
Apologies if I came off aggressive. I definitely agree that PTSD - like so many terms today - is way overused and becomes trivialized thereby. But I would also say not all trauma causes full on PTSD. Trauma is a highly subjective experience (the worst thing you have experienced is the worst thing you have experienced) and can broadly be defined as any time where the acting organism's standard set of adaptations and competence significantly fail to meet a demand placed on them by a difficult scenario. If the organism is not helped to reform its adaptations to meet or at least make sense of what occurred, it often maladapts and becomes frozen in its terror/helplessness and the rigid, narrow structure it developed to protect itself. The stereotyped examples are the "shell-shocked" soldier who is horrified by loud sounds or the abused dog who can never again trust dark-haired men with beards (if this was the physiognomy of the abusive owner). But, as is clear from the definition, many things can cause trauma in varying degrees, and a person's susceptibility is highly variable based on their age, maturity, ken and social support. All trauma does not necessarily cause the absolute worst outcome (full-blown PTSD) but it can be impactful and difficult nonetheless. At risk of being called nihilistic, I would venture that not a single person on earth does not carry some amount of trauma, if for no other reason than that children are extremely susceptible to it. Of course, I do not take this to mean that we are all broken and all of our faults, shortcomings, vices, etc. can be chalked up to trauma. The confrontation and overcoming of past traumas is an essential part of maturing and individuating. I would not count it as a tragedy to be lamented that we are all inevitably traumatized at some point or another, but a necessary prerequisite for the development of higher character. It would always be preferable to limit the traumas to the completely unavoidable, but it is worth remembering that the goal of parenting (and, by extension, of the management of oursleves we each assume at adulthood) should be resilience, not comfort or absolute safety. But I digress.
Children who were raised to be weak and not have coping skills do not need much trauma to give them PTSD. The "safe space" movement is about making weak children without coping skills, and thus increasing anxiety disorders.
Have you seen the SOCIAL DILEMMA ? We need to stop fooling ourselves with the idea we can choose... free will is gone with exponential brain-molding technology. Certainly some people maybe able to escape it, but the magnitude of the damage done to the rest will erase the benefits of their lucidity. Look at societies broken down.
There are a number of factors that affected Gen Z as a group. As a group I agree they are emotionally much more fragile, which means there are individual exceptions to the generalization. The demand for many more "safe spaces" where censorship is prominent to ensure they don't develop coping skills is on the rise.
Other factors include poor parenting skills from their parents, helicopter parents, schools that don't prepare them for adulthood, coddling parents that don't let kids stretch their wings or have free play time, and more. Coddling produces a weak adult child unready to face challenges as they have never been "tested" or learned to get thick skin, or be more tolerant, really important growth opportunities have been skipped in their life.
I would say that many urban public schools have horrifically changed their methods of teaching, creating a school-to-prison pipeline for boys and young men, a disturbing percentage of which are minorities. Those pushing these changes have been rich white ladies who are either ignorant of or incapable of handling data. There is an entire industry of education consultants who prey upon poor inner city children. These changed ways of teaching have increased racial gaps in test scores and led to dreadful outcomes.
I would also add that the privilege of growing up in a traditional family just keeping growing in impact, especially for boys. I think we need not be as concerned with girls and young women. They have endured far worse. They are equipped with more robust mental and emotional strength. Young men on the other hand, they can destroy civilizations. A return to traditional mating patterns (successful men getting all the women) will have painful results, and we are already on our way there. Our leaders might decide that it might be time for a war to mop up all of those excess males (especially in China).
I think there’s multiple ways to interpret Jack’s statement, and it’s far more interesting to consider what he might mean and may not be articulating precisely rather than just assuming he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That’s the whole point of this piece.
One example is how much better kids of this generation are at dealing with online hate and abuse, because they’ve been exposed to it for their entire lives.
Look at the young activists of this generation, like Greta Thunberg or the Parkland, Florida gun control advocates. Regardless of what you personally think of their politics, you can’t deny that they have a fluency and ease with dealing with people attacking, threatening, and abusing them online. Maybe that doesn’t equate to maturity as you’d define it, but not being bothered by constant death and rape threats does feel like some kind of strength.
I absolutely agree that kids these days need to read a book or two. But I am not a fan of how the writers here are trying to methodically figure out the psychology of the young people and the comments are just full of gripes that only serve to valorize previous generations. (I am a millennial myself, for what it’s worth.)
Hi, (member of Gen Z b. 1998 and UMich honors history grad ‘20)
The digital age is neither a catastrophe nor a boon, although I often feel the former. Instead it is a different age. As a member of the generation straddling two eras, though, I can speak to what underlies your data - we feel lonely because neither those before us or after share our perspective. We don’t love tech like those older than us who feel they will be left behind and need to modernize, and we are not like those younger than us who are blind to the world before. Tech to us is a tool - both good and bad. Many of us have dated both on the apps and with girls met in bars or through friends. As such we each have parts of tech we love and hate.
I personally stopped using headphones, deciding it is an unnatural way to experience sound that removes us from hearing the world around us. I also use a gigantic computer monitor that provides me massive productivity hacks. My thesis in college also featured cutting edge research because instead of merely going to archives, I used a treasure trove of online sleuthing.
In many ways we are like the Lost Generation, in love with the past but charging into the future headstrong. Of course, that generation faced bullets in trenches and we have not, but the malaise and insecurity are there. Plus, those of that generation did lead to many innovations and frankly they saved the free world with their leadership by the time of the 1940s and after. So I wouldn’t catastrophize the situation and say our lives are ruined, but certainly there were opportunities afforded others that we do not have, and opportunities afforded to us that others don’t have. And while it may frustrate me, it also gives me profound purpose. We have the opportunity to shape this century with both high digital skill as well as deep knowledge of the values of those who came before and laid the groundwork for our society.
To quote a person from a few generations before me--Admiral Jim Stockdale, “I think character is permanent and issues are transient.”
"We have the opportunity to shape this century with both high digital skill as well as deep knowledge of the values of those who came before and laid the groundwork for our society."
That's a great point, and much needed in today's world. As a Boomer, I regret that my generation left such a task to young people, and wish you and other members of your cohort Godspeed on that mission.
Thank you Eli for this informative, thorough post. I wanted to share two reflections:
"A significant number of young users think that social media helps them participate in a social community, express themselves, and receive emotional support." When youth are asked to make this evaluation, they lack the comparison to what a embodied, real-life social community and emotional support feels like; they equate snappy texts and emojis with community and support, but it is not the 'real thing'. Also 'self-expression' is viewed only in a positive light, yet may lead to unhealthy self-focus and a detraction from 'other-focus', which leads to greater purpose and meaning.
I found this comment by one of your respondents of interest:
“We are no longer embedded in a community to which we contribute to, we have not inherited any mythological narrative to guide our way forward, we have absolutely no institutional sources for acquiring wisdom available for us". In my most recent post "The Great Forgetting" https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/the-great-forgetting, I discussed how memory is necessary to preserve our cultural heritage. Notably, in order to form long-term memories our mind needs time to process and transfer information from our working memory. The incessant distractions of social media thus contribute to the erasure of deep memories and lead to our collective cultural withering. This might be an additional source of mental health decline to consider.
“ It’s just a blame on social media and not a blame on ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.’””
That actually made me laugh out loud. I guess I’m not surprised that someone would say it (and believe it), but it’s impossible to take seriously. I’ve never thought of myself as a sunny optimist but all this doom-and-gloom talk feels incredibly overwrought. This isn’t some uniquely difficult time to be alive. If anything the exact opposite is true. I’m convinced that social media is a big factor at play in causing depression and anxiety. But I see in the responses (especially in context of having read The Coddling of the American Mind) a learned helplessness: the respondents all seem to believe that Gen Z are the victims of forces outside of their control:
- Social media is harming their mental health, but what can they do - all their friends are on it (setting aside the fact that they could just delete their accounts and deal with the slight unpopularity that might cause them).
- Capitalism is to blame and somehow is causing them mental troubles that their grandparents who lived through the Great Depression didn’t have.
- School shootings are threatening their lives (despite the fact that these events are so incredibly rare as to make the national news and teenagers today are physically safer than any generation of human beings in history).
- Climate change will destroy the world (setting aside the more likely scenario in which human beings adapt to it and deal with it).
- etc.
It goes back to what Jon wrote about in an earlier post when it comes to locus of control. I’m one year removed from Gen Z, but I (and my friends) don’t share any of these beliefs of personal helplessness. Maybe it’s because my friends and I aren’t terribly online, but I have little doubt that the world and the country are far better off than seemingly a majority of people in Gen Z seem to think. Maybe it’s also a lack of historical perspective on their part.
Thanks for sharing Ben! I'm reminded of the "Okay Boomer" phrase. It seems trendy these days to mock Boomers yet conveniently forget they also lived through the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Stonewall Riots, JFK's assassination, etc. It's not to downgrade what Gen Z is experiencing, only to argue that fears about the world's future have existed throughout history.
Thanks, Donald! I’ve never been a fan of the phrase “Okay, Boomer,” because it strikes me as dismissive and even derogatory. In general, I dislike generational warfare arguments. No age cohort is a monolith and also no one age cohort is uniquely flawed (or uniquely gifted), so it’s pointless for Millennials to blame Boomers or Boomers to blame Gen Z, etc.
One thing Gen Z could learn from the Baby Boomers is, as you point out, that America has been through some difficult and tumultuous moments in the past and somehow came through. Which indicates that we aren’t incapable of dealing with whatever challenges exist in the world today.
Born in 1996, I grew up "chronically online," starting with sites like Neopets at a very young age and progressing to platforms like DeviantArt and Tumblr, before getting my first iPhone as a senior in high school (2013/14) and "finally" being able to join apps like Snapchat and Instagram. I love what the Internet/social media has brought me. And I also see what a detriment it has been. For me, personally, it's been more of a detriment being able to see people my own age - that I know personally - that I follow out of courtesy (we shared one class in high school, etc.) hit social milestones quicker than I do. I am frequently pruning the list of accounts I follow because the effect it has on me is not worth it. But at the same time, I also have that FoMO. It's almost a masochistic behavior - I don't want to follow, because the content makes me feel bad about myself, but I have this desire to know everything that's happening at all times...because I grew up online and thus feel like I "deserve" to know everything that's happening at all times. All of this to say: I am well aware that I am addicted to social media and the effects it has had on me, while also being grateful for living in a time where I'm able to access it. And yet, I'd rather it not exist at all...despite me being unwilling to give it up.
The same technology that allows me (a dad from No. CA) to debate a Nobel prize winner in economics on his own blog (yes this happened to me)... also allows me to lose hours of time checking up on pointless likes of my comments on Substack.
It is so sad we cannot stop ourselves from looking at things that basically give us no meaning at all. I think sometimes I fall into phases which I can best describe as “online paralysis,” where I am browsing but internalizing none of it
How is this different than me reading fiction or playing video games (StarCraft2 is my crack)? I am old (born in 1977). Every generation has had its time wasters. I had a grandfather who would carve intricate little animals out of random blocks of wood (he called it his witt-lin). He was very artistic, but it was the definition of time wasting.
Absolutely same! It so often feels like a chore and yet I still convince myself I have to do it. In high school and college I used to check my socials 3 times a day, always at the same time, and felt anxiety if I wasn't able to. Thankfully I stopped that cycle and no longer adhere to a "schedule" but there are still remnants.
Yeah. I remember checking a lot too, but my relationship to the internet definitely changed during the early 2010s. I'm not entirely sure when exactly, but it's obvious to me now. It definitely got more consumption-oriented, especially as algorithmic curation took over and social media ditched the chronological timeline.
I think I may just end up getting a "dumb phone." I already deleted most of the socials off my phone, anyway.
As always love this work. But I am skeptical this approach to getting Z feedback was sound. For one, 22 responses, from a Twitter distribution, is nothing like a large or diverse sample. And two, we need to compare Z self assessment to other generations. Perhaps they all thought things were going downhill. Maybe they would cite drugs or alcohol back then.
I think this is a powerful thesis. But I didn't find the Z feedback as meaningful to the case.
I recall looking at suicide statistics, and they are returning to 1990's levels. I went to high school and college in the 1990's. I knew good men who committed suicide. It is a shame that this rate is returning to what it was, but these are the costs of modernity (substance abuse. suicide,...). Even the school shootings seem like the old "duck and cover" videos from the Cold War. These are non-issues spewing forth from dying traditional media.
I am not surprised by the results having a daughter that was born in 2001. The article Jonathan wrote (Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest) was an eye opener for sure. At the end of every section I read, I said, that’s my daughter. I watched her grow up and saw all of this. She is very smart and has a great awareness of self because of her yoga and meditation practice. Because of this, she initiated sessions with an expert in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to assist her with the challenges that she was facing. She is making great progress and is able to recognize how her thoughts and reactions to her environment can have a negative impact on her thinking and well being. She is very strong willed and will break this, I am very confident. She is currently a junior at a great liberal arts college and will graduate with honors.
I agree that the societal and economic environment have a greater impact on Gen Z than their activity on social media. Social media, based on the above charts, just appears to amplify good or bad. It doesn’t seem to create. This topic is perhaps something that should be studied and documented, as I’ve seen this topic over and over, but have never seen a formal study with facts. Just, it “feels”worse now because of societal and economic factors.
Your study does not address the individual, but rather their environment, that is making them worse off. I would argue, from personal experience, that all kids are different and that they react differently than others to their environment. Somehow, you have to document that the parents of Gen Z, have done a much worse job of parenting than, for example, parents of Baby Boomers. Let’s not forget that the individuals of Gen Z are molded by their parents and my position is that their parents should take a large portion of the blame for their children's failures.
One of skills Gen Z kids did not learn growing up is conflict resolution. I learned this in sports and various other activities while growing up. Today kids can’t deal with conflict. They don’t know how to address it, nor resolve the conflict. They get too emotional because they are being challenged. They cry “words are violence.” Without this skill, boys are not asking girls out on dates. They are too afraid.
"decline of institutions that previously supported community connection outside of the workplace or school"
Gen-Z's version of Bowling Alone.
Third spaces are built by the participants though, which Gen-Z's fetishization of their phones prevents. I'm not blaming that on the individuals -- I think smartphones should be treated like any other addictive substance, with age restrictions -- but the collective effect is real.
And I have a very hard time taking anyone seriously who lays "blame on the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy". I appreciate that this is a survey, but Sarah really needs to get out more.
"profound economic pressure has made young people frugal and responsible beyond their years"
I have 3 teenagers: 14, 15, 16. My oldest two are among the most non-consumer-oriented people I have ever met in America. Is that just their personality or is their growing awareness of the frailty of economic opportunities feeding a frugality of lifestyle? I don't know.
I love the Mars metaphor! Blue lips and brain damage... totally worth it man!
"Social media platforms make depressed teens more depressed, insecure teens more prone to body image issues, and teens who have trouble focusing more prone to addiction. It turns distant global worries into fear- and outrage-inducing sound bites that flood teen and pre-teen news feeds and do little to help them grow into the kind of responsible and rational citizens who could help address the world’s problems as adults."
ChatGPT lists the most widely shared social media posts by Generation Z:
"1. Memes: Humorous images, videos, or text that are shared and remixed by users, reflecting cultural trends, current events, or relatable experiences.
2. Short-form videos: Platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts have gained popularity, with users sharing and engaging with short, entertaining, or informative videos.
3. Social activism: Generation Z is highly engaged in social and political issues, sharing content related to climate change, racial equality, mental health, and LGBTQ+ rights, among others.
4. Challenges and trends: Popular challenges and trends, like dance routines, social media challenges, or viral hashtags, often spread quickly among Generation Z users.
5. Influencer content: Generation Z users often engage with and share content created by their favorite influencers or celebrities, which can include fashion, beauty, gaming, or lifestyle content."
Number #3 sticks out as a likely primary cause for the teen mental health crisis. How are young, developing minds supposed to process the firehose of largely bad news that is omnipresent?
Weren't you engaged in political or social activism at a young age though? I was. The issues were different in the late 80's obviously, but the desire to improve the world is endemic in the young. Despite the strong desire, one of the reasons young adults are so bad at actually bringing about improvement (not just change, but improvement) is that they their lack of wisdom makes them easy prey to be coopted by those who would steer their drive into pointless or even harmful directions.
One of my favorite Clarence Thomas quotes: "Good judgement comes from life experience. And life experience comes from having not had good judgement."
1. I wouldn’t underestimate how self-selecting the group of Gen Zers who even see a Jon Haidt tweet is. Same with this substack. In large part because of the social media atomization discussed, the people who see the Jon Haidt online presence have probably read Coddling, largely agree with it, and perhaps are actively working to oppose the culture described in Coddling on their own college campus (or maybe that’s just me 🤪). Gen Zers who disagree with this kind of analysis are disproportionately likely to not have heard of Jon Haidt. Further, I could easily find you 50 classmates of mine who, after reading (for instance) the paragraph in Coddling in which Jon and Greg Lukianoff argue that the use of gender pronouns isn’t necessary as a matter of safety, would forever write Jon off as a hateful right-wing bigot, and probably wouldn’t give their time to his research even to disagree with his point of view.
2.I think you’re understanding point 5.3, that social media makes other problems worse. It might be beyond the scope of this post, but it’s worth mentioning that a lot of the “gen Z is doing bad but it’s not because of social media” group cited causes that… one could easily argue are themselves driven by social media. Specifically, there were multiple people who pointed out a decline in shared spaces, institutions, events, and other opportunities for real-life socialization. (And this is to say nothing of the decline of civic organizations as described in Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, which occurred long before social media.) But I would argue that if not for social media (and social media-adjacent technologies such as Uber, DoorDash, etc.), there would be more of an effort to bring back and revitalize these types of spaces. And I think social media has directly contributed to that not happening, and even to the acceleration of their decline and of the atomization that one respondent lamented.
This is very well researched and written! I super appreciate your inclusion of links to all the studies you referenced (it’s shocking how often people don’t do that).
I wish I had seen your call for thoughts sooner because I’m one of those members of Gen Z who thinks social media is a good thing. I was born in 1997, and have lived nearly my whole life with social media and the internet. I wrote a bit about it here in my opening essay on Substack:
I later distilled some of those thoughts into this passage from my essay Post-History:
“As someone who’s very first memories exist in an industrial world, and grew up in parallel with the internet— I feel compelled to impress upon people the importance of the age that we are living through. This isn’t a new chapter in the technological leaps of industrial society, this is the start of fundamentally different way of engaging with knowledge and information altogether.”
To be young in the current political climate and cultural climate is to be instinctually aware of this chasm between the modern world as it is, and as “adults” imagine it. This chasm makes the weight of the future immense on our shoulders. Across issues, the fear I see most from young people is a fear of running out of time. There is a sense that they are being asked to take on too much, too soon. They both know there are existential issues at play for humanity in the data age, but also aren’t ready to decide what needs to happen about them.
My message to Gen Z is this. We have time. The constant barrage of bad news and horror stories is the result of algorithms designed to suck every drop of profit out of us. You are right that many of these social media platforms are having negative impacts on society and our mental health. But social media isn’t the enemy, it’s the profit incentive that will mechanize humanity if we let it. Social Media is the tool by which we have a chance to organize against the coming ossification of bureaucracy.
This will require fighting the algorithms, forging own paths in the digital world, weathering evolving corporate attempts at psychological manipulation. But we must not give up the tool that is social media. Find ways to make each platform your own, understand how your mind engages with each new algorithm and don’t launch yourself into losing battles. (I for one learned quickly that my ADHD brain could not weather Tik Toks attention algorithm and so I avoid the platform altogether). And, above all else, keep that spark of human mischievousness and unpredictability alive.
I have just now reached adulthood, at 26 I am finally starting to feel a childhood of internet access solidifying into a adult mind. As I think about my younger siblings and other members of my generation who feel the burdens of the world so strongly, my single biggest piece of advice is that there is time. You do not need to solve all of tomorrow’s problems on your own. Our generation has a lot to do when we come to power, but the world will survive until we’re ready to wield it.
I’ll conclude with a passage from an upcoming, currently unfinished, essay of mine. “Today we are dealing with a language revolution on a scale not seen since the invention of the printing press. Generation Z isn’t the next generation in the history of industrial society, we are the first generation who was raised with the infinite question and answer box of the internet. We are the first generation with the 3 dimensional language tools of the internet and social media. We are a new generation of human minds, blessed with a freedom of information that past thinkers would have killed to be able to access. It may be true that the initial impact of social media and the internet on human intelligence will be a dumbing down and emotional weakening of society, but the select few who take these new tools and use them to develop their own minds will find their place among the greatest minds of human history.”
> To be young in the current political climate and cultural climate is to be instinctually aware of this chasm between the modern world as it is, and as “adults” imagine it.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but that sounds a little bit arrogant. You see that there's a difference in how you see the world and how adults see it, and you conclude that the way you see it is the "world as it is," while the adults' perspective is just an imagination.
Do you have any evidence to support that perspective? Doesn't it seem probable that those with more experience and exposure to the big picture are likely to have a more correct view of how things are in the world?
I don’t say anywhere that young people see the world as it truly is. I specifically implicate that Generation Z is not ready to wield power, and that they have time to wait multiple points in my comment.
I used this hyperbolic phrase to emphasize the disconnect between the importance of technology in daily life, and the relative political immaturity of the rules and regulations on that technology. There is no well established history of experience to cite when deciding how to integrate Large Language Models into society without tearing everything apart. There’s no past evidence to analyze about the risks of a foreign power potentially having access to the algorithms that automatically steer our children’s video viewing platforms.
Generation Z is anxious because they understand that the world is changing, and the traditional institutions for dealing with societal and technological shift have been slow to react.
Figuring out how to save humanity from becoming cogs in a giant machine run by artificial intelligences will take the decades of lived experience from older generations who experienced industrial society, and input from the younger generations who will have known various states of digital technology from the moment they entered the world.
Read some history. Everything you say was once said about water-driven looms, steam power, locomotives, the telegraph, even the internet itself (Bill Gates wrote a hell of an embarrassing book about the future in the 1990's if you want a good laugh--think video phones on everybody's walls, desks and even cars!
New technology scares people. People adjust and make the relevant regulations, new technology arrives,...,rinse and repeat,....
“This isn’t a new chapter in the technological leaps of industrial society, this is the start of fundamentally different way of engaging with knowledge and information altogether.”
How so? A tool doesn’t create a fundamental shift in communication, it’s merely a tool. I fail to see how this changes anything. The world, before and after the creation of the alphabet, DID create a fundamental shift in civilization, as did the creation of the Pythagorean Theorem. Pray tell how Google is on par with that?
Jon is certainly following in Marshall Macluhan’s footsteps. And Gen Z and everyone else for that matter could benefit from understanding the shared suspension of reality common to social media users. It leads me to believe that we will adapt and become desensitized to social media as we have become desensitized to other forms of mass media.
To demonstrate what I mean about this being the start of a new way of engaging with knowledge and information altogether, I asked GPT-4 to answer your question, giving it a 2 line outline for my argument.
“I understand your perspective that a tool might not necessarily create a fundamental shift in communication. However, I'd like to present a few arguments to help illustrate how technological advancements and their applications have led to significant changes in the way we engage with knowledge and information.
First, let's take the invention of the printing press as an example. Before its creation, books were handwritten and scarce, which made information and knowledge accessible only to a select few. However, the printing press revolutionized the distribution of language and ideas by making it easier to produce books and texts. This led to a significant increase in literacy rates and facilitated the spread of ideas, playing a key role in the Renaissance and the Reformation. It wasn't just the tool itself, but the way it restructured society's access to and engagement with knowledge that made it so influential.
Similarly, the internet has also brought about significant change in the way we access and engage with information. It has made an immense amount of knowledge instantly available to us, democratized the exchange of ideas, and created new forms of communication like emails, forums, and social media. The internet has also enabled increased collaboration across vast distances, fostering innovation and progress. The internet, like the printing press, has not only changed the tool we use to access information, but it has also reshaped the way we interact with and process that information.
Now, let's consider large language models and alphabets as revolutions in language itself. The creation of the alphabet, as you pointed out, indeed led to a fundamental shift in the way humans communicated. Before the alphabet, people relied on pictographic or logographic systems, which were often limited and harder to learn. The alphabet streamlined language and made written communication accessible to a broader audience, fundamentally changing the way humans engaged with each other and with knowledge.
Similarly, large language models today have the potential to revolutionize the way we communicate and understand each other. With the ability to process and generate human-like text, these models can provide real-time translation services or create highly personalized experiences based on individual language patterns. This development can enable us to engage with each other and with knowledge in new ways, bridging language barriers and creating more inclusive and global conversations.
In conclusion, while it's true that tools are inherently neutral, the way they are used, and the impact they have on society can indeed create fundamental shifts in communication and our engagement with knowledge. The printing press, the internet, the alphabet, and large language models all serve as examples of both language distribution revolutions and language revolutions in their own right. These innovations have not only changed the tools we use to access information but have profoundly influenced the way we interact with and process that information, leading to notable transformations in our society.”
So you push a button and something else answers a question for you? That's not "knowledge", that's plagiarism.
The printing press was useless unless people knew how to read. In the same way that using Google doesn't really help unless folks are already pretty knowledgeable on a subject, and calling upon your Chat buddy doesn't make you smarter, or more confident, or even able to fully "engage" with everyone if you don't know what you're talking about. This isn't revolutionary, it's merely a tool. Of which there are many in a toolkit.
Great work Eli, really enjoyable read. I maybe think your own metaphors could use a little more elaborating, as they seemed just a bit underdeveloped when they were utilised to explain a concept. But that's nitpicking, I just thought I could give you some advice since that's what I want whenever I write (often people are too polite to give it to me lol).
I think social media definitely augments anxiety and depression as your data suggests, and is a major cause of the deterioration of young peoples mental health. I also tend to agree with those members of Gen Z who posited the idea that the decline in shared civic life (and I'd add the decline in marriage and family formation among younger people into this mix too), and the associated loss of a strong sense of social identity and meaning it provided, lies at the root of mental health problems for many social cohorts, not just the young. I agree with Putnam too, who shows that civic decline harms social trust, social mobility, the effective functioning of political institutions and trust in those institutions.
Perhaps technology (like social media), alongside the development of professionalised institutions which crowd out organic social institutions (see Rajan's 'The Third Pillar'), is a key cause of this civic decline (people, for example, used to go to the local 'friendly society', church group or pub to entertain themselves in days gone by in my part of the world, now they can watch Netflix, surf the web or scroll social media instead).
I think its also interesting that while many young people lament the decay of traditional institutions (and some even point to the decline in stable relationships and marriage - itself caused by growing individualistic values, the rising socio-economic status of women, greater economic insecurity amongst many young folk, and the mix of contracteption, libertine sexual values and 'dating' apps) that served as the bedrock of communal life, Gen Z are simultaneously the generation whose liberal values lead them to criticise and oppose the constraints, traditions and often conservative values that served as the foundations those very institutions (Gen Z can be sad about the decline in religious practice and identity but they're also the generation most likely to view those things as forms of oppression, for example).
And a final thought, its possible that the volatile mix of 'the self-esteem movement' which was in full swing when I was young ("you're wonderful and special and perfect just the way you are...here have this participation trophy...we'll get rid of grades because that might make you feel bad"), the idea that our society is a 'meritocracy' (Sandel's 'Tyranny of Merit' and Goodhart's 'Head, Hand, Heart' are good books on this topic), juxtaposed against a deeply unequal economy has been damaging to mental health.
Young people may have had their egos massaged their whole lives only to find out, in the real world, that they aren't so special, in fact, they may be near the bottom of the 'meritocratic' pack. In this gap between their self-perception and the perception of themselves in the eyes of the world, lies cognitive dissonance, frustration and depression. Because of indulgent coddling by adults these young people haven't developed an accurate view of themselves and their abilities in relation to their peers, nor have they developed adequate coping mechanisms to deal with failure and negative emotion. This, as well as the effects of posturing on social media, may go some way to explaining the rise of 'insecure narcissism' among young people as well.
Anyway, just some ideas, I loved the piece, it must be a real treat to work alongside Mr. Haidt.
I've always thought that the problem with social media and digital devices in our pockets is a more profound one than it is often made out to be. There's a fundamental change in the way people go about their day. Now everyone, at any moment, has a distraction at one’s fingertips and are not hesitant to indulge in it. I think this can make the mind more fragile.
The opportunities one had to structure their lives and to create emotional order from emotional chaos needs deep inquiry into oneself. That is an aspect which has gotten lost in our current way of life where people often are afraid to be alone with their own minds. I have observed this. People not being able to take a walk without stimuli of their brains, in the form of music, a podcast or scrolling. A loss of perspective on how the solitude of the self is something good and useful. The brain, I think, does not just need new information piled on, it needs time to process as well. Especially emotions.
I think the techniques used in CBT, and techniques like it where you question the emotions you have, have to be practiced with intent and deep deliberation and I'm not sure that state of mind is often reached when one can just distract themselves from the anxiety temporarily. To hold the reins on the elephant one can’t just use their brains to passively engage with others and never actively engage with oneself.
Phones don’t just offer a way of comparing oneself to others but also interrupts the way one interacts with the Self. I think deep engaging with the Self comes from a lack of outside stimuli which is a rarity today.
Therefore, the type of distraction isn’t of importance to this negative effect but the distraction itself is the culprit.
I’m not sure if any of these ideas have any merit but I believe it’s something commonly observable.
I think with the decline of educational standards and the shift away from basic skills towards so-called social justice and environmental activism, young people have a sense that they're missing something important, but which they can't fully identify. They have been rewarded for merely existing, are unprepared to contend with the world as it is, and are more concerned with how things should be, but lacking the wherewithal to effect change other than acting out. Hence, the word "adult" becomes a verb that suggests incompetence rather than aspiration and growth.
The notion that the world will conform to their expectations only leads to disappointment and a sense of betrayal when they discover that's not how the world works. Because they have been taught to disdain the virtues of a self-ordering society, all that is left to them is fear and chaos, with no means of creating confidence, clarity, and order. Self-esteem cannot be endowed, it must be earned through effort, error, perseverance, and self-mastery.
This can be laid at the feet of the educational community, public schools and colleges that promote ideological activism over the learning experience. At an age where basic skills will facilitate the continuing command of abstract and critical thinking, colleges instead offer remediation for skills that should have already been acquired, and ideologies that history has repeatedly proven not just useless, but hugely destructive. The notion that change, in an of itself, is progressive and desirable is the big lie, discarding what works for what sounds good.
Instead of an institution that sustains and enhances the culture and society at large, education has become a tool to groom generations of young minds to accept consensus over independent thinking, servitude over liberty, and victimhood over aspiration ... all in the interests of safety and comity, neither of which can be delivered by what they are taught.
The idea of individualism has also become distorted in the context of group identity and herd mentality. The expression of individuality amounts to incidental externals, like a tattoo or purple hair or gender ambiguity, in an effort to try to define and differentiate themselves, but which is its own conformity to the hive mind and which does not forge true identity.
Technology has always contributed to changes in human behavior, but not to human nature.
Brilliant comment. So astute: “Technology has always contributed to changes in human behavior, but not to human nature.” As I mentioned in my own comment, before reading yours, technology is happening exponentially faster every day. I pray the parents and children of today will have the strength for the challenges they face which I believe are far greater than those I did for all the lack of technology during my time.
1997 here 👋 When reading this series, I've often jumped to the conclusion that mental health = anxiety, depression, etc. Figure 3 (Effects of Social Media Apps on British Teenagers' Mental Health) resonates so much -- the negative impact on sleep is definitely my top takeaway from this post. Having social media apps on your phone destroys your sleep, productivity and ability to maintain focus (particularly during difficult tasks). The best word to describe social media products is "potent".
I have accounts on most major social media apps (hard to have a Gen Z social life without them, nevermind how much they proliferate the work side of life too), but I (1) never have the native social media apps downloaded on my phone, (2) never sleep with my phone in reach of my bed, (3) never work with my phone in my pocket / near my desk.
On top of that, I make sure I have (1) pretty strong time limits to help break me out of 'brain-off scrolling' whenever I get caught in it, (2) the newsfeed eradicator plugin on my browser so if I ever do need to go on social media sites from my laptop that I don't get caught into scrolling by accident, and (3) that I disable phone notifications across everything except texts, calls and work stuff (emails, Slack etc).
If you don't acknowledge that social media companies hire many of the most talented developers, designers and data scientists from the top universities with the sole aim of maximizing how much time you spend on their products, along with the fact that you're really just a weak bag of meat in comparison to what they've built, then you're doomed to lose. You've literally got to build an arsenal of self defense techniques to stand any chance against them.
> Jack, in response #1, argued that Gen Z is “the most mature generation in history” precisely because the internet gave them access to such horrible stuff:
>
>“…I’d actually argue that exposure to these things poises us to handle stress better than previous generations.”
Jack may think that, but he's making a testable, falsifiable claim here that is in fact easily falsified by testing it against the data. Gen Z is *incredibly* emotionally fragile compared to previous generations. So it's worth asking, why is Jack's perception of how this should work for his generation so thoroughly at odds with the facts of the matter? What is the distorted mirror he's looking through that gets his perceptions so completely wrong?
I think what is really complicated about asking Gen Z to analyze how their situation has impacted them is that they have nothing to compare their experience to. It's like that old joke where you ask the fish "how's the water?" and the fish responds " water? what's water?". I work in this field and always find it useful and interesting to hear what young people have to say about the effects of life online, but I am also very skeptical of the "self- reported" data coming from those who have no experience of what joy, self-knowledge, connection might feel like had they grown up without the filtered reality of the internet and social media.
And, yet, that's what we have... so we have to adopt Roosevelt attitude “Do what you can, with what you have, where you’re" :)
Yes
As someone close to Gen Z in age (1994), them calling themselves “the most mature generation in history” is such a fitting example of how people growing up today completely lack perspective. “Ah yes, we are the most enlightened ones.” It’s like they internalized themselves as being at the end of some long journey of progress. It’s so delusional, really.
One must wonder if Western Europeans felt similarly at the turn of the 20th century before their world imploded in 1914.
It seems they did. For example, the Titanic (1912) was thought to be unsinkable because of their advanced technology, so lifeboats were unnecessary. They were sure of themselves right up until it hit the iceberg.
Actually, in a documentary they explained that there were some who exercised prudences, care and wisdom, but the "Greedy merchants" soul prevailed and they decided to cut down the numbers of lifeboats because they were "view inhibiting" and "people don't pay to see a bunch of lifeboats". This is were AI beats us. We just don't seem to learn much from the past plus humans are gullible by design, two features which should make us exercises tons of caution in any endeavor let alone endeavors involving exponential technology and effects at world scale [it used to be a European default attitude, before Zucki & Co proceeded with mass brains implants and Earth population homologation downward]
Probably at some point every generation has thought this though, right? The ignorance, the presumptuousness of each new young generation
i think the WWI/1914 analogy is completely apt.
from what I've read (a perspective created mostly by journalists, politicians and intellectuals for the most part): the rising generation of the start of the 20th century had been blessed with the benefits of science, technology and a level of freedom and sophistication unprecedented in history, even their parents and grandparents seemed like fossils sticking around after the death of an ancient civilization, and they were going to create a New World; and what better way to bring that world into existence than through a nice quick war (be done by Xmas!) where the winners would reveal their Hegelian historical destinies, and the losers would accept their subordinate status in a new imperium.
Well, those illusions came with a price tag of a few million dead bodies, hopefully when this generation gets smacked in the face with reality, it won't require a hecatomb of corpses.
(my guess is that 9/10 of them will go quietly into the digital panopticon, happily aping the crowd and never knowing otherwise.)
Here in Italy, WWII created the similar situation with the economic boom that flooded American lifestyle liberal values in our traditional conservative cultures with the invention of the "YOUTH" and export of mass consumerism. By late 60s parents and grandparents, as you nicely described, also seem like "fossils sticking around after the death of an ancient civilization".
THE DIFFERENCE, is that the influence was never so "personalized", pervasive, and addictive as today. Furthermore, this influence did not extract them from observable reality to turn them into virtual-worlds addicts. It didn't target young children (millions of them), it didn't torture them and push them to self-loathing. It didn't prevent youth to develop the enzymes necessary to metabolize life and experience happiness: feel love, care for others, think in nuances, ....
Simon Sinek in his insightful book "Leaders eat last", explains that from an evolutionary perspective it is the balance between "Selfish hormones (dopamine/endorphine) and selfless hormones (oxytocin / serotonin) that made it possible for cooperation to take place and to populations to thrive together. When you have bombardment of dopamine that slowly inhibits the production of serotonin (endocrinologist Prof Robert Lustig) generations are stuck in the digital limbo or a cruel version of the world envisioned by Irina Levin in the dystopic novel "This perfect day" -
My guess is that, unless something changes fast, with AI at work to build on the devastation brought by Social media & Co , your guess is very optimistic scenario.
i need to attempt optimism occasionally, as it goes against my natural inclination.
anyway, when the USA collapses i plan on escaping to Roma, where at least i will have a beautiful perch to watch the collapse from.
ciao!
Moderate optimism is good. I'm afraid if there's a place where we can spot harmony these days...it's in the rhythm all democracies are falling and being eaten up by the "Evil Tech"
True Josie, and the same can be experienced wherever Social Media have put there hands on children, but with a technology that flattens people on the present (conveniently) and downplays (to use an euphemism) the importance of history (let alone the wisdom that could stem from it!) I don't know if we can entirely blame them. There arrogance may come from "a sense of entitlement" that the Social Media driven "victimhood" culture , or dopamine overdoses self-aggrandizing effect or who knows, but are they those who had the naivety (or malignity) to pass and not amend in time SECTION230? Through Social media and the Internet, it seems we gave up adulthood just when they needed us to be adult the most ... 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, ... many alarm bells sounded, with children [today in their 20s] blatantly crying for our help, where were we? Were we listening to our gut feeling, our intuition telling us that something was not right?
It was ok to be naive in 1996 with only 8% of Americans on the Internet, but not later. Somebody made a bargain with the Devil (not sure this translates well in English)
It translates perfectly.
Not to the degree and the extent that it does when it is not submitted to the rule of law. Especially, when it involves a super powerful new technology that is obscure and pervasive.
Jake mistakes "I've seen lots of bad stuff on YouTube" with "I'm mature enough to deal with the bad stuff on YouTube". If Jack's statement is true, Gen-Z likely has a mild form of PTSD. PTSD makes someone incorrectly gauge risks and respond out of proportion to stimuli. From outside: that would look a lot like fragility.
Yeah, I know... old guy asserting that the kids are just mentally ill these days. But that doesn't make it untrue!
I wasn't trying to trivialize PTSD at all guys. I have a very mild case of it due to some extremely physically painful experiences when I was a kid. (No, no one abused me, it was just congenital medical problems, but they were extremely painful.) To this day there are a handful of stimuli to which my reactions look completely insane to any person not knowing my history.
While certainly not comparable to combat stress PTSD at all, if TikTok can give kids facial tics, Tumblr can convince girls they're boys, and social media use can cause anxiety and depression severe enough to need pharmacological treatment... I don't it's a stretch to say that swimming in violent and sexual stuff on YouTube or Pornhub could cause mild PTSD.
I've been studying psychology for 35+ years. I agree many of the kids are mentally ill, the most common illnesses among them are anxiety, depression, and narcissism, a personality disorder. A key point to personality disorders: they are highly intolerant to ideas that are different than theirs, and they can easily get verbally or physically abusive when confronted with a new idea. Because a narcissist is deeply insecure, and will often create a facade, a fake reality around them, and social media simply helps them do that. And any facts someone sends to a narcissist threatens their facade, and thus their fake manufactured self. They hate their real self so much they rely on their manufactured self.
I will defer to the expert. :-)
Your comment about "a narcissist will often create a a fake reality around them", isn't that the very definition of postmodernism?
Good points. Less real life experience and more digital second-hand experience
One problem, shown by another study, is Gen Z and Gen Y has a habit of feeding their own anxieties, which makes them worse. There's a difference between venting online, and feeding the illness. Feeding the illness is when this venting becomes more than a habit, it becomes a daily necessity.
Venting is supposed to be part of the process whereby the individual can "let go" of the negative emotions. And thus finish the path of processing the event and the emotions associated with it.
p.s. I have also seen this in real time on forums.
Learned helplessness. the perverse loyalty program of Social media.
Do you think a young child, say under 10, would be traumatized by stumbling upon extreme pornography, graphic mutilation/execution (ISIS, cartels) videos, and other refuse of the internet such as "2 girls 1 cup" or "1 guy 1 screw driver"?
If these aspects of the internet are foreign to you, I would argue that it is exactly this disconnect (the digital nativity of Gen Z) that is part of what makes the internet so much more harmful for them. Unfortunately, youth of my generation and later are able to find and expose themselves to things on the internet that older generations cannot even imagine. It is like Jon noted at the start of this post, Gen Z has an insular online existence that is not even visible or comprehensible to their elders.
Apologies if I came off aggressive. I definitely agree that PTSD - like so many terms today - is way overused and becomes trivialized thereby. But I would also say not all trauma causes full on PTSD. Trauma is a highly subjective experience (the worst thing you have experienced is the worst thing you have experienced) and can broadly be defined as any time where the acting organism's standard set of adaptations and competence significantly fail to meet a demand placed on them by a difficult scenario. If the organism is not helped to reform its adaptations to meet or at least make sense of what occurred, it often maladapts and becomes frozen in its terror/helplessness and the rigid, narrow structure it developed to protect itself. The stereotyped examples are the "shell-shocked" soldier who is horrified by loud sounds or the abused dog who can never again trust dark-haired men with beards (if this was the physiognomy of the abusive owner). But, as is clear from the definition, many things can cause trauma in varying degrees, and a person's susceptibility is highly variable based on their age, maturity, ken and social support. All trauma does not necessarily cause the absolute worst outcome (full-blown PTSD) but it can be impactful and difficult nonetheless. At risk of being called nihilistic, I would venture that not a single person on earth does not carry some amount of trauma, if for no other reason than that children are extremely susceptible to it. Of course, I do not take this to mean that we are all broken and all of our faults, shortcomings, vices, etc. can be chalked up to trauma. The confrontation and overcoming of past traumas is an essential part of maturing and individuating. I would not count it as a tragedy to be lamented that we are all inevitably traumatized at some point or another, but a necessary prerequisite for the development of higher character. It would always be preferable to limit the traumas to the completely unavoidable, but it is worth remembering that the goal of parenting (and, by extension, of the management of oursleves we each assume at adulthood) should be resilience, not comfort or absolute safety. But I digress.
Children who were raised to be weak and not have coping skills do not need much trauma to give them PTSD. The "safe space" movement is about making weak children without coping skills, and thus increasing anxiety disorders.
Have you seen the SOCIAL DILEMMA ? We need to stop fooling ourselves with the idea we can choose... free will is gone with exponential brain-molding technology. Certainly some people maybe able to escape it, but the magnitude of the damage done to the rest will erase the benefits of their lucidity. Look at societies broken down.
There are a number of factors that affected Gen Z as a group. As a group I agree they are emotionally much more fragile, which means there are individual exceptions to the generalization. The demand for many more "safe spaces" where censorship is prominent to ensure they don't develop coping skills is on the rise.
Other factors include poor parenting skills from their parents, helicopter parents, schools that don't prepare them for adulthood, coddling parents that don't let kids stretch their wings or have free play time, and more. Coddling produces a weak adult child unready to face challenges as they have never been "tested" or learned to get thick skin, or be more tolerant, really important growth opportunities have been skipped in their life.
I would say that many urban public schools have horrifically changed their methods of teaching, creating a school-to-prison pipeline for boys and young men, a disturbing percentage of which are minorities. Those pushing these changes have been rich white ladies who are either ignorant of or incapable of handling data. There is an entire industry of education consultants who prey upon poor inner city children. These changed ways of teaching have increased racial gaps in test scores and led to dreadful outcomes.
I would also add that the privilege of growing up in a traditional family just keeping growing in impact, especially for boys. I think we need not be as concerned with girls and young women. They have endured far worse. They are equipped with more robust mental and emotional strength. Young men on the other hand, they can destroy civilizations. A return to traditional mating patterns (successful men getting all the women) will have painful results, and we are already on our way there. Our leaders might decide that it might be time for a war to mop up all of those excess males (especially in China).
I think there’s multiple ways to interpret Jack’s statement, and it’s far more interesting to consider what he might mean and may not be articulating precisely rather than just assuming he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That’s the whole point of this piece.
Fair enough. So what sort of interpretation do his words afford that makes sense in light of the facts? Because the facts aren't going anywhere.
One example is how much better kids of this generation are at dealing with online hate and abuse, because they’ve been exposed to it for their entire lives.
Look at the young activists of this generation, like Greta Thunberg or the Parkland, Florida gun control advocates. Regardless of what you personally think of their politics, you can’t deny that they have a fluency and ease with dealing with people attacking, threatening, and abusing them online. Maybe that doesn’t equate to maturity as you’d define it, but not being bothered by constant death and rape threats does feel like some kind of strength.
I absolutely agree that kids these days need to read a book or two. But I am not a fan of how the writers here are trying to methodically figure out the psychology of the young people and the comments are just full of gripes that only serve to valorize previous generations. (I am a millennial myself, for what it’s worth.)
Touché - good point.
> What is the distorted mirror he's looking through that gets his perceptions so completely wrong?
Just the usual one: ignorance of history.
There are so many logical fallacies in this piece to address, along with blinkered and focus bias.
Hi, (member of Gen Z b. 1998 and UMich honors history grad ‘20)
The digital age is neither a catastrophe nor a boon, although I often feel the former. Instead it is a different age. As a member of the generation straddling two eras, though, I can speak to what underlies your data - we feel lonely because neither those before us or after share our perspective. We don’t love tech like those older than us who feel they will be left behind and need to modernize, and we are not like those younger than us who are blind to the world before. Tech to us is a tool - both good and bad. Many of us have dated both on the apps and with girls met in bars or through friends. As such we each have parts of tech we love and hate.
I personally stopped using headphones, deciding it is an unnatural way to experience sound that removes us from hearing the world around us. I also use a gigantic computer monitor that provides me massive productivity hacks. My thesis in college also featured cutting edge research because instead of merely going to archives, I used a treasure trove of online sleuthing.
In many ways we are like the Lost Generation, in love with the past but charging into the future headstrong. Of course, that generation faced bullets in trenches and we have not, but the malaise and insecurity are there. Plus, those of that generation did lead to many innovations and frankly they saved the free world with their leadership by the time of the 1940s and after. So I wouldn’t catastrophize the situation and say our lives are ruined, but certainly there were opportunities afforded others that we do not have, and opportunities afforded to us that others don’t have. And while it may frustrate me, it also gives me profound purpose. We have the opportunity to shape this century with both high digital skill as well as deep knowledge of the values of those who came before and laid the groundwork for our society.
To quote a person from a few generations before me--Admiral Jim Stockdale, “I think character is permanent and issues are transient.”
"We have the opportunity to shape this century with both high digital skill as well as deep knowledge of the values of those who came before and laid the groundwork for our society."
That's a great point, and much needed in today's world. As a Boomer, I regret that my generation left such a task to young people, and wish you and other members of your cohort Godspeed on that mission.
nicely stated, Hank 🙏🏼
if only you could have seen it...
https://opentochange.substack.com/p/growing-up-before-digital-heroin
Beautifully written
Thank you Eli for this informative, thorough post. I wanted to share two reflections:
"A significant number of young users think that social media helps them participate in a social community, express themselves, and receive emotional support." When youth are asked to make this evaluation, they lack the comparison to what a embodied, real-life social community and emotional support feels like; they equate snappy texts and emojis with community and support, but it is not the 'real thing'. Also 'self-expression' is viewed only in a positive light, yet may lead to unhealthy self-focus and a detraction from 'other-focus', which leads to greater purpose and meaning.
I found this comment by one of your respondents of interest:
“We are no longer embedded in a community to which we contribute to, we have not inherited any mythological narrative to guide our way forward, we have absolutely no institutional sources for acquiring wisdom available for us". In my most recent post "The Great Forgetting" https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/the-great-forgetting, I discussed how memory is necessary to preserve our cultural heritage. Notably, in order to form long-term memories our mind needs time to process and transfer information from our working memory. The incessant distractions of social media thus contribute to the erasure of deep memories and lead to our collective cultural withering. This might be an additional source of mental health decline to consider.
Good point re memory
“ It’s just a blame on social media and not a blame on ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.’””
That actually made me laugh out loud. I guess I’m not surprised that someone would say it (and believe it), but it’s impossible to take seriously. I’ve never thought of myself as a sunny optimist but all this doom-and-gloom talk feels incredibly overwrought. This isn’t some uniquely difficult time to be alive. If anything the exact opposite is true. I’m convinced that social media is a big factor at play in causing depression and anxiety. But I see in the responses (especially in context of having read The Coddling of the American Mind) a learned helplessness: the respondents all seem to believe that Gen Z are the victims of forces outside of their control:
- Social media is harming their mental health, but what can they do - all their friends are on it (setting aside the fact that they could just delete their accounts and deal with the slight unpopularity that might cause them).
- Capitalism is to blame and somehow is causing them mental troubles that their grandparents who lived through the Great Depression didn’t have.
- School shootings are threatening their lives (despite the fact that these events are so incredibly rare as to make the national news and teenagers today are physically safer than any generation of human beings in history).
- Climate change will destroy the world (setting aside the more likely scenario in which human beings adapt to it and deal with it).
- etc.
It goes back to what Jon wrote about in an earlier post when it comes to locus of control. I’m one year removed from Gen Z, but I (and my friends) don’t share any of these beliefs of personal helplessness. Maybe it’s because my friends and I aren’t terribly online, but I have little doubt that the world and the country are far better off than seemingly a majority of people in Gen Z seem to think. Maybe it’s also a lack of historical perspective on their part.
Thanks for sharing Ben! I'm reminded of the "Okay Boomer" phrase. It seems trendy these days to mock Boomers yet conveniently forget they also lived through the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Stonewall Riots, JFK's assassination, etc. It's not to downgrade what Gen Z is experiencing, only to argue that fears about the world's future have existed throughout history.
Thanks, Donald! I’ve never been a fan of the phrase “Okay, Boomer,” because it strikes me as dismissive and even derogatory. In general, I dislike generational warfare arguments. No age cohort is a monolith and also no one age cohort is uniquely flawed (or uniquely gifted), so it’s pointless for Millennials to blame Boomers or Boomers to blame Gen Z, etc.
One thing Gen Z could learn from the Baby Boomers is, as you point out, that America has been through some difficult and tumultuous moments in the past and somehow came through. Which indicates that we aren’t incapable of dealing with whatever challenges exist in the world today.
"This isn’t some uniquely difficult time to be alive. If anything the exact opposite is true."
Stop speaking obvious truths. You're triggering me!
Born in 1996, I grew up "chronically online," starting with sites like Neopets at a very young age and progressing to platforms like DeviantArt and Tumblr, before getting my first iPhone as a senior in high school (2013/14) and "finally" being able to join apps like Snapchat and Instagram. I love what the Internet/social media has brought me. And I also see what a detriment it has been. For me, personally, it's been more of a detriment being able to see people my own age - that I know personally - that I follow out of courtesy (we shared one class in high school, etc.) hit social milestones quicker than I do. I am frequently pruning the list of accounts I follow because the effect it has on me is not worth it. But at the same time, I also have that FoMO. It's almost a masochistic behavior - I don't want to follow, because the content makes me feel bad about myself, but I have this desire to know everything that's happening at all times...because I grew up online and thus feel like I "deserve" to know everything that's happening at all times. All of this to say: I am well aware that I am addicted to social media and the effects it has had on me, while also being grateful for living in a time where I'm able to access it. And yet, I'd rather it not exist at all...despite me being unwilling to give it up.
The same technology that allows me (a dad from No. CA) to debate a Nobel prize winner in economics on his own blog (yes this happened to me)... also allows me to lose hours of time checking up on pointless likes of my comments on Substack.
It is so sad we cannot stop ourselves from looking at things that basically give us no meaning at all. I think sometimes I fall into phases which I can best describe as “online paralysis,” where I am browsing but internalizing none of it
How is this different than me reading fiction or playing video games (StarCraft2 is my crack)? I am old (born in 1977). Every generation has had its time wasters. I had a grandfather who would carve intricate little animals out of random blocks of wood (he called it his witt-lin). He was very artistic, but it was the definition of time wasting.
Time-wasting is not the same as being part of systems designed for compulsive behavior and maximizing your attention.
If Starcraft II is affecting your sanity and social life, sure. Now imagine every single person on Earth needing to be plugged into that
Absolutely same! It so often feels like a chore and yet I still convince myself I have to do it. In high school and college I used to check my socials 3 times a day, always at the same time, and felt anxiety if I wasn't able to. Thankfully I stopped that cycle and no longer adhere to a "schedule" but there are still remnants.
Yeah. I remember checking a lot too, but my relationship to the internet definitely changed during the early 2010s. I'm not entirely sure when exactly, but it's obvious to me now. It definitely got more consumption-oriented, especially as algorithmic curation took over and social media ditched the chronological timeline.
I think I may just end up getting a "dumb phone." I already deleted most of the socials off my phone, anyway.
Yeah the comparing and contrasting phenomenon is toxic
As always love this work. But I am skeptical this approach to getting Z feedback was sound. For one, 22 responses, from a Twitter distribution, is nothing like a large or diverse sample. And two, we need to compare Z self assessment to other generations. Perhaps they all thought things were going downhill. Maybe they would cite drugs or alcohol back then.
I think this is a powerful thesis. But I didn't find the Z feedback as meaningful to the case.
I recall looking at suicide statistics, and they are returning to 1990's levels. I went to high school and college in the 1990's. I knew good men who committed suicide. It is a shame that this rate is returning to what it was, but these are the costs of modernity (substance abuse. suicide,...). Even the school shootings seem like the old "duck and cover" videos from the Cold War. These are non-issues spewing forth from dying traditional media.
This is an excellent research project.
I am not surprised by the results having a daughter that was born in 2001. The article Jonathan wrote (Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest) was an eye opener for sure. At the end of every section I read, I said, that’s my daughter. I watched her grow up and saw all of this. She is very smart and has a great awareness of self because of her yoga and meditation practice. Because of this, she initiated sessions with an expert in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to assist her with the challenges that she was facing. She is making great progress and is able to recognize how her thoughts and reactions to her environment can have a negative impact on her thinking and well being. She is very strong willed and will break this, I am very confident. She is currently a junior at a great liberal arts college and will graduate with honors.
I agree that the societal and economic environment have a greater impact on Gen Z than their activity on social media. Social media, based on the above charts, just appears to amplify good or bad. It doesn’t seem to create. This topic is perhaps something that should be studied and documented, as I’ve seen this topic over and over, but have never seen a formal study with facts. Just, it “feels”worse now because of societal and economic factors.
Your study does not address the individual, but rather their environment, that is making them worse off. I would argue, from personal experience, that all kids are different and that they react differently than others to their environment. Somehow, you have to document that the parents of Gen Z, have done a much worse job of parenting than, for example, parents of Baby Boomers. Let’s not forget that the individuals of Gen Z are molded by their parents and my position is that their parents should take a large portion of the blame for their children's failures.
One of skills Gen Z kids did not learn growing up is conflict resolution. I learned this in sports and various other activities while growing up. Today kids can’t deal with conflict. They don’t know how to address it, nor resolve the conflict. They get too emotional because they are being challenged. They cry “words are violence.” Without this skill, boys are not asking girls out on dates. They are too afraid.
Cheers.
Well done Eli. Great work. Jon is lucky to have you on board. Mark, Brisbane.
"decline of institutions that previously supported community connection outside of the workplace or school"
Gen-Z's version of Bowling Alone.
Third spaces are built by the participants though, which Gen-Z's fetishization of their phones prevents. I'm not blaming that on the individuals -- I think smartphones should be treated like any other addictive substance, with age restrictions -- but the collective effect is real.
And I have a very hard time taking anyone seriously who lays "blame on the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy". I appreciate that this is a survey, but Sarah really needs to get out more.
"profound economic pressure has made young people frugal and responsible beyond their years"
I have 3 teenagers: 14, 15, 16. My oldest two are among the most non-consumer-oriented people I have ever met in America. Is that just their personality or is their growing awareness of the frailty of economic opportunities feeding a frugality of lifestyle? I don't know.
I love the Mars metaphor! Blue lips and brain damage... totally worth it man!
"Social media platforms make depressed teens more depressed, insecure teens more prone to body image issues, and teens who have trouble focusing more prone to addiction. It turns distant global worries into fear- and outrage-inducing sound bites that flood teen and pre-teen news feeds and do little to help them grow into the kind of responsible and rational citizens who could help address the world’s problems as adults."
ChatGPT lists the most widely shared social media posts by Generation Z:
"1. Memes: Humorous images, videos, or text that are shared and remixed by users, reflecting cultural trends, current events, or relatable experiences.
2. Short-form videos: Platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts have gained popularity, with users sharing and engaging with short, entertaining, or informative videos.
3. Social activism: Generation Z is highly engaged in social and political issues, sharing content related to climate change, racial equality, mental health, and LGBTQ+ rights, among others.
4. Challenges and trends: Popular challenges and trends, like dance routines, social media challenges, or viral hashtags, often spread quickly among Generation Z users.
5. Influencer content: Generation Z users often engage with and share content created by their favorite influencers or celebrities, which can include fashion, beauty, gaming, or lifestyle content."
Number #3 sticks out as a likely primary cause for the teen mental health crisis. How are young, developing minds supposed to process the firehose of largely bad news that is omnipresent?
Weren't you engaged in political or social activism at a young age though? I was. The issues were different in the late 80's obviously, but the desire to improve the world is endemic in the young. Despite the strong desire, one of the reasons young adults are so bad at actually bringing about improvement (not just change, but improvement) is that they their lack of wisdom makes them easy prey to be coopted by those who would steer their drive into pointless or even harmful directions.
One of my favorite Clarence Thomas quotes: "Good judgement comes from life experience. And life experience comes from having not had good judgement."
Yeah look at the 1960s
Two thoughts (2002 here)
1. I wouldn’t underestimate how self-selecting the group of Gen Zers who even see a Jon Haidt tweet is. Same with this substack. In large part because of the social media atomization discussed, the people who see the Jon Haidt online presence have probably read Coddling, largely agree with it, and perhaps are actively working to oppose the culture described in Coddling on their own college campus (or maybe that’s just me 🤪). Gen Zers who disagree with this kind of analysis are disproportionately likely to not have heard of Jon Haidt. Further, I could easily find you 50 classmates of mine who, after reading (for instance) the paragraph in Coddling in which Jon and Greg Lukianoff argue that the use of gender pronouns isn’t necessary as a matter of safety, would forever write Jon off as a hateful right-wing bigot, and probably wouldn’t give their time to his research even to disagree with his point of view.
2.I think you’re understanding point 5.3, that social media makes other problems worse. It might be beyond the scope of this post, but it’s worth mentioning that a lot of the “gen Z is doing bad but it’s not because of social media” group cited causes that… one could easily argue are themselves driven by social media. Specifically, there were multiple people who pointed out a decline in shared spaces, institutions, events, and other opportunities for real-life socialization. (And this is to say nothing of the decline of civic organizations as described in Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, which occurred long before social media.) But I would argue that if not for social media (and social media-adjacent technologies such as Uber, DoorDash, etc.), there would be more of an effort to bring back and revitalize these types of spaces. And I think social media has directly contributed to that not happening, and even to the acceleration of their decline and of the atomization that one respondent lamented.
*** understating, not understanding
This is very well researched and written! I super appreciate your inclusion of links to all the studies you referenced (it’s shocking how often people don’t do that).
I wish I had seen your call for thoughts sooner because I’m one of those members of Gen Z who thinks social media is a good thing. I was born in 1997, and have lived nearly my whole life with social media and the internet. I wrote a bit about it here in my opening essay on Substack:
https://open.substack.com/pub/anewgenerationofmemes/p/welcome-to-a-new-generation-of-memes
I later distilled some of those thoughts into this passage from my essay Post-History:
“As someone who’s very first memories exist in an industrial world, and grew up in parallel with the internet— I feel compelled to impress upon people the importance of the age that we are living through. This isn’t a new chapter in the technological leaps of industrial society, this is the start of fundamentally different way of engaging with knowledge and information altogether.”
To be young in the current political climate and cultural climate is to be instinctually aware of this chasm between the modern world as it is, and as “adults” imagine it. This chasm makes the weight of the future immense on our shoulders. Across issues, the fear I see most from young people is a fear of running out of time. There is a sense that they are being asked to take on too much, too soon. They both know there are existential issues at play for humanity in the data age, but also aren’t ready to decide what needs to happen about them.
My message to Gen Z is this. We have time. The constant barrage of bad news and horror stories is the result of algorithms designed to suck every drop of profit out of us. You are right that many of these social media platforms are having negative impacts on society and our mental health. But social media isn’t the enemy, it’s the profit incentive that will mechanize humanity if we let it. Social Media is the tool by which we have a chance to organize against the coming ossification of bureaucracy.
This will require fighting the algorithms, forging own paths in the digital world, weathering evolving corporate attempts at psychological manipulation. But we must not give up the tool that is social media. Find ways to make each platform your own, understand how your mind engages with each new algorithm and don’t launch yourself into losing battles. (I for one learned quickly that my ADHD brain could not weather Tik Toks attention algorithm and so I avoid the platform altogether). And, above all else, keep that spark of human mischievousness and unpredictability alive.
I have just now reached adulthood, at 26 I am finally starting to feel a childhood of internet access solidifying into a adult mind. As I think about my younger siblings and other members of my generation who feel the burdens of the world so strongly, my single biggest piece of advice is that there is time. You do not need to solve all of tomorrow’s problems on your own. Our generation has a lot to do when we come to power, but the world will survive until we’re ready to wield it.
I’ll conclude with a passage from an upcoming, currently unfinished, essay of mine. “Today we are dealing with a language revolution on a scale not seen since the invention of the printing press. Generation Z isn’t the next generation in the history of industrial society, we are the first generation who was raised with the infinite question and answer box of the internet. We are the first generation with the 3 dimensional language tools of the internet and social media. We are a new generation of human minds, blessed with a freedom of information that past thinkers would have killed to be able to access. It may be true that the initial impact of social media and the internet on human intelligence will be a dumbing down and emotional weakening of society, but the select few who take these new tools and use them to develop their own minds will find their place among the greatest minds of human history.”
> To be young in the current political climate and cultural climate is to be instinctually aware of this chasm between the modern world as it is, and as “adults” imagine it.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but that sounds a little bit arrogant. You see that there's a difference in how you see the world and how adults see it, and you conclude that the way you see it is the "world as it is," while the adults' perspective is just an imagination.
Do you have any evidence to support that perspective? Doesn't it seem probable that those with more experience and exposure to the big picture are likely to have a more correct view of how things are in the world?
I don’t say anywhere that young people see the world as it truly is. I specifically implicate that Generation Z is not ready to wield power, and that they have time to wait multiple points in my comment.
I used this hyperbolic phrase to emphasize the disconnect between the importance of technology in daily life, and the relative political immaturity of the rules and regulations on that technology. There is no well established history of experience to cite when deciding how to integrate Large Language Models into society without tearing everything apart. There’s no past evidence to analyze about the risks of a foreign power potentially having access to the algorithms that automatically steer our children’s video viewing platforms.
Generation Z is anxious because they understand that the world is changing, and the traditional institutions for dealing with societal and technological shift have been slow to react.
Figuring out how to save humanity from becoming cogs in a giant machine run by artificial intelligences will take the decades of lived experience from older generations who experienced industrial society, and input from the younger generations who will have known various states of digital technology from the moment they entered the world.
Read some history. Everything you say was once said about water-driven looms, steam power, locomotives, the telegraph, even the internet itself (Bill Gates wrote a hell of an embarrassing book about the future in the 1990's if you want a good laugh--think video phones on everybody's walls, desks and even cars!
New technology scares people. People adjust and make the relevant regulations, new technology arrives,...,rinse and repeat,....
“This isn’t a new chapter in the technological leaps of industrial society, this is the start of fundamentally different way of engaging with knowledge and information altogether.”
How so? A tool doesn’t create a fundamental shift in communication, it’s merely a tool. I fail to see how this changes anything. The world, before and after the creation of the alphabet, DID create a fundamental shift in civilization, as did the creation of the Pythagorean Theorem. Pray tell how Google is on par with that?
>A tool doesn’t create a fundamental shift in communication, it’s merely a tool.
Um ever heard the phrase, "the medium is the message" perhaps?
Jon is certainly following in Marshall Macluhan’s footsteps. And Gen Z and everyone else for that matter could benefit from understanding the shared suspension of reality common to social media users. It leads me to believe that we will adapt and become desensitized to social media as we have become desensitized to other forms of mass media.
To demonstrate what I mean about this being the start of a new way of engaging with knowledge and information altogether, I asked GPT-4 to answer your question, giving it a 2 line outline for my argument.
“I understand your perspective that a tool might not necessarily create a fundamental shift in communication. However, I'd like to present a few arguments to help illustrate how technological advancements and their applications have led to significant changes in the way we engage with knowledge and information.
First, let's take the invention of the printing press as an example. Before its creation, books were handwritten and scarce, which made information and knowledge accessible only to a select few. However, the printing press revolutionized the distribution of language and ideas by making it easier to produce books and texts. This led to a significant increase in literacy rates and facilitated the spread of ideas, playing a key role in the Renaissance and the Reformation. It wasn't just the tool itself, but the way it restructured society's access to and engagement with knowledge that made it so influential.
Similarly, the internet has also brought about significant change in the way we access and engage with information. It has made an immense amount of knowledge instantly available to us, democratized the exchange of ideas, and created new forms of communication like emails, forums, and social media. The internet has also enabled increased collaboration across vast distances, fostering innovation and progress. The internet, like the printing press, has not only changed the tool we use to access information, but it has also reshaped the way we interact with and process that information.
Now, let's consider large language models and alphabets as revolutions in language itself. The creation of the alphabet, as you pointed out, indeed led to a fundamental shift in the way humans communicated. Before the alphabet, people relied on pictographic or logographic systems, which were often limited and harder to learn. The alphabet streamlined language and made written communication accessible to a broader audience, fundamentally changing the way humans engaged with each other and with knowledge.
Similarly, large language models today have the potential to revolutionize the way we communicate and understand each other. With the ability to process and generate human-like text, these models can provide real-time translation services or create highly personalized experiences based on individual language patterns. This development can enable us to engage with each other and with knowledge in new ways, bridging language barriers and creating more inclusive and global conversations.
In conclusion, while it's true that tools are inherently neutral, the way they are used, and the impact they have on society can indeed create fundamental shifts in communication and our engagement with knowledge. The printing press, the internet, the alphabet, and large language models all serve as examples of both language distribution revolutions and language revolutions in their own right. These innovations have not only changed the tools we use to access information but have profoundly influenced the way we interact with and process that information, leading to notable transformations in our society.”
So you push a button and something else answers a question for you? That's not "knowledge", that's plagiarism.
The printing press was useless unless people knew how to read. In the same way that using Google doesn't really help unless folks are already pretty knowledgeable on a subject, and calling upon your Chat buddy doesn't make you smarter, or more confident, or even able to fully "engage" with everyone if you don't know what you're talking about. This isn't revolutionary, it's merely a tool. Of which there are many in a toolkit.
Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, replaces well worn domain specific knowledge https://daisychristodoulou.com/2012/01/why-21st-century-skills-are-not-that-21st-century/. As you are so knowledgeable, I am sure you have heard about the Baseball Experiment, right? Here's something you can plug into your Chat buddy https://www.coreknowledge.org/blog/baseball-experiment-two-wisconsin-researchers-discovered-comprehension-gap-knowledge-gap/
Or in the fine words of Will Hunting, "At least I won't be unoriginal" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIdsjNGCGz4
Nothing can replace knowing stuff. You can't just google your way through life, and why would you want to? https://www.thefp.com/p/introducing-a-sunday-series-from
Great work Eli, really enjoyable read. I maybe think your own metaphors could use a little more elaborating, as they seemed just a bit underdeveloped when they were utilised to explain a concept. But that's nitpicking, I just thought I could give you some advice since that's what I want whenever I write (often people are too polite to give it to me lol).
I think social media definitely augments anxiety and depression as your data suggests, and is a major cause of the deterioration of young peoples mental health. I also tend to agree with those members of Gen Z who posited the idea that the decline in shared civic life (and I'd add the decline in marriage and family formation among younger people into this mix too), and the associated loss of a strong sense of social identity and meaning it provided, lies at the root of mental health problems for many social cohorts, not just the young. I agree with Putnam too, who shows that civic decline harms social trust, social mobility, the effective functioning of political institutions and trust in those institutions.
Perhaps technology (like social media), alongside the development of professionalised institutions which crowd out organic social institutions (see Rajan's 'The Third Pillar'), is a key cause of this civic decline (people, for example, used to go to the local 'friendly society', church group or pub to entertain themselves in days gone by in my part of the world, now they can watch Netflix, surf the web or scroll social media instead).
I think its also interesting that while many young people lament the decay of traditional institutions (and some even point to the decline in stable relationships and marriage - itself caused by growing individualistic values, the rising socio-economic status of women, greater economic insecurity amongst many young folk, and the mix of contracteption, libertine sexual values and 'dating' apps) that served as the bedrock of communal life, Gen Z are simultaneously the generation whose liberal values lead them to criticise and oppose the constraints, traditions and often conservative values that served as the foundations those very institutions (Gen Z can be sad about the decline in religious practice and identity but they're also the generation most likely to view those things as forms of oppression, for example).
And a final thought, its possible that the volatile mix of 'the self-esteem movement' which was in full swing when I was young ("you're wonderful and special and perfect just the way you are...here have this participation trophy...we'll get rid of grades because that might make you feel bad"), the idea that our society is a 'meritocracy' (Sandel's 'Tyranny of Merit' and Goodhart's 'Head, Hand, Heart' are good books on this topic), juxtaposed against a deeply unequal economy has been damaging to mental health.
Young people may have had their egos massaged their whole lives only to find out, in the real world, that they aren't so special, in fact, they may be near the bottom of the 'meritocratic' pack. In this gap between their self-perception and the perception of themselves in the eyes of the world, lies cognitive dissonance, frustration and depression. Because of indulgent coddling by adults these young people haven't developed an accurate view of themselves and their abilities in relation to their peers, nor have they developed adequate coping mechanisms to deal with failure and negative emotion. This, as well as the effects of posturing on social media, may go some way to explaining the rise of 'insecure narcissism' among young people as well.
Anyway, just some ideas, I loved the piece, it must be a real treat to work alongside Mr. Haidt.
I've always thought that the problem with social media and digital devices in our pockets is a more profound one than it is often made out to be. There's a fundamental change in the way people go about their day. Now everyone, at any moment, has a distraction at one’s fingertips and are not hesitant to indulge in it. I think this can make the mind more fragile.
The opportunities one had to structure their lives and to create emotional order from emotional chaos needs deep inquiry into oneself. That is an aspect which has gotten lost in our current way of life where people often are afraid to be alone with their own minds. I have observed this. People not being able to take a walk without stimuli of their brains, in the form of music, a podcast or scrolling. A loss of perspective on how the solitude of the self is something good and useful. The brain, I think, does not just need new information piled on, it needs time to process as well. Especially emotions.
I think the techniques used in CBT, and techniques like it where you question the emotions you have, have to be practiced with intent and deep deliberation and I'm not sure that state of mind is often reached when one can just distract themselves from the anxiety temporarily. To hold the reins on the elephant one can’t just use their brains to passively engage with others and never actively engage with oneself.
Phones don’t just offer a way of comparing oneself to others but also interrupts the way one interacts with the Self. I think deep engaging with the Self comes from a lack of outside stimuli which is a rarity today.
Therefore, the type of distraction isn’t of importance to this negative effect but the distraction itself is the culprit.
I’m not sure if any of these ideas have any merit but I believe it’s something commonly observable.
I think with the decline of educational standards and the shift away from basic skills towards so-called social justice and environmental activism, young people have a sense that they're missing something important, but which they can't fully identify. They have been rewarded for merely existing, are unprepared to contend with the world as it is, and are more concerned with how things should be, but lacking the wherewithal to effect change other than acting out. Hence, the word "adult" becomes a verb that suggests incompetence rather than aspiration and growth.
The notion that the world will conform to their expectations only leads to disappointment and a sense of betrayal when they discover that's not how the world works. Because they have been taught to disdain the virtues of a self-ordering society, all that is left to them is fear and chaos, with no means of creating confidence, clarity, and order. Self-esteem cannot be endowed, it must be earned through effort, error, perseverance, and self-mastery.
This can be laid at the feet of the educational community, public schools and colleges that promote ideological activism over the learning experience. At an age where basic skills will facilitate the continuing command of abstract and critical thinking, colleges instead offer remediation for skills that should have already been acquired, and ideologies that history has repeatedly proven not just useless, but hugely destructive. The notion that change, in an of itself, is progressive and desirable is the big lie, discarding what works for what sounds good.
Instead of an institution that sustains and enhances the culture and society at large, education has become a tool to groom generations of young minds to accept consensus over independent thinking, servitude over liberty, and victimhood over aspiration ... all in the interests of safety and comity, neither of which can be delivered by what they are taught.
The idea of individualism has also become distorted in the context of group identity and herd mentality. The expression of individuality amounts to incidental externals, like a tattoo or purple hair or gender ambiguity, in an effort to try to define and differentiate themselves, but which is its own conformity to the hive mind and which does not forge true identity.
Technology has always contributed to changes in human behavior, but not to human nature.
Brilliant comment. So astute: “Technology has always contributed to changes in human behavior, but not to human nature.” As I mentioned in my own comment, before reading yours, technology is happening exponentially faster every day. I pray the parents and children of today will have the strength for the challenges they face which I believe are far greater than those I did for all the lack of technology during my time.
1997 here 👋 When reading this series, I've often jumped to the conclusion that mental health = anxiety, depression, etc. Figure 3 (Effects of Social Media Apps on British Teenagers' Mental Health) resonates so much -- the negative impact on sleep is definitely my top takeaway from this post. Having social media apps on your phone destroys your sleep, productivity and ability to maintain focus (particularly during difficult tasks). The best word to describe social media products is "potent".
I have accounts on most major social media apps (hard to have a Gen Z social life without them, nevermind how much they proliferate the work side of life too), but I (1) never have the native social media apps downloaded on my phone, (2) never sleep with my phone in reach of my bed, (3) never work with my phone in my pocket / near my desk.
On top of that, I make sure I have (1) pretty strong time limits to help break me out of 'brain-off scrolling' whenever I get caught in it, (2) the newsfeed eradicator plugin on my browser so if I ever do need to go on social media sites from my laptop that I don't get caught into scrolling by accident, and (3) that I disable phone notifications across everything except texts, calls and work stuff (emails, Slack etc).
If you don't acknowledge that social media companies hire many of the most talented developers, designers and data scientists from the top universities with the sole aim of maximizing how much time you spend on their products, along with the fact that you're really just a weak bag of meat in comparison to what they've built, then you're doomed to lose. You've literally got to build an arsenal of self defense techniques to stand any chance against them.