The Anxious Generation
It takes quite something to bring the activist in me to life.
That part of me got stung too many times by causes that claimed to be ‘good’ only for me to find out they didn’t hold the nuance of reality, or carried underlying messages or implications that jarred with deep parts of me.
Occasionally a cause, however, catches me with such power that I find the activist in me waking up. One is the charitable organisation GiveDirectly (read more about that here, or listen to me interviewing their VP, People here), but over the last few years nothing has switched on the activist in me like the work of the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt on what he calls The Anxious Generation.
The story of this work is personal to me because I was incredibly excited about what he was planning to be writing about in this stage of his career. I came across his work when I was trying to fathom what was going on in the weirdness after 2016, in the UK and the US. Why was culture falling apart? What was behind these incredible schisms that were appearing between people who I had previously felt were grounded and grown up? I saw him give a talk about what he called The Three Stories of Capitalism at the RSA in 2017. I was really excited for that book.
But it never came.
As he was working on it, he became aware of worrying trends in young people’s mental health - first on university campuses, like the one he worked on, where he and co-author Greg Lukianoff saw students exhibiting the kind of mental struggles that had led Lukianoff into therapy in the preceding years. That spawned the 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind. As Haidt researched it, he became more and more worried about the data he found.
A shocking rise in mental health problems, particularly among young people.
A shocking rise in suicide attempts, particularly among young people.
What was happening?
That is the story he tells in his 2024 book, The Anxious Generation. Widely. Widely read and widely admired, it is an incredible piece of work, which made Barack Obama’s list of his favourite books in 2024 among many other accolades.
It tells the story of two huge societal patterns: of play leaving childhood, and of the smartphone entering childhood. Either might have had the kinds of effects on children and young people that the research and data are showing, but together the impact is shocking.
And - crucially - there are things we can do about it.
That is why Haidt wrote the book, The Anxious Generation - the sense that not only was this a problem, but actually it was a problem we could have swift, cheap impact on.
Delaying smartphones to our children and young people.
Delaying social media for them.
Giving them more free play and more trust to do adventurous things, by themselves or with other children - crucially, without adult supervision.
When I teach Meaningful Productivity to groups of leaders, I tell them about just how addictive our smartphones and social media are. About how the smartest people in the world are competing for our attention. About how no one is smart enough to resist those destractions. And about how they are damaging for our productivity, our energy, our wellbeing and more.
And the same people that are trying to hijack your attention are coming after your children. And they have no qualms about doing it - leaked memos that Haidt quotes in the book show that internally in these companies, they know the psychological vulnerabilities we have and they are using them.
But worse: we know that it is high risk to give children access to addictive activities. That’s why cigarettes, alcohol, gambling and more are prohibited at a young age.
That is a wise decision: as Haidt lays out, child brain development is far more plastic in childhood and adolescence than in adulthood. Giving our children and young people access to incredibly addictive devices and software - so addictive that adult leaders can’t resist them - is causing what Haidt calls the great rewiring. Changing the structures of our young people’s brains, across culture at almost unimaginable scale, forever.
And every month counts.
Delaying smartphones, limiting screen time, delaying social media for even one more year, one more month, will give each child’s brain that little bit more chance to build into resilience and antifragility.
That’s the task.
Haidt’s book - and website - is full of practical ways to do this. Mostly low cost, and easy to implement.
But the truth is, you know what to do anyway.
The only question is: what’s the next step?
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For more on this, see The Anxious Generation (the audiobook is also great): https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/
Or this interview on Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee, for a conversational introduction: http://drchatterjee.com/how-smartphones-are-rewiring-our-brains-why-social-media-is-eradicating-childhood-the-truth-about-the-mental-health-epidemic-with-jonathan-haidt/
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PS My new book, The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World, is out now! Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.