Gen Dread

What the paper says

What's wrong with the young people? Since the times of Aristotle, older folks have asked this question with a mix of despair and incredulity. Be it the readers of Spengler, Camus, or Cioran, there will always be an audience for stories of the coming collapse (Mastroianni & Gilbert, 2023). However, it is not clear whether there is a common core to the contents of the elders’ complaints. Yet it seems that there is a persistent and gnawing sense that the young people don't have what it takes to achieve the sort of things their parents take pride in having achieved (see Krueger, 2025, for the possibility that this might actually be true—on average). The young ones, the elders fear, are weak, spoiled, and entitled. The worry expressed in these sentiments not only expresses a dismissive (and anxious!) attitude toward children and young adults, it also reveals a narcissistic concern about the impermanence of their own good works and accomplishments. The older generation takes pride in what they have built over decades, both in their personal and family lives and in their society and culture at large. Will all this, they fret, slide into decline and dissolution? If the young people fail to pick up the baton, preserve, nurture, and build, all the efforts were in vain. What we have built—and therefore we ourselves—will be forgotten. In other words, the next generation holds the key to our immortality projects (Becker, 1973). If they fail, we fail.Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation gives a contemporary expression to this perennial generational anxiety. Haidt diagnoses two problems, identifies one major cause for each, and ends by proposing a set of critical fixes, at both the individual and the collective levels. The first problem is the declining independence, confidence, and chutzpah observed in Gen Z, that is, children born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s, especially children born in the United States. It resonates. When my elder daughter went to Germany with a high school exchange program, she was amazed to see her German peers taking hour-long train rides into the city of Köln (Cologne) without parental supervision. She reported that she observed greater maturity in general. The German kids seemed to be 2 years ahead of the Americans.Haidt holds the creeping ideology of “safetyism” responsible. Since the early 1990s, parents have increasingly responded to the realization that the world can be a dangerous place by seeking to minimize, dodge, or extirpate dangers for their kids wherever they could. The chief victim of these efforts was free play. It all but disappeared. Kids became overprotected and overmanaged. Everything became scheduled; playdates became curated events. Safetyism is an insidious ideology because it corrupts perception. Where real dangers do exist, the parental radar worked with an ever-sinking threshold. As kids became safer, the perception of risk increased. Parents found themselves living with more instead of less fear, an attitude easily noticed and copied by the kids.The second problem is the well-documented increase in anxiety and depression, especially among girls, as well as myriad other social–emotional problems, such as social isolation and loneliness, especially among boys. Deficits in paying and maintaining attention and deficits in all manner of social intelligence increased. Withdrawing from the offline social world, Gen Z kids had fewer misadventures with automobiles or alcohol while becoming more prone to self-harm, again, a trend most pronounced among girls. The root cause of these troubling changes is the technological revolution writ large, and especially the choking inescapability of smartphones and the social media contents they pour into young minds. The year 2007 was a watershed with the arrival of the iPhone. The promoters and engineers of smartphones were incentivized to “capture” attention in order to maximize advertising revenue. Psychological science has played a dark role here by informing the coders of those algorithms that allowed the tech companies to succeed and their CEOs to become rich and powerful beyond belief (including, presumably, their own belief). After decades of cognitive revolution, “cognitive” science has regressed into the applied engineering of reinforcement learning, and the tech world loves it. We can almost hear Thorndike's voice echoing from the graveyard, “Told ya!”When human behavior is so skillfully manipulated, one ought not to be too surprised in hindsight. What is less obvious in hindsight are the emotional costs teenagers have suffered. The rise of anxiety and depression is so alarming that we should ask how we did not see it coming given what we already knew about the patterns and problems of teenage identity formation, especially the immense role of social comparison during those years. The data Haidt presents from a variety of large-sample sources are clear, and Haidt is judicious in their interpretation. When he takes some speculative leeway he says so. His narrative is driven by the facts as they are documented, not by a desire to shock and awe the audience.Boys, who show a less dramatic rise in anxiety and depression than girls do, suffer serious problems in their own right, although they may be less visible. For boys it is not so much the case that they suffer more than they used to within their (now largely digital) social circles but that they have withdrawn into a world of online gaming and pornography consumption. In the good old days, boys benefited the most from free play, play that, while being fun and physical, taught them valuable skills of coalition making, leadership and followership, and conflict management. The computer in mom's basement does not do that. Boys, perhaps even more so than girls, face the specter of loneliness in ways their parents cannot fathom. The tragic side of loneliness is that it is self-reinforcing (Luhmann et al., 2014). As social skills atrophy, anxiety rises, which in turn leads to social withdrawal being a negative reinforcer.The two sets of problems could be studied and described separately, but Haidt chooses to discuss them together, and for good reason. Although it may be difficult to capture their interactions quantitatively, and although safetyism preceded technologism, it seems plain that the former trend enhanced the detrimental effects of the latter. If kids spent more time playing freely in woods or parks, they would not even want to spend as much time staring at their screens.To recap, Gen Z's psychobehavioral problems are legion: We see increases in insecurity, social deprivation, and risk aversion along with reductions in exploration, creativity, trust, and plain old happiness. Like chemical addicts, many youngsters moan that “nothing is fun anymore,” Haidt reports, an outcome not surprising to connoisseurs of range frequency theory (Parducci, 1965).A word of caution is in order. Roughly speaking, there are two kinds of result: those based on large survey studies and those based on small laboratory studies. Often, the former yield larger effects than the latter. This does not have to be so, but it is likely when many causal factors outside the laboratory pull in the same direction. In theory, laboratory experiments can have larger effects, but this happens only if the manipulations of the independent variables are strong, the measures of the dependent variables are precise, and countervailing causal factors are effectively controlled.To illustrate, consider key findings Haidt presents in Chapter 6, “Why Social Media Harms Girls More Than Boys.” Survey data from the United Kingdom show that rates of depression among girls more than triple, from 12% to 38%, with social media use ranging from none to more than 5 hr daily. By contrast, experimenters can only take empirical snapshots when studying the underlying causal dynamics. Haidt (p. 148) quotes Kleemans et al. (2018), who found that “exposure to manipulated Instagram photos directly led to lower body image.” He fails to mention that this effect was observed only among girls with a strong tendency to make social comparisons (r = .25, a small effect).Haidt dutifully reports a meta-analysis (Hancock et al., 2022), which lands on average effects around r = .15 for the correlation between social media use and anxiety and depression in girls. This result is not nothing, and it's worth being concerned about, but its small size might mitigate the most alarming interpretation of Haidt's exposition. The large effects found in surveys retain some of their mystery because Haidt carefully sheds doubt on several other potential causes, such as socioeconomic crises or terrorist attacks. Importantly, Haidt notes that every generation since time immemorial has faced shocks to their world. Typically, children living through major upheavals, such as war, emerge stronger instead of weaker. This observation is not to diminish the reality or trauma (e.g., malnutrition due to famine, being orphaned due to enemy raids), but it suggests that such shocks can stimulate young people to build skills, resilience, and tolerance of adversity.What to do in the current crisis? Haidt urges society to bring back free play and to limit phone use and thus access to social media. He recognizes that cultural change in the face of strong headwinds is very difficult indeed. Not the least problem is that there are social dilemmas making individual action ineffective at best and dangerous at worst. Who is ready to be the sole parent on the block whose kids are running wild? Who is ready to send their kids to school where they will be the only ones who are not digitally connected? Some group coordination will be necessary, and it is all right to start small. There are places like Waldorf or Montessori schools that recognize the value of embodied experience and engagement. Send your kids there if you can afford it. This latter caveat incidentally highlights Haidt's observation that the digital divide has reversed. Now it is the poor kids who are most vulnerable to the insidious effects of tech, whereas in the past, their lagging access to the internet was bemoaned (Krueger, 1998).As to reforms endeavored by governments, institutions, or school districts, Haidt's call for quasiexperiments brings to mind Don Campbell's (1969) famous article on “Reforms as Experiments.” The world is not a lab, but with well-designed interventions, we can cut through some of the messiness, even if the blade is dull. The challenge is that participating institutions will want to coordinate their efforts so they can compare notes, lest the job be left to the latter-day data scientists to crunch the numbers.Haidt enjoys strong creds as a psychologist sensitive to the history of philosophy and some of the outpourings of the mystics. It is well that some of his advice taps into the spiritual nature of man (and boy). Boys in particular need same-gender role models and well-designed, culturally embedded rituals so they can grow up to be men (Eliade, 1965). Mom's basement does not offer such opportunities. Marcus Aurelius set a fine example of how to thank the men who helped shape him. The first few pages of his Meditations are a record of who taught him what. His elders brought forth a virtuous, powerful, and humble man. Social media influencers can't do that.Besides recommending six spiritual practices (Chapter 8, “Recovering the Sacred, Embodiment, Stillness & Focus, Self-Transcendence, Tolerance & Forgiveness, Biophilia”), Haidt urges us to redesign playgrounds to allow age-appropriate risk taking, social interaction, adventure, and contact with nature. Again, it resonates. When my children were young, a year into the iPhone era (but they didn't have one yet), we spent a few months in Germany. My children helped me marvel at and enjoy local playgrounds in the lovely town of Marburg and beyond. Some days we spent hunting down the most fun playgrounds. There was a lot of hooting, hollering, and happiness, and the parental touch was light (still needed on the swing sets, of course). Recently, my elder daughter sent me a photo of a friend's son in Berlin, enjoying his freedom to play. It makes the parents happy too, no?