Ending the Phone Based Childhood

Jonathan Haidt's new book, thoughts on populism and more in this week's roundup

NYU professor Jonathan Haidt has a new book out called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The Atlantic recently posted a very interesting excerpt and adaptation.

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

…

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

…

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

…

How can it be that an entire generation is hooked on consumer products that so few praise and so many ultimately regret using? Because smartphones and especially social media have put members of Gen Z and their parents into a series of collective-action traps. Once you understand the dynamics of these traps, the escape routes become clear.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Leah Libresco Sargeant reviews Haidt’s book and another by Tim Carney in the new First Things magazine.

How can parents and children be reoriented to the real? By returning to physical play and work, to a smaller “village” of in-person friends. The more parents build up their local connections, the more risk they can take on, for themselves and for their children. My husband and I moved to the suburbs of D.C., but we picked a very specific suburb in order to retain some of what we loved about the walkable density of the city. Our neighborhood of single-family homes is densely occupied by big families with kids crammed into bunk beds. When I take my girls out on our electric cargo trike for errands or adventures, we run into someone we know on about a third of our trips, and it’s easy to slow to a stop for conversation.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal writes that “The Rough Years That Turned Gen Z Into America’s Most Disillusioned Voters.” Among their findings:

One-third of Gen Z Americans described themselves as conservative, according to NORC’s 2022 General Social Survey. That is a larger share identifying as conservative than when millennials, Gen X and baby boomers took the survey when they were the same age, though some of the differences were small and within the survey’s margin of error.

More young people now say they find it hard to have hope for the world than at any time since at least 1976, according to a University of Michigan survey that has tracked public sentiment among 12th-graders for nearly five decades. Young people today are less optimistic than any generation in decades that they’ll get a professional job or surpass the success of their parents, the long-running survey has found. They increasingly believe the system is stacked against them and support major changes to the way the country operates.

Life in the Negative World Roundup

My new book Life in the Negative World continues to draw a lot of attention.

Kevin DeYoung reviewed my book in First Things. Russ Pulliam at World magazine also provided a writeup. James Clark at the North American Anglican also reviewed it. And it got another mention in American Reformer.

On Populism

A couple of recent takes on populism. The first, from Frank Furedi, sees populism as a justifiable backlash to the “de-nationalization” of their elites:

Since the turn of the 21^st century populism has emerged as a medium through which the Western Elites recycle their worst fears. In the mainstream media populism serves as a signifier of a dark, potentially dangerous force that undermine the stable political institutions that were carefully nurtured in the post-Second World War Era. That is why terms like extreme, far-right, authoritarian, xenophobic and even fascist are often coupled with the word populist. The semantic strategy for framing populism as the antithesis of democratic and liberal norms is to create a moral distance between it and the rest of society.

…

Anti-populist sentiments are particularly prevalent among the oligarchy that runs the European Union. They refuse to regard populist parties as legitimate political opponents. Instead, they treat them as enemies rather than political opponents, The EU financially supports projects designed to curb the epidemic of populism. One such project titled, ‘Countering the populist threat: policy recommendations and educational tools’ is justified on the ground that ‘populist sentiments and politics are spreading across Europe, dividing society into ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. It describes itself as an ‘An EU-funded project’, which ‘addresses this challenge, thereby ensuring stability of liberal democracies’.

This was primarily about the EU. But a Substack user called Tracing Woodgrains takes this line of thinking to an interesting but logical conclusion in the US, namely that the Republican party is doomed.

The Republican Party is doomed. I don't mean they'll lose every election moving forward. My case, rather, is this: they know exactly what they want someone to do, but in an increasing number of institutions, there is no one left to do it. Increasing age and education polarization means that Republicans are rapidly losing the capacity to run public institutions at all levels other than electoral, and this trend cannot realistically reverse within a generation. The near-term future is already written.

…

I am one of the most conservative students at my law school. More specifically: I, a gay, centrist Biden voter, am one of the most conservative students at my law school. The Federalist Society here is anemic and widely derided, while there's a dizzying array of progressive organizations. The professors and administrators are, if anything, even more progressive. My school is in no sense an outlier in this regard, nor is this specific to law. The same patterns are overwhelmingly visible in every group of educated, young professionals.

His argument is that Republicans will be able to win elections, but will lack the human capital to actually run institutions that could implement the policies their governments wants. This take is overstated, but the hyperbole makes an important point. As the GOP becomes a downscale party, that will make it ever harder to govern, even if it wants to.

Last year I did had podcast devoted to this very topic..

Conservatives Need to Learn How to Govern

Again, this isn’t the full story. Conservatives are de facto frozen out of many of these institutions involuntarily. But that doesn’t make the human capital problem any less real.

Best of the Web

Vox: How to talk to boys so they grow into better men

Cosmopolitan: What’s the Price of a Childhood Turned Into Content? - In the unregulated world of vloggers, children are, for the most part, not entitled to a single cent they help earn. We spoke to creators—and a former kid influencer—to understand how this unusual family business actually works.

New York Magazine: The Exes Who Froze Embryos and Regret It - From hurt feelings and debt to legal battles and harassment, risks come with committing by combining DNA.

WSJ: Blue-State Residents Streamed Into South Carolina. Here’s Why It Stayed Ruby Red - A lot of people had the idea in their heads that migration would turns red states blue, as happened to Colorado. But as migration has become more politically driven, it’s now often turning red states redder. I wrote a column a year ago highlighting this very phenomenon.

The Wall Street Journal also had an interesting piece about migration into South Appalachia:

In the 2010s, net domestic migration for this five-state region averaged 140,000 annually. While not all of those states are part of the federally-designated Appalachian region, Appalachia saw significant growth, especially in rural counties that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has designated retirement or recreational, he said.

From April 2020 to July 2022, the population in the 221 counties of southern Appalachia grew by 2.1%, compared with 0.55% for the U.S. as a whole, according to Census data. 

While northern sections of Appalachia, including West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, continue to face economic challenges, southern Appalachia—below West Virginia and southeast of Kentucky—is booming.

You may recall that I authored a research report last year that made this very point about the organic revitalization of South Appalachia. It’s another example of how I’m giving you tomorrow’s news today.

New Content and Media Mentions

My podcast guest this week was sociologist Brad Wilcox, talking about his new book Get Married. It’s a great read and I recommend it.

Paid subscribers can read the transcript.

You can subscribe to my podcast on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

Also this week, I published an article about why we need to periodically level up - because what got us here won’t get us there.