I recently attended a free guided meditation at the college where I used to teach. Four of us sat in a circle — the leader, two freshmen students and me. During a break we introduced ourselves. Everyone said how good it was to be offline and away from our phones for a while. Then we discussed how essential our phones had become. “I get all my news from TikTok,” one student said. “I get mine from Instagram,” the other replied. Though I’m as addicted to my smartphone as anyone else, I knew enough not to mention that I don’t tweet or snap or TikTok and still watch PBS NewsHour. And I was reminded that part of the reason I retired (during COVID) was that everything had gone online. I missed the immediacy of in-person classrooms.
For a moment I flashed back to 1979, my own freshman year, when we had immobile phones and plunked away on typewriters that had arms and bells. And called our parents “long distance” on Sundays after 5:00 p.m., when rates were low. Back then we had four TV channels, two kinds of coffee (regular and decaf), and two kinds of beer (regular and light). Fewer choices.
After 35 years of watching students adapt to one startling technological innovation after another, I remain stunned and confused by how far we have (and haven’t) come. Some young people are thriving, some merely surviving, but an ever-increasing number are floundering in this sea of choices — this culture of perpetual distraction and never-enoughness — and trying not to drown.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing and Epidemic of Mental Illness thoughtfully addresses this growing problem. An honest and struggling parent himself, Haidt offers an inviting, first-person narrative voice as he interprets and reflects on all the research. He recognizes that his generation — X — has also become “frazzled, scattered, and exhausted by our new technologies and their incessant interruptions.” And, he observes, the wild pace of change has made it much more difficult “to think, focus, forget ourselves enough to care about others, and build close relationships.”
Another strength of the book is its practicality. Haidt presents real solutions already in his introduction: One, no smartphones before high school. Two, no social media before age 16. Three, phone-free schools. Four, far more unsupervised play and childhood independence to encourage the natural development of social skills and self-governance. The rest of the book is a practical and convincing argument moving toward these four proposals.
The first section, however — “The Surge of Suffering” — describes “the great rewiring” of Generation Z, those born between the mid-1990s and the advent of the smartphone in 2012. It is a time of rapidly rising anxiety and depression diagnoses among teens and college students often attributable to their reliance on or addiction to their phones, screens and social media accounts. After explaining the essential difference between “fear” (an “emotional response to a real or perceived imminent threat”) and “anxiety” (the “anticipation of a future threat”), Haidt describes different kinds of anxiety, and how and why anxiety predominates.
Then he shares some alarming stats. Focusing on the 2010s, Haidt reports that emergency room visits for self-harm among 10-to-14-year-olds rose 188 percent for girls and 48 percent for boys. Suicide rates for the same cohort rose 167 percent for girls and 91 percent for boys. Boys (up 161 percent) eclipsed girls (up 145 percent) in documented cases of major depression among those aged 12 to 17. And among college students, anxiety cases jumped 134 percent and depression 106 percent.
Further, according to a 2023 study of American college students, 37 percent reported feeling anxious “always” or “most of the time.” Only one-third of students said they felt anxious less than half the time or never.
According to Haidt, all this anxiety can be measured in “four foundational harms” that stem from this great rewiring: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction. The average teen, Haidt notes, spends more than seven hours a day on screen-based leisure activities (not including school and homework). That same teen has seen the average amount of face-to-face time with friends plummet from 122 minutes to 67 minutes per day. Meanwhile, that young person’s phone receives on average 192 alerts from top social apps each day. Given that the average teen gets seven hours of sleep per night, Haidt explains, this pans out to 11 notifications per waking hour, or one every five minutes.
Aside from the research and reflection on how the great rewiring has impacted young minds and their behaviors and values, one of Haidt’s most interesting chapters details how social media impacts religious and spiritual practices, which might offer some buffer against the social isolation of a phone-based life. A spiritual practice, he notes, may require attentiveness, silence, meditation, a sense of awe and self-transcendence as well as a community and shared rituals — an embodied rather than disembodied life.
“The phone-based life . . . is a never-ending series of notifications, alerts, and distractions, fragmenting consciousness and training us to fill every moment of consciousness with something from our phones,” he writes. “Social media keeps the focus on the self, self-presentation, branding, and social standing. It is almost perfectly designed to prevent self-transcendence.”
By book’s end, I was convinced by Haidt’s central message: A life lived with our heads down and trained on our selves is unhealthy. We are happier and more fulfilled when we turn our eyes and our minds outward. When we lift our heads and look up from the buzzing, blinking plastic brains in our hands to the dazzling presence of the sensate world.
Tom Montgomery Fate’s six nonfiction books include The Long Way Home, a new collection of essays. He teaches writing at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois.