Human anxiety or human nature?
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin, 2024)
Reviewed by Kimberly A. Bain
What better way to reach today’s generation than by telling them they have it all wrong? Jonathan Haidt finds a way to write off today’s generation of adolescents as being more anxious than previous generations, specifically because of heavy technology use. He employs various rhetorical strategies to argue that technology, particularly smartphones, has caused increased anxiety among today’s adolescents, namely Generations Z and Alpha. Haidt cleverly begins his book with the emotionally driven chapter “The Surge of Suffering,” which details a story about Emily, the fourteen-year-old who threatened to harm herself due to social media restrictions placed on her phone, signaling signs of a mental crisis. He concludes this anecdote by pointing out that Emily’s parents felt “trapped and powerless” to do anything about their child’s technology dependence, which becomes a common theme in this book’s conversations around technology (23). These strategies help Haidt set up a faulty premise that conflates technology use with issues that have not been unique to adolescents of any previous generation.
Haidt’s examples consistently leave the audience questioning the more significant issues of parental boundaries and authority that are blurred by the issue of an overuse of technology. In many cases, Haidt uses children with learning differences and atypical social skills that already demonstrate outlier behavior despite technology to support his argument against adolescent technology overuse. One of his examples considers James, an adolescent with mild autism whose parents struggled with limiting his technology use because he had already struggled to make friends (22). Highlighting this child’s social difficulties makes it is clear his dependency on technology is much more complex than Haidt would have it seem. Perhaps the more significant issues of parents fostering opportunities for family engagement that many parents often fail to address get blamed on heavy technology use.
Haidt continues to piece together unsteady correlations by considering elements of the “basic phones” of the 1990s and early 2000s that Haidt sees as less harmful due to their lack of internet capabilities (33). The generalization of vintage cell phones fails to consider the instances of cyberbullying that text messaging brought along in those early days. Most millennials can attest to that as a time of exchanging grainy illicit photos back and forth and sending “I H8 U” messages to their high school nemeses, ruining the social lives of many teens. The spread of information was no less illicit and traumatizing simply because it was less advanced.
In the chapter “What Children Need,” Haidt leaves the utopic realm of the early days of cell phones to shift to the phenomenon of “experience blockers” found in the heavy use of technology (54). Haidt uses charts to show how physical meetups among adolescents have steadily declined since the early ‘90s, signaling a steep decline around the time (circa 2015) smartphones became widely distributed. His claim that free play is essential to human development is well intended. However, Haidt fails to identify the instances of playground bullying and other malignant social dynamics that occur through unrestricted adolescent activities. Haidt establishes the claim that “free play” is healthy and constructive (53). However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that teen pregnancy rates have now reached historic lows. The rate of teen births in 2008 was almost double that in 2015. The move away from unrestricted adolescent activity could be a contributing factor to low pregnancy rates among adolescents, which is a real consequence of physical social engagement that Haidt does not address explicitly in his text. In Haidt’s view all play, including risky play, is healthy play.
Further explanation for the need of unrestricted and risky play is provided through Haidt’s argument that all play is necessary for self-development. In the chapter “Discover Mode,” Haidt focuses heavily on evolutionary concepts of survival of the fittest and how adolescents need to adapt through risky physical behavior. Through a myriad of images of playground equipment that he presents in this chapter, Haidt’s identifies play with obstacle courses and playgrounds. His stance against “safetyism” neglects the other types of free play that are both thrill-seeking and risky activities and could include deviant sexual behavior. One could deduce that exposure is learning and that children are either safe or learning, which creates yet another faulty correlation. Haidt’s line of reasoning struggles to articulate the nuances of risky play and the dangers and limitations experienced in the physical world that can be just as detrimental to an adolescent’s mental and physical health.
Haidt considers the pacing of the stages of adolescence essential to healthy development yet neglects to consider how the trauma of engaging in risky physical behavior can also work to stunt that development. In considering the “age of apprenticeship,” which is meant to occur at age 12, Haidt argues that children should seek mentors and possibly earn money during this time (107). This lineation of rites of passage that Haidt sets up seems too linear. Haidt fails to consider delayed disability or environmental circumstances that could make the ladder appear more appropriately unilateral and cause adolescents to feel marginalized by any time restrictions on their growth and development. He also fails to see how technology can aid adolescents in development. A child who lives in a remote part of the country or has vocational interests outside of his local community may easily benefit from the connectivity of social media to find mentors and opportunities outside of his immediate sphere of influence.
Yet, a laser-focused approach to the dangers as direct consequences of heavy technology use as considered in the chapter “Four Foundational Harms.” Here, Haidt lists the different harms that could be a result of heavy technology use among adolescents, including social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. This might be Haidt’s strongest argument. The harms of heavy technology use draw in the typical parent and the popularity of Anxious as a best-selling book adds credibility. Indeed, the premise sounds incredibly justifiable on paper. But with a constant shuffle between smartphones, gaming stations, computers, and occasionally television, Haidt makes a clever and overly simplified argument that addictive behavior is bad. And he conflates the propensity toward addiction with the nature of the item itself, namely, smartphones and other advanced technologies that can be abused so much to the point that the item seems to almost have a sinister nature of its own. What’s alarming about the line of reasoning that Haidt lazily employs is that technology can be replaced with almost anything, according to his argument. For example, physical activity could lead to social deprivation if one does not have the finesse to engage in these activities. Correlation equates to causation in much of Haidt’s discussion.
Haidt throws the audience a proverbial bone to assuage their skepticism of his questionable correlations by including a section in “Four Foundational Harms” on the benefits of social media for adolescents (136). Haidt’s anecdotes that consider the benefits of social media focus on its ability to foster social engagements that would otherwise be limited in the physical world. However, he presents the reason for social media’s false sense of engagement as that it leaves its users more socially dysfunctional than they started. His choice to focus only on the example of social media use for his counter argument remains unclear, but perhaps because of the opportunity to create a premise that is easy to dismantle. Social media is more widespread, superficial for all the wrong reasons, and less nuanced than the avenues and opportunities of today's technological landscape. So, Haidt attempts to dismantle the argument that social media makes people more social by focusing on marginalized communities that struggle to fit in anyway. It seems to come as a surprise to Haidt and his presumed audience that those on the margins of society, such as those in the LGBTQ community, would feel marginalized no matter where they go. Whether in the physical or virtual world, humans are still humans.
What is clear is that Haidt wants to consider a solution to the age-old dilemma of humanity as a nuanced, contentious, and just plain difficult existence by tackling technology that has been around for less than 50 years. Humans have long had connectivity issues. When parents struggle to find opportunities for connection, adolescents adapt to their resources, whatever they may be, which often include their most accessible resource. Haidt sees the world through a very binary lens, as portrayed in Anxious: adolescents are involved in unrestricted (or managed) play that allows their minds to shape and grow “appropriately,” or their intense use of technology debilitates them. It is honorable that Haidt can surmise that the lack of physical connection that technology robs adolescents of leaves them spiritually compromised. While this presents a moral perspective, only a few chapters prior, Haidt argues that harmful and risky physical behaviors are essential to the growth and development of adolescents, rather than acknowledging that anything more detrimental or spiritually harmful could be found and performed other than through technology.
Throughout Anxious, Haidt struggles to consider any other activity than heavy technology use as the blame for annoying adolescent behavior. By examining the differences between the effects on boys and girls due to the overconsumption of technology, Haidt considers how both genders can be affected in different ways. Haidt struggles to consider how reducing technology would mitigate the nuanced issues that adolescents face, including body image insecurity for girls and isolation issues for boys, which he relates to what the Japanese call hikikomori, without failing to mention how much of an individualistic society in Japan is despite its technological advances (196). Unsurprisingly, Haidt focuses heavily on examples of individualistic societies that already had issues of human connectivity long before the advent of technology as we know it today.
Haidt’s conversation in Anxious is heartfelt and eager, even in the concluding chapter, “Preparing for Collective Action,” which includes notes apologizing for his possible misinterpretations and room for error regarding his well-intent musings (225). Haidt is passionate about solving the issues that adolescents face in his time; his passion is palpable. However, what must be considered for a thorough and well-balanced discussion are the issues of human society that are more challenging and nuanced than one technology can take responsibility for.
Overall, the issue of causation conflating with correlation is evident in Haidt’s argument throughout Anxious. By creating a binary between the physical world and the virtual world, he neglects to address the nuanced circumstances that could possibly lead to phenomena much more traumatic and anxiety-inducing than heavy technology use. The predispositions that exist among adolescents, which include issues of mental and physical health, fail to be addressed through any other solid lens than that of the harms of heavy technology use. To provide a more balanced context, Haidt must consider all the nuances of adolescent life that serve to provide an accurate assessment of how technology stands out amongst the factors of the struggle of adolescence.
Kimberly Bain is an assistant professor of English at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Her favorite genres to read are self-help nonfiction and Southern Gothic fiction.
