They Not Like Us
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin, 2024)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
One of the most popular songs in 2024 is Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.” A diss track to take down Drake, it includes the infectious and omnipresent chorus:
They not like us, they not like us, they not like us
They not like us, they not like us, they not like us
It is the habit of every generation to complain about the succeeding generations. They are lazy, they are soft, they do not appreciate what they have. Schools have gotten too easy. People have said the equivalent in every century. Most of the time, older people are envious of the conditions young people experience or refusing to remember their actual, own youth. Different generations do, however, live in different contexts and see and experience the world, in some ways, unlike others.
In the last ten years, everyone paying attention has become alarmed about Generation Z. They do not drink or smoke or get pregnant as much as earlier generations, but they are very much struggling. Boys are underperforming in school and adulthood. Girls are becoming more depressed and self-destructive. They all report very high levels of anxiety. When it comes to Gen Z, are the generational difference our fault?
Haidt’s argument is straightforward. Gen Z is not growing up on Earth like previous generations, they are growing up on Mars—or an equivalently foreign and dangerous environment, still experimental for humans, without enough gravity. They are existing too much on screens and too little in the real world. Two bad trends are converging and creating the wake zone Gen Z is floundering in: overprotection in the real world and under-protection in the digital world. They need more play, less screen time, more exposure to real-life danger, and real limitations on social media.
If you have talked to any parents in the last ten years, you are familiar with concerns about screentime and safetyism. What Haidt has done is gather evidence from studies to support his arguments and go beyond the parental anecdotes we’ve all heard. For example, he demonstrates more than correlation between social media and mental health decline among adolescents. He also uses the Millennial generation as a helpful counterpoint to highlight the very real impact of technological changes since 2010 and the relevance of age in exposure to these changes. Screen time and social media and physical inactivity may also be harming adults, but less so and at our own discretion. Haidt strongly advocates specific screen limitations based on age and the development of better milestones on the path to adulthood. It is time to stop sending children into the mines (even of Minecraft) and start sending them back onto unattended playgrounds.
One of the interesting things about technology is the dramatic rate of change in the last two hundred years. In 1000 and 1500, people farmed with many of the same tools, with some minor improvements. Things began to speed up around the Renaissance. Gunpowder came West. Ships changed more between 1500 and 1600 than they did between 1000 and 1500. Crop rotation evolved. But almost everyone still moved by horse at best from the beginning of time until the 1800s. We then went from the first airplane flights all the way to landing on the moon in less than a hundred years. Now we have cars that park themselves and satellites that spy on us in ways the Czar’s secret police could only have imagined.
In particular, the period 1870-1970 has been identified by economist Robert Gordon as the peak of American growth and productivity, one which will not be rivalled. The technology that affects daily life also dramatically changed in that time. His book The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016) illuminates the impact of things like refrigerators and washing machines and the decreasing cost of electric lighting and indoor plumbing, among other things. We almost cannot imagine how differently people lived before and after that period of 1870 and 1970.
Questions about the impact of these changes are not new. All along the yellow brick road of modernity, we have been asking “how does this affect me?” After all, the prominence of the individual grew up alongside this modernity. When trains came about, some worried that the speed would be bad for the human heart, which surely could not have been designed for bodies to move so fast. We are culturally different people now that we are accustomed to air conditioning and indoor plumbing and do not spend hours a week doing laundry by hand. We have redesigned our cities and states for automobile transportation and have later reflected and come to hate Robert Moses for it.
Anyone who has lived in the last century has been dealing with rapidly changing technology. And we have often had complaints. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud observed that technology made it possible to speak to relatives far away via telephone. Of course, they would not be far away if technology had not also made that possible. Could it be that something has really shifted since 2010 which has an altogether different effect on young people? Hasn’t screen time been a problem since television came into the home?
The Anxious Generation acknowledges we are experiencing these big changes in real time and some of Haidt’s conclusions may need re-evaluation. However, no one can really argue with the evidence for a mental health crisis among the young. Neither can we ignore the ways in which smartphones have transformed daily existence—they are not even like earlier cellphones. There is evidence for the effects of smartphones being more severe on younger people. Information has also emerged from within social media companies that they have specifically targeted young people and used what amount to psychological tricks to addict them to content known to be harmful. Perhaps Gen Z should be uniquely pitied and protected from screens while being pushed back into the real world.
The question is not, can anything be done? The question is, will anything be done? Millennials were the first generation to be deeply affected by school shootings and the adjustments made since to protect youth have been paltry at best. Solutions cannot come only (or maybe effectively at all) from government. This is not because government is always the problem, but because the best hope likely comes from the area in which adults are hurting—civil society. Adults being able to form community bonds, offer each other mutual aid and support, and function together organizationally without governmental oversight is what is required. A parent bowling alone will struggle to effectively shield their children, because we do not live in the state of nature, we live in a society.
We once used lead paint in children’s rooms. We once sold cigarettes to minors. Bicycle helmets used to be uncommon. Collective action and improvement are possible. We have more than addressed the physical risks that children encounter. To aid the anxious generation, it may well be that we will need to ease up a bit on addressing the physical safety of children and apply ourselves more directly to their mental safety by realizing that the comfort we feel with technology may not accurately reflect its dangers.
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Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War.
