Perspective Matters: Why Jonathan Haidt is ‘wildly optimistic’ about Gen Z

BENJAMIN P. RUSSELL

In 2005, less than 9 percent of American teens reported having had at least one major depressive episode in the previous year, according to the U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health. By 2022, that number had risen to roughly 20 percent. Incidence of anxiety and depression among college students, emergency room visits for self-harm and suicide rates among young people likewise rose at alarming rates in that period. While the Covid-19 pandemic likely made things worse, these trends were already well underway between 2010 and 2015, said Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business and the author of the new book “The Anxious Generation.”

Haidt refers to this period as “the Great Rewiring,” and in the book describes how, driven by a surge of social media and smartphone use, “overprotection in the real world and under-protection in the virtual world” have combined to batter the mental health of children born after 1995.

“If you have a play-based childhood rooted in a real community, you have a lot of protection from the age of the smartphone,” Haidt said. “Kids that didn’t have a lot of free play and aren’t tightly anchored in a real community, those are the ones that got swept away.”

Haidt spoke about his research and why he’s optimistic that solutions to the mental health crisis among young people are within reach. He says, “The Great Rewiring is a five-year period in which technological changes interacted with social trends to radically transform the daily lives of teenagers in the United States and many other countries. In 2010, few teens had a smartphone, few had high-speed internet, few had unlimited data plans, nobody had Instagram and kids still sometimes went over to each other’s houses and spent some time with other kids. By 2015, everything changed at a faster pace than ever before in human history.” He adds, “For evidence showing how radical this change was, look at the millennial generation, which got most of the way through puberty before this happened, and their mental health is fine. Gen Z, I believe, is defined by the fact that they went through puberty on social media, without spending much time with other kids, and their mental health is the worst ever recorded.”

“For girls, we have a lot of correlational evidence and experimental evidence that social media is really bad for them. For boys we don’t. For them, it’s pornography and video games. So the story for boys took us much longer to figure out. But I think we came up with something very plausible building on Richard Reeves’s great book, “Of Boys and Men,” which is the gradual withdrawal of boys from effort in the real world,” he remarks.

We’re not seeing boys really applying themselves in the real world — we’re seeing them apply themselves in the virtual world. They’re investing their time, their efforts into things that don’t pay off in the long run. How much of what we’re seeing with the mental health crisis might be attributable to other factors — more openness in speaking about mental health issues, say, or a tendency to pathologise what are actually normal aspects of human feeling?

Mental health is complicated. But when we look at what’s moving the needle on the national trends, the fact that we see the same thing in so many countries tells me that there is no other theory that is doing the bulk of the work here.