Thread by @SketchesbyBoze

I’ve just finished reading @JonHaidt’s bestselling new book THE ANXIOUS GENERATION.

I think it may be the most important nonfiction book of the decade, and today I want to tell you why. 🧵

Haidt argues that the major tech companies are responsible for an epidemic of teen mental illness. “By designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears, these companies have … changed human development on an unimaginable scale.”

The book marshals an abundance of evidence to show that rates of teen anxiety and depression began surging across western nations between 2010 and 2015, the years in which Facebook introduced the “like” button and Instagram took over the world.

It’s important to note that the advent of the web and flip phones in the late 1990s wasn’t accompanied by a corresponding rise in depression or anxiety. But with the introduction of the smartphone and social media in the late 2000s, the transformation was immediate.

The biggest change took place between 2011 (when only 23 percent of US teens had a smartphone) and 2016 (when 79 percent of teens had one). A 2015 Common Sense report found that teens were spending an average of seven leisure hours a day online.

Haidt calls this the Great Rewiring of Childhood. Social norms, sleep patterns, playtime and book-reading were disrupted like never before in history, all within the space of a few years. Most parents sensed something was wrong but couldn’t guess how bad it was.

Teen girls disappeared into social media, boys into video games and pornography. “Gen Z became the first generation in history,” he writes, “to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe.”

There’s been a parallel decline in the amount of time teens spend in face-to-face play with others. Physical play confers mental and social benefits that are essential for a young person’s development, but increasingly, over-protective parents keep their kids indoors.

The tragic result is that we’ve been “over-protecting children in the real world … and under-protecting them online.” Teens need the slings and arrows of embodied experience to become functional adults. They need in-person friendships and social networks.

And in what Haidt calls “the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children,” we’ve allowed tech companies to place in the hands of our children addictive devices that steal their sleep, fragment their attention and manipulate their emotions.

“The Great Rewiring,” he writes, “devastated the social lives of Gen Z by connecting them to everyone in the world and disconnecting them from the people around them.” Boys were “swallowed whole” by virtual worlds, never learning agency and independence in this world.

In 1985, Neil Postman wrote a short but prophetic book entitled “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” In it he argued that the proliferation of screens and useless trivia was creating a dystopian world in which governments don’t need to ban books because no one wants to read them.

Citing Huxley’s warning in Brave New World about our “almost infinite appetite for distractions,” Postman wrote, “People will come to love their oppressions, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

In a 2017 interview, Sean Parker, the founder of Napster, said the founders of the major tech companies designed their products to “consume as much of your time and attention as possible.” Parker added, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

What’s to be done? There’s a nationwide push to remove phones from classrooms, and it needs to expand. (My local school district is currently working on this.) When Norway banned phones from schools, teen mental health improved suddenly and dramatically.

The design of American suburbs and cities is not conducive to the flourishing of children. They need walkable communities in which to play, roam and explore. They need parks, playgrounds and libraries. Kids thrive when they’re given the freedom to be out-of-doors.

Haidt writes that he hopes to “roll back the phone-based childhood” by 2025. He urges parents to delay giving their children smartphones until driving age. If enough parents start doing this, it will create a tipping point. A world where children can be kids again.

“The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation,” Haidt writes, “not just in adolescents, but in all of us.” We need to recover practices that are spiritually elevating—encountering nature; ancient wisdom traditions; meditation to focus the mind; art and literature.

“It’s not healthy,” he concludes, “for any human being to have unfettered access to everything, everywhere, all the time, for free.” There’s so much joy in the world, in books, in other people, but we have to be willing to risk the boredom and bruises of an analog life.