Jonathan Haidt on the 'National Crisis' of Gen Z - WSJ - 0 views
www.wsj.com/...lity-gap-childhood-11672401345
social media psychology research education crisis culture Gen Z mental health defense creativity
shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 23
- No Cached
-
he has in mind the younger cohort, Generation Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”
-
He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood
-
Social media is Mr. Haidt’s present obsession. He’s working on two books that address its harmful impact on American society: “Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing” and “Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.
- ...26 more annotations...
-
What happened in 2012, when the oldest Gen-Z babies were in their middle teens? That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.”
-
Mr. Haidt’s research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,” but “it’s only Gen Z, not the older generations.” If you’d stopped collecting data in 2011, he says, you’d see little change from previous years. “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” (His data are available in an open-source document.)
-
Mr. Haidt imagines “literally launching our children into outer space” and letting their bodies grow there: “They would come out deformed and broken. Their limbs wouldn’t be right. You can’t physically grow up in outer space. Human bodies can’t do that.” Yet “we basically do that to them socially. We launched them into outer space around the year 2012,” he says, “and then we expect that they will grow up normally without having normal human experiences.”
-
He calls this phenomenon “compare and despair” and says: “It seems social because you’re communicating with people. But it’s performative. You don’t actually get social relationships. You get weak, fake social links.”
-
That meant the first social-media generation was one of “weakened kids” who “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” with other children. They were deprived of “the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.
-
Now, their childhood “is largely just through the phone. They no longer even hang out together.” Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.
-
Mr. Haidt especially worries about girls. By 2020 more than 25% of female teenagers had “a major depression.” The comparable number for boys was just under 9%.
-
The comparable numbers for millennials at the same age registered at half the Gen-Z rate: about 13% for girls and 5% for boys. “Kids are on their devices all the time,”
-
Most girls, by contrast, are drawn to “visual platforms,” Instagram and TikTok in particular. “Those are about display and performance. You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.
-
Mr. Haidt says he has no antipathy toward the young, and he calls millennials “amazing.”
-
“Social media is incompatible with liberal democracy because it has moved conversation, and interaction, into the center of the Colosseum. We’re not there to talk to each other. We’re there to perform” before spectators who “want blood.”
-
To illustrate his point about Gen Z, Mr. Haidt challenges people to name young people today who are “really changing the world, who are doing big things that have an impact beyond their closed ecosystem.”
-
He can think of only two, neither of them American: Greta Thunberg, 19, the Swedish climate militant, and Malala Yousafzai, 25, the Pakistani advocate for female education
-
I’m predicting that they will be less effective, less impactful, than previous generations.” Why? “You should always keep your eye on whether people are in ‘discover mode’ or ‘defend mode.’ ” In the former mode, you seize opportunities to be creative. In the latter, “you’re not creative, you’re not future-thinking, you’re focused on threats in the present.”
-
University students who matriculated starting in 2014 or so have arrived on campus in defend mode: “Here they are in the safest, most welcoming, most inclusive, most antiracist places on the planet, but many of them were acting like they were entering some sort of dystopian, threatening, immoral world.”
-
56% of liberal women 18 to 29 responded affirmatively to the question: Has a doctor or other healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition? “Some of that,” Mr. Haidt says, “has to be just self-presentational,” meaning imagined.
-
This new ideology . . . valorizes victimhood. And if your sub-community motivates you to say you have an anxiety disorder, how is this going to affect you for the rest of your life?” He answers his own question: “You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.”
-
Whereas millennial women are doing well, “Gen-Z women, because they’re so anxious, are going to be less successful than Gen-Z men—and that’s saying a lot, because Gen-Z men are messed up, too.”
-
The problem, he says, is distinct to the U.S. and other English-speaking developed countries: “You don’t find it as much in Europe, and hardly at all in Asia.” Ideas that are “nurtured around American issues of race and gender spread instantly to the U.K. and Canada. But they don’t necessarily spread to France and Germany, China and Japan.”
-
something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen-Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback.” That makes it hard for them to advance professionally by learning to do their jobs better.
-
“this could severely damage American capitalism.” When managers are “afraid to speak up honestly because they’ll be shamed on Twitter or Slack, then that organization becomes stupid.” Mr. Haidt says he’s “seen a lot of this, beginning in American universities in 2015. They all got stupid in the same way. They all implemented policies that backfire.”
-
Mr. Haidt, who describes himself as “a classical liberal like John Stuart Mill,” also laments the impact of social media on political discourse
-
Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood, in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 or 8, to between 10 and 12.
-
Is there a solution? “I’d raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16,” he says—“and enforce it.”
-
By contrast, “life went onto phone-based apps 10 years ago, and the protections we have for children are zero, absolutely zero.” The damage to Generation Z from social media “so vastly exceeds the damage from Covid that we’re going to have to act.”
-
Gen Z, he says, “is not in denial. They recognize that this app-based life is really bad for them.” He reports that they wish they had childhoods more like those of their parents, in which they could play outside and have adventur
Cached
