The genie is out of the bottle—Part 1
Can we ever be the masters of our fate again?
Author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt likes to take on big issues: happiness, the coddling of the American mind, how our different beliefs divide us. So it’s unsurprising that his latest book takes on another big issue: smart phones and their impact on those who grew up with them “It’s as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars,” writes Haidt in The Anxious Generation, “when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s, in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children.”1 The results are disastrous for kids’ mental health, said Haidt in a recent Atlantic article: 2
[What’s] remarkable to me is that the mental-health data doesn’t get worse slowly. The mental-health data is fine in the 2000s. And then all of a sudden—right around 2012–2013—everything falls off a cliff.
Pushing kids off that cliff is the skyrocketing use of smart phones with their endless apps and nonstop notifications. By 2012, gone were the innocent days when iPhones had only the few apps that came with them, and notifications were few and far between. Back then, you only pulled out your phone when you needed it. But with the proliferation of apps and notifications, the smart phone transformed into. . .
. . . a portal that millions—millions—of companies can use to get to you, as a child. Without your parents’ permission or knowledge, they can get to you. They can send you notifications. They can try to get you to stop your homework and: Come—look at what someone just said about you.
At the same time, Instagram showed up, smart phones added a front-facing camera, and high-speed internet hit the ground running. This is when the phone became a master rather than a servant, as Haidt aptly put it.
And it’s not just smart phones, but tablets, laptops, and high-definition TV—all with 24-hour cable news, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn—turning not just Zoomers but Boomers and everyone in between—into servants serving insatiable commercial interests with their clicks and subscriptions.
No, strike that. Servants get paid, even if only a measly sum. We are paying them (our commercial masters) in money, blood, sweat, and tears. As a result, everyone’s mental health is tanking and fast, along with our social health, which has also gone off a cliff, as these graphs suggest:
Source: SSM Popul Health, March 21, 2023.3
All these data add up to one conclusion: a large percentage of us are sentencing ourselves to a slavish life, much of it spent in solitary confinement. That trend has gotten so bad that in May 2023, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a public health advisory warning that loneliness and isolation have reached epidemic proportions.
That epidemic is taking a toll, not just on the mental health of individuals, but on our society and our democracy. Consider this passage from Remaking the Space Between Us:
In a 2023 Democracy article, behavioral scientist George Ward describes how mounting isolation and loneliness is fueling a disturbing decrease in happiness. In 2021, only 19 percent of Americans surveyed said they felt happy, the lowest level since 1972. The resulting increase in unhappiness is not only leading to more “deaths of despair,” it is also shaping voting behavior. Says Wards’ colleague Johannes Eichstaedt:
“Unhappiness predicted the Trump vote better than race, income levels, or unemployment, how many immigrants moved into the country, or how older or religious citizens were. Unhappiness also predicted the Trump election better than other subjective variables like how people thought the economy was going or would be going in the future.4
Without our knowing it, our individual decisions to stay glued to electronics rather than each other are adding up to collective harm. Those individual decisions, taken as a whole, are fraying our social fabric and weakening our democracy’s immune system—those social and community structures that tether us to one another.
So I can’t help but ask myself: Is this really what we want? Have we lost our ability to exercise choice and free will in the face of these commercial masters and their electronic whips? Has technology reduced us to zombies, mindlessly clicking our lives away, each of us in our own worlds? Now that the genie is out of the bottle and walking on its own, can we ever again be the masters of our fate?
Or, can we change this depressing trajectory in much the same way we created it—through our individual actions adding up to collective good?
Tell me what you think in Comments. In the next post, I will take up these questions, hopefully in light of your thoughts.
Notes
Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing An Epidemic Of Mental Illness.New York: Penguin, 2024.
The rest of Haidt’s quotes come from Hanna Rosin’s excellent Atlantic article. “The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right.” March 2024.
Viji Diane Kannan and Peter J. Veazie, “US trends in social isolation, social engagement, and companionship ⎯ nationally and by age, sex, race/ethnicity, family income, and work hours, 2003–2020.” SSM Popul Health, March 21, 2023.
Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams, and Harry Hanbury, “The Death of Deliverism” in Democracy, June 2023 at https://rb.gy/8dqdp. Also see George Ward, “It’s Unhappiness, Stupid.” The Society for Personality and Social Psychology, June 2021. https://rb.gy/ieybe.
As the parent of a middle schooler, I'm right at the moment where most kids get smartphones, and fear of all that's written in this article and more has kept me holding the line on --no phone--. Then, my son's former principal gave me some hard hitting advice: "You can keep him from them, let him be singled out as the only kid without one, and watch him use all his resources to get access anyways. OR, you could get him a phone and make it a partnership. Teach him, slowly and intentionally, what each aspect of this technology is, what it can do, what the research shows, how it can hurt you and others, how it can help... and you normalize that he will make mistakes, fall victim to advertising and algorithms, feel the urge for likes, believe fake news and so on. Make it safe for him to learn this world and ask you questions. When he gets older, and kids are using AI to write papers and take notes, make sure he experiences the value of his brain of doing that himself. Rather than tell him what's bad, show him what's good." And that's just about the best parenting advice I've ever gotten. So yes, existentially terrified over here, but there's some solace in knowing that some huge part of the answer is loving the heck out of our kids, and raising our own game (we, the generation that created this mess) on how we teach them the paths to happiness and the obstacles we know they will face on the way.
Thanks for writing this -- important for us all to think about!
The combo of the pandemic + a smart phone was pretty disastrous for the mental health of my oldest kid. Trying to the put the genie back in the bottle is a very tricky business. I am truly hoping for a corrective pendulum swing but humans have never been super successful at overcoming addictions. I like what I heard Haidt say about shifting cultural norms being much for effective than individual solutions.