The Anxious Generation with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt

0:02Gen Z is the only generation in human history to go through adolescence with both the ubiquity of smartphones, and instant access to social media. This alone is not news. But according to social psychologist and NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, it is this specific combination of smartphones and social media that is at the root of a generational mental health crisis. Anxiety and depression affect Gen Z at statistically higher rates, like way more than any previous generation. In Jonathan's new book, The Anxious Generation, he takes a highly data-driven approach to understand what modern technology is doing to our kids.

0:41The good news is that Jonathan believes the anxiety problem is eminently solvable. And it's more important than ever to have conversations about what technology is doing to us. This is a bit of optimism.

0:59Jonathan, huge fan of your work. You know, we used to read the news and then call up our friends and vent our anger or feel our emotions and cry or whatever it was to our friends. And then we would be able to have a rational conversation about it later. And now we read the news and we log on to our social media of choice and we vent our anger or feel our emotions. And then we respond to the responses. We respond to the reactions. That's right. The frustration is, and this goes to some of the work that I've done and a lot of the work that you've done where we speak about younger generations and the insidiousness of social media and cell phones, there's no going back.

1:42The genie's out of the bottle. The concept of dopamine and dopamine hits and addictive quality, like this is now known. Like this is no longer news. Yet we all know it. We know these things. And yet for some reason, we still can't control ourselves. We still can't get out of it. You know, Jonathan, fix America. Okay. I can do half of it. let's break the problem into the kids and the democracy. The kids, which is the subject of my book, The Anxious Generation, that we can actually solve that in the next year or two. The democracy, my God, that is a much harder problem for a lot of reasons, which I hope we'll get into.

2:23But what you were just laying out was how each of us might individually want to change, but yet we're not able to. Now, sometimes that's because of addiction. And as you said, I mean, these things are all about little dopamine hits, and that's what makes us crave more. And so smokers, when they want to quit, have trouble quitting. And so part of that is what's going on for adults. But the biggest thing, I teach courses here at NYU and I have MBA students and I have undergrads. And we go through what the life on social media is doing to them, to their productivity, to their focus, to their happiness.

2:56Some of them try to quit, but I say, why don't you all just quit? And the answer is always the same, because everyone else is on it. I can't quit because everyone else is on it. and they would miss out on too much. And there are sometimes career elements for the MBA students, but for the undergrads, it's all social. And so the way to understand what's happened to us is that these tech companies have put us into what social scientists call a collective action problem, where we face a problem, we don't like how things are, we could change it individually, but each of us looking at the change says, oh, wow, if I do that, I'll actually be worse off.

3:32And so most of us who, you know, our kids come to us in sixth grade, typically fifth or sixth grade and say, daddy, I need a smartphone. Everyone's got a smartphone. I'm the only one. And that's very painful to hear that your kid is being excluded. The only reason that the other parents gave their kids a smartphone so early is because they also said everyone has a smartphone. And so each of us might want to delay smartphones and social media. But if our kid is the only one who's kept out, well, then our kid is worse off. but if we all do it together, or if even a quarter of us do it together, then our kids can't say they're the only one.

4:09So if we can do this with the parents of our kids' friends, then we give them a normal child. We say, instead of spending all afternoon on your phone, how about you guys get together and go out someplace with no supervision, ride your bicycles, go buy ice cream, do something together, not supervised by adults. They would have a much better childhood. they'd come out mentally healthy. Though I agree, the challenge is kind of like education reform. The more I learn about education reform, the more I'm learning that it's not the school districts, it's not the teachers, but it's largely the parents, which is everybody wants education reform.

4:47We just don't want you to experiment on my child. Please experiment at a different school and find out what happens. And I've heard the same when it comes to phones, which is some schools have attempted to ban phones. And it's the parents who make an uproar. I have to be able to text my kid anytime. What happens if there's an emergency? We'll call the office. They know where your kid is. They'll go get your kid out of class and say, your grandmother died. They know where your kids are at all moments. But for some reason, it's the parents and the anxiety the parents have. And I've even read research that in the car, kids who are on the phone when they're driving, it's largely the parents texting them and the parents will get mad at them.

5:24Oh, no. Oh, no. So the intensity of like, I have to respond immediately, even when I'm driving, the pressures are not coming actually from, I mean, look, there's plenty of peer pressure from the kids, obviously, but huge amounts of pressure from the parents. So I hear you, but how many of the parents will collectively say we agree not to give our kids both when they have the anxiety of not being able to get hold of their kids every moment? Okay. Right. So this is the big thing that a lot of people don't seem to understand is that there are other kinds of phones other than smartphones. So I totally understand.

5:57Look, half of what I'm saying isn't about the phones. Half of it is we have to let kids out on their own by the age of eight or so. That's when you went out to play with other kids. That's incredibly healthy. You get into trouble, you get into arguments, but you resolve them. So that has to happen. And I understand, look, I live in New York City. I wasn't going to let my kids walk around New York City without being able to track them and find them and contact them. But I didn't think to give my son a flip phone. I just said, well, he needs a phone. So I gave him my old iPhone. But what I'm advocating for is that we solve this collective action problem by saying no smartphones until high school.

6:36You can give your kid a flip phone. You can reach your kid. What's a flip phone good for? All it's good for is making phone calls and receiving texts. It's not even good for sending texts because you have to press the seven key three times to make whatever letter. If we gave our kids flip phones, they wouldn't be on it all the time, like pouring out their emotions. They'd say like, you know, see you at three. And then they're more likely to use it to meet up and to communicate with one person, not to broadcast out to social media. So that's an important technological thing. As for schools, you're absolutely right.

7:07When I talk to principals, they all hate the phones. It's making their lives miserable. The teachers all hate the phones. The students aren't paying attention in class. They're literally watching porn and YouTube and gambling. I mean, it's insane that we let kids have the greatest distraction device ever invented. They can just keep it in their pocket. Completely insane. And I say to the principles, why don't you just use phone lockers or yonder pouches? It's always the same thing, which is just what you said. Some of the parents will freak out. They need to reach their kids. Yes, that's true.

7:34Some of the parents will freak out. But you know what? Most parents now are so fed up with what the phones are doing to their kids that most parents would support a phone-free school as long as they know that everyone else is supporting it, everyone else is doing it, and I can reach my kid in case of an emergency. Some will still freak out, but the great majority want to do something. So I think this, again, it's a collective action problem. If we start this together, it's going to overwhelm the principals and they'll have to say, you know what? Far more parents want their kid to pay attention in class than the seven who are always ruining my life by yelling and screaming at me.

8:10People are ready to act. They just don't know what to do. And I think that in my book, I basically have been able to say, here's where we are. Here's how we got here. Four norms will get us most of the way out. If we do these four things, we can really improve children's mental health. One, no smartphone before high school. Two, no social media before 16. Three, phone-free schools. And four, more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world, the free-range kids. Those four things, they cost essentially nothing, maybe some phone lockers you'd have to buy. They're totally bipartisan.

8:44There's no culture war issue here at all. And most parents want to do it. So I'm incredibly excited that I get to be part of and a contributor to what I think is going to be one of the most successful social movements and the fastest ever. That is, I think within, by the end of 2025, I think we're going to have different norms about childhood. Because the ones we got now, they only started 10, 15 years ago. They're very new and they're terrible. Do you have kids? I don't. I have a niece and a nephew. Okay. How old are they? My nephew just turned 13 and my niece is 14. And they both have smartphones, I assume.

9:21They do. They do. And do you know if they're on Instagram? They are not. Okay. What about TikTok? they are, my niece is, my nephew's, his demise is YouTube. A teenage boy on YouTube. I mean, he'll get up and go get a drink and I'll walk into the kitchen and he'll be on his phone looking at YouTube. I'll be like, I thought you were just getting a drink, you know, which is insane. My niece, it's, what I find fascinating about my niece is, and I actually really like this. Yes, she's talking on the phone the whole time to her friends, but she's on FaceTime. Like, I find that super healthy. FaceTime is fine.

9:56I think that's super healthy. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. That's right. Yeah. So what the research shows is that boys and girls are equally, they're spending roughly the same amount of time on their phones, about five hours a day, just on social media. The trick is though, that includes TikTok and YouTube because the kids are watching huge amounts of videos. What really began in the early 2010s is that when they all got phones, they all spent the whole day on the phone, but the girls went for social media, especially visual platforms. They went for Instagram and Pinterest and Tumblr. And the boys went for video games and YouTube.

10:31They tend to be more addicted to those too. The girls instantly got depressed. The depression epidemic, it begins in 2012, 2013. In 2010, very few kids had a smartphone. It was just coming in. The app store had just been released recently. So in 2010, the iPhone is not a big part of teen life. By 2015, it's the center of teen life. So what I'm arguing in the Anxious Generation is that between 2010 and 2015 was the great rewiring of childhood where kids were no longer looking at each other or spending time with each other because they had this incredible distraction device, this phone, which was their portal to lots of companies that wanted to get their attention.

11:12Most parents would not want their child, their daughter to have an open window out onto the street where anyone can just reach in and see them and take them. But that's kind of what we did in the early 2010s. We said, here, have a phone, go on Instagram, talk with strangers. They'll try to proposition you. They'll try to sell you things. But what are you going to do? It's the digital age. That's where we are. Most parents are well-intentioned. Most parents, the vast majority of parents want what's best for their kids. It's okay to be tempted by the magic of the phone because it's a great babysitter.

11:48Yes. You know, kids are, by definition, annoying. I see why you don't have any. I would disagree with that definition. You know, they whine and they cry and they make a scene. All right. I guess you're right. And they get temper tantrums in the supermarket and they're agitated when you're out for dinner. And so to just give a kid a phone in the supermarket while they're sitting in the cart, to give a kid a phone in the restaurant so you can just have a peaceful dinner with your spouse. Like, I get it. I mean, maybe this is just coming from a grumpy old man who doesn't have kids, but like you kind of knew that going in.

12:24And like there's a healthiness with the kid just acting out and being difficult. Like I have friends who they've got two younger kids and the kids don't have phones. And I've gone out for dinner with them and their family. They bring paper and colored pencils. Right. As soon as you get to the dinner table, the kids just start drawing. That's great. So you're still allowing the kids to be distracted to do something else, except it's analog. Whatever happened to the mom bag filled with games and toys and pens and pencils and paper? Yeah. No, that's exactly right. As I've been reconstructing the history of how did we get here?

13:00Yeah. How is it that entire generation is now sucked into this terrible way to grow up? How did this happen? What I realize is you have to put yourself back in the year, let's say, 2011, 2012. which is when the big transition is happening. And I just turned 60. Boy, do I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 1990s, the beginning of the internet. The 90s were incredible. And it was like so hopeful. And it was democracy is going to rule and the internet is going to be the greatest friend of democracy and it's going to take down tyrants. And then the millennial generation, which grew up with the early internet, they mastered it and they were able to use it in all kinds of ways but the millennials their mental health didn't plunge and so we thought the internet's amazing we all love it these kids are digital natives they're going to this is the way of the future and the internet is amazing for democracy so is social media and look at the arab spring and look at occupy wall street so in 2011 2012 say you're a 35 year old parent and you're at dinner and you think should i give my kid an iPhone.

14:06I mean, iPhones are amazing. Internet's amazing. The kid's going to master it anyway. We thought it was okay. We thought maybe we're even helping them. Let them get a head start. They're going to be living with these things. Why not let them play with it at age three? I got my first iPhone when my son was two and he was incredible. He got the touch and swipe technology. So you have to go back to that time and realize we didn't know what we were doing. We thought that this wasn't going to harm the kids. And it's really only in 2016, I'd say, it's after the Trump election. That's when a lot of people, especially in the blue parts of the country, really began to turn on the internet and social media and see this is causing all kinds of problems.

14:45And then, so our discovery that a life online is really bad for kids, we didn't actually know that in 2011. How would you define the social differences between the millennial and the Gen Z generation? Like what are the big markers that make them so different? Yeah. So the big marker, the biggest marker of all is that millennials grew up with flip phones and Gen Z grew up with iPhones. And the reason why this matters so much is that for millennials, so we'd already ruined childhood by the time the millennials came along for a lot of reasons that you've talked about. The coddling, the everyone gets a medal.

15:22So that was already going on. That began in the 80s. So the millennials grew up without toughening. We began to crack down on going outside. So the older millennials, if you're born in 1981, 82, you probably did still play outside. But if you're born in 1990, 91, 92, you probably didn't. You probably were not allowed to go out without an adult watching you. It's really the 90s that we really stopped letting kids out. So the millennials actually don't have as much freedom in childhood. They have a lot of overprotection, but they're still really heavily interacting with each other directly, one-on-one or in small groups.

15:58They have flip phones, but with a flip phone, again, you're not going to pour out your heart on a flip phone texting. You use it to talk to one person or text one person. It wasn't all about group calls. So that's the millennials. So then we get to 2009, 2010, 11. This is when social media now becomes much nastier. So the millennials got Facebook in college. You had to have a college account in order to get it for the first few years. So the millennials had flip phones and no social media when they were going through puberty. They don't get that stuff until they're in college or later. Gen Z, I would define Gen Z.

16:35It's the first people who got a smartphone and social media at the beginning of puberty. Gen Z went through puberty with a thing that blocked their interactions with others. They don't spend much time with others. And we have a lot of data on this. Kids used to spend a lot of time with their friends. And as soon as you get to 2012, that plummets, it plummets to the point where by 2019, kids were only spending a little bit more time with their friends than their parents were, which is insane. And when they were with their friends, they might be physically with their friends, but they're all on their devices.

17:07As a human being, we're an incredibly social species. You can't grow up without a lot of social interaction, but that's what we did to Gen Z. You talk about the irony of democracy, which is we thought the internet would be the greatest thing for democracy. And it's ended up being... Possibly the worst thing. Possibly the worst thing for democracy. And you look at the way that more dictatorial or tyrannical regimes operate, they've cracked down on all of it. And not always for propaganda purposes. We know in China, for example, they too are concerned about their children spending too much time on the phone.

17:41And so it's just not possible. Like the phones physically don't work for more than a fixed amount of time per day. And like they can do that. And you start to think, you know, democracy might be a great form of government for choice, but is it the best form of government for the flourishing of society? Right. And that question goes back to Aristotle and Plato. That's the fundamental question of political theory. What form of government is best? I still believe in democracy, of course. The internet and social media have profoundly changed many, many things in our lives. It changes the way innovation works.

18:20Innovation used to be a hardware model. Now it's largely a software model, iterate, iterate, iterate. It's changed the way entrepreneurship worked, which is only big companies could compete against big companies. Now small companies can compete against big companies because of computers and the internet and social media. And it's a huge boon for entrepreneurs. It's had profound and permanent and many positive impacts, but we have to look at the liabilities as well. And again, I go back to the original question where we started, which is the genies out of the bottle. And I think everybody has their point of view, which is we have to pass legislation to crack down on the social media companies because of their algorithms.

18:59And we have to censor this and we have to stop that. and we have to control this and control that and our children. But the reality is we're doing nothing. That's right. We're doing nothing at all. That's right. We're whining and complaining and everybody thinks they have the solution, which none of those are silver bullets. And so you spend a lot of time looking at this data and you spend a lot of time and you've written and spoken extensively about the damages and the collective action that you're talking about, which I agree with. Social animals can only cure social problems socially. But we're left back at point one, which is how do I even organize people to do that when the very thing that I need to organize them, which is the internet, is being used to organize disorganization.

19:44This is getting deeply philosophical. Okay. So we've got so many threads here. I'll tell you what. Are you free for the next four hours? Well, I plan to work on this basically until I die. So yeah. How about let's trace out the democracy threads, and then I really want to talk about the effect it's having in the workplace and on entrepreneurship. I mean, here I am teaching in a business school, and I haven't really been keeping up with trends in work culture over the last couple of years, whereas you have. So let's do the democracy thing, and then we'll go to entrepreneurship and business. My friend Tristan Harris of the Center for Human Technology has long made the argument that digital technology is helping authoritarian countries be better authoritarian countries.

20:27If you're China, in the era of Mao or Stalin, they had to have secret police forces that were brutal, but they couldn't be everywhere. Now they can be everywhere. So the digital technology is a tremendous boon to China. And that includes all the cameras and the AI for face recognition. So you take all of it. China is in much better shape because of the technological revolution. Democracy, on the other hand, has all these really well-known weaknesses known since the time of Plato, who said that democracy is the second worst form of government because it inevitably decays into tyranny. And he was talking about direct democracy because people are passionate.

21:02They're easily led astray. They respond to demagogues. And so the American founding fathers knew all this. They read Plato and Aristotle. They knew political theory and history. And James Madison said, how do we design it so that the people don't get to make the laws and rules? The people choose the representatives, and then the representatives are somewhat insulated from the people's passions so that they can actually think together and debate and come up with policies. And the people get to throw them out if they're not happy. That was the system they gave us. And boy, did that work in the Gutenberg era, the era that was based on print.

21:34Now, in the network era, the problems Madison was trying to fix are overwhelmed. I mean, those problems are 10x, 100x for the reasons we've been talking about. If the citizens aren't just like voting on election day for who they want, they're rather opining at every moment so that Congress people, I mean, you see this. Ted Cruz, he once had given this bombastic speech on the Senate floor. And then he sat down and he was caught on camera instantly checking his Twitter feed to see how his Senate speech played. So if our politicians are being held captive to this instant feedback from whatever random stranger, boy, does that pervert democracy.

22:15I've been told by some of the old timer congressmen that there was a time where they would grandstand 20 % for the cameras. And then 80 % of the debate was behind closed doors. That's right. And now it's 100 % for the cameras. And even when the new Speaker of the House was elected, the number of people who said, I don't even know him, congressmen who said, I don't even know the guy. That's incredible. And there's not that many of them. There's a few hundred of them. They don't socialize anymore. And they don't socialize anymore. And there was a time when you moved your whole family to Washington, and your kids integrated into the school systems.

22:48And then you went to the baseball games, and you went to the PTA meetings, and you went to school plays, and you saw people of the opposite party sitting in the stands with you, and you socialized. They may or may not have been friends, but they were social and they were civil and they saw each other as human. They saw each other as parents. And now they spend most of their time back in their home states. They say doing the work of their people, but let's be honest, it's fundraising. Fundraising. And they spend very little time in Washington and rarely move their families to Washington anymore.

23:16So they don't even see each other as human anymore and they don't know each other. How can a governing class govern and be expected to find common ground with people who they only view as the enemy, what we're really talking about in all of these things is the restoration of humanity. Whether it's teenagers spending time with teenagers, and they all put their phones in a bucket when they come in the house. It's the same thing, right? It's the same thing, which is invite all the kids over for a play date and call the parents and say, if you need your kid, call me. Here's my phone number, because I've taken all the kids' phones away.

23:53Yes. Oh, that's great. Oh, I'm going to write this down, because that's a piece of advice I'm going to give to parents. Right? Like, yeah, here's my phone number, your kids coming over to my house. I'm taking your kids phone away while they're playing. Call me if you need anything. I know somebody who did this, which is they they were really stressed out about their kids being addicted to their phones. They decided to go on a family vacation, and they forced their kids to leave the phones at home. So that was fight number one. Of course. But turns out the parents prevailed because the kids are, you know, 13.