Book Review: THE ANXIOUS GENERATION by Jonathan Haidt

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I finished this book on the day that a high school student shot a fellow student in Nueva Ecija, mere months after two knife stabbing incidents in local schools. Our children are not OK, and this book helps explain why, and offers a course of action.

I’ll just go out and say it: THE ANXIOUS GENERATION is perhaps this generation’s single most important book for parents, educators, and policy makers. Necessary and timely, it’s for anyone who has fallen asleep and woken up only to reach for their phone to check social media notifications, for everyone who has spent an inordinate amount of time online.

Social psychologist, parent, scholar, and professor Jonathan Haidt has written an extremely alarming book on “the psychological damage of a phone-based life.” The accessibility of his language in presenting scholarly findings makes it so that his message comes across even more urgently.

He presents scholarly research on how the deadly combination of underprotection of children online (unsupervised access to screens with Internet for hours), combined with overprotection of children in real life (preventing them from gaining feedback through overcoming meaningful challenges) has resulted in an epidemic of anxiety, depression, and mental illness in our youth. And the evidence he shows points to social media as the cause, not as a correlate.

Smart phones are “experience blockers,” Haidt explains, and the current epidemic of mental health goes hand in hand with too much screentime and too much helicopter parenting. From reducing our students’ interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience (I remember a student asking me what’s the point in going on a field trip to listen to World War II veterans when she can just watch a YouTube video online), to mass social media - induced illness (kids claiming to have Tourette’s after a German influencer who really had the condition went viral, or the sociogenic spread of gender dysphoria)... the book covers a lot of ground, but every page is important.

The book provides a historical background of a cultural shift towards “Safetyism” as well as a timeline of the rise of smart phones and social media companies deliberately targeting psychological vulnerabilities, or what he calls “The Great Rewiring.”
His closing chapter offers suggestions for collective action, on what parents, schools, and governments can do to fight this global crisis.

“The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us… There is a hole, an emptiness in us all, that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble or elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.”

The irony is not lost on me that I am posting this on social media, but perhaps this is the start: recognizing the evil that the algorithms have done in the past, yet using these same tools to spread awareness, to shed a bit of light in an ocean of doom and gloom.

And after posting this, I shall turn off my gadget and read. Or play the piano. Or do countless other life-giving activities offline.

In the book, Haidt quoted Thoreau: “The cost of a thing is the amount of… life which is required to be exchanged for it.” Life cannot and should not be lived online. Here’s to not spending a single minute on social media, more than is absolutely necessary.

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