Henry David Thoreau once wrote,
“The cost of a thing is the amount of LIFE … required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
He penned those words in 1854, but Jonathan Haidt argues they are even more important now in an age of digital distraction, and the bottomless scroll of social media.
In part 1 of this series, I offered a short overview of Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. In part 2, I’ll move beyond summary to a short response from my admittedly limited perspective as a parent and professor.
In short, I find Haidt’s argument largely compelling: By swapping a play-based childhood for a phone-based one, “The Great Rewiring” has created a generation that is more anxious, scattered, and distracted than ever. And I also agree that one positive solution involves more free-play and independence—even if that’s hard for parents who, myself included, worry about our kids’ safety.
Despite this broad agreement, I’d like to focus on some additional factors that complicate Haidt’s book, even if they do not contradict it.
- #ParentsToo
A first challenge for parents (like me) is the charge of hypocrisy that easily attaches if we move to limit unhealthy digital behaviors in our children while we too are compulsively engaging in them.
Kids see us. They know our habits. And it’s tough to go all “Molly Hatchet” on your daughter’s screentime if you’re a raging digital addict too. (Picture a 1920s prohibitionist trying to close the local speakeasy by selflessly drinking all the liquor before it harms the kids.) Given this worry, a prerequisite for adopting Haidt’s advice may be to detox ourselves from screens and devices before preaching such an unpopular gospel to our children. That doesn’t mean throwing my phone in the lake, but it does mean making some important changes.
Preteens are attuned to hypocrisy. Thus, it seems insincere to act on the issue in the way Haidt suggests till we “first, remove the plank [read: phone] from our own eye.”
- Knowing isn’t Enough
While I hope Haidt’s book makes a difference, Alan Jacobs makes the point that “knowing” is NOT our problem when it comes to the dangers of smartphones, social media, and the zombie-fication of the American amygdala.
As Jacobs writes,
“Everyone knows that living on screens is making children miserable in a dozen different ways, contributing to ever-increasing rates of mental illness and inhibiting or disabling children’s mental faculties.
Everyone knows that engaging creatively with the material world is better for children — is better for all of us.
Everyone knows that Meta and TikTok are predatory and parasitical, and that they impoverish the lives of the people addicted to them.
Everyone knows that social media breed bad actors: each platform does this in its own way, but they all do it, and the more often people engage on such platforms the more messed-up and unhappy they become. […]
Everyone knows all this. Some people, for their own reasons, choose to deny it, but even they know it — indeed, probably no one knows all that I’ve been saying better than Mark Zuckerberg and Shou Zi Chew and Sam Altman do.”
If that’s true, another book or blog post may not move the needle. Our problem is not a lack of knowledge. Our problem is a lack of will, fueled by compulsion and disordered loves.
- Already Dated
A third issue for Haidt’s research (and one he readily acknowledges) is that his book is already dated. This doesn’t change the overall thesis, but it does mean the situation is already substantially worse than his data suggests.
Because of how long it takes to publish peer reviewed studies, the The Anxious Generation barely touches on the new developments in the digital landscape: AI, VR, and TikTok. And for those of us in education, we can attest to how TikTok especially has abbreviated attention spans ever further.
To address that challenge, Haidt has a website that promises to add to the conversation as new data emerges (see here).
- Beyond Anxiety
Publishers (not authors) determine titles. And it’s no wonder why Penguin chose this one: Anxiety is front and center, especially in Gen Z.
Still, I think we shortchange the conversation by making it primarily about “anxiety.” To view fretful nervousness as the main cost of The Great Rewiring is already to prioritize the individual, therapeutic self as most important: “‘x’ is bad because ‘x’ makes me anxious.” Yes. Indeed. But there are moral, spiritual, and intellectual problems that go far beyond that.
The Great Rewiring is also troubling because it makes us more shallow, stupid, sleepless, sexually stunted, spiritually vacuous, and incapable of normal human interactions. That matters too. But we’ll need a rubric larger than anxiety to appreciate it. (To Haidt’s credit, he works to balance this trend with sections on porn, video games, and a need for real-world play.)
I witness this cost weekly in university chapel services where it sometimes feels like almost every student around me is staring blankly into smartphones, “forever elsewhere.” The same distraction afflicts classrooms, dinner tables, date-nights, Bible studies, and literally every waking moment.
To be fair, we shouldn’t blame Gen Z entirely. For the first time in history, a generation was captured by powerful tech companies before puberty, and captivated by digital stimuli for which they had no preparation. It happened when they were too young to know it. But the costs go far beyond anxiety.
- A God-shaped Hole
Since Haidt is an atheist, it was interesting to find him affirming Pascal’s famous line about a God-shaped hole in every human heart. In his words, “if [that hole] doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.” And with the rise of smartphones and social media, “that garbage pump got 100 times more powerful in the 2010s.”
Haidt thus joins a line of recent atheistic thinkers (most notably, Richard Dawkins) who want to extol the virtues of religion, but without the actual “God part.” (On this point, Dawkins created quite a stir recently by espousing what he calls cultural Christianity [see here].)
I appreciate Haidt’s respectful posture toward people of faith. Indeed, he seems like exactly the sort of measured, thoughtful, humble public intellectual we badly need. Still, I find Nietzsche’s critique of this brand of godless religion and post-Christian morality to be far more persuasive than the appeals of Haidt or Dawkins to “our elevated nature” and “cultural Christianity.” For all his terrifying faults, Nietzsche rightly saw that we have no basis for prioritizing (or even discerning) “our elevated nature” once God is dead and gone.
- Collective Action
Let’s end with application.
Haidt admits that his four action steps are hard to follow alone. If your kid is the only member in a friend group without a smartphone, then that isolation may be almost as bad as the negative effects of being on the platforms. (I can relate to this personally after hearing a child lament that “My friends already think I’m weird for not having one!”)
For that reason, Haidt hopes parents can act collectively. I must say, I’m not optimistic.
But perhaps he’s right to hope for incremental, voluntary change. After all, lots of harmful adolescent activities—from teen smoking, to drunk driving, to kids without seatbelts—used to be completely normal. Now they’re not. We changed in response to evidence. So while these problems still occur, they are not nearly as common.
Maybe in fifty years we’ll look at big tech companies capturing childhood much as we now view Big Tobacco using cartoon characters and product placement during kids’ programming.
Still, how we urge collective action matters. I’m wary of parental shaming that makes others (moms especially) feel like they’re failing because they don’t parent like the latest guru says. Hence, I don’t want Haidt’s work to become the latest bludgeon in the ongoing Suburban pastime of “parenting as competitive sport.”
We need to be clear that phones are harming kids. But we need to communicate that reality with humility and grace.
One of the best parts of The Anxious Generation comes in the form of practical, positive steps to get kids out in the real world, doing things that kids used to do for generations—playing, learning skills, and building confidence apart from screens. After all, the real cost of digital distraction is not just anxiety—it’s all the stuff we miss out on while staring vacuously into a phone. Again,
“The cost of a thing is the amount of LIFE … required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
Grace and peace, JM
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