At the time of this writing, Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation has sold over 2 million copies, been translated into over 40 languages, and spent an entire year amongst the top spots of the New York Times Bestseller list.

But perhaps more impressively, it has arguably led to direct political action: Australia has banned social media for children under 16 and similar laws are in the works in Denmark, France, Indonesia, and Spain, with a few more countries considering legislation.

While significant policy action has yet to occur in the United States, the book should be praised for achieving the increasingly rare accomplishment of being something that both sides of the political aisle can agree upon. As of this writing, the only other thing that shares this distinction is the superiority of a chicken parm hero.

The central claim of The Anxious Generation is that the introduction of smartphones caused a “great rewiring” that fundamentally changed the landscape of childhood, and completed the decades-long transition from a “play-based” childhood to a “phone-based” childhood. The book explains how we arrived at the current moment, explores the many negative effects of a phone-based childhood, and dissects why overprotection in the real world coupled with under-protection in the online world has created a particularly harmful dynamic.

The Anxious Generation is a must-read for any parent. While it’s technically a story about what happened to GenZ, its sleight of hand is that it’s really a book about all of us and the type of society we want to live in.

Here are some takeaways that I found particularly compelling:

Haidt puts into words something that I think many of us feel when doomscrolling, outsourcing meaning to likes, and performing our lives satisfy an algorithm.

He argues that that the phone-based life produces spiritual degradation.

Using graphs and social science research that I won’t replicate here, he contends that there are certain things in life that pull us “upward” (virtuous actions, great art, a sacred experience) and other things pull us “downward” (nasty behavior, disgusting actions, feelings of degradation).

He discusses how a phone-based life blocks or counteracts six time-tested spiritual practices: sacredness; embodiment; stillness, silence, and focus; self-transcendence; being slow to anger and quick to forgive, and finding awe in nature.

We seem to be collectively wondering why we’re so lost, why people are suddenly unable to talk to each other, and why the world seems like a less forgiving, me-first place. Substituting these time-tested spiritual practices for TikTok dances feels like a decent chunk of this explanatory pie.

Haidt devotes an entire chapter on why social media is particularly harmful to teenage girls. He says:

“On of the most prototypical platforms, like Instagram, users post content—often about themselves—and then wait for the judgements and comments of others.”

I had never explicitly thought about this way, but it’s something we all know. Comments—whether you’re an eighth grade girl particularly susceptible to social comparison or a 38 year-old sharing some sort of vulnerability—comments are really just judgements.

At my old job, I’d often take a mid-afternoon break with a colleague. When it was nice out we’d walk all around the sun-deprived financial district, and I’d typically feel restored enough to get through the rest of the day. When it was rainy, we sat in the break room.

I remember a few occasions where we spent the whole 10-15 minutes in the break room just sitting on our phones alone, saying nothing to each other. At some point I became aware of this and became profoundly sad. Not so much because we were “phubbing” each other, but because I internalized that this was the way we all had decided to go as a society.

When I was in college, there was a certain type of person who never seemed content to be at the party or bar we were currently at. They’d always be BBMing about where to go to next.

This is what we all do now, with every moment. As the media scholar Sherry Turkle denotes in her book Reclaiming Conversation, we are forever elsewhere.

Anyone serious about managing their time has had that moment where they realize that if they didn’t spend 2 hours per day on social media, they’d be able to train for that half marathon/learn spanish/get a million more things done at work.

For kids, the opportunity cost of phone use is particularly glaring. Two hours per day is a much larger percentage of their entire existence, at a period in their lives in which their brains are making important neural connections.

Says Haidt, “…the addictive design of these platforms reduces the time available for face-to-face play in the real world. The reduction is so severe that we might refer to smartphones and tablets in the hands of children as experience blockers. Of course, a smartphone opens up a world of new possible experiences…but this happens at the cost of reducing the kinds of experiences humans evolved for and that they must have in abundance to become socially functional adults.”

Neighborhood games of capture the flag in which bonds, crushes, and interpersonal skills are developed appear to be a thing of the past. So are late night chats in the dorm room about the meaning of life. All of this is now just sitting around on a phone, getting more and more depressed and anxious.

We’ve all heard about the tech executives who insist upon sending their kids to phone free schools. We also intuitively understand how terrible the COVID lockdowns were for children, even if we don’t yet fully understand its long-term effects on learning.

Haidt explains that the research indicates that there is a new digital divide emerging:

“Studies show that lower-income, Black, and Latino children put in more screen time and have less supervision of their electronic lives, on average, than children from wealthy families and white families (Across the board, children in single-parent households have more unsupervised screen time.) This suggests that smartphones are exacerbating educational inequality by both social class and race. The “digital divide” is no longer that poor kids and racial minorities have less access to the internet, as was feared in the early 2000s; it is now that they have less protection from it.”

Sixteen year-olds used to have jobs as fry cooks and servers. While there are of course many who still do, some trends in the teen labor force indicate that there are less teens engaged in the classic summer job. Part of this can be explained by the extracurricular/intensive parenting arms race, but I’d also argue that many of these teens already have jobs as full-time brand managers.

Haidt notes that by 2014, nearly a third of teen girls were spending over 20 hours a week on social media sites, posting and consuming content. As we all know, many of these sites are our “digital resumes,” painstakingly curated versions of ourselves where one wrong move can cost you dearly.

There’s a famous line in Harry Potter where Hermione chastises Harry and Ron for a particularly reckless endeavor, telling them “we could have been killed…or worse, expelled.” I think this line resonates even more these days when applied to the world of social media. For adolescents, social expulsion is often a fate worse than death.

One of my wife’s friends from college is from England but had spent her high school years in America, has a British accent. Her younger sister has an American accent. I always found this intriguing; clearly this wasn’t some sort of affect, but rather had some sort of rational explanation.

Apparently, the science indicates that this is indeed “a thing”. Just as young children have a much better grasp of learning languages, research indicates that there is a “sensitive period of cultural learning” in which kids 12 or younger typically don’t develop and accent, while kids 14 or older typically maintain it.

Research also indicates that there may be a.highly critical period of cultural learning between the ages of 9-15 in which certain lessons and identities formed during these ages are more sticky and have a greater imprint on the development of self. I’m guessing this is partly why I still listen to Blink-182 all of the time, and can tell you the entire roster of half of professional sports teams from 2002.

As Haidt notes, this sensitive period is also when most tweens and teens get their first smartphone and become fully acculturated into online life. Taking all of these factors together, it’s as if we’re willingly enabling teens to form permanent internet brain.

Says Haidt:

“So what happens to American children who generally get their first smartphone around the age of 11 and then get socialized into the cultures of Instagram, TikTok, video games, and online life for the rest of their teen years?…in a phone-based childhood, children are plunged into a whirlpool of adult content and experiences that arrive in no particular order. Identity, selfhood, emotions, and relationships will all be different if they develop online rather than in real life. What gets rewarded or punished, how deep friendships become, and above all what is desriebale—all of these will be determined by the thousands of posts, comments, and ratings that a child sees each week.”

**

If you haven’t yet read the book, I’d encourage you to buy it. Or if you prefer to read books by listening to podcasts that basically tell you the main stuff of a book, he’s been everywhere across the political and cultural spectrum; from Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson to Ezra Klein and Michelle Obama, to Dr. Becky, Andrew Huberman, and a million other places. I’d link them all here but that seems annoying. You know how to forage.

As always, thanks for reading.

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ALSO. This is the first installment of a possibly recurring series in which I read a book that is somewhat related to parenting, being a dad, etc., and then write about it. If you have a book you’d want me to cover, leave a comment or send me a message.