Taking The Anxious Generation Further

In her recent review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, Claire Morell writes that “the tide is finally turning” when it comes to children, smartphones, and social media. Thanks in large part to Haidt’s work, concerted efforts are being made to reclaim childhood from the pull of the screen.

This turning of the tide is especially evident when it comes to smartphones in schools. Across the country, more and more individual schools and school districts have introduced phone-free or phone-minimal policies and are already seeing kids come alive again. And now, several states are instituting similar statewide policies in their schools, though actual implementation and enforcement vary widely from school to school or district to district.

These are wonderful strides. But I wonder how much impact they will have if Haidt’s argument ends up being truncated into “don’t let me see your smartphone during the school day.” Or if the wider implications of Haidt’s argument are ignored in other realms of life. Morell agrees: “I appreciate the maximalist position that Haidt has taken on schools and only wish he had extended that maximalist approach to families as well.” She goes on to say, “If these technologies are as bad as Haidt shows us they are, then parents should take a maximalist approach to them and keep both smartphones and social media out of childhood entirely.”

I’d like to explore where I think Haidt’s arguments could fruitfully lead and suggest some places where he is hesitant to go. Specifically, I’d like to apply Haidt’s framework to the context of personal and family life.

Understanding Haidt’s Argument

Haidt coins the term the “Great Rewiring” to refer to the tectonic shift from what he calls a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood.” Haidt argues that this “profound transformation of human consciousness and relationships . . . occurred, for American teens, between 2010 and 2015,” when smartphones became their ubiquitous possession.

I would have to agree. I was a high school teacher in the public school system on both sides of that fateful transition, and the smartphone drastically changed the nature of the classroom and the type of challenges students—and teachers—faced. (You can read what I did about it several years ago here. Spoiler: I took their phones and put them in a closet before that practice became trendy.)

Haidt goes on to document how these changes are affecting boys and girls differently, which is a very helpful and insightful portion of the book. For boys, the digital world has been a gateway to things like pornography and gaming, which Haidt points out are both environments of artificial risk and conquest. These digital worlds simulate what young men crave, but don’t provide the real-world benefits, which leads to the downward cycle so common for boys today. And for girls, the digital habitat has been oriented more around social comparison and appearance. As with boys, there is a real human need and desire that begs to be met, and the internet provides an alluring placebo that turns out to be poison, leading to the common challenges girls face today.

Haidt summarizes: 

Boys and girls have taken different paths through the Great Rewiring, yet somehow, they have ended up in the same pit, where many are drowning in anomie and despair. It is very difficult to construct a meaningful life on one’s own, drifting through multiple disembodied networks.

In the case of both boys and girls, certain aspects of the digital environment make it antithetical to human flourishing. And Haidt provides one of the most concise and persuasive frameworks for what really constitutes the central difference between “real life” and “virtual life,” and why it really makes such an impact on our well-being. It is not just being old-fashioned to recognize that something significant changes for humans when we take our lives online and live through a glass glow-box. Such a recognition is entirely reasonable and truthful—and supported by the evidence. Haidt offers four points of comparison that capture precisely why humans struggle online and show how it’s not what we’re designed for. Haidt explains:

When I talk about the “real world,” I am referring to relationships and social interactions characterized by four features that have been typical for millions of years:

1.     They are embodied, meaning that we use our bodies to communicate, we are conscious of the bodies of others, and we respond to the bodies of others both consciously and unconsciously.

2.     They are synchronous, which means they are happening at the same time, with subtle cues about timing and turn taking.

3.     They involve primarily one-to-one or one-to-several communication, with only one interaction happening at a given moment.

4.     They take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen.

These are the normative ways humans are designed to build relationships and in which they most likely flourish. And, Haidt argues, the digital habitat works in the exact opposite direction:

In contrast, when I talk about the “virtual world,” I am referring to relationships and interactions characterized by four features that have been typical for just a few decades:

1.     They are disembodied, meaning that no body is needed, just language. Partners could be (and already are) artificial intelligences (AIs).

2.     They are heavily asynchronous, happening via text-based posts and comments. (A video call is different; it is synchronous.)

3.     They involve a substantial number of one-to-many communications, broadcasting to a potentially vast audience. Multiple interactions can be happening in parallel.

4.     They take place within communities that have a low bar for entry and exit, so people can block others or just quit when they are not pleased. Communities tend to be short-lived, and relationships are often disposable.

As Haidt puts his finger on these four central differences, the puzzle pieces start to fit together as to why the digital world affects us the way it does. It goes against the grain of our natural embodied and relational nature. And with this framework in place, we can better explore its implications and extend it into other areas of life.

Extending Haidt’s Argument: Beyond Phones, Schools, and Social Media

There is no doubt that Haidt provides a research-backed framework for us all to better understand what “phone-based” living is actually doing to us. In response, Haidt advances what he calls four foundational reforms:

1.     No smartphones before high school,

2.     No social media before the age of sixteen,

3.     Phone-free schools, and

4.     Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.

These are great suggestions, and they are already having a significant impact across the country, especially in schools. But if we prune Haidt’s book down to these four action items, we’ve missed the larger point. Yes, taking these four steps may help reclaim childhood. But this is not just a childhood problem; this is a human problem. 

We must employ Haidt’s logic as we consider the broader effects of our technological environment. Robin Phillips and I take up these related questions and issues in Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine. For example, if we are taking the step to ban cell phones in schools, what about technologically mediated classrooms with laptops or iPads for every student? And what about habits and practices in our homes or churches? We also address the growing role of AI (artificial intelligence) and AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality) in our lives. Haidt’s book also bumps up against questions of spirituality and religion without providing a satisfying answer. Robin and I dive into this issue headfirst and offer a way forward with a philosophy of technology anchored in classical and Christian thought, the sacramental life of the Church, and the rich tradition of liberal learning.

The detrimental effects of a phone-based childhood are getting more difficult to deny. Haidt’s work has caused many individuals, families—even whole school districts and state governments—to take this issue seriously and act. For that, we all should be grateful. But there is more left to be said and done. Phone-based, digitally mediated living impacts all of us—in our habits and lifestyles and in how we think about ourselves, our work, one another, and our world. The Machine becomes the template for the human. Wendell Berry warned of this decades ago when he wrote: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

What does Berry mean by “wish”? It seems to me that he is pointing toward our desires and affections and what we deem most valuable, lovely, and worthwhile. When our lives are ordered toward the machine—or even as a machine—our desires and affections are misplaced and distorted, settling on the second-rate thrills of what Haidt calls the “virtual world.” To counteract such deforming influences, we can tap into the traditional twofold way human desires and affections are reordered toward proper ends. First, we need boundaries and limits, including ways to diminish those aspects of technology that are dehumanizing and addictive. But second, our hearts need to be stirred by a more beautiful vision than what the technocratic world can offer. 

This is not just about saying no to smartphones or screens; it is also about finding ways to make them less alluring in the first place. And that takes work in refining our tastes and desires toward what is truly beautiful (art, music, literature, nature, craftsmanship). It takes work to slow down and choose the embodied relational path of more resistance, but it yields more lasting rewards. 

For example, we might start by changing the default settings of our surroundings. That is, instead of having screens prominently placed within a room or always at your hip, insert substitutes: good books, board games, and musical instruments. If we make these a part of our everyday environments, it will be easier to default to those activities rather than turning to screens. 

Second, we can practice a form of technological asceticism: to use a perhaps more familiar analogy, think of how the practice of fasting develops one’s strength of will and resolve, or how the self-discipline of exercise develops a sense of confidence and grit. Just as the spiritual life is punctuated by times of fasting and feasting, so, too, our technological habits can be characterized by the type of balance that emerges from self-discipline. Such practices are not primarily negative, but are ultimately a means to a higher end, namely, connecting to what is good, true, and beautiful.

Finally, in our digital age, the embodied service of others is powerful and profoundly countercultural. If we want to return technology to a more tempered, moderate place, we might start by practicing hospitality in our homes. God himself has woven hospitality and fellowship into the very fabric of the cosmos, and we can practice it as a way to ensconce ourselves in the reality of the embodied, physical, relational world.

Haidt’s work points us toward reclaiming childhood. Let’s go further and reclaim our humanity. Doing so requires conviviality and gratitude, hospitality and physicality. It requires embracing the goodness of human embodiment and physical limits. It requires risk and vulnerability, friction and interdependence. But the beauty and power of such a vision, difficult and messy though it is, just might cause us, as Berry put it, to wish to live as creatures once again.

Image by AnnaStills and licensed via Adobe Stock.