Ross Douthat blamed the cellphone. Icon of the young set, Taylor Lorenz pulled her head out from between someone’s legs to disagree.
Some might argue that there was no time in the history of mankind when there weren’t serious problems to be overcome, but rather than squarely face the problems and strive to overcome them, Lorenz suggests her generation has given up, accepted if not embraced failure, and has lost hope.
American teenagers, and especially American teenage girls, are increasingly miserable: more likely to entertain suicidal thoughts and act on them, more likely to experience depression, more likely to feel beset by “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” to quote a survey report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
One might consider whether the teens storming the beach at Normandy on D-Day had reason to be pessimistic, given the likelihood that they would be strafed by machine gun fire and die. Or whether the teens in the Warsaw ghetto would be shipped off to Auschwitz and gassed. Or redlining precluding their buying a home in the suburbs after they sacrificed to build the wealth needed to move on up. Or whether double digit mortgage rates would make home ownership beyond their reach when Jimmy Carter was president, as recession and competition meant their college degrees would no longer assure them a middle class future. Or…well, you get the picture. This generation isn’t the first to find hurdles in their path to happiness.
Adults in every era tend to fret about the condition of the youth relative to the good old days when we ourselves were young and full of promise. But in the debate about these psychological trends, the alarmists have the better of the argument: As cataloged by N.Y.U.’s Jonathan Haidt, a leading alarm sounder, in indicator after indicator you can see an inflection point somewhere in the early 2010s, where a darkening begins that remains.
Haidt thinks the key instigator is the rise of social media. Other causal candidates, enumerated by Derek Thompson of The Atlantic in his helpful essays on the subject, tend to have a stronger ideological valence: A liberal might point to teenage anxiety about climate change or school shootings or the rise of Donald Trump; a conservative might insist that it’s the baleful effects of identity politics or the isolation created by Covid-era lockdowns.
Douthat doesn’t argue that it was cellphones alone, but they’re a proxy for social media, and present the linchpin atop the myriad other factors that both happen simultaneously and happen generationally,
Overall I think if you’re looking for a single explanatory shock, Haidt’s camp has the better of the argument. The timing of the mental health trend fits the smartphone’s increasing substitution for in-person socialization, while the Great Awokening and Trumpism are more chronologically downstream. And the coronavirus era exacerbated the problem without being a decisive shift.
Of course, the tendency to look for a “single explanatory shock” because the confluence of a series of complex factors gives people a headache and makes for a lousy column might be part of the problem here.
Then data aside, having lived through the online revolution as both a participant and a parent, it seems obvious that social media has worsened the coming-of-age experience relative to the halcyon 1990s — creating a “sense of another consciousness that’s welded to your own consciousness and has its own say all the time,” as my fellow teenager-of-the-’90s Freddie deBoer wrote recently, which makes the general self-consciousness of adolescence feel much more brutal.
Back then, the perpetual question was whether social media was making people stupider. The obvious answer was yes and no, as people had access to every fact that ever existed at their fingertips, as well as every “fact” that never existed. But was that what is making young people miserable? Have they lost resilience, forsaken effort with the approval of their online “thought leaders” who reliably inform them that effort is too hard, not to mention racist, sexist and oppressive. Or is it the realization that they will never live up to the glorious pretense of the perfect wokesters, with anything less making them unworthy of existence?
Was the cellphone, and social media, the cause of their misery? Was it the mechanism by which the disease spread? Was it the laboring oar or the straw that broke their will to overcome societal problems? And if progress is good, why then are they so miserable?
*Modified Tuesday Talk rules are in effect. Govern yourselves accordingly.
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