What makes a book good? Good books fill gaps in knowledge, whether it be our own or society’s at large. Good books serve as a key to unlock the mystery of something that happened in history or is presently occurring in the world. There’s something satisfying about reading and thinking, “so that’s what’s happening.” But good books must also compel and prescribe action. No one wants a book full of statistics and trends that offers no advice on what to do with them. Perhaps such books are necessary, but they don’t fit my definition of a good book.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is a good book. It fills a gap in society’s knowledge by answering the question of what’s causing the rapid increase of mental illness among Gen Z. It also solves the mystery of how smart phones and social media are changing childhood and affecting our mental health. And it offers compelling calls to action to parents, schools, governments, and tech companies. It is an excellent book.

In The Anxious Generation, Haidt argues that “the great rewiring” of childhood is causing the current epidemic of mental illness among Generation Z (those born after 1997). This rewiring consists primarily of the the transition from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood that took place in the early 2010s.

Haidt presents his argument by citing numerous studies that reveal a significant increase in mental illness between the years of 2010 and 2015.[2] These are the years that smartphones and social media were adopted by Gen Z during the most formative years of their lives, roughly 9 to 15 years old.[3]

Ages 9 to 15 are the primary ages of cultural and social learning. Adolescents should spend these years in the real world of free play and face-to face relationships. Instead, Haidt notes that “Gen Z was the first generation to go through puberty and the sensitive period for cultural learning on smartphones.”

“Lessons learned in these years (9 to 15) are likely to imprint, or stick, more than other ages,” Haidt writes. What someone does and learns during these years can shape their thought patterns and behaviors for life. So what should young people do? In one of my favorite chapters in the book, What Children Need to Do in Childhood, Haidtargues that children and adolescents need to play.

Children learn through play to connect, synchronize, and take turns. They enjoy becoming attuned with each other as they play in rhythm (think of pat-a-cake, for example). Children are also antifragile. They need challenges of the real world to prepare them for the real world. These challenges are accomplished by play. Kids learn how to not get hurt by being exposed to situations in which they could get hurt. They learn to be independent by opportunities that provide independence.

Haidt writes regarding children, “For physical development they need physical play and physical risk-taking. For social development they need to learn the art of friendship, which is embodied; friends do things together, and as children they touch, hug, and wrestle.” Mistakes are low cost and can be easily rectified by an apology, a handshake, and a return to play. In contrast, when young people move their lives online, their relationships become disembodied and easily disposable. And even the smallest mistake can be grave on platforms where content can live forever and where cancel culture stands ready to condemn the next offender.

Not only does a phone-based childhood take away the time and opportunity needed for a play-based childhood, it also inflicts four unique harms on young people: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. It robs children of healthy social opportunities and good sleep while decreasing their attention span and fostering social media addiction.

Several of these effects did not come as a surprise. Haidt highlights how social media companies intentionally used neuroscience and behaviorist techniques to create the most addictive apps possible. In one internal presentation that was leaked by a former employee, Facebook details how they were capitalizing on vulnerabilities in adolescent brains.[4]

The goal of Facebook and other social media companies was to continually increase the time spent on the app in order to monetize attention and sell data to advertisers.[5] Unfortunately, they succeeded, with most members of Gen Z spending more than seven hours a day on their phones. These companies intentionally designed their apps to cause dopamine releases on a variable schedule to increase time on the app and foster addiction. Unfortunately, the symptoms of withdrawal from such an addiction (when teens spend time away from their phones, for example) include anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.[6]

Haidt spends a considerable amount of time discussing how social media affects the cultural learning of adolescents. He highlights two biases, conformity bias and prestige bias, that are integral components of cultural learning. Teens naturally conform to what they see everyone else doing, and once childhood becomes phone-based, young people conform to what they see everyone else doing in the virtual world. They also pattern their thoughts and behaviors after those who have achieved prestige in the virtual world (Haidt notes prestigious users like Kim Kardashian, for example).

Consider the gravity of this issue. Instead of young people conforming their thoughts, actions, and identities to the embodied family, friends, and communities in which they live (those who love them), they conform their lives to disembodied influencers chosen by social media algorithms that typically reward extreme and unconventional behavior (people who could care less about them).

Spending this period of cultural learning on social media is much more harmful to girls than it is to boys, Haidt argues. They are more affected by visual social comparison and perfectionism, more prone to relational aggression, are more open to sharing harmful emotions and mental disorders that negatively affect others, and are  more vulnerable to men who behave inappropriately toward them while avoiding accountability.

Boys are not unaffected, though. They too became more depressed and anxious in the early 2010s and are more at risk of “failing to launch” now than ever. Once boys moved their social lives online, they began engage in free play with each other, and especially in risky activities, less-often. They, like girls, sacrificed the quality of their friendships in the real world for a perceived quantity of relationships online. The unlimited access to hardcore pornography and addictive video games also made it easier for boys to “retreat to their bedrooms rather than doing the hard work of maturing in the real world.” Why take the risk of asking a girl out if you can watch pornography alone in your bedroom? You get the idea.

Enough of the bad news. What can we do about it? Haidt offers several solutions for parents, schools, and governments. He has chapters on each of these, and in my opinion, this is where his book shines. The reader arrives at the “advice” section fully convinced of the problem and hungry for solutions, and Haidt has countless realistic and achievable propositions.

Haidt distills his recommendations into four primary solutions. (1) No smartphones before high school, (2) No social media before 16, (3) Phone-free schools, and (4) Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.

I found Haidt’s chapter on Spiritual Elevation and Degradation to be the most helpful. It applies to everyone. In it, Haidt argues that the phone-based life typically pulls people downward spiritually: it changes the way we think, feel, judge, and relate to each other, and not for the better. Haidt calls this spiritual degradation.[7]

In contrast, spiritual elevation lifts us up. It happens when people see morally beautiful actions, come together for a common purpose, or experience awe in nature.

I found this chapter intriguing, especially coming from Haidt’s self-professed atheism. He admits that many religions have powerful antidotes to the depressing and anxiety-producing phone-based life in their beliefs and practices. For example, he encourages his readers to practice embodiment by sharing spaces of sacredness together, and offers regularly attending places of worship as a family as a suggestion.

Haidt also recommends taking time to pray, meditate, and sit in silence. “The phone-based life makes it difficult for people to be fully present with others when they are with others, and to sit silently with themselves when they are alone. If we want to experience stillness and silence, and if we want to develop focus and a sense of unified consciousness, we must reduce the flow of stimulation into our eyes and ears.”[8]

Haidt contends that we must transcend ourselves and work to become others-focused if we want to escape the religion of self-ism promoted by the phone-based life. As Paul says in Philippians 2:3, we must “count others as more significant than ourselves.” Once again, Haidt prescribes prayer, meditation, and mindfulness to help achieve this goal. These things help keep our minds free of the “bedevilments” that are inherent to social media that train us to think contrary to the world’s wisdom traditions: “think about yourself first; be materialistic, judgmental, boastful, and petty; seek glory as quantified by likes and followers.”[9]

Haidt gives another example by referencing Jesus’ instruction to be careful of whom and how we judge in the Sermon on the Mount. He writes, “In my 35 years of studying moral psychology, I have come to see this as one of humanity’s greatest problems: we are too quick to anger and too slow to forgive.” Haidt is right; and he is right to see that Jesus has the answer, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For the judgment you give will be the judgment you get, and the measure you give will be the measure you get” (Matthew 7:1-2).

Haidt (accurately) explains Jesus’ words as teaching us to “judge thoughtfully, and to be aware of using different standards for others than we use for ourselves.”[10] And he notes, “social media trains us to do the opposite, it encourages us to make rapid public judgments with little concern for the humanity of those we criticize, no knowledge of the context in which they acted, and no awareness that we have often done the very thing for which we are publicly shaming them.”[11]

Haidt concludes this chapter by describing social media as a disease of the mind and prescribes spiritual virtues such as forgiveness, grace, and love as the cure.[12]As a Christian, I couldn’t agree more. I have experienced that social media does not encourage the virtues of forgiveness, grace, and love in my life. Rather, it tempts me to judge, compare, envy, critique, and boast. It is a disease of the mind. On the contrary, I have felt the closest to God (what Haidt would call spiritual elevation) when I have worshipped Him in corporate settings, experienced awe in nature, or “felt” His presence in the stillness of prayer.

There’s so much more that I could write- but in our attention-fragmented world I know that many of my readers will not have even made it this far. So if you have- kudos to you! Thank you for reading. Let me conclude with a simple recommendation: read this book. Especially if you have kids; it has changed the way I think about their childhood, especially with regard to their need for free-play and increased independence.[13]

But even if you don’t have kids: read it. All of us can play a role in recapturing the play-based childhood for the next generation. And all of us can learn the value in transcending ourselves and breaking the shackles of the phone-based life that quickly enslaved us and continues to produce symptoms of mental illness in us as well. Thankfully, there is a way out. And thankfully, Haidt has given it to us.

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[1] I am discussing non-fiction here. But I do think the same could apply to fiction: it fills a perceived gap in knowledge or experience, it unlocks a mystery (often to a story), and compels action.

[2] These markers of illness are not limited to self-reports of anxiety or depression, they also include hospitalizations  for self-harm and suicide.

[3] Smart phones and social media were rapidly incorporated into most American’s lives in 2010.

[4] Haidt, The Anxious Generation, 133.

[5] Including specific triggers for young people, see Haidt, 131.

[6] Ibid., 140.

[7] Interestingly enough, Haidt is using spiritual language even though he is a professed atheist. It is almost as if he can sense that there is a spiritual battle going on.

[8] Ibid., 206.

[9] Ibid., 209.

[10] Ibid., 210. Kudos to Haidt here on correctly interpreting this passage. Many Christians misunderstand Jesus’ words to mean that they should never judge anything or anyone.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid., 211.

[13] I will probably write more on this in the future.