The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of ChildhoodIs Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

The Anxious Generation:
How the Great Rewiring of Childhood
Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
with
Professor Jonathan Haidt
Author and Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University's Stern School of Business
In Conversation with
David Goodhart
Head of Demography, Immigration and Integration,
Policy Exchange
--
After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents in many countries around the world deteriorated suddenly in the early 2010s. Why have rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide risen so sharply, more than doubling in many cases?
In this book, Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the decline of free-play in childhood and the rise of smartphone usage among adolescents are the twin sources of increased mental distress among teenagers. Grounded in ancient wisdom and packed full of cutting-edge science, this eye-opening book is a life raft and a powerful call-to-arms, offering practical advice for parents, schools, governments, and teens themselves.

[@PentUpPentatonics]

I think it goes deeper than social media. It is the attention economy itself.
It should never have been legal in the first place to sell the data of a user to advertisers. Every issue stems from that in my opinion. With fierce competition, in order to be a “successful” app you must lock the user into an addiction cycle that exploits inherent weaknesses in our brains to keep us engaged and harvest our data.
I shudder to think what powerful AI will do down the line to keep us engaged when we’re already slaves to “dumb” algorithms.
On a side note, something I find very sinister about the online gaming aspect is that modern games don’t seem to allow multiple children to play together in front of the same screen. They need to go home to separate houses in order to play together.

[@melindanoone3293]

Would we let a 12 year old drive a car, wield a knife or handle a high calibre gun ?