The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood

boem@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 202 points – The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood
theatlantic.com

By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

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Well I could only read the first 2 paragraphs due to paywall, but it's definitely the phones causing all this and certainly not late stage capitalism sucking the energy and empathy out of everything around us right?

I think the two (phones and late stage capitalism) are working hand and glove to fuck up the kids. Us older folks had a much easier time pretending things were okay because our pockets weren’t constantly buzzing with instant feedback and we weren’t continually forced to consume traumatic and stressful content. Sure, we had plenty of other problems, and each generation is going to deal with their own fair share of shit, but I do think this cohort has a much harder job avoiding the ugliest sides of humanity.

But it was still bad then, you just didn't know it. It's good now we know how bad the world is, maybe bad for mental health, but good if you don't want to remain in your own bubble, unable to have any effect on the world. And individually, you still won't have an effect on the world, but the more people that know and care about issues, the more likely they are to get fixed. Something the internet can help with.

i remember the fall of Berlin wall, i was very young but i do remember. I remember the end of that either/or era

i remember internet going global and accessible. I remember the early internet that was about information wanting to be shared. Not the internet of globalSupermarket + gov.net + selfie

i remember discovering new and exciting sounds that weren't possible before sampler/sequencers

i remember scandals that actually ended political careers. I remember people disagreeing because their ideas of a better world was different and not because they hated people who think differently

it wasn't "still bad then", there was a sense of things getting "better". Can we say the same thing today? Who thinks the world will be a better place in 5 years or 10?

Thanks for the paywall warning. I've opened the page in Firefox, clicked on Toggle Reader View immediately and could read all text. Here the end of the article :

::: spoiler spoiler

We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. :::