He visited Princeton University this month to deliver a talk entitled "Far Beyond Mental Health: What the New Phone-Based Life is Doing to Human Development, Social Capital, and Democracy."
According to Haidt, as the power and appeal of the cellphone has increased, young brains in particular have grown around it as a tree's trunk and roots might grow around a rock or a gravestone. This growing attachment, despite considerable benefits, has spawned a long list of maladies, beginning most visibly with pinky fingers deformed from constantly grasping a phone. Myopia has become more prevalent as people spend more time indoors, staring at their screens.
At the same time, parents perceiving a more dangerous world, have deprived their kids of the chance to explore the world on their own. Largely limited to adult-supervised activities, kids don't learn self-government. As neighborhood connections have broken down, phones have delivered increasingly addictive content, calculated to keep kids continually online. Suicides among girls have increased. Boys interact primarily through their computers, spending hours on customized video gaming maximally experienced on their own computers at home. Though it can be potentially heartening that accidents and injuries have dropped among young people, it also points to a drop in physical activity and risk-taking that are an important part of growing up.
Young people trapped in cellphone use:
Significantly, surveys show that youth are not necessarily enamored with this constant attention to the screen, but say instead that they are glued to their phones because everyone else is. To put the phone down is to risk social isolation and diminishment.
At one point, citing young men of the past who made transformative contributions to society in their 20s--Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg--Haight asked the audience for names of young people who have proved transformative more recently, excluding the music world. Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai were mentioned, but no young men, and no one outside of advocacy. His suggestion is that young people's attention is now largely consumed by the phone, leaving no time for the mind to wander and mull things over.
Starting around 2012, Haidt's collection of data shows, youth became increasingly trapped--in barren neighborhoods, by their own and their parents' perceptions of lurking dangers, in schools running lockdown drills due to mass shootings, and most of all by increasingly sophisticated phones and software calculated to suck them in and keep them fixated on the screen. Internal communications reveal that tech companies learned early on the physiology of how to manipulate phone users, providing dopamine-inducing reward with every click.
A second, even more widespread form of entrapment:
Unmentioned in the talk is a strong parallel here with another form of entrapment that affects people of all ages. We are all trapped in a fossil fuel economy. The drop in happiness among youth coincides with increasing awareness that each one of us contributes in a small but measurable way to the destabilization of the earth's climate. Here, too, the social pressure to participate in this collective rush towards dystopia is overwhelming. Advertisements urge us to buy more, drive bigger cars, fly to appealing destinations. Our primary role in society, we are constantly being told, is to seek fulfillment and happiness through consumption. As with the youth locked onto their phones by social pressure, all of us risk social isolation and diminishment if we unilaterally withdraw from a fossil fuel-dependent lifestyle. Here, too, internal communications in fossil fuel companies have revealed efforts to keep us addicted to their products, regardless of consequence.
Though fossil fuels have enabled us in many ways, the mobility and comfort they make possible has often kept us isolated in our cars and homes. Machine-scaled development spreads us out in barren subdivisions. Unable to get anywhere or see a friend without the assistance of a parent and a machine, kids in particular have been disempowered.
Also unmentioned in the talk, nature, once a playground and source of refuge and endless fascination for childhood, has changed as well. What woodlands and fields remain have become impoverished and tangled with the dense, thorny growth of invasive species. Exploration carries the risk of tick borne disease.
Haidt cited evidence that those of a more liberal persuasion, and/or lacking in religion, have proved more prone to unhappiness. He quotes about the hole in our hearts that can only be filled by God. I believe he said that past efforts to replace religion with various forms of spirituality lacking God have not been very successful. Though an atheist, Haidt takes his kids to the synagogue, and encouraged the audience to explore the role religion could play in bringing solace in troubled times.
At this point in an otherwise highly convincing talk, I grew skeptical. Conservatism in many ways has devolved into illusion and irresponsibility. Unchastened by truth and evidence, denying our collective impact on the climate, ignoring massive deficits caused by tax cuts, coddling its own while projecting harsh criticism outward, it excuses its adherents from caring about our collective fate and the plight of others. Conservative happiness appears dependent on being gaslit and let off the hook.
Religion can foster a similarly dubious happiness, believing God has a plan that will ultimately supersede current earthly suffering. Embedded in denial and passivity is a deeply pessimistic view that we cannot understand nor solve society's problems. A liberal, seeking happiness on earth, feels trapped in a political climate where we are free to collectively create problems, while political sabotage prevents us from collectively solving them.
Haidt has a solution, however, at least for kids trapped in social media: phone-free schools, no smartphone until highschool, no social media until age 16, and encourage real-world independence and play. That might help youth trapped in social media, but all of us will remain trapped in a society destabilized by our machines' emissions and a seemingly uncontrollable proliferation of lies, while collective action to solve problems is stymied.
It's a sign of just how rapidly our world is unraveling that the title of Haidt's lecture, advertised as "Far Beyond Mental Health," had become the more deeply urgent "Far More Than Mental Illness" by the time he showed up to deliver it.Robert George (on the left in the photo) promotes a diversity of views on campus, which is a fine sentiment, but ten years ago, when he hosted columnist George Will, that promotion of diverse views was used as an excuse to deny and delay while climate destabilization continued unchecked.
Haidt seems optimistic that the case he and others are making about smartphones and social media will lead to action. We've seen, though, how even overwhelming evidence of climate change's perils can be resisted and denied. I grew up in an era of free-range childhoods, exploring nature and playing pickup games with no grownups in sight. It was a time when facts still mattered. We enjoyed the comforts and mobility of fossil fuels without the knowledge of the havoc they ultimately wreak. Technological innovation has brought new freedoms, and yet we and kids especially are increasingly trapped, indoors, in social media, in ideological echo chambers, in a fossil fuel economy, with resistance to collective solutions deeply entrenched.