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 would preclude 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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Whining has always been a human problem, only now online you can find almost unlimited people to whine with you. For young people that’s very seductive.
We should see some new songs out of this trend. Maybe titles like, “Haidt the Game, not the Players” or “The Man who Shot Ideological Valence.”
R.I.P., Burt Bacharach.
Blind man says elephant is shaped like a rope after investigating tail thoroughly. Other blind men disagree, because reasons. Are they wrong because they are blind, weak, or woke?
The answer is yet another Rorschach test, revealing nothing substantial about the relationship between causes and effects, instead revealing far more about the person responding.
Your answer feels too hopeless. Are you revealing that you are miserable?
Well, when teens were storming the beaches at Normandy, we had leaders like FDR. The USS Texas and some other old battleships were providing some respectable fire support, and the defenders were caught by surprise. As it turned out, the odds went pretty well for an enterprise of that scale.
Teens look around now to see that we have the likes of Trumps and Bidens, and two cocked-up cesspools of incompetence and corruption that refuse to present anyone better. Plus, the prevailing view is that success is shameful (except when achieved by the black, Islamic, LGBTQ, disabled, sexual assault survivors who deserve it). The rest of the teens have to fail miserably to be morally and socially correct, and they probably see that the way is laid out for them. Maybe they could persevere with some mental toughness, but that is outmoded, and empathy is unlikely to work as well. So, the future is bleak, and they aren’t up to the challenge. Nothing to do but man the lifeboats and sound the retreat.
Late stage capitalism is pseudo intellectual crap that has no meaning in reality. If imbalances are created you adjust.
There’s nothing better to change to except for a system that has oppressed and failed time and time again.
And you’re right, we’ve been through worse times as a country and a species. People like Lorenz have no historical understanding to draw from.
What do you mean by “you adjust”? And for that matter, what “imbalances”?
Monopolies and too much imbalance as to how resources are being developed and their ownership is spread. Societies have always adjusted when things get out of whack, with where that point is will be decided by society at large.
‘Adjusted.’ That’s a gentle way of putting it. Given the likely trend on the price of wheat this year due to the war in Ukraine, now would be an appropriate time to brush up on James C. Davies’ J-curve hypothesis.
That sounds a little alarmist but I don’t completely disagree. Discontent has been building among the normals for quite some time after going on 30 years of things being done by the “elites” that are harmful to the regulars. I don’t know but it’s possible that stuff like Trump and Brexit are symptoms of that.
I claiming that this is all correct, but I do know that we’re not immune from history. Revolts have happened before and the chances of it are nonzero.
Was the cellphone, and social media, the cause of their misery?
Yes, in part. Today’s kids (20-30s) have no heroes. Fantasy is their only friend. Their hobbies, listed on their social media profiles, include “gamer”. Perhaps better stated is that parents gave up on their kids, placed their needs to have their kids be their “friends” blithely unaware that theirs was to be parent. They should have had friends and been fully functioning, mature adults when they had kids. Thus kids having kids was doomed to fail. I see these kids at Golds Gym, on their smart phones, occupying benches and weight lifting machines, doing what gamers do: living in fantasy, in a gym crowded with adults who had Frank Zane, Franco Columbu, Steve Reeves, Chris Dickerson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, et al as heroes. Some of us had Catholic Saints as heroes! That would be a “heresy” today by the Church of Woke.
Denizens of Twitter have estimated Ms. Lorenz’s age to be as much as 60. It is difficult to accurately estimate her age because she uses a dated picture in her header, and she suffers from multiple unspecified disabilities.
I consider this post to be a form of Internet elder abuse. (Clap!) Do (Clap!) Better (Clap!) Mr. (Clap!) Greenfield (Clap!).
(Jazz Hands)
Per Wikipedia: According to Politico, Lorenz’s birthday is October 21. In February 2016, CBS News stated that she was 30, in August 2018 – prior to her employment with the newspaper – The New York Times stated that her age was 31, and in September 2020, Fortune listed her age as 35.
Also: In a 2022 interview with Zagat, Lorenz identified herself as vegan. In an interview with MSNBC, Lorenz said that she has “severe PTSD” from experiencing online harassment.
Well look at that. A blue hair who brags about wristwatches can’t grasp the grim nature of our current oligarchy. Scott’s breadth of talent allows him to serve as both a legend and a cliche.
“Not to be a doomer but u have to be delusional to look at life in our country rn and have any amt of hope or optimism”
– late stage capitalist hellscape spokesperson
If this is what social media gets us, imagine the horrors that virtual reality will bring. A Book of Revelation for our time but plastered with trendy social justice platitudes and messianic corporate branding.
With SHG’s indulgence I suggest “Happy Being Miserable” by the Leningrad Cowboys as the anthem of the TikTok generation
youtu.be/jaU1OVs1fP4
I do get the feeling that the unnatural beauty of Instagram filters and the global reach of Twitter dogpiles does make it harder to be a teen. My son is very happy limiting his social media to Discord and Google Chat.
The great irony is, Ross and Taylor are both right. The average living teenager can access more information with a mobile device in ten minutes than any person who lived during 99% of human history could access in their entire lives. Even if 99% of what these kids these days see is memes, cats, and disinformation designed to trick everyone into believing the status quo is the best we can do, that still leaves plenty of data to remind all of us normies that unless we are incredibly rich, we’re fucked. And it doesn’t matter if that claim is factual. For most people qualified to carry a gun, perception is reality -and that’s a very real problem.
One thing that can be laid at the feet of social media/the cellphone is that, when I was a teenager just over a decade ago, it was already a struggle enough fitting somewhere in with a high school class of a couple hundred people, being judged by people who didn’t know you well, finding your real friends, bullying, etc. It’s not hard to see that this phenomenon is much more difficult to deal with when your “peer group” is no longer the kids at your high school (who even if you hate, you will someday leave behind at graduation), but tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of teens in America and around the world who you will never be able to get away from, in addition to 20something and even 30something adults (like Miss Lorenz) who are very invested in whatever is happening on TikTok or Instagram. The privacy bubble which we used to afford teenagers, to allow them room to grow, is gone.
“…pulled her head out from between someone’s legs…”
Just so you know, this did not go unnoticed (*even if I am more of a lesbian than Lorenz).
“This generation isn’t the first to find hurdles in their path to happiness.”
Absolutely not. And they have some serious structural challenges ahead of them. But screen hypnosis and social media, unlike double digit inflation or incoming machine gun fire, are completely within their control.
Cellphones are to blame in the sense they enable effortless (pseudo-)connection and we’re far too connected to each other in a way we did not evolve to be. We’re supposed to be able to get away from bullies for a weekend and recontextualize the experience, crawl home in shame after a social faux pas and comfort our egos, disconnect from our peers and explore
different facets of our personalities with family, loved ones, or alone. In a sense that is gone from our lives now unless we make a conscious effort to keep things that way. And if you grew up connected 24/7, would you even recognize the value of that lack of connection?
Human beings are remarkably adaptable creatures. But I worry we’ll have a tough time managing these all these new vices available to us thanks to the internet. I mean, we’re not doing so well with junk food.