Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist who said it best, and then finally convinced public education and lots of parents, that a big chunk of youth mental illnesses and suffering (which educators had witnessed mushrooming up around us in classrooms) could be attributed to social media and gaming consumption. His 2024 book, The Anxious Generation, made the case for how social media alerts + dopamine hits => addiction, anxiety, sadness, irritability, and insomnia. His work helped move many US school administrators to discuss banning phones–and then follow through on it. School admin should beware of his most recent warning.
Much has changed since Haidt completed his work for that 2024 book. This past week I heard him respond to a good question from Russell Moore in a podcast, “would you rethink anything? Do you think you downplayed anything…?”
I’m quoting part of Haidt’s response, “What I’ve learned since the book came out is that the problem is so much bigger, so much more comprehensive in terms of taking over so much of childhood and life… Now I realize that’s (referring to mental illness) not the biggest problem. The one that’s even bigger, because it affects almost everybody, is attention fragmentation, the loss of the human ability to pay attention… we’re losing the ability to think.”
Throughout the discussion, Haidt reminds educators and parents to be on the alert especially for the quality of online stuff our kids consume. Garbage in, garbage out… with what he claims to be the most-specifically gross garbage for young people as TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Younger brains are more apt to be rewired in a damaged way by short-form videos. Plus, two other things that seem truly unhealthy: LLM AIs and the faith that lots of people of all ages hold that they can do their thinking for them, as well as the loss of individual privacy. And I don’t mean banking information.
Filming oneself having a life isn’t the same as having a life. Lots of young people are trapped by cameras…. de facto believing that their faces online are the sum total of who they are, who they need to be–and not being able to reconcile the difference between their inner, undeveloped selves, and what they post. When kids or young people cultivate and curate that online self and neglect their actual selves.. It’s bad.. Long ago, I came across a quote about why Native American Plains tribes refused the filming of the sacred Sundance, or anything important, “when cameras or money enter, the spirit leaves.” Makes sense to me.
Haidt says the dopamine hits that keep us posting, scrolling and playing are no different on the brain than any other addictive drug and that the “only long-term cure is to go off the drug.”
Further, he warns that at this point in time it’s too early, and likely a mistake, to buy into AI educational tools, especially for elementary students. The risk of unintended consequences is too huge. And for older students and adults, he advises we use our phones as “tools, not slot machines.”
Teachers already recognize this fragmented-attention phenomenon in the classroom. We see increased difficulty in more students’ ability to get far enough into any given academic challenge to experience the payoff that comes after a “productive struggle”. We see how it’s increasingly difficult for more kids to be able to engage in learning. Haidt is probably right. The dopamine hit that comes after academic trial and error, and finally leads to success, brings a kind of satisfaction that lots of kids don’t know to anticipate… and therefore don’t find motivating. When technology trains kids to feel that challenge or any hardship is intolerable… even for short periods… then that discomfort they feel, feels meaningless and incomprehensible to them and they really do lose the thread. Certainly impedes learning.
And now for something completely different, but maybe not totally. Here’s a detox book recommendation, in case you need it. Without letting your phone tell you about it first, read The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday. It’s short and old. No review or summation can give your brain the experience it will have by just reading it and thinking about it. Maybe you’ll need to process it for a while before it starts to spark some insights… or maybe it won’t speak to you at all.
