The Kids Are Dopes, Pt. 2
Gen Z is lost in a phone fog.
On February 26, I posted an End Note here from The Kelly Letter, “The Kids Are Dopes.”
Its cartoon shows a classroom filled with zoned-out kids inside pods, wearing goggles, oblivious to their teacher lecturing in the background. A whiteboard behind her displays a chart of attention spans collapsed to zero in 2024. No kid listens.
The accompanying story is about my getting in trouble for calling out a friend’s kids for their lack of focus and over-reliance on smartphones. Their mother told me I don’t know what it’s like for kids these days, they didn’t grow up with books the way I did and, besides, every older generation says the kids are a lost cause.
I replied that this time is different, arguing that kids truly struggle with reading and critical thinking due to less exposure to books and the pervasive influence of smartphones. This viewpoint is supported by Adam Kotsko, a college educator, who observed over his teaching career a significant decline in his students’ ability to engage with and comprehend reading material, a trend he attributes to the ubiquity of smartphones and possibly exacerbated by covid school shutdowns.
A longtime subscriber, Neil, pushed back.
He said his own college-aged son is thriving in the current environment, sharing research that he conducted online using ChatGPT and videos, most of this taking place on his iPhone. From Neil’s comment on the subscriber site:
“I remember the same thirst for knowledge when I was in college. But, I never would have been able to obtain so much information. First of all, such a vast repository of knowledge was not available to me at the tap of my iPhone screen. …
“My own students are a mixture, as always. But, the top students have no trouble excelling, learning in new ways, books or no. The mediocre students have no trouble being mediocre, books or no, same as always. And so on.
“I am 100% confident in the next generation, and the next one after that and so on. I am also 100% confident that every generation, after building bigger and better technology than was present in the previous generation, will look down their nose at the next one and claim that this time it’s different, the next generation really is worse. It always is.”
From my reply to Neil:
“I’m happy to hear that your son is doing well in the new mediascape, and that you’ve been able to adapt to your students’ preferred ways of learning.
“However, I believe your experience is the exception.
“For common ground between us, I can offer that, yes, society has always consisted of a minority of smart, high-achieving people. The ones we lose to phone fog are likely the same types we lost in the past to different ways of idling a brain and wasting time. For example, your son has made good use of modern capabilities, while a dozen others around him might infinite-scroll to nowhere; just as I remember the contrast of a handful of high school debate leaders with crowds of stoners.
“I can also offer that when tech goes wrong, it’s rarely the tech itself but an unintelligent use of it by people for whom the phrase ‘idiot proof’ was invented. Social media could have been fine, for instance, if not for the moronic mass that mortgaged their minds for the pleasure of memes and other mental junk food.”
A day after my post on Signalizer, I recorded “Discussion: The Kids Are Dopes,” a freewheeling 26-minute podcast episode, in which I mentioned Neil’s pushback and expounded on my position.
There things stood, until last Sunday’s Kelly Letter, in which I paid tribute to Israeli-American behavioral economist, Nobel laureate, and best-selling author Daniel Kahneman, who passed away on March 27. From my tribute:
“A principle from Kahneman’s work is the importance of keeping an eye on the big picture, an exercise you witness regularly around here. The world routinely loses its mind over something in the news, overlooking context that we’ve usually: (A) seen it before, (B) seen the same warnings about it before, and (C) know how it turned out before. We need not engage in guesswork, but default to it anyway.”
Neil wrote that he finds it “confusing why you don’t recognize the same fact in comments about youth and various aspects of culture and other non-financial things.” He acknowledged that the human population falls into a bell curve that stays relatively constant through the generations, a point I made back in February. Exceptionally gifted and exceptionally challenged people are rare. From his comment:
“The exceptional, of every generation, use the tools of the day to be and do exceptional things. They build the amazing new technologies, businesses, science, art, etc. They do things that were not possible by the generation before them because they both needed to stand on the shoulders of the previous generation and because the tools have enabled them to do in a year what took the previous generation a decade or more.”
There’s no argument here. It’s a restatement of our mutual views in February.
Our difference appears to be that Neil thinks there’s nothing unusually wrong with today’s youth, while I maintain that there is. On this specific topic — not economics, the stock market, politics, or other topics more pertinent to my tribute to Kahneman — I believe it’s different this time.
Is today’s young generation worse than ones of the past?
If we agree that any population consists mostly of mediocre people, incapable of rising to the best usage of the “tools of the day to be and do exceptional things,” then it seems plausible that offering a damaging new technology to that group could cause harm we’ve never witnessed before. If a majority is unable to defend itself against the damaging effects of the new technology, then the result could be a generation worse off than any previous generation, in aggregate, allowing for the usual small percentages of exceptionally good and bad people.
A compelling amount of evidence suggests this to be the case.
To Adam Kotsko — the college educator I cited in February saying that “in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch” to produce students unable to understand readings of even modest length, much less respond intelligently to them — we can add Jonathan Haidt to the list of people noticing the kids are not all right.
Haidt is a social psychologist, bestselling author, and the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business. His books include The Happiness Hypothesis and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, and he just published The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The latter is the most relevant to our discussion today.
The Anxious Generation posits that the move from “play-based childhood” to “phone-based childhood” has had disastrous effects. The back cover begins: “After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?”
Haidt writes that he and other parents discovered the babysitting power of devices and software created over the past two decades. “Many parents were relieved to find that a smartphone or tablet could keep a child happily engaged and quiet for hours.” New technologies “hooked children during vulnerable developmental stages, while their brains were rapidly rewiring in response to the incoming stimulation. This included social media companies, which inflicted their greatest damage on girls, and video game companies and pornography sites, which sank their hooks deepest into boys.”
The book tells the story of what happened to the generation born after 1995, popularly known as Gen Z. Haidt offers thanks to social psychologist Jean Twenge for her groundbreaking work revealing something I mentioned above, that what causes generations to differ (emphasis Haidt’s) “goes beyond the events children experience (such as wars and depressions) and includes changes in the technologies they used as children (radio, then television, personal computers, the internet, the iPhone).”
Twenge is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University who researches generational differences. She wrote an Atlantic cover story in 2017, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” in which she argued that post-Millennials were on the brink of a mental-health crisis:
“It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen [what she calls those born between 1995 and 2012] as being on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”
Haidt points out that Gen Z reached puberty around 2009, just in time for high-speed broadband’s proliferation, the iPhone’s widespread adoption, and the “new age of hyper-viralized social media.” He writes that along came:
“the increased prevalence of posting images of oneself, after smartphones added front-facing cameras (2010) and Facebook acquired Instagram (2012), boosting its popularity. This greatly expanded the number of adolescents posting carefully curated photos and videos of their lives for their peers and strangers, not just to see, but to judge.”
And the following is the kicker:
“Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and — as I will show — unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness — perpetually — to managing what became their online brand. This was now necessary to gain acceptance from peers, which is the oxygen of adolescence, and to avoid online shaming, which is the nightmare of adolescence.
“Gen Z teens got sucked into spending many hours of each day scrolling through the shiny happy posts of friends, acquaintances, and distant influencers. They watched increasing quantities of user-generated videos and streamed entertainment, offered to them by autoplay and algorithms that were designed to keep them online as long as possible. They spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in embodied social behaviors that are essential for human development.”
This may have played a part in turning them into the zombies I described in February and depicted in my cartoon, and into Kotsko’s students incapable of basic reading comprehension. Because the pressures that created this outcome were recently invented, we are witnessing a generation like no other. Calling it out goes beyond the traditional “Get off my lawn!” grumpiness of an older generation toward a younger. Today’s vacated brains are something new.
They’re also in big trouble.
Meghan Cox Gurdon is the author of The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction, published in 2020. In a review of The Anxious Generation, she wrote last month in the Wall Street Journal that:
“Starting in about 2010, suicide rates for young adolescents in the US shot up (increasing 91% for boys ages 10-14 and 167% for girls). The rate of self-injury almost tripled between 2010 and 2020. In the UK, too, more children than before were using self-harm to cope with severe anxiety and depression; in Australia, rates of hospitalization for mental health showed a sharp increase for both boys and girls.”
She remembered a prescient 2012 video report by the satirical Onion News Network, “Brain-Dead Teen, Only Capable Of Rolling Eyes And Texting, To Be Euthanized,” from which
“Caitlin Tegart was a beautiful, lively girl who loved laughing and playing outside. But all that changed at the age of 12. Caitlin slipped into a persistent vegetative state, confining her almost entirely to her bed, and Facebook.”
Above the caption, “Caitlin Tegart: Brain-Dead Teen,” she appears pale and miserable, flopped on a couch. Her parents seek permission to euthanize her, reminding themselves that “the real Caitlin is already gone. That’s just her body texting.” They plan to make her an organ donor, her father explaining, “Her organs can help other children. We can give her eyes to someone who would actually use them to read a book.”
I stand by my February assertion that the kids are dopes. It might not be their fault, and it might not be all of them, but Gen Z is lost in a phone fog.
Sources
Slate
The Loss of Things I Took for Granted — Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively.
by Adam Kotsko
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
by Jonathan Haidt
The Atlantic
Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
by Jean M. Twenge
The Wall Street Journal
‘The Anxious Generation’ Review: Apps, Angst and Adolescence
by Meghan Cox Gurdon
The Onion
Brain-Dead Teen, Only Capable Of Rolling Eyes And Texting, To Be Euthanized
In my opinion, the educational system itself is the problem not smart phones or AI.
Critical thinking is no longer taught in primary and secondary education. Instead, educators “teach to the test”. They are incented to do so given that educators and administrators are rewarded based on how their student populations perform on standardized tests.
The pandemic only exacerbated this problem since the small amount of "soft skill" learning that was left was eliminated when learning went fully online.
Smart phones and AI are just tools. Like any tool they can be used with both good and bad results. Blaming these tools for the problem is simply an avoidance of the underlying issue.
I would be pleasantly surprised if the percentage of Zoomers that regularly use tech for anything other than entertainment the majority of the time exceeds 10%. Sure, there are loads of so-called content creators out there, but I don’t consider documenting one’s day-to-day “story” so much content creation as it is glorified journaling.
Smartphones and the internet have become more of a crutch than a tool for most. Quite honestly, it takes self-restraint and discipline to use tech in a responsible and productive manner. I find myself having to keep my smartphone use in check from time to time. Let’s be honest, American culture is severely lacking in both self-restraint and discipline; just take a look at the evolution of the body mass index over the past few decades for example.
Looking forward, the onus is on parents to teach their children how to use tech responsibly. Unfortunately, many parents themselves are incapable of using tech responsibly, therefore they’re not going to make the best role models when it comes to teaching their children how to do so. For the Zoomers already out there floating around with a fistful of tech, I only hope they find the desire and willpower to experience life beyond the screen.