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There’s a global debate raging about the state of our youth. On the one hand, there are the influential voices of two academics, Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, raising the alarm that kids everywhere are cracking under the pressure of a technological revolution they aren’t wired to manage. On the other, a growing list of opposing voices, most recently led by a cover story in The Economist, suggesting that on many measures the kids are doing better than we think.
Who’s right? Only time will tell, but here are some of the key data points being argued over—and who is taking which side. Telling in itself.
Happy or Sad?
The heart of the debate is the sudden increase in mental health issues faced by young people aged between 12 and 27, aka Gen Z. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is leading the charge, pointing the finger at social media for making our kids, especially girls, sick. His book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, charts the rise in mental health issues among Gen Z starting in 2012. That was the year Apple launched the iPhone. Haidt is leading a campaign to restrict social media access and protect young brains from the pull of unregulated tech giants and their algorithms designed for addiction. He pulls together research and proof of the causation between social media and mental health, and is sharing it all online. In particular he points to four interrelated “foundational harms”—social deprivation, lack of sleep, attention fragmentation and addiction—and is working to “bring childhood back to earth.”
Jean Twenge is a psychology professor who’s built a career on analysing generational traits and trends. Her most recent book is lengthily titled IGen: Why Today’s Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, less Happy and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood. That pretty well sums up her thesis which she scrupulously documents with mountains of data charting “39 million people” through dozens of analyses and graphs. She profiles Gen Z (who she calls iGen) across a series of ‘I’ words: “Internet, No In-Person, Insecure, Irreligious, Insulated, Indefinite, Inclusive, and Independent.” In her substack, she shares the latest statistics on suicide, showing the fast-increasing levels of young American men in their 20s taking their own lives, overtaking middle-aged men. It’s not an encouraging portrait.
Both of these positions come from American writers and thinkers, even though they are casting their research nets globally. One of the challenges for the rest of the world is to disentangle the cultural and generational arguments of causality.
Purposefully striding into the boxing ring on the opposing side is the British-based Economist magazine, with a recent cover story titled Reasons to be Cheerful About Generation Z—They Are Not Doomed to Be Poor and Anxious. In a series of articles, The Economist offers a different perspective on this group of emerging adults now entering the workforce. It contexts the conversation with a global look at the two billion young people born between 1997 and 2012 who are being debated under the single, simplifying label of ‘Gen Z.’ One of the key points they underline is that four-fifths of this cohort live in emerging economies. Unlike the American youthscape dominating much of the debate, they suggest the majority of these “young” are likely to grow up better off than their parents—“richer, healthier and more educated.”
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