10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing

Growth was the ultimate goal of the social media era. We pursued more friends, more followers and more likes, on as many platforms as possible. A decade later, we're finding ourselves hyper-connected but emotionally unfulfilled. More hasn't made us happy. Instead, we're sadder, lonelier, and anxiety-ridden.

2020 saw a grand, mostly unnoticed shift in online behaviour: the clickhogs all went catatonic, thick tongues lolling in the muck. On Facebook, the average engagement rate—the number of likes, comments, and shares per follower—fell by 34%, from 0.086 to 0.057….But the same pattern is everywhere. Engagement fell 28% on Instagram and 15% on Twitter. ... See more

...loneliness levels have reached an all-time peak, 13% of Americans are on antidepressants, the U.S. suicide rate is at its highest since World War II, and polarization appears to be rising...

First, some numbers: Gen Z spends an average of 109 days per year looking at a screen. Eighty percent of our waking hours are spent consuming information, up from 40% in 1980.

In 1995, Putnam was concerned about teens who were alone 3.5 hours per day. But nowadays teens spend up to nine hours daily staring into screens, according to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychology.

Meanwhile, the amount of time spent with friends has dropped markedly The number of social outings has declined too. Almost every me... See more

Putnam believed that the single biggest risk factor was the growing amount of time people spent alone.

Even back when he wrote Bowling Alone —before smartphones and apps—teens were solitary for three-and-a-half hours per day. Adolescents spent more time alone than with their family.

For the first time in history, people were growing up disconnected... See more

Then, Americans’ attitude towards risk shifted. I wrote about this in Riskophilia . For that post, I asked ChatGPT to make me a chart of America’s attitude towards risk by decade, and while certainly unscientific, there is a stark difference between the 1770s - 1960s trendline, and the 1960s to 2020s trendline. The timing lines up well with the slo

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