The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
added by James Stevens and · updated 1d ago
added by James Stevens and · updated 1d ago
A 2015 report by Pew Research[31] confirms these high numbers: One out of every four teens said that they were online “almost constantly.” By 2022, that number had nearly doubled, to 46%.
Maria Potoroczyn added 6mo ago
The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.
Maria Potoroczyn added 5mo ago
The oldest members of Gen Z began puberty around 2009, when several tech trends converged: the rapid spread of high-speed broadband in the 2000s, the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, and the new age of hyper-viralized social media. The last of these was kicked off in 2009 by the arrival of the “like” and “retweet” (or “share”) buttons, which transfor
... See moreMaria Potoroczyn added 6mo ago
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 ma
... See moreMaria Potoroczyn added 6mo ago
free play began to decline in the 1980s, and the decline accelerated in the 1990s. Adults in the United States, the U.K., and Canada increasingly began to assume that if they ever let a child walk outside unsupervised, the child would attract kidnappers and sex offenders.
Maria Potoroczyn added 6mo ago
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 ma
... See moreMaria Potoroczyn added 6mo ago
some studies have failed to find evidence of harm. One well-known study reported that the association of digital media use with harmful psychological outcomes was so close to zero that it was roughly the same size as the association of “eating potatoes” with such harms.[5] But when Jean Twenge and I reanalyzed the same data sets and zoomed in on th
... See moreMaria Potoroczyn added 5mo ago
We need to be careful about which kids have access to which products, at which ages, and on which devices. Unfettered access to everything, everywhere, at any age has been a disaster, even if there are a few benefits.
Maria Potoroczyn added 5mo ago
Self-transcendence is among the central features of spiritual experience, and it turns out that the loss of self has a neural signature. There is a set of linked structures in the brain that are more active whenever we are processing events from an egocentric point of view—thinking about what I want, what I need to do next, or what other people thi
... See moreMaria Potoroczyn added 5mo ago