A paradox: People are more connected now than ever — through phones, social media, Zoom and such — yet loneliness continues to rise. Among the most digitally connected, teenagers and young adults, loneliness nearly doubled in prevalence between 2012 and 2018, coinciding with the explosion in social media use.AdvertisementContinue reading the main s

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Teen anxiety and depression are at near-record highs: The latest government survey of high schoolers, conducted in 2023, found that more than half of teen girls said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless.”

Jean Twenge argues that technological change is the largest single driver of generational differences, in her book, Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future. Putnam and Twenge both point to the “individualizing” or “atomizing” effect of new technologies of conv... See more