How Modern Life Is Making Us Less Happy - Jonathan Haidt

Doesn't every generation complain about the next one that's coming along? Is what we're seeing at the moment not just more old hat that's occurred for every generation previously?

Um, well, yes and no. Yes, every generation complains, and the complaints tend to be similar, and that's gone on not since the dawn of history. People always quote, you know, Pl- Socrates or something, but really that begins when you start getting modernity, you start getting each generation is changing, you know, around the 16th, 17th century in, in Europe. So yes, that's been going on a long time, but it's never before been the case that the mental health of the young generation suddenly was really different and really bad. So, you know, the main argument I get against me is just the one you just said, that, "Oh, this is just another moral panic. There's nothing going on here. This is what always happens." No, this is not what always happens. You don't ever before get a doubling of the suicide rate of preteen girls. You don't ever get an across the board, across many nations plummeting of mental health all beginning right around 2012, 2013. So no, this time is really different.

What is it that children need to do in childhood? Like, uh, we don't think about it that importantly, it's just, it's, it's just the thing that you do before you get to puberty-

Right. Right.

... where you start to become a person, but-

Yeah.

... those experiences are very formative. Wh- what does a good childhood look like?

Yeah. Now thanks for setting it up that way because there's so much focus on the phones and social media, and, and I was focused on that too, but what I decided to do in writing this book, in writing The Anxious Generation, was I'm not even gonna talk about the phones and social media until I've taken readers through w- what is childhood, why do we have it, how is human childhood different from every other animal, including chimpanzees? And so, you know, if you start just with mammals, all mammals have the same life plan, which is huge investment from the parents or the mother in the, in the baby, long childhood, big brain. How do you wire up the brain? Play. Play is the thing. Your brain doesn't grow from nursing. Your brain grows from moving away from your mother, trying to climb something. Uh, you know, anyone who's had a, a puppy or a kitten knows they wanna play all the time, 'cause they have to practice the skills to wire up the brain. So we have to let our kids wire up their brains. Now humans are different because we have much bigger brains and we have culture. This is crucial. Other animals, they grow as, you know, sort of as fast as they can and then they reproduce. Humans, we grow fast and then we slow down, right at age seven to thir- 12, 13. We're not growing very fast. And it's thought that that period is a critical period for cultural learning. Um, all the way through puberty we're really trying to soak in, how do we do things around here? Um, what do adults do? How do I approach the opposite sex or sexuality? So there's a lot of learning that has to happen, and the problem is we've taken that learning period and we've said instead of learning from grownups around you or even from, you know, older kids in your neighborhood, how about if we just hook you up, here's a phone or an iPad, we'll just hook you up and you can get socialized by random weirdos on the internet who are selected by an algorithm for being really extreme. How about that? Well, that's kind of what we've done.