Plain English with Derek Thompson - Why Are American Teenagers So Sad and Anxious?

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

The United States is experiencing an extreme teenage mental-health crisis. It is one of the most troubling and fascinating social phenomena in the country today. From 2009 to 2021, the share of American high-school students who say they feel “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 44 percent, according to a new CDC study. This is the highest level of teenage sadness ever recorded. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, joins the podcast to explain why. Haidt is the author of The Righteous Mind, and the coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind. He and Derek debate the role of social media, the evolution of parenting, and the deep root of anxiety in modern life. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Jonathan Haidt Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's time to celebrate this rock we're all floating on. This Earth Day on April 22nd, we want to share two easy steps for climate change action. Step one, head to Spotify's new Climate Action Hub, a one-stop shop for inclusive climate information and inspiration. You can check out the hub at Spotify.com slash climate action. Step two, get into action with Act Now, the UN's Climate Change Action campaign. Learn more at UN.org slash act now. Today's episode is about what I think is one of the most interesting and disturbing mysteries in America right now. That is the stunning rise of teenage sadness and anxiety.

The facts are these. In the last decade plus, the share of American high school students who say they feel persistent sadness has increased by 70% to the highest level ever recorded by the CDC. Today, more than four in 10 teenagers say they are consistently. sad, hopeless, or anxious. Now, most sociological trends are what I call spiky. They're specific to a few places or a few key demographics. Like, you would say, you know, violence is increasing in America, but it's really being

driven by a few cities. Or video game sales are booming, but it's mostly driven by men under 40. Not here. Not here. It's actually kind of hard to find a trend more universal than this one. Since 2009, sadness has increased for teenage children. of every race for straight teens and especially for LGBT students. It's increased for freshmen and increased for sophomores and increased for juniors and

especially increased for seniors. It's increased for teens in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. What is happening here and why? So I think of this topic and my attempt to solve this mystery, a bit like a detective story. And what I want to do is line up all the usual suspects and unusual suspects today, the pandemic, social media, parenting, the news, to see if we can arrive at some kind of answer to this big, fact, important, fascinating mystery. And today I'm very happy to report that my fellow detective is the NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Jonathan is the author of the righteous mind and the coddling of the American mind. He is also the author of a very big, very good essay in the Atlantic about what social media is doing to our culture.

And today's episode is, I think, one of the most interesting and important ones that we've done so far, because at the bottom of the mystery of what today's teens are going through, the mystery of why they are so sad, really is a question that makes contact with all of us. What is sadness? What is happiness? And what is it about America that is making it so hard for us? for today's teenagers to find it. I'm Derek Thompson.

This is plain English. Jonathan Haidt, welcome to the podcast. Eric, thank you so much. What a pleasure to talk to somebody whose work I have read so often. Oh, thank you. Well, it's mutual. And speaking of work that I've read often,

I wrote this piece for The Atlantic, why American teenagers are so sad. And it spread way further online than I anticipated. But my article has not for one solitary second been the most popular article on The Atlantic because it happened to come out the same day as your big critique on social media entitled why the past 10 years of American life

have been uniquely stupid. And your essay has, I'm pretty sure, been the most read article on the Atlantic site for every minute and every hour of the last two weeks straight. And this is no normal achievement. Like your essay is like the Joe DiMaggio of online leadership.

So I thought what I would do is have you on this podcast to braid your analysis of social media and your previous writing of youth mental health into my sociological detective story, this mystery of rising teenage sadness, and that together you and I might, through debate and discussion, come to some clear answers here. So how does that sound? That sounds great because I'm a social scientist and I like to tell sociological detective stories.

In fact, when Greg Lukianoff and I wrote the coddling in the American mind, we framed the whole second half of the book as a sociological detective story. What the hell happened to Gen Z? And we had all these threads and all these things to weave in. And then I write this Atlantic article on what social media is doing to democracy. And I kind of focused on one thread, namely social media. And I know I agree there are a lot more threads that I didn't cover. And so actually, I'm very glad to, to what do you say, interweave, interbrain, whatever we're going to do.

Let's do it. Great. Let's weave. Let's braid. All right. So my first question for you is, how do we know that this phenomenon is real? Like the CDC has found through its various surveys that persistent sadness and hopelessness among high school students has increased in the last decade and spiked during the pandemic. But I think some people might look at this and say, well, you know, kids have always been moody.

Growing up has always been hard. Sadness has always been a part of the youth experience. It only looks like some phenomenon is rising now because kids are more willing to disclose their mental health issues today than they used to be. But there are objective measures outside of surveys that tell us this is a real trend. Is that right? So on the day that the coddling the American mind, the book was published, was like September 7th, 2018. On that very day, the New York Times had an op-ed by a psychiatrist Richard Friedman, whose work I like very much. But the headline was, the big myth about teenage anxiety, subhead, relax.

The digital aid is not wrecking your kid's brain. Now, this was as late as 2018, and what Friedman was arguing was, relax. It's just self-report data. I mean, you know, we're just looking at all these surveys and sure the kids say they're depressed, but that just shows that they're comfortable talking about it. That's a good thing. They're not repressing it. They're not shame. So that's a good thing. Don't worry. There's nothing real. Your kids can have iPhones. So that was 2018. And by then, actually, the data was already in that it wasn't just self-report data. The suicide rate was sort of reached a kind of a low in 2009.

There was a little dip in 2009. It begins rising after that. But it begins rising much faster, especially for preteen girls. It's a big jump between 2012 and 2013. And then it just keeps going. So suicide rates began rising in the early 2010s. Self-harm rates, it's like it's a hockey stick. It's unbelievable what happened to, and this is not self-report.

This is hospital, a group in the U.S. and then a different group in the UK, they looked at medical. records, hospital admissions for self-harm. And those numbers for the older teen girls, it goes up, I think it's like 80% over the next few years, from 2012 to 2015, about 80%. For the pre-teen girls, or this is 11 to 14, I think was the way they cut the data, it was I think it was 150%. So pre-teen girls didn't used to be hospitalized for self-harm as late as 2011, 2012. But by 2015, they've more than doubled their rate. So this is not just self-report.

This is an epidemic of self-harm and suicide. I think it's important to say that both things are true. It is true that there has been desigmatization of mental health issues, that people might be more likely to disclose what they are feeling to their parents or to the CDC or to a therapist. And also, as you said, we have all of this evidence from eating disorders and self-harming behavior and suicides an emergency department visits for mental health emergencies that showed that there is an objective

increase in rising youth anxiety and sadness. What I want to do here is that now I'm satisfied that what we've established is a real trend. I want to basically focus the rest of the conversation about why it's happening. Why is American teenage sadness increasing? I have four main culprits that I want to hit, and I'd like to just run through them, one, two, three, four. So the first culprit. And I'll support you or shoot you down.

Okay. Let's do it. Let's do it. So the first culprit that I name in my article is social media use. And I want to give you the floor here because you wrote this huge essay about social media and what it's doing to our culture and our brains and our politics. Specifically on the issue of American Teenage Sadness, why do we think that social media use is a core culprit here? Okay. So there's a number of reasons. So the first is that the timing is impeccable. We have, teens, you know, they're getting on Facebook in 2004, 2005, but you have to be a college student to do it, and their flip phones don't have it. It's only after the iPhone comes out, 2007, and then by 2009, teens are beginning to have them more commonly. So before 2019, teens aren't

on social media on a daily basis, whereas by 2012, they are. Social media has changed. It's become much more engaging. Instagram has come out, which is very engaging to girls. So between 2009 and 2012, teen social life in the United States and Canada and Britain and other countries has really changed. And now most teens are daily users of these platforms, which are now much more viral, interesting, engaging, and addictive than they were as recently as 2008. And so what I, and then, so that's by 2012. And then the mental health epidemic begins in 2013. So the timing is impeccable. It's exactly what you would predict. Now, of course, correlation does not show. causation. As a thousand listeners are screaming at the podcast right now. Yeah, no, I always like to

let them scream a little bit and then I come back and say, here's why we can go away beyond that. So the standard social science response is exactly. So then we take our cues from correlational studies, and then we test them experimentally. So it's not just that these two things co-occurred, like, you know, television spread in the 1950s and 60s, you know, and so did crime. Like, you can't just say that. So it's, as you said, it's that A, there, is direct correlational evidence that the more you use it, the more depressed you are. But it's actually, that's a curviliney relationship where using it like an hour or two a day, you don't find much. But the heavy users, you do find actually that they're much more depressed. So there is

direct correlational evidence, user by user on it. And just to jump in here, you and Gene Twengee have compiled a Google Doc with hundreds of studies, at least over 100 studies, looking at the relationship between social media and teenage mental health. And most of them have found that more social media use is correlated with worse mental health. But it's not just these studies. It's also Facebook and Instagram that have found this connection. Very famously, there was an Instagram study, a piece of internal research that was leaked to the Wall Street Journal last year in their famous Facebook files. And that internal research reported, quote, 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.

quote, we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls. Quote, teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups, end quote. So it's not just the timing. It's not just, oh, these things both started in 2012. It's that when Facebook asks its own users what's going on, this is what they say. The victims themselves point to the killer. I mean, it's like, you know, it's like people are, oh, there's no evidence.

You know, yes, we've got a dead body. You know, we have a suicide epidemic and a depressed. But, you know, there's no evidence that this was the killer. Well, you know, there's correlational evidence. There's experimental evidence. And the victims themselves point, you know, from the grave and say, he did it. He did it. You know, ask, you talk to any group of teenage girls.

I have never found one. I do this a lot. Whenever I'm, you know, I annoy my nieces and my friends' children, but I've never found a teenage girl or group of girls just said, oh, no, Instagram's great. We're, you know, it's so good for us. I think it's really, nobody thinks it's good for them. Yeah, the gold standard here, you're pointing to some of these, some of these experiments. The gold standard here for me is the 2019 study, the welfare effects of social media. This was in part done by the economist, Matthew Genskow at Stanford.

And basically, these are researchers. They paid people to randomly deactivate Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 midterms. And they found four things in this treatment group. Number one, they spent more time doing things offline, sometimes watching TV alone, but often hanging out with family and friends. And we're actually going to get back to that in just a second. Number two, it reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization. We're going to get back to that as well in just a second. Number three, it increased subjective well-being.

People were happier when they were paid to be off Facebook. And number four, many of them continued that behavior when they reflected on that happiness. So I just think it's really important for people that are coming to this podcast, not particularly interested in hearing the argument that social media and smartphone usage is having this negative effect to understand that we have timing, we have correlation, we have surveys, and we have experimental data. My question for you, and this to a certain extent is a million dollar question, is what's the mechanism, right?

In case of it, to be fair, we have freaked out about technology basically every time there was new technology. Like Plato said writing was bad for us. Trimithia said the printing press was bad for us. What is social media doing to teenage minds that is having this negative effect? So what's the mechanism? Well, like many complicated phenomena, when you radically change childhood life, there are a variety of mechanisms, a variety of paths by which this can be harmful. And so what I've come to see in digging deep into the hundreds of studies in looking at the sex differences and the age differences. So let's focus on what I think is the most harmful pathway. And that is girls going through puberty posting photos of themselves for others to rate.

That is the most damaging thing that there is. What I'm finding, just from talking to girls in reading about this, is that you know, is that It's not just, you know, we all know, oh, you look at everyone else's perfect life. That's the thing that everyone talks about is, oh, you know, everyone's life looks better than yours. And they have filters, and they only pick their best moments. And of course, your average is always worse than their best. So we all know about that, the social comparison. That's a big process.

But I think the most poisonous, dangerous, damaging process is not just, oh, her life is better than mine. Or, oh, lots of people liked her post, but not mine. It's not that. It's, it's, you post photos of yourself, your body. your face for strangers to raid, or even if you keep it just to your friends, so that the amount of time that girls spend composing these and then the pain they feel

when people make a critical comment or when they say nothing at all. So I think what we have here is a platform that is unsafe at any speed. People talk about how to tweak it, well, let's hide the like counter is what Instagram tried. But let me say this very clearly.

There is no way, no tweak, no architectural change that will make it okay for teenage girls to post photos of themselves while they're going through puberty for strangers or others to rate publicly. That is unsafe at any speed. So, you know, we didn't know this in 2012. We thought, oh, what a great outlook for creativity.

But now we do. You know, we have this mental health catastrophe unfolding. There is no other explanation. Let me be very clear about this. I've been saying this stuff, you know, since 2018, and I keep saying, okay, if you have another explanation, let's hear it. Nobody has one.

I mean, people say, oh, well, the global financial crisis, you know, But, okay, we'll get to that one, because that's your bad news. Yeah, I have other explanations that I think are, I've used this metaphor before, like, ingredients and ingredients in the jambalaya. But I think it's important to begin with this ingredient because I really do think that social media is just an enormous part of young people's lives. And this brings me to my number two explanation. So number one is the direct effects of social media use. My number two explanation. Especially posting photos of yourself.

Especially posting photos of yourself for teenage girls. My number two explanation is that the rise of youth sadness has something to do with the decline of social life for teens, and that that has to do with the fact that social media use has a displacement effect. Teens spend, according to some surveys, between five and seven hours a day on their phones, most of which time is spent on social media. And that's 40% of their waking hours, and it is, as the Matthew Genskow study that I just mentioned, it's displacing time with friends and family. So I want to ask you how important you think this displacement effect is as a culprit for rising youth sadness. I think it is huge, and it's much worse than you say, because it's not

just displacing. It's more than that. So to talk about this one, here's where we have to talk about normal mammal development, because mammals have this unique life plan. We have big brains. We're very social. And we have, you know, live birth, huge investment by the parents. But there's a long period of childhood play. All, you know, puppies and kitties play a lot. And human children play a lot for many, many years.

And humans have this really interesting pattern where our growth actually slows down between around age seven and 12. And then we hit a growth spurt. And some have speculated that this is like a kind of a slow, a timeout period of physical growth to allow for cultural learning. So all over the world, once kids reach around the age of seven, they can take the cattle down to the river, they can scavenge and scour and learn hunting.

They're copying adult behavior patterns, but they're still very, very playful. So this is a crucial period of brain development, social development, age seven to 12. And all over America and everywhere, not well, over America, Canada, UK, I always ask when I give a talk, I say, at what age were you let out?

And I just say, if you were born before 1982, tell me at what age could you go out and play no adult supervision? And the answer is always six, seven, or eight. You know, and me and others, we grew up during the crime wave. Like, there was a lot of crime in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But kids went out and played unsupervised. And then all of a sudden, in the 90s, we freak out about child abduction, even though

the crime rate is plummeting. And even though nobody is abducted in America other than by a non-custodial parent, we freak out about it. And we lock our kids up. We say it's too dangerous for you to go out. And, of course, they can be on television. They can be on computers. But then when the iPhone comes in and social media comes in,

Now, this is so fun and so addictive. And there's this kind of a reinforcement pattern with a touchscreen that is much more addictive than anything on a computer, on a computer, which is not a touchscreen or on a television screen, which is not responsive at all. The way I see it, it's like kids need millions of experiences of conflict, getting lost, struggling with something, failing in a low-stakes environment. That's what play is all about. Play is what develops our brain, but what we did, beginning around 2009, was we put all of our kids on experience blockers. That is, we said, all that experience that you're supposed to be getting, you know, going out with your friends and making a fort in the woods and learning how to shoplift or not shoplift, whatever it is, all the experience that kids are supposed to get, let's just stop that.

And to be clear, just to jump in here, everything that you are saying is backed by data compared with their counterparts in the 1990s, early 2000s, today's team. are less likely to go out with their friends by their own admission. This is the CDC asking kids, asking high school students. Time report studies. How much time are you spending with your friends?

That has gone down. The share of kids getting driver's license. That has gone down. The share of kids participating in youth sports. This isn't self-reports. These are the youth sport league saying how many kids are signing up for youth sports. That has declined as well.

So you have less sociality. You have less going out. And you have less literal play. Also, I think it's important to say that, although you point out, this is more than just displacement, it does seem to be displacing sleep. The share of high school students who say they get eight or more hours of sleep per night declined 30% between 2007 and 2019. And to me, when I think about the mechanisms here, because I want theories out only of what is happening,

but why? Like, how are the dominoes clicking into each other? Like, being around people, it's play. It teaches you resilience, of course. But it's also like it's a social tonic. It's a social medicine. Like, I've had sad moments in my life. I've had sad years in my life.

And I know personally for me that what makes me happy is being around the people that I love the most. And so if you live in a stressful world and growing up is so stressful, it will always be filled with Anwi. There's no innovation that can get us around that. But if we take away sociality, if we take away hanging out with people in person, then you keep the disease and you remove the social. tonic, you remove the medicine of just being with the people that you love. And that's the part

that really worries me the most about youth being sucked and funneled into the screen of a phone. So I love your metaphors, and I think the idea of, you know, the medicine, a tonic is very good. I've been playing with the metaphor of food. You know, when I was, I was born in 1963, and it was all about the space program and tang, this like fake orange juice substitute, which has vitamins in it and instant breakfast. And there was the idea that, well, if, you know, science can make a better breakfast than nature and we have, we put in all these vitamins and just have this. And now we know, no, like food has so many micronutrients. There's all kinds of phytochemicals. There's all kinds of things you need. You need a balanced diet. We're omnivores.

We need a vast range of foods in order to develop healthfully. Now, what would happen if someone said, you know what the perfect food is? Rice. Let's just give kids rice. And they could live for a long time on rice, but they would pretty quickly get scurvy because if you don't have vitamin C, you're going to get scurvy and you're, you know, you get all deformed and you go insane. And so I think what happened, because let me be clear, phones are a kind of experience and video games, actually, multiplayer video games, actually have a lot to recommend them. I'm not, you know, I'm not a Luddite. My son got on, we kept him off a fortnight that when he was in sixth grade when other boys were getting on and getting addicted.

but we did let him on on eighth grade, just especially before COVID, thank God, because it was actually really good for him. So to be clear, video games and screens and even social media, it is a kind of experience, and there are some good things that come from that experience. But it would be like saying, okay, we're going to give you just fortified rice.

So it's rice with vitamin C and some other vitamins, but it's still just rice. And if we fed our kids on, basically we'd be giving them food blockers. Like all of your diet is just this one narrow stretch. And of course you're going to come out to form. And so, and the numbers that you gave before, you know, if kids are on, say, four or five hours a day on their phones, and most of that is social media, well, for girls on social media, the time on the app isn't all of the time. Because, you know, I watch them walking around New York City and you watch them composing the photos.

And it's, it's, you know, they carefully sculpt the photo for Instagram. The amount of time that they spend thinking about their posts and thinking how they're doing. So if they're on four or five hours a day, their mental space is primarily. probably eight or nine hours a day. And, you know, my kids are busy. My son's in high school. He has no time. If someone came to me and said,

hey, I've got this thing. It's going to take 30 hours a week from your son's life. And it probably has many more harms than benefits. Would that be okay with you, dad, 30 hours a week of your son's time? I'd say, are you crazy? I'm going to have you arrested.

That's such an interesting way of putting it. And I think about this aspect of social media a lot. I think about this aspect of work a lot. The fact that I spend all this time thinking about it that can't be captured by any typical time you survey. Like my phone can tell me to the very minute, to the very second how much time I spent the previous week on Twitter. It can't tell me how much time was destroyed in my life because someone said something really mean and nasty about me on Twitter and I obsessed about it for the next 36 hours. But that is how the poison of

social media can insinuate itself in us in ways that these surveys aren't capturing. You know, I've said before that just had a food metaphor to your food metaphor to my original metaphor. I've called social media attention alcohol. And the reason I like to call it attention to alcohol is that I think it's important to say that social media can be good. I learn a lot from Twitter. I have gotten a lot from various social media platforms. And it's just like alcohol. There's some aspects of it that are very pro-social.

But as with alcohol, we know that it can create severe problems, dependency problems, depression problems, among a minority of the population. And so as a result, we develop a social infrastructure around talking about alcohol. We say, you know, don't have that fifth drink or have some water now or don't drive home or you should see someone. We're having an intervention. We have this really lush social vocabulary around alcohol because we've been around it, not just for decades, for thousands of years. We do not have that social infrastructure around social media, around the attention, alcohol.

And yet it is creating a lot of very similar problems for us. Love it. I love the metaphor and I can improve it for you. Please. Part of our adaptation is that we've decided that, you know, it's too hard to ban it. And actually, many people get a lot of pleasure from it. So we do let adults have it. But we've decided that under 18, when I was a kid, it was under 18, you're not supposed to be drinking. And then it turned out that, you know, my generation and before, we would get drunk and we would drive and that would kill people.

So we said, you know what, 21. You can't drink. You're not allowed to drink until 21. And I think we are now at the point we need to do the same thing with social media. I think whether it's 18 or 16, I'm not sure. But I think it's clear, you know, kids going through puberty should not be on social media until they're well-past puberty. And so I think at 16 is the minimum age that we should be letting kids have accounts that allow them to post for strangers. Now, let's be really clear.

Social media broadly defined includes Zoom, FaceTime, texting, WhatsApp. We're on social media right now. Yeah, we are talking over Zoom. Yeah. But we're communicating. We're not, well, okay, I was going to say, we're not performing on a platform. Actually, of course, we are doing this for public. But the point is, technologies that connect kids so they can talk to each other, are great.

That's wonderful. It's the performance aspect. It's a platform on which you're not talking directly to your friends. You're using the platform to perform to try to impress people. That is what we're not going to stop adults from doing that. If adults want to spend their life managing their brand, their social brand, fine. I'm not going to tell adults what to do. But if platforms are hooking my kids, without my permission, without my knowledge, in ways that seem devastating, in ways that basically take up 30 hours a week of their time, yeah, I'm mad as hell about that. And I think we need to have an age limit, and that needs to be enforced.

You constructed a pretty convenient on-ramp to the number three variable here, which is changes in parenting. So to review, we've done direct effects of social media and indirect effects of social media, my displacement thesis. You mentioned, you mentioned. that in the 1980s, 1990s, there were fears about what was happening to kids. There were fears about violence. And since then, we have seen, again, both in self-reports and in studies, that time spent with kids has increased tremendously, and that strategies of parenting have shifted toward being more what some people call accommodating, not just helicopter parenting, but parenting that is designed to keep our children from feeling stresses. And that this might have a blowback effect in creating a generation of anxious kids. What is your thesis about how much parenting styles have to do with the phenomenon of rising teenage sadness and anxiety?

So there's two things here. One is the data is very clear that fathers are spending more time with kids than they used to. And we generally think that's a good thing. But here's the weird thing. Mothers are spending more time with kids than they used to, too. Even though women or families are having many fewer children, and even though women are working a lot more than they used to in the 50s and 60s. So what we have is very small families, typically only one or two kids, with two parents, when the parents are married, with two parents who are spending a lot more time with the kids. So now, of course, there are many kids that are still neglected, but in sort of more typical middle class and above families, there is way too much parenting. Now, that's not necessarily

a bad thing if the parenting was skillful, but it's not skillful because Americans, I think we do just about the worst job in the world of raising kids because we've bought into some ideas that are really, really harmful. And one is the idea that stress is bad. And what is true is that chronic stress is bad for us. If we leave our stress system turned on for days and days, you know, the body evolved, humans evolved like all mammals, to have emergency response systems. And if they're left on for days and days, you get stress-related disorders.

So you don't want your kids to be anxious. Of course, bullying, you know, destroy is so damaging. when it goes on for a long time. But we've accepted the idea that even short-term stress is bad, which is exactly wrong. Kids need a lot of short-term stress. And I don't mean to fear for their lives.

Never, that's bad. But to feel a challenge, to go out and take a risk to get lost, risk-taking is a crucial human skill. And so, you know, most of us learn this. You learn climbing a tree. You take the risks yourself. You learn to size up a branch.

As far as I can tell, New Zealand is the last English-speaking country where kids are allowed to climb trees. We basically said, we don't want our kids to take any risks. Our playgrounds are so safe that our kids don't have a chance to learn anything. There's no risk that you can take on a playground. So the key idea I should have introduced this in my first sentence is the wonderful concept from Nassim Taleb called anti-fragility.

And this is the key thing that American parents don't seem to understand. Just to put some meat in that bone, Nassim Taleb is an incredibly diverse. creative, frustrating, brilliant, writer about economics and finance, and he has this theory

of anti-fragility, which essentially says that some systems are fragile, some systems are resilient, and some systems are anti-fragile. Is that the right sort of triptych breakdown? Yep, that's right. We hear endless talk

about how kids need to be resilient. But as Taleb points out, resilient means that when you drop something like a plastic sippy cup, it doesn't break. It's resilient. You know, A glass is fragile, so if you drop it, it breaks. We don't let kids have glass, you know, play with wine glasses.

We give them sippy cups. But if you drop a sippy cup, it doesn't get better. And what Taleb was trying to figure out is, what are the systems that actually get better when you drop them? And I think, I can't remember what I think the way he came to it was, he's one of the few people who predicted the global financial crisis. He wrote that book, The Black Swan. And he could see that the banking system was so fragile, it hadn't been tested. And if it had been tested repeatedly, it would have adapted to those tests, but it wasn't. So he said, this thing can all come down all of a sudden, and that's what happened.

And so I think, I don't remember if this was his exact story, but I think he then came to think about, are there other systems like that? And of course, now we all understand the immune system really well, and the immune system is antifragile. If you protect your kid from dirt and germs, then the immune system doesn't have a chance to develop, and your kids will have autoimmune disorders because it'll have antibody, you won't understand that there are certain things like peanuts that are not harmful. And so peanut allergies have tripled since from the 90s through the early through around 2010,

precisely because we tried to protect kids from peanuts, but they needed exposure to peanuts in order for their immune system to learn that peanuts are okay. So once you understand antifragility, now you can see why it's so important that kids be let out on the playground, led out to explore. And you know what happens when they do that? They get into arguments. They tease each other.

And, you know, many of us think, oh, we can't let that happen. We can't, you know, teasing is bullying, hurt feelings. We don't want that. But if you do that, it's like you're protecting your kid for emotional peanuts and your kid is going to be so hypersensitive and easily harmed. And then you're going to send them to us at universities. And we said starting in 2014, what is going on? What is happening with students who can't take the presence of a speaker with ideas they hate or someone who criticizes their idea, they experienced it as a personal attack? You know, it's like some of the Gen Z students who came in around 2014. It's as though they had no skin. And of course, it's not their fault. But it happened for exactly this, this reason that you're saying and that we said and that Taleb says, kids are anti-fragile. You know, it's interesting. So another Atlantic feature was by Kate Julian in 2020 called What Happened to American Childhood. And her thesis is very close to the point that you just made. She said that researchers in among sort of developmental psychology and parent researchers have noticed this increase in what she called the accommodative parenting style. So what that means is, For example, if a girl is afraid of dogs,

an accommodation would be that you never visit a friend's house who has a dog. Or if a boy won't eat vegetables, you feed him nothing but turkey loaf for four years. And that, unfortunately, is a actual story from the article. I think it's important to say that those behaviors do come from love, right? Parenting is hard. No one wants to see their children suffer,

even these micro-stresses. But a part of growing up for both children and parents is learning how to release negative emotions in the face of inevitable stress. And that is something that has to be inculcated. It's something that has to be taught. And so much of Kate's article was essentially about teaching parents the wisdom of exposure therapy. An exposure therapy for anyone who's been in clinical therapy is this idea that if you do have a fear of something, if you have aversion to something, it's very helpful to find safe environments to confront that fearful stimulus in order to stop feeling the same kind of fear

from it. So, for example, if the kid doesn't like broccoli, maybe like caramelize some broccoli for a few weeks. You got it. Put some brown sugar on that broccoli, make it sweet as hell, and then after a while the kid will eventually enjoy Brussels sprouts and broccoli. And that's sort of, that's sort of anti-accommodative parenting writ small, right? Caramelize the broccoli so that you're so that we don't raise a generation of kids that has the sort of vegetable aversion in life that's right and that's very well put and and the idea of accommodation sounds like a good word and of course since the uh americans with disabilities act we're all you know we're all required to accommodate uh various disabilities and that includes uh mental illness and that includes

depression anxiety um and so i you know i remember one of the articles one of the examples from the kjulian article is the kid who was so anxious that uh you know the boy or girl was you know If the mother was out of earshot, if the mother couldn't be reached verbally at every moment, the kid would get very anxious. And they moved houses. They moved into a different house so that the mother could always be within earshot of the kid, it had a different design. That's the ultimate accommodation.

Whereas, as you say, the whole point of childhood is to give the kid the experiences that will give them the skills to cope with the world. So the only thing I disagreed with you, you said something about it's important that they learn to express. or release emotions. I don't think that's, that's not the issue. We don't have to express ourselves. It's you have to develop the actual skills and you do that through trial and error. Children like other animals learn by trial and error. We don't learn much by adults lecturing us. We learn by going out, trying something, and then we fail in a low-stakes environment, and then we do it better the next time. You know, I, so I live in New York City. On Governor's Island, we have this wonderful junkyard playground, and no adults are allowed in.

We have to sign a big waiver before our kids are allowed in, but, It's junk. It's all kinds. It's a junkyard. And I remember watching from the fence, they let us watch from far away. A kid had a hammer. He was pounding nails. And then he hit his thumb.

And he shakes out his thumb. And then he keeps pounding nails. Whereas the normal thing would be, well, we would never let a 10-year-old kid use a hammer. Like, what if he hits his thumb? But that's how you learn how to use a hammer. So accommodation generally is bad for kids. What we need is, as you said, graduated or gradual exposure. and that's how they learn to tolerate or master the world that they were going into.

Really quick question on this point before we turn to my fourth culprit for rising teenage sadness and anxiety. What do you consider the most important drivers of this accommodative style of parenting? Because, again, I want to bend over here and be fair to the fact that a lot of it just comes from, a lot of it comes from love, right? it comes from parents who love their kids so much, that they don't want to see them suffer, but that ironically, as if some, is it by some ancient Greek curse, you know, in trying to keep their kids from suffering,

end up sowing the seeds of future suffering. But where does this instinct come from? So love is part of it, but actually, I don't think that's the main part. I think fear and shame are gigantic, especially on women. That is, you know, if a man, encourages the kids to go out and do something like,

oh, you know, he's teaching them life skills. But I think women get much more shame and attacks from others, especially from other women, when they try to do this. I think women who want to raise their kids as free-range kids, it's some others, even if most to prove quietly, they'll be attacked. And especially now with social media,

it makes it easy to attack everyone all the time. So I think a lot of the craziness that Americans do is actually not just love, it's actually fear and shame or fear of shame. Let's see. Secondly, part of what's happening is just prosperity. So there are problems of prosperity, as Greg Lukianap and I talked about in our book and others have talked about. As you get prosperous and as women get education and as the economy changes from agrarian, people don't have 12 kids. When I was growing up, there were a lot of families with four and five

kids in my town. And when you have four or five kids, you can't possibly hyper-parent them. And, you know, they've got a gang and then they go out and there's lots of other kids around. So as family size shrinks, it becomes possible to overparent. But more than that, you've got all your eggs in one basket. And, you know, if you have one kid, you really are afraid. If that kid is late to come home, you don't know where he is, you can panic. Whereas if you have four or five kids, you just literally don't panic as much. So it's problems of prosperity, which include shrinking family size, putting all your eggs in one basket.

And then something unique to United States, although it's actually true of all the Anglo countries, our economy's got much more competitive in the 80s and 90s. This was the neoliberal turn. And there's a really good book, oh, shoot, who's it by a Scandinavian author, who talks about how, you know, I think in Scandinavia, your kid's going to go to a university and it'll be a public university. It's not so competitive. Whereas in the 80s and 90s, as family size was shrinking and as applications to colleges, the top colleges were rising,

now American childhood became much more like the family is the pit crew, the one child is the racing car, and it's a race. Life is a race. And if your middle class or higher, our job is to get you into the top college.

Like, oh, you came in second. You go to Princeton or Yale, whatever. You didn't get into Harvard. Oh, no, but okay, second is okay. And that didn't happen in continental Europe. But the Anglo, you know, because all the things we're talking about

are true. all of the Anglo countries, but not as true on continental Europe. I don't know as much about Latin America, but the French and the German countries, especially the French, because they hate Anglo-America, like they hate Anglo-Culture, so they really try to be different for us. And the Germans, the Germanic cultures, they're actually, they raise the best kids, I believe, because they totally get anti-fragility. They have forest schools. They encourage, they let their kids start, learn how to play with fire when you're seven. That's what our ancestors did for millions of years, a million years.

I want everyone in podcast land to know that my rate of nodding was increasing exponentially throughout your answer. I think you got just about all the variables that I had top of mind. I think that when you put together rising wealth,

shrinking family size, fewer kids, more time invested per kid, rising competition, especially within the meritocratic bonanza that is college admissions, what you get is within the middle and upper middle class, particularly,

is more and more accommodative parenting, more time spent with kids, more time spent pressuring kids to get into school, as if that is the singular threshold of personal achievement in their life, put it all together, mix it around in a pot, and I think you have a decrease

in what you called anti-fragility and increasing anxiety on top of the first two things that we pointed to social media and its displacement effects. I want to move on to number four here. And the fourth culprit that I am pointing to is the stressors of the world. And this is actually a two-part explanation.

Part one is that the world itself is more stressful, potentially, arguably. And part two is that there is more negative news about the world's stressors. I actually want to take these one by one. So I reached out to Lisa Damore, who is a clinical psychologist, an author, who said that, and this is something

that I've heard in a lot of my reporting on the subject, the teenagers often come to therapy, either virtual or physical, and say that the state of the world is a huge source of their distress, whether it's gun violence or school shootings or climate change. And so I want to ask you,

If you buy this argument that the state of the world is an important driver of kids' stress today? Nope, not at all. And here's why. So first, the last few years, yeah, things are, you know, in a lot of ways, things are getting worse the last few years. But this all started in 2012, 2013. And we had just gone through the global financial crisis. And the economy was getting better and better. Employment rate was going down.

The unemployment rate was going down and down. So as the economy got better and better, the depression rate should have gone down, but in fact, it went up. So, you know, Steve Pinker and many others have written about progress and how, you know, people in all ages have said, oh, things are terrible. But in fact, things are getting better and better, and that was true up until a few years ago. So if we go back to 2013, 2014, almost everything was getting better, not just the economy, you know, there are long-term declines in racism. sexism, you know, huge rapid rises in rights. So if you're politically progressive, you should be celebrating the incredible progress that we made decade after decade.

Also, another thing is people have this naive idea that, oh, if the world is terrible, I should kill myself. And that's not true at all what Emil Durkheim discovered going through suicide statistics in the 1890. This is Emil Durkheim, the French father sociologist, yes, is that when a terrible thing happens like war, the suicide rate goes down. And that happened with COVID too. When there's an emergency, when there's a national disaster, people don't kill themselves.

They don't kill themselves because the news is bad. They kill themselves because they feel isolated and alone. And when there's a national emergency, people actually don't feel alone. They often come together. And I just saw some suicide stats during COVID. Suicide went down for every age group except for the young. It went up for teens. So, but continuing on this thread, so the world was actually.

getting better and better, at least until a few years ago. But maybe it's just that, oh, well, maybe kids are exposed to more news. Yes, that's what happened. That's exactly what happened. Social media hyper connects kids, not to reality, but to little bubbles of other kids like them. And so a really important finding, which is not widely known, only came out about a year or two ago is that when in the few data sets, I know of only two, that ask teenagers what their political identification is, are you a Republican or Democrat or liberal conservative, the two data sets, one from Pew, one is, it's one of the federal national data sets. Both of them show the same thing, which is that girls on the left got depressed first and fastest. They're the first

ones to go, and that's 2012. Then I can't remember whether there's boys on the left or girls on the right who go next. But this is all under the Obama administration. There is no way that you could say that girls on the left should be particularly upset about the way the world is going with the state of the world. It's rather, I believe, that in social media, which creates these intense bubbles and in which girls are more susceptible to shared emotion, the sort of the worldview, the ideology on the left, is this emerging victim culture that Greg and I wrote about in the coddling the American mind. There's a book, Manning and Campbell, two sociologists have a great book on victim of culture. So the girls are sharing this ideology about negativity, oppression.

They don't seem to agree that things are getting better for women, better for African Americans, generally better for the environment, although of course global warming, that is the one thing that is going the wrong way. But rising global warming should not make people depressed. I grew up in the 70s when it looked like everything was going to go to hell and nuclear war and overpopulation and the environment. And my sister, my older sister, spoke with my mother about her feelings. And I don't want the exact quote with me, but my mother said the gist of it was sweetheart, you know, I was born in 1931. And, you know, what I lived through and the way the world looked to us.

And, you know, things have a way of working themselves out. Things, you know, things get better. So I do not agree for a moment that terrible catastrophes in the world will make people depressed, anxious, or suicide. Let's just not what history shows us. It's also the case that the suicide depression rates aren't responsive to who's in the White House. So you'd think that, oh, well, Democrats should be more depressed if a Republicans present and vice versa. But that's not what happens. So mental health is not affected by what's happening in the world in the newspaper.

It's affected about what's happening in your social world. and the more connected you are on social media platforms, the less communication and connection you have. You're performing on platforms. You're not actually connecting. Yeah, so I'm very torn on this issue. I think there are things that you said that I agree with, and there are things that you said that I don't agree with.

What I agree with is that there is not a clear historical record of, like, big global news events causing anxiety disorders in America. That said, on anxiety and leftism, I'm very interested in this topic. I don't feel that confident one way or another. I would say that heightened sensitivity to injustice is a good thing. But I can also imagine how that sensitivity to the world's suffering might lead to some personal suffering. And I want to get back to that in a second.

I want to get back to how we find a balanced way to care about fixing a broken world without feeling broken ourselves. But I want to plan a flag on a different point that I feel very, very strongly about, which is in the general news space. And that is that journalism has a famous bad news bias, right? Like, cliche, if it bleeds, it leads. And social media has a high arousal emotion virus. It makes anger and outrage and fear aerodynamic. And when you put those two things together, it means that when kids go online, they're like choosing to dunk their heads in a that of,

of negativity. Now, why is that bad? Well, besides the obvious, one of the most popular modes of modern clinical psychology today is CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy. And CBT builds on an ancient wisdom that says that we can't control the world, but we can control the way we think about the world. So the Buddha said life is suffering, and of course many kids today would agree. But it is profoundly in our power to change the way we think about our life. And by changing our thinking, by taking maladaptive thoughts that are harmful and turning them into adaptive thoughts, we can change the way that we feel and we can suffer a little less. We can make our minds, our friends. But when you go online, you're choosing to subject yourself to like an assault

of maladaptive thinking. All the emotions that a good therapist would try to restructure, that pointless outrage and constant anger and obsessing about things you can't control. All those things are fucking rampant online. And so it's almost as if, like, the demand for CBT among therapists is increasing in lockstep with the fact that kids are dunking their heads

in a world of maladaptive thought. And I wonder how you feel about that. Oh, 100% agree. So my first book was called The Happiness Hypothesis, Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. And I read all the wisdom literature I can find, east and west, and I took out every psychological claim. And the two richest sources of wisdom, I believe, are the Buddhist tradition and the Stoic tradition. They really understood

consciousness and relationships. And as I've been rereading them, in part because as the world got really complicated in the last five or so years, and I was kind of frightened about the way things were going, which doesn't make you depressed. Anxiety or being upset doesn't make you depressed, but I started reading the Stoics in the mornings, and my God, they understood social media. Like, they had warnings to us about how to use it, what's going to happen. So let me read you a couple. So here's Epictetus. So the most classic line, it is not events that disturb people, it is their judgments concerning them. That's basic CBT. It's not, you know, it's what we make of it. But here's even more important. He says, if your body was turned over to just anyone, you would

doubtless take exception. Why aren't you ashamed that you have made your mind vulnerable to anyone who happens to criticize you so that it automatically becomes confused and upset? So anyone listening to this, consider getting off Twitter, you know, or any platform that's like, that just makes you, where people attack you, you get upset, because we're turning over to others the power to ruin our day. Here's Marcus Aurelius. The things you think about determine the quality of your mind, your soul takes on the color of your thoughts. So once I used to be on Twitter more. When I greatly reduced it, and I sometimes would go on just once a week for various obligations. When I'd go on, it really felt like opening a trash can and seeing rats and scorpions fighting in the dirty water

in the bottom of the trash can. And I see my friends who spend a lot of time on it. I think, why come out of there? Don't spend so much time on that. So the Stoics and the Buddhists understood how vulnerable our consciousness is to contamination and to other processes. And so, yeah, I don't think it's that we get bad news from social media. I think it's a bad platform for human beings. Yeah. The metaphor that I've used for social media is that it's a library with a food fight in the lobby. So it theoretically could be a source of all of this knowledge and intelligence and brilliant

perspective, but we walk into the library and we get stuck in the food fight in the lobby. You have to push through it to get to the elevators to reach the intelligence stacks. But I want to close here on just some prescriptions because we've talked about sort of my main culprits, direct effects of social media, displacement effects, changes in parenting and the rise of negativity in the news discourse. One of the things I think is really hard about growing up and just being around social media is having access to all the bad news in the world and disentangling the interest in caring about that news from letting it rule your life, from letting the bad news be like the horse that drives the card of your emotional state. And there was just a quirky example that I felt this week that I wanted to ask you to comment on just as a matter of closing. I was scrolling through Twitter, and for some reason it was showing me a bunch of meteorologists talking about how bad the weather was in Boston. I live in Washington, D.C., so I have nothing to do with the weather in Boston.

But I still felt that frisson of terrible awe that you sometimes feel when you come across bad news. Like your body is provoked. It goes to overdrive. You want to do something about the bad news that you saw. And just as I was, that wave of anxiety was coming over me, I had this moment of, like, sort of beautiful clarity where I thought, wait, that's not my weather.

That's Boston. Oh, that's good. That's not my weather. I think you've got a new mantra. Hey, that's not my weather. Right. Like, it's sunny in my world. This news only makes contact with my life virtually.

If I put down the phone, the news disappears. And what I tried to do since then is, like, be very purposeful about, like, cultivating that exact same mindset about everything else that produces that same emotional reaction in me, right? Like, the tempest in the world, they exist. It can be logical and reasonable

to care about them. But sometimes we just have to say that's not my weather. How do you feel about that? So at first, I rallied to it. I thought, oh, that's wonderful. But it also sounds a bit like, hey, I'm not going to worry about any problems that don't affect me personally. But I think we can save it by just saying, this is actually what the Stoics and the Buddhist said. You should be the same in success and failure. You should not get upset about these things. If you can affect it, do so. But if not, don't, and in any case, don't go into the whole run of negative emotions. So I think, yeah, social media is really good at having us be upset about something without actually being able to do anything. Social media is great for tearing things down, but it really isn't very good at building things up.

And in that spirit, let's build things up. What do we do about this? What do we do specifically about social media? So in my Atlantic article, I close, I have a long section on the three big things we have to do or three categories of things. I'll just briefly mention them. And then I'm going to focus more individual stuff with you. So the three big categories of reforms, of systemic reform, structural reforms, are, one is we have to harden our democratic and epistemic institutions, that is the institutions that generate knowledge, universities, journalism, courts, all sorts of processes.

We have to harden them so that they'll work better, even in an escalating culture war. And so I co-founded Hedodox Academy to help universities incorporate more viewpoint diversity and have healthier discussions. So if there are any professors or administrators listening to this, I urge you to just check it out and join heterodoxycoma.org. So that's one set of reforms to make our political institutions work better. The second set is to make social media less toxic to our institutions and our minds. And for that, I think we need, the big one is user identity authentication.

So you can still post under a fake name. But in order to get access to a platform that enjoys Section 230 liability protection from lawsuits, and that gives you massive algorithmic amplification, this isn't a free speech question. This is a question of, you know, does everyone, should such a platform just accept anyone, like even a Russian agent making a thousand fake accounts? Like, no, these things are systemically and democratically important.

So you should at least have to verify that you're a real person in a particular country and you're old enough to be using that platform. So there's a bunch of reforms we can make to social media. And the third is we have to raise the next generations that they will have thicker skin, and better skills of conflict negotiation, which are especially crucial during a culture war, and in fact, we've rendered Gen Z much less able

to deal with conflicts. We're in big trouble in terms of the next generation. Again, not their fault. We did this to them. Those are the big three structural changes. But I wish that I'd said more in the article about what we can all do as individuals. That's what I fail to do.

And for that, I think there's really two things. So the first, the simple thing is, just if you use social media, more than half an hour a day, consider cutting your use by 50% to 100%. It does have many uses. I'm not saying it's all bad. Of course, the feeling on Facebook is generally a lot better than Twitter. Twitter is just such a cesspool.

But even still, just don't generate so much stuff. There's just way too much stuff. You're not the customer. You're the product. So stop generating so much product. If someone says something outrageous, don't call them out on it. Just ignore it. You're just contributing to the problem.

If you show your outrage, it's somebody that outrageous. Just don't do that. So we should all stop adding to the pollution. The second thing is we have to all go easier on each other. So this advice just comes to us from so many wisdom traditions. Here's Marcus Aurelius. To feel affection for people, even when they make mistakes, is uniquely human. You can do it if you simply recognize that they're human too,

that they act out of ignorance against their will, and that you'll both be dead before long. And so once we understand that we're all getting sucked into this giant anger machine, So even the jerks that you want to call out, first of all, you know, they don't understand you. When they criticize you, they don't understand you. They're just, they're playing this game because they're manipulated to play it. So don't play along. Go easier on each other.

If we all go easier on each other, don't forward so much outrage material. Don't take offense. Don't, you know, and don't give offense. So we're living in a very dangerous culture war. We're on this rapidly escalating polarization cycle. And the more angry we get about it, the more we contribute to spewing hate against the other side, which is so terrible and awful, the faster the spiral spins. My takeaway is a little less phones, a little more kindness, a few more scrapes, dash of ancient philosophy. I'm not sure we've entirely cured the surge of teen sadness here, but I do believe this is a pretty good start.

Jonathan Haidt, thank you very, very much. Derek Thompson, what a pleasure to exchange. metaphor is with you. Plain English with Derek Thompson is produced by Devin Manzi. If you like what you hear, please follow, rate, and review us. New episode drops on Tuesday. Have a great weekend.