The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jonathan Haidt on the Plague of Anxiety Affecting Young People

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

Both anecdotally and in research, anxiety and depression among young people—often associated with self-harm—have risen sharply over the last decade.  There seems little doubt that Gen Z is suffer...ing in real ways.  But there is not a consensus on the cause or causes, nor how to address them.  The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes that enough evidence has accumulated to convict a suspect.  Smartphones and social media, Haidt says, have caused a “great rewiring” in those born after 1995.  The argument has hit a nerve: his new book, “The Anxious Generation,” was No. 1 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list.  Speaking with David Remnick, Haidt is quick to differentiate social-media apps—with their constant stream of notifications, and their emphasis on performance—from technology writ large; mental health was not affected, he says, for millennials, who grew up earlier in the evolution of the Internet. Haidt, who earlier wrote about an excessive emphasis on safety in the book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” feels that our priorities when it comes to child safety are exactly wrong.  “We’re overprotecting in [the real world], and I’m saying, lighten up, let your kids out! And we’re underprotecting in another, and I’m saying, don’t let your kids spend nine hours a day on the Internet talking with strange men. It’s just not a good idea.” To social scientists who have asserted that the evidence Haidt marshals does not prove a causative link between social media and depression, “I keep asking for alternative theories,” he says. “You don’t think it’s the smartphones and social media—what is it? … You can give me whatever theory you want about trends in American society, but nobody can explain why it happened so suddenly in 2012 and 2013—not just here but in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Northern Europe. I’m waiting,” he adds sarcastically, “for someone to find a chemical.” The good news, Haidt says, is there are achievable ways to limit the harm.  Note: In his conversation with David Remnick, Jonathan Haidt misstated some information about a working paper that studies unhappiness across nations. The authors are David G. Blanchflower, Alex Bryson, and Xiaowei Xu, and it includes data on thirty-four countries.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:02 This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Stories about mental health and school-age kids are a constant now, both in the news and in our conversations with family and friends. Every parent I know is talking about this. The rates of anxiety, of depression, and self-harm are all up sharply, trends that began in the 2010s. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the current generation, people born after 1995, have experienced what he calls a great rewiring. In other words, having smartphones and social media accounts from childhood has affected not just their
Starting point is 00:00:50 emotional lives, but their neurology too. Height's new book is called The Anxious Generation, and it's clearly connected with countless readers. The book debuted at number one on the nonfiction bestseller. So I was raised on the, you're sitting too close to the television, your eyes will burn out, your brain will turn to jelly from watching the Three Stooges or whatever, wherever we were watching. And it was an incredibly powerful instrument. There were books written like 10 arguments for the, for the getting rid of television. I think I'm getting a title semi, semi-write anyway. But there were such polemics. Polemics, not unlike your own in a way. They were evidence-based, however, controversial. they seem to have at least a grain of truth.
Starting point is 00:01:39 Yeah, very plausible. We survived radio. We survived television. Why is this so different? Right. So first, let me acknowledge, because this is the one, they're really only two arguments I get.
Starting point is 00:01:51 One of them is this one. Isn't it just another moral panic? We've been through, oh, you know, Socrates said writing was going to do us in, and whatever the young people are doing is going to be terrible, and then it turns out not to be. But this time is incredibly different, because before there was just, you know, kids are watching TV,
Starting point is 00:02:08 and then, you know, much later there is a crime wave, but it can't be tightly linked to TV. You know, the evidence doesn't show that when kids watch TV, they go out and hurt people or kill, you know, so there was a lot of research. This time, there's never been anything like it. So here's what happens. The internet comes in in two waves.
Starting point is 00:02:27 In the 90s, we get personal computers, the 80s and 90s, personal computers, and then we get dial-up internet slow, but it allows you to connect to the world. It's amazing. So the technological environment in the 90s was miraculous. We loved it. The millennial generation grew up on it.
Starting point is 00:02:42 Their mental health was fine. So a lot of the indicators of teen mental health are actually steady or improving in the late 90s, and then all the way through the 2000s. In 2008, the App Store comes out. Before then there were no apps. They were just the things that Apple gave you. And I think it's 2009. Something around there is where push notifications come out.
Starting point is 00:03:02 So now you have this thing in your pocket in which thousands or millions, literally, of companies, are trying to get your attention and trying to keep you on their app. 2010 Instagram comes out, which was the first social media app designed to be exclusively used on the smartphone. So the environment that we adults were in suddenly changes where now the iPhone isn't just a tool. It actually is a tool of mass distraction. And then in 2012, 2013, boom. It's just, you know, the graphs go way, way up, mental health falls off a cliff. It's incredibly sudden.
Starting point is 00:03:37 So you can give me whatever theory you want about trends in American society. But nobody can explain why it happened so suddenly in 2012 and 2013, not just here, but in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Northern Europe. So, you know, I'm waiting for someone to find a chemical that was released just in those areas, you know, and a chemical that especially affects girls and especially young girls. Like, if someone can find that, you got another story. But until then... You put a name to this. You call it the period between 2010 and 2015. You call it the great rewiring of childhood.
Starting point is 00:04:12 What's happening then, in a granular sense? Sure. So what I mean by the great rewiring is the day that you change your flip phone for a smartphone, and you have a front-facing camera, and you have Instagram, and you have high-speed data, which you didn't have before, that's the day that this device can become your master, not for all kids, but for a lot of them. How does it become your master?
Starting point is 00:04:32 So, first of all, even if there was no social media, kids are just much more subject to, when the thinking gets hard, I start looking for entertainment. I mean, if I do this myself, you know, when I'm trying to write something and it's hard, I say, what's the weather? Let me go look at the weather. What's my email?
Starting point is 00:04:51 You know, I'm looking for anything that's more interesting and easier than the thing I'm trying to do. But I have a fully formed prefrontal cortex, and I have trouble. with it. Teenagers don't. They don't have a fully formed prefront cortex. It's still in the child form. It's not very good at impulse control. And so as long as you have all these, you know, toys and games and interesting things happening on your phone, it's going to call you away.
Starting point is 00:05:13 And that's without social media. Now let's add in social media. And when does that come online in a way that has a market effect in your view? So social media before 2009 was just about connecting, and it was about performance, and it might make some kids anxious. But it was not particularly toxic. After 2009, now it's much more about not who you know. It's more about the things that people are putting out that went viral, that got a lot of likes. So once we get super viral social media in 2009, 2010, now a lot of things change. Now it's not just, hey, I'm bored, let me play a video game. It's my phone is pinging me saying, someone cited you in a photo, someone linked to you in a photograph or, you know, come check it out. Someone said something about
Starting point is 00:05:57 you. Somebody just joined. Somebody liked your post. So we've allowed companies to reach our children, to manipulate them, to send their notifications whenever they want, and the kids don't seem to turn off the notifications. They seem to leave them on. What you're describing, if I'm understanding your book correctly, and I spent a lot of time with it, is a change in human consciousness. Absolutely. Absolutely. And what does that mean? So there's a long history of interesting scholarship on how tools change our And, you know, I read some, I think it was, I can't remember, it was Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman, but, you know, when you get a change in technology, whether it's a change in what we do or how we communicate or how we can affect the world, it changes our consciousness. It's almost as though we were growing a third arm. I think McLuhan talks that way. It's the move to smartphones. This thing that moves to the center of your life. And so just the sheer number of hours that you spend looking at it. And can we quantify the sheer number of hours?
Starting point is 00:06:57 Yes, so Common Sense Media and also Gallup and Pew. Those three have given us really great data over the years. And the estimates vary. The most recent ones are 7 to 9 hours a day of entertainment screen time. So that's the phone, it's video games, it's iPads. It's all the internet-connected stuff, not including school, not including school or work. But when I think back on my own adolescence, there was a lot of, you know, watching television and kind of wasting time. Is that so much more socializing or psychologically healthy than spending more time with the smartphone?
Starting point is 00:07:36 Were you alone or did you have siblings or friends? Both. So that's much better. So watching television, right. No, both alone and both with siblings. Oh, okay. But my point is that watching television, while our parents complained about it, when you look back on it, it was, my recollection was usually social. You're with another person.
Starting point is 00:07:53 You're talking about the show. So you're together. It is social. Now what happens? You know, I've heard stories from Gen Z. You know, they go over to their friends. Sometimes they do go over to their friends' house. Not that much.
Starting point is 00:08:06 But they do go over to their friends house. And they're on their phones together. Separate. No, right. One might be watching her shows on Netflix. One might be checking her. So even when they're physically together, Gen Z, there's a wonderful phrase from Sherry Turkle.
Starting point is 00:08:18 Because of our phones, we are forever elsewhere. We're never fully present. The problem is, And I don't think you disagree with me on this, that there are aspects to social media, just as far out to the Internet and writ large. That can be terrific, whether it's about finding community or staying connected to friends. How does society, technology, legislation, or parents possibly separate out that which you describe is legitimately harmful from what is potentially beneficial or fun or harmless? Sure. First, let me be very clear. The internet is not the same thing as social media. So we're not talking about giving up the internet. I'm not talking about keeping kids off the internet. I'm talking about them not allowing them to sign a legal contract. It's not enforceable because they're minors, but it is a contract, the terms of service, to give away their data and some rights to a company that does not have their interests at heart. That is using them as the product to sell to their customers who are the advertisers. Okay.
Starting point is 00:09:22 That's what I don't want done to 11, 12, 13, 14-year-old kids. I think they should be 16 before they can be exploited in that way. Now, you write, and this is a crucial part of your book, you write about sharp rises in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm that began showing themselves in a very concerning way in the 2010s. You say that girls were hit hardest. Why does it affect girls differently than boys?
Starting point is 00:09:48 So if there's several reasons. The first is that when kids got smartphones and then tablets come in very soon and all these devices, they made different choices. Boys gravitate towards coalitional violence, which, you know, sports, team things. So video games. Coalitional violence is a term for sports? Well, it's a, it's not a sports fan. It's true, I'm not. Yeah, I can tell.
Starting point is 00:10:13 It's a social science term for how we just love, you know, making teams to do combat. And so football, you know, sports, you can't understand team sports unless you understand that we evolve for war and we enjoy it. We enjoy fake war. So the boys gravitate to video games and especially multiplayer video games, which are amazing. You know, I didn't let my son on Fortnite in sixth grade. And he does resent me for that. But I finally let him on eighth grade. Thank God we did just before COVID, because it was helpful during COVID. So for the boys, they go for that mostly. They also spend a lot of time on YouTube. They're on social media. YouTube is technically social. media, but it's used more as a video library. So the boys, you know, they'll have Instagram accounts and things like that. But they're not as into it as the girls are. So the girls spend a lot more time on social media. They spend more time. They went especially for Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, for the visual platforms.
Starting point is 00:11:05 And their interactions are asynchronous. So the boys are laughing it up at the same time, which is better than... Together. Together. Even if they're separate, even if they're in separate rooms, at least they're communicating. Whereas the girls are making a post. They're, you know, it's been an hour. crafting the post in the picture. And they're waiting for other kids to comment on it,
Starting point is 00:11:23 including strangers, including adult men. They're waiting for strangers and friends to comment on it. And that's kind of anxious. And it's not play. It's performance. It's brand management. Now, I also read your earlier book, The Codling of the American Mind. And in it, you critique emotional safety. You know, the notion that we worship or valorize safety. Above All Else, how does that jive with your understandable desire to safeguard our emotional safety in this book? Yeah. So, you know, sometimes you want a high level of safety, sometimes you want a low level of safety. If the dangers aren't really, if there aren't not much in the way of dangers, we don't want to force kids to wear a bike helmet when they're playing in a field. So it depends on the context.
Starting point is 00:12:17 And my argument in the book is that we have vastly overprotected our children in the real world. We have to give them more freedom. And we have vastly underprotected them in the virtual world where there are no safeguards, no age limits, no protections. We can't even sue the companies that are harming them. And a lot of kids are getting severely damaged in many, many different ways. So am I contradicting myself? Well, then I contradict myself. No.
Starting point is 00:12:44 You know, we're overprotecting in one place, and I'm saying, lighten up. let your kids out. And we're underprotecting another. And I'm saying, don't let your kids spend nine hours a day on the internet talking with strange men. It's just not a good idea. I'm speaking with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In 2018, Jonathan Height and Greg Lukianov published a book called The Coddling of the American Mind. The book looks at cancel culture, arguing that schools have prioritized psychological comfort much too highly, that they've discouraged students from dealing with ideas that they don't
Starting point is 00:13:39 agree with. I've been speaking today with Jonathan Haidt about his new book, which for some is no less controversial and every bit as timely. It's about anxiety. Haidt says that social media and smartphones have helped to create what he calls an anxious generation, which is the title of the book. One question that some critics have raised is about causation versus correlation. Hight's book shows that being on your phone all the time may correlate with anxiety. But does that prove that one causes the other? We'll continue our conversation now. There's a review in the science journalism.
Starting point is 00:14:17 I'm sure you're aware, nature. And it's gotten a lot of attention for saying that your assertions that digital technologies are somehow rewiring our kids' brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not quite supported by the science. She didn't say not quite supported. She said I have no evidence. Well, I'm such a polite guy. Candice Rogers, the she, I believe you're referring to. Candice Auger's writing in this essay says, quote,
Starting point is 00:14:44 the adolescent brain cognitive development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the U.S. has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital technology use. So how do you answer her? So first, so her main charge was that I have no evidence. She said I don't know the difference between correlation and causation, and that she could use my writing in her intrastats class. And that's just not true.
Starting point is 00:15:13 When it was mostly correlation, when it was almost all correlational, that was a fair criticism. But over time, there have been now dozens of experiments. So there are a variety of sources of data, different kinds of experiments. So she just missed that. Well, but note her wording. She, well, when she said I have no evidence, I think that was just an encouraging. statement because I do have evidence. She is free to say, I disagree with it. I think these studies have problems. So that would have been fine. If she said he presents experiments, but I think that they're
Starting point is 00:15:40 wrong. Fine. That would have been a correct. That would have been a reasonable thing to say. But it was just, I thought she was too categorical. Yeah, to say that I have no evidence, I thought was not really correct. So that's what I said in my response. So if it's not social media causing these issues that you describe at length in kids, what else could it be? Well, that's a good question. And that's the second problem with that review in nature. I keep asking for alternative theories. I keep saying, okay, you don't think it's the smartphones and social media?
Starting point is 00:16:08 What is it? Well, the world is terrible. That's an alternate theory. No, that doesn't make any sense. Well, hang on. The kids have a greater sense of ecological impairment. The politics of the world are pretty awful. You know, we were facing an election in November just as we did in 2016.
Starting point is 00:16:29 Today, things are terrible. I agree with you. Things are terrible today. Go back to Obama's first term. How terrible were things in Obama's first term? 2008 to 2012. We're recovering from, or 2009, whatever, we're recovering from the global. We have the global financial crisis.
Starting point is 00:16:45 We're recovering. The economy is getting better and better in his second term. That's when mental health collapses. That's when kids suddenly decide, oh, my God, things are so terrible. And it's not high school kids who are reading the newspaper. perhaps, it's middle school girls are the ones who are most devastated by this. I don't think you could make a case that all of a sudden, in 2013, 11 to 14-year-old girls suddenly freaked out about the political state of the world. And this happened not just here, but in Canada, the UK, Australia,
Starting point is 00:17:15 New Zealand. Or ecological or other conditions. None of that makes sense. That's right. The other thing is, you know, about the world being terrible hypothesis, when bad things happen, do people suddenly get depressed? No. You get depressed, not because you think the world is bad, you get depressed because you feel isolated or alone. And so you and I grew up, I don't know how you felt about this, but I thought there probably won't be a nuclear war this year, but what are the odds we're going to go 20 years? It seemed to me like there's a good chance
Starting point is 00:17:42 there's going to be a nuclear war, and the overpopulation is going to kill us. I mean, there were a lot of things wrong with the world in the 70s, but our generation didn't get depressed by it. You mentioned earlier in our conversation, the critique of you and your work as somebody who's worried about moral panic or inciting them. How would you describe the critique and how would you answer it?
Starting point is 00:18:07 Well, you know, the critique is what we started off with, which is this is no different from comic books and television. And I think, you know, in Thomas Jefferson's time, in the 18th century, it was novels that were supposed to excite the sexual passion. So, you know, I'm glad that I live in a world in which there are skeptics who keep alarm ringers honest, otherwise every. would be a moral panic. And I understand their frustration, the skeptics, that a lot of moral panics, you know, we see them all the time. They end up being nothing. And it is up to me to say,
Starting point is 00:18:41 actually, this time is different and here's why. And that's what I tried to do in the anxious generation, to say this time really is different. And in 2017, it wasn't so clear. But now what I'm finding is now that COVID is behind us and our confusion is lifting, their kids are messed up, but it wasn't from COVID. It was actually in place before COVID. Everybody sees it. Most journalists who interview me, they'll say at some point in the interview,
Starting point is 00:19:05 you know, I read your book and, you know, this is happening to my daughter. She's like right out of your book. Am I wrong, Jonathan, to discern, and I haven't, but possibly discern a politics emanating from your work. In other words,
Starting point is 00:19:20 your book on The Colling of American Mind could be put in a line with other books with similar temperament and an argument, like Alan Bloom, for example. Maybe you think I'm being unfair. And this book, I've heard, not me, but sort of people around the office who've read it.
Starting point is 00:19:39 It's alarmist, and it's just an old guy panicking about the latest cool thing. And it's, you know, an impression begins to form that Jonathan Haidt is a social conservative in some matter. Is that fair, or is it, wrong. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, so I'm glad to hear that. I was going to ask you how am I perceived around here. And I could guess. So we live in an age of polarization with negative politics where you're judged by... Which you've also written about, too. That's right. That's right. You're judged by who you criticize. And so I've always thought of myself as a liberal. I'm also a kind of like a David Brooks sort of meeliorist like, you know, let's do the social science. Let's think about systems. Let's think in a really subtle way, not just this narrow, quantified way. But
Starting point is 00:20:27 Let's bring in cultural trends. And let's see, can we make things a little better? And so when I saw universities kind of going off the deep end in 2015, Greg Lukianoff and I both were very alarmed. Now, does that make me a conservative? You were seeing it in your own students. I was seeing it in students at NYU and hearing it from other professors and the stories coming in from all over.
Starting point is 00:20:51 It wasn't like that in 2013. I mean, just something changed around 2015. So anyway, my point is to get back to your question. I love universities. I love being a professor. I feel as though I am a member of an honored guild that stretches back to Socrates and Plato. And I see my institution getting corrupt.
Starting point is 00:21:15 In social sciences, it's not that people are doing things for money, but what I saw as corruption I started talking about in 2011 was in my field, everyone is on the left. all social psychologists are on the left. I gave a talk in 2011 where I went through many steps to find a conservative. I found one.
Starting point is 00:21:31 I did find one. But everyone else is on the left. And I said, you know, this is going to be a problem for us. Did you have an explanation for the why of that? Yes. So part of it is normal self-selection
Starting point is 00:21:44 based on personality. And so the arts are always going to lean left, just the nature of the psychological differences between those with a conservative and liberal temperance. So the arts, the social science, especially sociology.
Starting point is 00:21:54 If you're questioning the social order, You're more likely, so there's a natural ratio. And in the 20th century, it was about three to one in psychology, three to one left, right. Let's say that's the natural ratio. I would never expect it to be 50-50. You don't need balance, but you need. That was a quantifiable thing? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:22:11 There were a number of surveys of who professors voted for. There were self-report surveys of whether you're liberal or conservative, and they all converge on about the same thing. But my concern was we don't need balance, we don't need evenness, but there has to be someone in the room who's willing. to speak up and say, that doesn't make sense. And what I was seeing was any conclusion that was conducive to the progressive view, that would get waved into publication.
Starting point is 00:22:34 Oh, yeah, we want that one to be true. But any conclusion that went against it would have to climb mountains and the reviews would be scathing and they'd be rejected. When you say reviews, just to be clear, you mean scholarly reviews to allow, peer reviews allowing publication
Starting point is 00:22:48 in university press books and publications. So just for example, so Steve C.C. at Cornell and Wendy Williams, they had a line of work looking at gender bias in the sciences. To what extent do women in the sciences face a disadvantage in hiring and promotion? And what they found was that overall, it's a benefit. That overall, I can't remember which decades they were looking at,
Starting point is 00:23:11 but I think it was in the 21st century, that overall, at least in recent years, there's not a bias against women, there's a bias for them. I think that's a perfectly plausible finding. It was incredibly difficult for them to publish that. because what you need to show is that there is sexism and racism everywhere. That is the popular view. Now, my argument was, in 2011, was if we go down this road, if we continue to make fun of conservatives, which we do, you know, we tell jokes about them to our students.
Starting point is 00:23:43 I mean, it was really a hostile climate for conservatives in the academy. If we continue to do this, we're going to hurt our own science, and we are going to be. going to lose any support from Republicans and red states. And so when I watched what happened last semester, where, you know, in the fall semester, and especially in that courtroom, in a Senate hearing room where those three presidents testified, you know, the country was disgusted with higher ed. And the survey data shows this. The trust in higher ed. Just to be clear, you're referring to the congressional hearing about October 7th in the aftermath on college campuses, specifically Harvard and MIT.
Starting point is 00:24:24 And MIT. That's right. Yes, correct. And it was a House here and it was in the Senate, yeah. And Representative Stefano, who is herself not absent political ideology and motivation, was behind the microphone for the crucial moment. Yeah. Okay. But the point is that whole
Starting point is 00:24:41 there was a whole series of events. So I'd been writing about the decline of trust in higher ed. Look, you asked me why my politics is, I want my mission, yeah. So my mission is And when I moved to NYU Stern, I wrote a mission statement. My mission is to use my research in moral psychology and that of others
Starting point is 00:24:59 to help people understand each other across divisions and to help important institutions work well. Jonathan, finally, what will happen to the anxious generation if nothing changes? Will they grow up feeling lonely and disconnected forever? Or is this something they grow out of? Yeah. So we don't know. What we can say is that young people in their 20s used to be the happiest people.
Starting point is 00:25:26 There was what was called the U-shaped curve of happiness, where young people in their late teens and 20s are the happiest, along with people in their 60s and 70s, and it's people in middle age who are less happy. That was true across the world until a few years ago. Now, the paper just came out by James Blanchflower, who's an expert on this topic, the U-shaped curve of happiness is over internationally. He looked at 27 countries, and he found,
Starting point is 00:25:49 that the late teens and early 20s, they're actually the least happy now, or the most anxious, whatever the measure is. So there's been a huge change in young people. They used to be the happiest, and now they're the least happy. So are they going to grow out of this in their 20s?
Starting point is 00:26:07 It doesn't look like it yet. There could well be lasting changes in their brains because we didn't protect them in puberty, and puberty is such an important time. Essentially in the wiring of their brains. Yeah, the brain is literally, rewiring, literally in the sense of neurons are seeking each other out, neurons are being, they're fading away if they're not used, synapses are forming or fading away. So that happens
Starting point is 00:26:30 very rapidly in the first couple of years of life, then it slows down. But in puberty, it speeds up. So puberty is a time of really important rewiring. And traditional societies would give young people some guidance into how do you make the transition to adulthood. We don't do that. We give them an iPhone and an iPad, and we say, here, We're going to let you be guided into adulthood by a bunch of random people on the internet chosen by algorithm for their extremity, whatever it is. That's how you're going to get, that's how you're going to rewire your brain. So it is possible that there are lasting effects and that Gen Z for the rest of their lives will be more anxious and fragile. That is possibly just don't know.
Starting point is 00:27:07 But the optimistic thing I can say is that there's a lot they can do to make themselves better quickly. I teach a course at Stern at NYU Stern called Flourishing. It's an undergraduate positive psychology course. And one of the most important things I do with the class is we go through their notifications. How many do you get? 200 to 500 a day, typically is how many the students get. And I say, turn off notifications for everything except for five. If you could only keep on five apps like Uber, you surely want to keep on Uber and Lyft,
Starting point is 00:27:37 because you need to know, is the car coming or not. But do you need an update from the New York Times or from the New Yorker or anybody else about breaking? Okay. New Yorker. I tell them that. The New Yorker is different. Thank you. I appreciate that. But, you know, they don't, and most of them get a notification every time an email comes in.
Starting point is 00:27:55 So if they get a piece of spam on email, they get interrupted in their daily life. And so this has just become normal. They haven't learned to protect their attention. I try to convince them, and it's easy to convince. You know, your attention is the most precious thing you have. You could make huge amounts of money. There's no limit to how much money you could make. But there's a very severe limit on how much attention you have.
Starting point is 00:28:15 You can't get more of it. So who are you going to give it away to? Tell me which companies you're going to allow to take your attention every day. And once you phrase it like that, they turn off almost all their notifications, and we get remarkable results. They say that they, for the first time, they can think clearly. They're able to do their homework. They're less anxious. So modern life is fragmenting all of us, and it's really doing a number on young people.
Starting point is 00:28:41 If we reverse that, we improve their mental health. But it seems that it requires the same discipline that it once did for someone to go off to a Zen Buddhist monastery? No, turning off notifications is easy. We do it in class. Yeah. Self-control is hard, but turning off notifications is easy. Jonathan, thank you very much. David, my pleasure. Always a pleasure to talk with you.
Starting point is 00:29:07 Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and a professor at the Stern School of Business of New York University. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thank you for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman,
Starting point is 00:29:44 with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccat. or radio hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.