It isn’t just the kids who are suffocating under the duress and unpleasure of scrolling on smartphones. It’s the adults, too.
There has been a flurry of reviews about Jonathan Haidt’s new book this week diagnosing and describing what is wrong in the hearts and behaviors of minors and what is broken with children.
But now we know the answer is no, it is not just as good. We know this because when they transfer their social life, as the girls transferred it onto social media and the boys transferred it onto video games, that’s exactly when the epidemic of loneliness accelerated. Girls are suffering more depression and anxiety; boys are suffering more loneliness and friendlessness. [bold emphasis added]
How Phones Warped Gen Z by Marc Novicoff, Politico, March 2024.
It reminds me of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, published in 2000.
The gendered distinctions of boys feeling lonely and friendless and girls feeling depressed and anxious further connects to the gendered differences around the differences between girls’/women’s higher frequency of suicidal ideation though boys’/men’s higher rates of dying by suicide, as the Wall Street Journal differentiated, “While women have consistently been found to have suicidal thoughts more commonly, men are four times as likely to die by suicide. “
So, the focus on kids is misguided. Maybe it is a deliberate focus on children excluding adults because the book is targeted at an audience who want to inspect kids who we hold real authority over, but to not describe the difficulties that other adults experience. Maybe it’s a book focusing on children because there were not research dollars willing to pay for rigorous science dissecting the social media habits of adults; or maybe a book publisher or editor wasn’t as interested in a book about kids and adults. Maybe a kid-only book will be more lucrative and successful at the bookstores and online, corporate vendors.
But, I see plenty of middle aged adults primping, I see young adults sashaying for multiple selfies, and I’ve seen the online vitriol and triggers of elderly adults. I imagine that the feelings of loneliness that Haidt wrote about boys also applies to men while the anxiety assigned to girls pervades women, too. These feelings of social stigma don’t stop after 18 or 21 or 26. The isolation, fear and internal unkind lines that we do to ourselves endures throughout life.
I see anger spilling out of some men at the residential, assisted living center for older people. I just heard about the middle aged woman who felt unable to ask her friends for support and help while caring for a dying parent. That is loneliness and isolation as it lives inside of adults.
Rather than point fingers at all the ways that kids are messed up, why don’t we look at the social, cultural, environmental and political institutions and norms that afflict all of us. Another author could be writing about how watching Rachel Maddie or Chris Hayes on MSNBC or whomever is ona news-talk-education show on Fox or PBS or CNN feeds the despair, aloneness, and fears of adults from 20 to 90. Feelings of mistrust and anxiety that adults then pump into the children around them. I find it disingenuous to say that gaming is exacerbating the problems in boys when cable tv and the decrepit homeostasis of corporate journalism exacerbate the problems in adults.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 