Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose . . . Part 2
The kids are not alright
by Micah E. Weiss (part 1 of this series can be found here)
“I do wonder if we are going to reach a point quite soon where banning teenagers from having smart phones is going to be within the Overton Window.” -Louise Perry, Cliveden Literary Festival, October 16, 2022
“I think banning social media for kids up to a much older age is definitely within the Overton Window.” -Mary Harrington, Walk-ins Welcome podcast, March 16, 2022
If there’s one sentiment I can’t stand it's, “The debate is over.” It has other, more annoying iterations: “The science is settled” or “The data is in,” as if the former were ever possible or the latter anything but contingent. However the speaker wishes to say it, they often follow it up with something like, “It’s time for action!”
Well, here I go. The debate is over, and it’s time for action! Sorry. Let me backup eight years to when I was the only teacher calling for a ban of all smart phones at my school on the grounds that they were harming our students. The evidence wasn’t quite there at the time, I guess. I did know from research by Stanford University’s Memory Lab that multitasking is a made up nothing that makes you stupider, and later I found out, reduces memory. There were trickles of other data as well, but mainly I was going on what I could observe. I’d started fighting the cellphone war with my students some years earlier, and I still have to fight it in every class, nearly every day (and no, I don’t need your well-intentioned suggestions of a classroom phone-basket, or asking students to keep their phones off and upside down on the table, which doesn’t do any good anyway—I’ve tried everything, and I win more than I lose, but the battle continues).
I did know about something called Decision Fatigue, a term for a phenomena where over the course of a day our ability to make good decisions, i.e., control ourselves, goes down the more decisions we make. Did you know that most riots “pop off,” as it were, in the evening? Not at dawn, or after lunch, or late at night, but in the evening when people are tired and have been making decisions all day. Teenagers have poor impulse control anyway, and I observed that it was even more difficult for my students to make good decisions when they were given a pocket-toy that demands constant decision making from the moment they wake—tap-tap, swipe-swipe, scroll.
I also knew, eight years ago, that thanks in part to the self esteem movement of the 70s and 80s, narcissism had been on the rise for two generations before social media filled us with jet-fuel-like dopamine-triggering self-regard. There are even different types of social media that affect different types of narcissists. Capitalism at its best!
Political polarization was just an ugly little stink on the wind of Obama’s presidency in those days, comparatively speaking. Yeah, we had the Tea Party, but compared to the minions of the Orange Menace, I think I rather prefer a paunchy middle-aged guy in a tricorn hat waving a sign saying, “get your government hands off my medicare!” Besides, I was focused on my students, who were not doing well.
Here is some of what I have learned since then: that it was a feature not a bug to make social media addictive, a process the engineers themselves termed brain hacking, that the effects of porn on young men are not good, and it’s addictive, and can cause impotence. I learned about the proliferation of what Devid T. Courtright termed limbic capitalism, and what Shoshana Zuboff calls Surveillance Capitalism, and tech insider Jaron Lanier’s frighteningly convincing eschatology of social media, and that Silicon Valley execs keep their kids away from screens and in tech free schools, and even hire nannies with contractual obligations proscribing personal phone use. And all of this was before TikTok came along and redefined what a wolf in sheep’s clothing could look like.
I didn’t know any of that eight years ago, but there I was, worried about my students, watching them escape their troubles in their phones and video games instead of confronting them, and taking on the burden of their responsibilities in life. I must have looked like a fuddy-duddy scold, suggesting that we make our school tech free. And I have done so every year since, almost like a ritual. In 2020, The Social Dilemma documentary was released on Netflix, and while it was widely watched and broadly praised, it was quickly absorbed by the pandemic where the Internet became the way we communicated, so that this deeply affecting documentary was smothered in our need to simulate our way of life from before rather than change it, especially we parents. More on that later.
Now it’s 2023, and we know so much more than we did. New data is in. I have one large link for the data below, and I want to say that Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge are doing God’s work at After Babel. My reading of the document in question, one that does a fair job of presenting contrary information, is that the data moved past robust some time ago, that there is a crisis in young people’s mental health, and that social media specifically, and the Internet/screen time more generally, are largely responsible for that crisis.
Boys
Boys are in trouble. Suicide rates, self harm, depression; all are on the rise. And yet boys are doing better than girls. Even Jonathan Haidt, who plays Cassandra in this story more than any other public intellectual, notes that boys spend much of their time online playing video games. Despite adolescent boys being in slightly better shape than girls, the statistics on all of the mental health measures are going from bad to worse since 2012, and they are behavioral—it goes well beyond self-report from survey data.
Beyond the blunt data, there are other concerns. Because video games are less damaging in the short-to-mid term than social media, and because boys are different than girls in interests and needs, the long term consequences will not have supporting evidence for many years to come. I think that if we don’t consider the long term effects of the present and recent past’s behavioral shift from tech for boys, we are being grossly irresponsible. I contend that at this moment in time we can see flickerings of what’s to come, as the generation is now of age that was given over to the Machine starting at widespread broadband accessibility in the late aughts. Recently it was reported that over 60% of men in their 20s are single. Fewer men are looking for a relationship, and loneliness has increased amongst men, in particular, at all age groups.
Online influencers like Andrew Tate have filled a void for young men, preaching and teaching a deeply depraved form of hedonic regressive masculinity. The so-called manosphere has many facets, and I don’t want to sink the entire realm of what mostly left-wing commentators want to be the Great Satan of gender relations, but it's clear that an increasingly popular tentacle of that Internet-based world isn’t helping facilitate long-term stable lives in our young men. How does this affect sexual encounters? There is conflicting data here: while on the one hand, violence in porn doesn’t seem to be on the rise, maybe, on the other, women reporting that they have been choked during sex has spiked dramatically.
Furthermore, let’s take what we know from above. Young men were given largely uncontrolled access to video games and porn starting when they were 12 years old, on average, and now they feel lonely, can’t date, and when they do, experience erectile dysfunction at increasing rates and/or treat women as disposable sex objects, while having a declining number of social connections even with each other. And have you played video games lately? Full disclosure, I still do from time to time, and they are awesome in their ability to distract and entertain—awesome in the real sense, as in inspiring fear. There is some interesting social science that suggests limited game usage, depending on the game, particularly when in cooperation with other players, can have positive social benefits, but guess what! Those aren’t the games anyone is playing. The top games are first person shooter games like Fortnite or depraved open-world RPGs like Grand Theft Auto. In other words, simulated war.
What will become of a generation of boys who grow up spending most of their time in simulated war? And what are the consequences for a generation of boys entering relationships after spending their late childhoods learning about sex from pornography? Simulated war and simulated sex. These are the true parents of this generation of boys.
The good news is that masturbation isn’t unhealthy in and of itself, and simulated war provides goals to reach that are cognitively challenging and can be attained collaboratively. That, I think, is why the statistics for boys aren’t as terrible as they are for girls. . . so far. Now that those boys are turning into men, what will become of them when they need to work for a living, find spouses, treat their spouses with respect, start families, and do their part to keep those families together?
These are all open if somewhat ominous questions.
Girls
According to The Atlantic, NPR, CNN, etc, the CDC recently released data showing that girls are not okay. Most of those outlets said what they usually say about social media as the cause for mental health problems—it’s hard to prove. So I will now rely, once again, on Jonathan Haidt’s work on this subject. The spike in depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide is exactly correlated with social media use, and there are no other explanations to account for it, try as the media might to dig for anything that will not offend Silicon Valley.
Girls are in a death match of self-comparison, not just competing for social capital in a school with maybe a thousand other girls for who is prettiest, most popular, and most desirable, but in addition they now must compete with millions online. The reach of social media is also awesome in its power and scale. The gradual and disturbing trends in make-up use among tweenage and teenage girls is fueling a multi-billion dollar industry. This is a competition that has always been with us, but younger and younger girls advertising their sexual availability is the result of social media-fueled insanity.
Social contagions are another female-centric result of our Social Media landscape. For two weeks at my school last year, a group of students developed physical and verbal tics overnight, but then they went away thanks to a no-nonsense, low-tolerance approach from our student life administrator. After the fact, I learned that it was part of a national trend stemming from social media influencers. At the risk of my job and my career, I will now write that I have found Abigail Shrier’s reporting on the spike in gender dysphoria and transgender self-identification as a social contagion much more compelling than the left-wing media’s insistence that it’s merely like being left-handed in a more accepting world. The UK and now all of Scandinavia have pulled almost all the way back from medicalizing gender dysphoria in children under 18. I am looking forward to the mental gymnastics the left will perform to rationalize 20 years of Bernie-inspired bloviating on the enlightenment of the Scandinavian health care systems as compared to ours now that those same Nordic systems of socialist utopians have come to different conclusions than our medical establishment with regard to this issue. (It is a testament to media capture by certain interests that the only link I could find domestically for Norway’s recent medical caution is from The Washington Examiner, though the facts are sound and the author, Dr. Debrah Soh, is a medical professional who has studied the issue for years).
Social contagions aside, if all I had was this graph, it would be enough:
And it’s not just that data. Dig into the document linked above (I can’t link everything), and there is study after study, graph after graph, revealing girls are literally dying in increasing numbers. Suicide rates are at a 40 year high for both boy and girl teenagers, and for the first time, tween suicide rates among girls have appeared in significant numbers. I want to say that again. Girls between the ages of 10-13 never used to commit suicide in large enough numbers to be noticed. It was a tragic aberration. Now they are dying in measurable numbers, and only one thing in our society is fundamentally different from then to now.
Adolescence is a time when the brain is developing at an astonishing rate, and where we learn everything we need to know for the rest of our lives. Our prefrontal cortex, the most human part of the brain and the last to complete its development, enters the final iterations of that process during the teen years. This section of the brain is related to personality, personal identity, decision making, self control, and self discipline. It is, in short, the place where we think our way into adulthood. Adolescence is consequently the period where the bulk of time is evolutionarily hard-wired to build the knowledge and skills and habits of a lifetime. Instead of supporting that essential developmental stage, what have we as a society allowed to happen by handing every 12 year old a smart phone?
This last generation that has grown up not “with,” but “in” social media, in the Machine, is struggling, anxious, depressed, and dying. They wake up with their phones, they eat with them, sleep with them, masturbate to them, preen to them, communicate in them, live in them, and are now dying from them. And we, the parents and teachers and politicians who managed their childhood environment, we did this to them.
Most of the “advice” I see in the media is as tepid as this epidemic is disturbing. Most “experts” talk about limiting screen time, parental controls on devices, and encouraging productive activities like clubs and sports. I am reminded of how successful the “Just Say No!” campaign was when I was growing up.
Last week, Josh Hawley—not my least-favorite pandering, gun-wielding, psuedo-conservative Trumpy, but close—tried to get legislation passed to make age-verification for social media and porn use legally robust, and he was almost laughed out of the capital. In better news, the Mississippi legislature just passed an age-verification-with-teeth bill that at least is something. But it occurred to me as these stories came one after another, what in the living hell am I doing allied with Josh Hawley and the conservative Mississippi legislature? Where the hell are all the liberals who want to protect children? Or maybe the better question is where is the giant sand-dune where all the left-wingers are hiding their heads?
I have a better solution, and you’re not going to like it, but it’s time that certain ideas enter the Overton Window. Parents need to remember their job is first and foremost to protect their progeny, and that means accepting the idea that parents might have to make decisions that will make them unpopular with and disliked by their own children. Parents, you don’t have to give them a phone. No, really, stop laughing and look at the data again. You don’t need to let them use the computer. You don’t have to buy them that video-game console and you can even throw it away if you already have. According to the data your kids don’t have jobs anyway, so they can’t buy their own. So stop. Just stop. You are the adult, you have the bank account that pays for the phone, you have the password to the WiFi. You have the power to fix this; you have the technology. You get to drink, screw, and watch porn because you are an adult, and adults have different rules than children. I have heard so many adults shy away from accused hypocrisy when it comes to smart-phones and Internet usage that I swear I’m in some kind of strange bizarro world, and (for the last time, I promise) Jonathan Haidt is correct again that the parenting trends that led us to this horrific situation are much older than social media.
What are the objections? “But their friends will have them.” Sure, maybe, but is that a justification for being complicit? And how do you think social trends start? So instead, you can be the model to other parents. Besides, are their friends in their bedrooms at night, first thing in the morning, all the live-long day? “But they will feel left out.” So what? When did parents start believing it was their job to facilitate their child’s belonging? And left out of what, exactly? Children are terrible at making decisions, and teens are worse, and you want to help them be a part of a collective of bad decision makers? Or do you mean our popular media? Is it so filled with masterpieces of art and culture that you will be depriving your kid by limiting access? “But they have to know how to use technology.” They design these fucking things to make even a two year old able to figure them out. Do you think your kids are that stupid? Accessibility, and increasingly early addiction, are the core of how Silicon Valley engineer these devices and platforms! “But I want to be able to reach them.” NO! Leave them alone. Let them find their way without you managing them all the damn time. Protecting your children means also protecting them from yourself. “I don’t want them getting into drugs.” How do you think they buy drugs? Snapchat should be called “Street Corner Hookup.” “But it’s safer.” Under what absurd circumstances do you think your kid will be in that the phone will save them? School shooting? Phones aren’t bulletproof vests. Kidnapping? The rarest of all crimes perpetrated by the stupidest kidnapper who doesn’t know to throw the kids phone away. Flat tire? Here’s an idea, teach them how to change a goddamn tire before they get in the car to drive (which fewer and fewer young people know how to do anyway). Terrorist attack? Shut up, you don’t get to talk now. The risk of serious mental health concerns, especially—once more with feeling—suicide, passed that crazy standard of narrative nonsense long ago. If they have to have a phone for logistical reasons, or when they turn an appropriate age (like 25), get them a burner phone, or one of the new Light Phones. But just stop pretending that it’s for their safety, because it’s really for your safety and comfort that you want your bias confirmed or these tepid solutions to work.
So let’s look at that narcissism data again. From the linked article: “The endorsement rate for the statement ‘I am an important person’ increased from 12% in 1963 to 77–80% in 1992 in adolescents.” Well, those adolescents are grown parents now, like me, and here’s where I get real popular with my fellow parents: the real reason our culture is so resistant to this solution isn’t a rational concern but rather the dread of responsibility. Without the mediating, mollifying, and pacifying effects of the devices, the full weight of responsibility of parenthood will fall, once again, as it did of old, on parents. Parents who are too busy doom scrolling on their own phones, too important in their own social media and video gaming preoccupations, too narcissistic, too self-indulgent, too entitled, and at the end of the day, too frightened, to spend time parenting.
Let’s go back to the pandemic, to the lock-downs that probably should not have been. The common consensus is still that the Internet, Zoom, and social media saved us and our economy, and saved our children by providing an outlet for their social needs (proving to me the lack of imagination of the collective common consensus builders). They never bothered to ask the real question: what would we have done without the Internet? I can’t speak to the economic outcomes, but in all other respects, let’s say that COVID-19 had attacked us in 2001 instead of 2019, what would we have done with our children? We would have been forced to spend time with them, gotten to know them better, played with them, read with them, watched movies with them. We would have made that sourdough starter with them, or opened that craft-beer kit with them, or fixed that old car with them, or knitted with them, or made music with them, or put on plays with them, or hiked with them, or ran with them, or gone to the park with them, or, god forbid, sent them outside and said “come back at dinner.”
What would our children have learned, how much would they have grown, had we, as a culture, accepted our responsibilities and stood up to our fears?
The debate is over, the science is settled, the data is in.