Why today’s youth is so anxious and judgmental

What’s not to like about a world in which youths are involved in fewer car accidents, drink less and wrestle with fewer unplanned pregnancies? Well, think about it. Those kids might not be wiser; they might simply be afraid of everything. And what has got them so afraid? A little glass rectangle, ‘a portal in their pockets’, that entices them into a world that’s ‘exciting, addictive, unstable and… unsuitable for children’.

So far, so paranoid – and there’s a delicious tang of the documentary maker Adam Curtis about the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s extraordinarily outspoken and well-evidenced diatribe against the creators of smartphone culture. These men, says Haidt,  were once hailed as ‘heroes, geniuses and global benefactors, who, like Prometheus, brought gifts from the gods to humanity’.

The technological geegaw Haidt holds responsible for the ‘great rewiring’ of brains of people born after 1995 is not, interestingly enough, the iPhone itself (first released in 2007) but its front-facing camera, released with the iPhone 4 in June 2010. Samsung added one to its Galaxy the same month. Instagram launched in the same year. Now users could curate online versions of themselves on the fly – and they do, incessantly. Maintaining an online self is a 24/7 job. The other day on Crystal Palace Parade I had to catch a pram from rolling into the street while the young mother vogued and pouted into her smartphone.  

Anecdotes are one thing; evidence is another. The point of The Anxious Generation is not to present phone-related pathology as though it were a new idea, but rather to provide robust scientific evidence for what we’ve all come to assume is true: that there is causal link (not just some modish dinner party correlation) between phone culture and the ever more fragile mental state of our youth.