The Lectio Letter - Issue #85 - The Kids Aren't Alright - Anxiety and Technology
“With so many new and exciting virtual activities, many adolescents (and adults) lost the ability to be fully present with the people around them, which changed social life for everyone, even for the small minority that did not use these platforms. That is why I refer to the period from 2010 to 2015 as the Great Rewiring of Childhood. Social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity, and even sleep patterns were fundamentally recast, for adolescents, over the course of just five years.”
Jonathan Haidt. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (pp. 35-36).
Welcome to Issue #85 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly.
For this Issue, I’ve switched the format up slightly. While I normally write an article loosely based on something I’ve been reading, for this issue I’m doing some kind of hybrid of a review on the book “The Anxious Generation” and some of my own reflections on how Christian communities might respond to the ‘epidemic’ of anxiety in young people that the author Jonathan Haidt helps define.
While most of the issues of the Lectio Letter go to the few folks who help me buy books (you can find out why here), I’m keeping this one open for anyone, so feel free to share it below if you think it might be interesting to someone you know.
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Status Board
Life
In the last Lectio, we mentioned our trip to the TRNC, well it’s been quite a full few weeks back in Cape Town. We ran our yearly camp where we invited 80 of the most consistent children from our Isithembiso community for three days of games, bible stories, songs and good food. I keep saying to people, I’d find it easier to write 3 hours of lectures at a post-graduate level than a 15-minute children’s talk. Those who do that well have a real skill. Here’s some sights;
What was a beautiful few days of weather has now receded and Cape Town is living up to its nautical title “Cape of Storms” with major flooding and high winds. Counterintuitively it also left us without water for 24 hours which was as much fun as it sounds.
Reading
The article below contains some reflection, as promised, on Jonathan Haidt’s now best seller “The Anxious Generation”. I’ve also been scanning through Strange New World which is the popular version of Carl Trueman’s excellent book “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self”.
Over the weekend, I got to re-read a chapter or so from Richard Beck’s Unclean which deserves more attention which I don’t have right now.
Eating
On these cold winter days, warm coffee always needs an indulgence so I looked up these simple cookies which came out great.
Ingredients
- Assorted dark, milk, or white chocolate (not commercial chips), roughly chopped (2 1/2 cups; 395g)
- all purpose flour (2 3/4 cups, spooned; 355g), such as Gold Medal
- unsalted butter (225g), soft but cool, about 65°F (18°C)
- white sugar (205g)
- light brown sugar (225g)
- vanilla extract (1 tablespoon; 15g)
- 2 teaspoons (8g) Diamond Crystal kosher salt, plus more for sprinkling
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/8 teaspoon grated nutmeg
- 1 large egg straight from the fridge
Instructions
Make the Dough: Adjust oven rack to middle position and preheat to 350°F (180°C). Set aside a handful of chopped chocolate (about 2 ounces; 55g) and place the remainder in a medium bowl. Sift flour on top and toss together. Combine butter, white sugar, brown sugar, vanilla, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and nutmeg in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Mix on low to moisten, then increase to medium and beat until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. With mixer running, add egg and continue beating only until smooth. Reduce speed to low, add flour/chocolate all at once, and mix to form a stiff dough.
Portion the Dough: Divide in 2-tablespoon portions (about 1 1/2 ounces or 40g each) and round each one into a smooth ball.
To Bake: Arrange portions on a parchment-lined half sheet pan, leaving 2 inches between cookies to account for spread. Garnish each with reserved chocolate and a pinch of kosher salt. Bake until puffed and pale gold around the edges but steamy in the middle, about 15 minutes. For crunchy cookies, continue baking until golden, 3 to 5 minutes more. Cool directly on baking sheet until crumb is set, about 5 minutes.
I had hoped to ration them as a daily sweet treat but Rachel’s generosity to our friend’s children meant they lasted 48 hours before 2/3rds had been given away. They got rave reviews though and were simple to bake.
Listening
We’ve been slowly listening through BBC iPlayer’s Glastonbury sets. Glastonbury in general is a perfect picture of collective effervescence and headliners like Coldplay really know how to leverage that to full success.
There are individual tracks littered over YouTube by artists you will have heard me mention here before, here are a few hand picked for you;
Finally, this upbeat track by Vulfmon and Evangeline recommended by Andrew Lavers has been a mood lifter in our dour winter world.
Watching
We have been watching LOTS of the UEFA Euro 2024 as well as the British Grand Prix, lots of English and British success to celebrate there!
We’ve been transfixed by The Bear’s third season and are not put off by its slow burn given all the beautiful vignettes it creates visually.
The Kids Aren't Alright - Anxiety and Technology
I must have been about 13 when I got my first phone. As with many things in my ‘scarcity-bound’ memory of childhood, I got one later than most of my peers. But, I loved that phone.
There was rarely a pre-paid balance available for sending text messages or making calls, so essentially all I could do was play the “snake” game preloaded on it. But you can only play ‘snake’ for so long and I tested the limits of that. But the rest of my childhood was spent riding mountain bikes in the woodlands near my home and one summer where I played football ‘keepie uppie’ with a similarly uncoordinated neighbour kid for hours on end every day. Let’s just say, we played a lot but we didn’t hit 10,000 hours and haven’t since.
The Death of Play-based Childhoods
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist argues in his new book “The Anxious Generation” that my childhood is a thing of the past. In the late 1990s and early 2000’s the availability of social media transitioned childhood from “play-based” to “phone-based”.
The central claim he makes in his most recent book is that;
“….two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.”
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation (p. 9).
He illustrates how radical the shift has been in the years since smartphones and social media have become all but ubiquitous;
Imagine that you fell into a deep sleep on June 28, 2007—the day before the iPhone was released. Like Rip Van Winkle, the protagonist in an 1819 story by Washington Irving, you wake up 10 years later and look around. The physical world looks largely the same to you, but people are behaving strangely. Nearly all of them are clutching a small glass and metal rectangle, and anytime they stop moving, they assume a hunched position and stare at it. They do this the moment they sit down on a train, or enter an elevator, or stand in line. There is an eerie quiet in public places—even babies are silent, mesmerized by these rectangles. When you do hear people talking, they usually seem to be talking to themselves while wearing white earplugs.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation (p. 49).
While the argument that smartphones and social media have transformed our world over the last 20 years or so is hard to argue with, Haidt claims that these transformations and the resulting open access for children and adolescents has caused a mental health epidemic. In the last 10 years, my own (admittedly non-widespread or scientific) observation has been a huge increase in people self-diagnosing mental health fragility and for context I interviewed my friend and therapist Anne Harrington about that here in Lectio Letter #75.
Anxiety, Fear and Human Connection
Haidt helps us name anxiety by using their technical definitions and distinguishing between fear and anxiety;
Anxiety is related to fear, but is not the same thing. The diagnostic manual of psychiatry (DSM-5-TR) defines fear as “the emotional response to real or perceived imminent threat, whereas anxiety is anticipation of future threat.” Both can be healthy responses to reality, but when excessive, they can become disorders.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation (pp. 26-27).
By most metrics life is physically safer than it has been in human history, and so what is this perceived threat? Haidt argues that it is not physical threat which is creating ‘hair trigger’ anxiety in young people but ‘social death’;
Our evolutionary advantage came from our larger brains and our capacity to form strong social groups, thus making us particularly attuned to social threats such as being shunned or shamed. People—and particularly adolescents—are often more concerned about the threat of “social death” than physical death.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation (p. 28).
Haidt is working from an evolutionary perspective in this book but what he names can be easily mapped onto a biblical account of humans too.
Adam is placed in the garden called Eden, but his ‘aloneness’ is the first ‘not good’ we find in the opening narrative of scripture. Once Eve is formed, they are together, made to Image God who is a communion of persons or, as some have paraphrased, a “community” who are in such deep connection that God’s identity is only understood when we see the relationship that makes up his life as a Father-Son relationship in the unity of the Spirit.
What this means at the most basic level is not that we are all made for marriage (the value of which is relativised in the new covenant), but that we are all made for deep relational connection. When these relational bonds are severed and we become isolated, humans become less than what they were intended to be by God. Simply put, to be Human is to be in-relationship because the God we image is relationship.
Human connection is a major, if not the major influence on a sense of human flourishing and well being and so when something is introduced that radically changes the nature of those connections we are engaged in an experiment in ‘being human’ that we don’t know the outcome of.
Haidt argues early on in the book, that while we are all influenced by this, the experiment of human connection is being most vigorously tested on Gen Z because they were the first generation to go through the socially formative phase of puberty with smartphones.
Why does social media disproportionally affect the mental health of young people?
It could be argued that many of the adults in my life spend at least as much time, if not more, on screens than the teenagers I know so why does this anxiety epidemic, if caused by social media, disproportionally affect the mental health of young people?
The reason, Haidt argues, that young people are most affected is because they are in a sensitive period of brain development where they learn the nuances of human connection and interaction;
Social learning occurs throughout childhood, but there may be a sensitive period for cultural learning that spans roughly ages 9 to 15. Lessons learned and identities formed in these years are likely to imprint, or stick, more than at other ages. These are the crucial sensitive years of puberty. Unfortunately, they are also the years in which most adolescents in developed countries get their own phones and move their social lives online.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation (p. 66)
Haidt states that humans have two learning methods in picking up cultural cues for how to interact with other people and establish a sense of connection; Conformist bias and Prestige Bias both of which used to operate in embodied communities but which now operate on overdrive in the virtual world.
Conformist bias motivates children to copy whatever seems to be most common in a group they want to belong to and Prestige bias motivates them to copy whoever seems to be the most accomplished. Social media disconnects children from the surrounding embodied community that would have historically guided them into relational skills for adulthood in the real world and offers instead ‘influencers’ whose lives and well-being are curated in ways that don’t mirror the dynamics of real life for the children who are hardwired to be attracted to them.
If human connection is what we are made for and what leads to greater flourishing then learning how to build and maintain these connections becomes key for establishing mental well-being into adulthood. Haidt mentions four characteristics of interacting in the real world in these ‘sensitive periods’ which have historically prepared children to be able to cultivate these connections in the real world (by which I mean embodied) and contrasts them with the online environment which has begun to be more formative in these ‘sensitive periods’ (for the sake of time, I’ve only unpacked three of those below);
They are Embodied
In the real world; “They are embodied, meaning that we use our bodies to communicate, we are conscious of the bodies of others, and we respond to the bodies of others both consciously and unconsciously.”
Online world: They are disembodied, meaning that no body is needed, just language. Partners could be (and already are) artificial intelligences (AIs).
It doesn’t take a social psychologist to recognise that bodies are both denied, distorted and idealised in an online world. Learning to read body language helps us grasp non-verbal queues about appropriate distance, touch and comfortability. Learning social queues in an online world gives very little opportunity to gain this kind of innate understanding which helps build and sustain relational connection in the real world.
They are Synchronous
In the real world: They are synchronous, which means they are happening at the same time, with subtle cues about timing and turn-taking.
Online World: They are heavily asynchronous, happening via text-based posts and comments.
In-person social connection requires the ability to take turns, to read cues and to navigate the immediacy of human interactions. When children don’t develop this ability, in-person human interactions suddenly seem overwhelming, unsafe or excessively challenging.
Haidt states
“Children learn through play to connect, synchronize, and take turns. They enjoy attunement and need enormous quantities of it. Attunement and synchrony bond pairs, groups, and whole communities. Social media, in contrast, is mostly asynchronous and performative. It inhibits attunement and leaves heavy users starving for social connection.”
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation, (p.65)
Interactions take place in “High entry bar” communities
In the real world: [Interactions] take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen.
Online World: Interactions take place within communities that have a low bar for entry and exit, so people can block others or just quit when they are not pleased. Communities tend to be short-lived, and relationships are often disposable.
Sustained Human connection in real-world relationships requires the skills to repair those connections when they are strained or frayed and in the past, human life depended much more directly on your ability to remain in an interdependent community. This meant the need to learn the skills of repair, forgiveness, self-control over emotional reactions or dealing with the consequences.
The online world in contrast offers an ability to (virtually) walk away or be walked away from without the embodied cues or long-term feedback in-person relationships offer.
So where does Anxiety come from? It comes from a fear of social death tied to the new rules and novel environment for personal connection and interaction that social media represents. Without the interpersonal skills historically learned in the sensitive periods of 9-15 through in-person, synchronous, in-community play-based childhoods, children are left without the skills required for building connections that lead to their mental health and well-being.
The Impact of “Real World” Social Deprivation on a Generation
In my overview of Haidt’s argument I’ve focussed on the thread of his thought related to what he calls “Social Deprivation”. In addition to social deprivation, Haidt lists sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction as the foundational harms brought to bear on the lives of children through their use of social media. But in the area I’ve focused on, of social deprivation, Haidt argues that social media has re-wired a generation’s ability to learn how to relate and therefore build sustained relational connections.
This has wide-ranging consequences that range from the ability to build connections with family members and romantic partners all the way up to the ability to hold the tensions required to interact in a democratic society. It represents the raw materials which could result in increased social isolation through the breakdown of an ability to engage in the intimate and identity-forming relationships in family, close friendships and spouses. On a more societal level, it could represent the breakdown of the kinds of social skills of respectful disagreement and thoughtful reflection required to make political democracy sustainable in our lifetime.
So what can we do about it? Haidt argues for four levels of intervention from parenting, and schooling all the way up to stricter enforcement of legislation at the government level. But I want to suggest that Christian communities have the opportunity and resources to become something of an outlier demographic in the impact Haidt is describing. But before I offer some thoughts on how Christian communities can be locations of a counter-formation from these trends, I want to share some things we may need to change in our intuitions about how to engage and reach young people.
We won’t be able to help young people if we just try to be relevant on social media
There is an intuition about mission and “relevance” which has been at work in the evangelical church, especially in the last 50-60 years attempts to find where people are, which in this case is online, and try to become an alternative or competitive presence in that space. This is the source of Christian TV, Radio, Films, music and social media accounts. The logic is that if ‘the world’ is influencing people in one direction, we will simply use the same format to ‘influence’ them in another direction.
Now, I am not saying Churches or organisations shouldn’t have social media accounts but what is important to pay attention to in Haidt’s diagnosis of the problem is that “content” is not the primary issue. It is the “form” of social media as disembodied, asynchronous and low-entry/exit which causes the deformation. This means whatever social media ‘presence’ we have as Christian communities needs to be guiding people into in-person communities and not encouraging online as a legitimate alternative to that.
We won’t help young people if we only gather on Sundays or are content with online streaming engagement
In my suggestions below, I am going to argue that participating in embodied inter-generational gatherings over time that build relational christian community have the potential to form social skills, provide role models and build a robust identity. But to craft actual human connection, we need much more than sitting shoulder to shoulder in a room once a week hearing a didactic sermon delivered (as important as that also is). If a Sunday event, which has a form that mostly encourages passive observation of a main event which happens on a stage, or on a screen, is our only offering, we will not form children and young people to be anything other than their non-Christian peers because we haven’t actually welcomed them into a community but a performance.
3 Ways Christian Communities can contribute to the counter-formation of Gen Z
Intentional Christian communities offer in-person, synchronous spaces to grow relational skills and form identity in ‘sensitive periods’ of development
While Church attendance numbers continue to fall, those who remain engaged in a church community have the opportunity to grow in the very skills which social media usage seems to erode.
The ability to learn social and cultural skills through safe failure and repair in communities which are marked by forbearance, kindness and forgiveness can be islands of human flourishing in an increasingly polarised world marked by caustic cancelling and shaming.
As I have mentioned above, these skills require more relational interaction than Sunday services often provide and so churches need to broaden their sense of calling to cultivate contexts of increasing emotional and relational intelligence in formal and informal gatherings. In sensitive periods where identity formation is particularly vulnerable, Christian communities offer a group identity which can act as a psychological trellis amid the ups and downs of identity formation and development.
When these social networks are marked by Christian virtues, young people are free to play with and explore the possibilities of their unique personalities while not needing to perform or construct an identity (which is the vision of social media) instead, they can receive the gift of a bestowed identity as a child of God deeply loved by God’s people.
Inter-generational Communities can offer Role models and a ‘Team’
Several years ago a Christian Study (called “Sticky Faith”, Fuller Youth Institute) which tracked faith formation from childhood to adolescence confirmed the common observation that in adolescence, children are experimenting with crafting a separate identity from their parents or family. This natural but understandably anxious period for parents can be contained within a wider church community where the connection and oversight of other adults becomes more common than families disconnected from embodied Christian communities.
The Christian study which tracked faith formation reported that the highest predictor for those who kept their faith into adulthood was having other Christian adults who were not a part of their immediate family, who were a consistent presence in their lives bringing encouragement and oversight. These role models can connect in an empathetic and synchronous way could potentially outstrip the asynchronous connections to online celebrities and influencers.
Secondly, being consistently encouraged to cultivate inter-generational relationships teaches social etiquette and builds connections that the “generational echo chambers” of social media work against.
Christian communities offer spaces of attention, learning and a coherent narrative
One of the additional impacts that Jonathan Haidt mentions which I have given far less space to in this review is attention fragmentation. While I argued above that simply sitting together to listen to a sermon does not create community, learning to increase the span of your attention through in-person learning really can.
This is especially the case in a community that encourages reflection and question-asking. As a brief aside, this forms part of my own hesitancy toward the increase in online education which doesn’t easily provide opportunities to engage in robust discussion and disagreement while looking at another human face and standing before a human body. My own learning capacity grew exponentially in my late teenage years in a church that valued robust theological discussion without shutting down dissenting opinions and that happened mostly because I could observe the lives of those I was interacting with.
Secondly, part of the challenge of identity formation in the post-modern online context is the plethora of competing metanarratives which vy to become the frameworks through which we make meaning. Christians’ attention to the scriptures as our overarching narrative offers a “big story” which has clear enough high points to be depended on and understood, but enough intricacies to map the many complexities of human life into.
In Conclusion
While a large proportion of the initial reviews for Jonathan Haidt’s book have been positive, there have been some detractors. The negative reviews have argued that he has oversimplified the causes of the undeniable mental health crisis and in some ways this is inevitable. The immediate popularity of the book is doubtlessly due to the fact that it taps into common concern over a demographic of people who deserve empathy, care and protection.
But the second reason for its wide reach is that the book is eminently readable. While it provides overviews of complex and in-depth research it does so while taking pains to build a clear case that is repeated multiple times throughout the book. Each chapter includes a summary page and the introduction and conclusion seek to summarise the overarching structure of the book with great clarity.
A few areas of the book I have not touched on deserve a mention; an unpacking of the distinction in how mental health is experienced between girls and boys, and a fascinating (to me) section on what Haidt has said he can only describe as ‘spiritual degradation from an agnostic social psychologist.
Is social media the only influence on the anxiety crisis which is well documented? I’m sure the narrative around this will be complexified, but Haidt and his research team have done an unparalleled job in making their case and I am convinced they have named at least one of the primary sources of the mental fragility we are observing.
Miscellaneous Links
An Assortment of miscellany I cam across on the Internet recently;
How the UN translates Everything in (near) Real-time
Piranesi to be made into a film
In 2023, I unusually read a fantasy novel called “Piranesi” (see the review here along with everything else I read that year)
The book begins in a seeming fantasy of endless rooms of an abandoned and tide-flooding city of a building with few clues to its origins as its narrator and main character seem to be struck by some kind of amnesia. As the book unfolds (without ruining a twist) the place has a much closer connection to our 'real' world.
I was excited to read that it will become a movie in 2026;
“Piranesi is a treasure and very dear to me,” Knight said in a statement. “As a filmmaker, I can scarcely imagine a more joyful experience than wandering through the worlds Susanna dreamed into being. She’s one of my all-time favorite authors, and with Piranesi, Susanna has created a beautiful, devastating and ultimately life-affirming work of art. I’m humbled that she chose Laika as her home.”
Cargo from ancient ruin found during gas survey
Hundreds of intact amphorae - ancient storage jars - believed to be 3,300 years old, were discovered 90km (56 miles) off the northern coast of Israel at a depth of 1,800m (5,905ft) on the sea bed.
Only two of the amphorae - believed to have been used by the Canaanite people who lived in an area stretching from modern-day Turkey to Egypt - were removed using specially designed tools, so as not to disturb the remaining artefacts.
Dr Bahartan described their discovery as a "truly sensational find".
She said that only two other shipwrecks with cargo are known from the late Bronze Age in the Mediterranean Sea, both of which were found relatively close to the Turkish coast using normal diving equipment.
"Based on these two finds, the academic assumption until now was that trade in that time was executed by safely flitting from port to port, hugging the coastline within eye contact," Dr Bahartan said.
"The discovery of this boat now changes our entire understanding of ancient mariner abilities.
"It is the very first to be found at such a great distance with no line of sight to any landmass," she said.
A Fascinating Story of how the FBI built its own smartphone company to hack the criminal underworld
After breaking into a few of these encrypted smartphone companies, the FBI ended up running one of these secure phone services itself so it could spy on criminals around the world. And that means the FBI had to actually run a company, with all the problems of any other tech startup: cloud services, manufacturing and shipping issues, customer service, expansion, and scale.
The company was called Anom, and for about three years, it gave law enforcement agencies around the world a crystal-clear window into the criminal underworld. In the end, the feds shut it down in large part because it was too successful — again, a truly wild story.
Read the rest at the Verge here
The Least Common American Jobs in 2023
The least commonly-held job in America is “wood patternmaker,” with only 260 employed by a business country-wide. According to the BLS, wood patternmakers “plan, lay out, and construct wooden unit or sectional patterns used in forming sand molds for castings.”
Technological advancements have caused job declines in the industry for the last decade. It is also likely that this occupation has more self-employed individuals, explaining their low numbers.
Read the rest at Visual Capitalist
Incredible Images of Fractured Ice Drift in the Baltic
Massive ice floes crush like pebbles in a frosty series by Bernhard Lang. Known for his stunning aerial photos that capture the intricate textures found around the globe, Lang recently flew above the Baltic Sea to glimpse the wintry conditions.
That’s all for now,
