Jon Haidt @ After Babel  and considered a worthwhile read by Christopher Owens. 

This is not just “Kids these days.”

From the first time I wrote about Gen Z in 2015 (with Greg Lukianoff, in our Coddling essay) through my most recent discussion in a December interview with Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal, the main criticism I have heard is that I’m just another old man (I’m 59) shaking his fist and complaining about “kids these days,” when in fact “the kids are alright.” 

If that’s true, then the first half of the Babel project—on what social media did to childhood and to teen mental health—is fatally flawed. Is the criticism valid?
1. The Case Against Me

Two responses to that WSJ essay do us the favor of collecting quotations from previous generations complaining about the behavior of youth. First, see this Twitter thread from Paul Fairie, titled A Brief History of Kids Today Are Spoiled

Fairie includes this 1925 gem:

Remove the girl or boy of today from radio, the telephone, furnace heat, the automobile, the libraries, movies, and other forms of amusement and comfort––give them merely a jackknife and nature’s unchanging wonders for amusement, and how would they fare? 

Continue reading @ After Babel.

The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012

Jon Haidt @ After Babel  and considered a worthwhile read by Christopher Owens. 

This is not just “Kids these days.”

From the first time I wrote about Gen Z in 2015 (with Greg Lukianoff, in our Coddling essay) through my most recent discussion in a December interview with Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal, the main criticism I have heard is that I’m just another old man (I’m 59) shaking his fist and complaining about “kids these days,” when in fact “the kids are alright.” 

If that’s true, then the first half of the Babel project—on what social media did to childhood and to teen mental health—is fatally flawed. Is the criticism valid?
1. The Case Against Me

Two responses to that WSJ essay do us the favor of collecting quotations from previous generations complaining about the behavior of youth. First, see this Twitter thread from Paul Fairie, titled A Brief History of Kids Today Are Spoiled

Fairie includes this 1925 gem:

Remove the girl or boy of today from radio, the telephone, furnace heat, the automobile, the libraries, movies, and other forms of amusement and comfort––give them merely a jackknife and nature’s unchanging wonders for amusement, and how would they fare? 

Continue reading @ After Babel.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks, Christopher.
    T'is indeed a worthwhile read. As previously stated, I'm a big fan of Haidt's work.

    More and more of the population have become entrapped by 'emotional reasoning', a tendency that is most likely driven on & sustained by algorithms that in turn herd us into self-serving social silos. Ensconced in these silos, our immature parts are provisioned with imagined attention, acceptance, and even affection; all leading to the inevitable firing off of the dopamine reward systems.
    All heady stuff, particularly so for those who are largely externally referenced. Reduce or take away the perceived attention, acceptance and affection and then the immature and insecure become devastated.

    The introduction of the Twitter 're-tweet and the 'fb' buttons, to the extreme detriment of the young, subtly capitalizes & exploits the hardwired social need for approval.

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