We're All the Anxious Generation Now

When Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation in 2024, he jumpstarted a global conversation that centered children’s use of technology. Roughly 20 states passed legislation banning phones for the full school day, a shift that the book helped accelerate. It was influential in Australia's landmark legislation prohibiting minors under age 16 from accessing social media platforms. Barack Obama named it one of his favorites of the year, landing it squarely on mainstream reading lists.

Two years ago, that conversation focused mostly on the smartphone impacted kids. Today, however, that conversation has evolved. We’re waking up to the impact its had on everyone.

As Jon told me in the studio: “We adults, we are overwhelmed. We become scattered and fragmented. We lose our ability to focus."

The separate forces pulling at our attention

Jon and I dissected the forces that keep us reaching for our phones. It’s not as simple as one would think. There are two separate forces pulling at our attention, and we tend to conflate them.

The first is what he calls “quick dopamine.” It’s the variable-ratio reward systems baked into social media and games that function like slot machines in our pockets. Personally I attempt to fight this one by turning my notifications off, and switching my screen to grayscale. (And if you were to pick up my phone right now, you’d discover I’ve undone both of these hacks; they never seem to last.)

The second is something I hadn’t really considered: workaholic compulsion. Knowledge work today requires constant responsiveness—even if managers suggest the opposite. Dominant company culture that requires you to reply to texts within 15 minutes, which creates, as Jon puts it, is “a company designed to never let anyone think.”

Real productivity, and here I’m talking about the birth of new ideas, requires a kind of friction that I’ve written a lot about this year, robust downtime and a process for introspection. It’s much easier to just check Instagram 17 times an hour and fritter our time away.

In this week’s conversation, we get into all of this, and I run an idea of my own by Jon. Check it out:

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I’ve spent 20+ years covering tech from the inside for BusinessWeek, Fortune, and Wired. My mission is to close the gap between the people building the future—and those of us living it.