Saturday, January 06, 2024

youth angst

Headline:

What We Learned in 2023 About Gen Z’s Mental Health Crisis

The central question animating the After Babel Substack is this: Why does it feel like everything has been going haywire since the early 2010s, and what role does digital technology play in causing this social and epistemic chaos?

[ ... ]

The main line of our work so far can be summarized like this: We have shown that there is an adolescent mental health crisis and it was caused primarily by the rapid rewiring of childhood in the early 2010s, from play-based to phone-based. It hit many countries at the same time and it is hitting boys as well as girls, although with substantial gender differences.

The article links to a number of articles/papers that cover the topic of youthful anxiety and the role of digital technology in the cultivation and spread of that anxiety. I haven't read the papers yet, but the titles are provocative, e.g., "Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic. Here’s the Evidence" or "The Teen Mental-illness Epidemic is International." The younger generations have been ill-served by modern tech, but with such tech having woven itself so thoroughly into the fabric of today's society, what's to be done?

Somewhat related—gaming addiction in China:





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