just read Jonathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation"... i have thoughts
it was a less a serious analysis of youth mental health and more a boomer panic attack dressed up in footnotes.
his big idea? that smartphones and social media broke childhood around 2010, and absolutely nothing else contributed. not inequality, not climate collapse, not mass shootings, not racism, not the slow-burn apocalypse of capitalism. just... the phone.
you almost expect him to add "get off my lawn" as a chapter title.
he calls it "the great rewiring". which sounds like a sci-fi reboot but is actually Haidt's excuse to blame every modern adolescent crisis on TikTok and Insta.
depression? ... screens.
gender identity questions? ... screens.
girls under pressure? ... not patriarchy, just selfies.
queer kids, poor kids, disabled kids? ... briefly mentioned, then memory-holed for getting in the way of the thesis.
the data? ... cherry-picked and dressed in objectivity drag.
Haidt ignores anything that doesn't sync perfectly with his smartphone-doom narrative. his solutions? ban smartphones till 14, kill social media until 16, and throw kids into "risky play" like it’s 1956 and there's a jungle gym made of asbestos behind every school. it's policy by Norman Rockwell painting.
for all his talk of "norms", Haidt utterly refuses to explore how different communities actually experience the digital world. he's too busy assembling a diorama out of rotary phones and stoic quotes.
his "cure" is useless to the kids who need it most because they're not even visible in the diagnosis.
worst of all, Haidt frames it all like this is "just the science talking" while serving up moral panic with a stoic flavor.
of course, it's **always** the stoics.
he doesn’t just ignore structural violence, he actively erases it. his "help" is only for kids with middle-class parents and ipad guilt.
also... "the mars hypothesis".... yes, really.
he spends pages describing how raising kids today is like raising them on mars. because of gravity. because of isolation. because apparently analogies about actual child development weren't dramatic enough, and he needed to imagine Earth as a space colony of lord of the flies being destroyed by Insta.
if anyone ever tells you that social science is boring, just show them the part where Haidt earnestly compares TikTok to a breakdown in atmospheric pressure.
this isn't a serious intervention. it's tech-blaming fanfic from a man who lost an argument to an algorithm and decided to write a book about it. and if Jonathan Haidt really wanted to help, maybe next time he should stop diagnosing the future like it’s a software glitch and actually ask the kids what they think.
no wonder it's on so many conservative parenting book lists... the scholarly equivalent of someone shouting "SATAN IS IN THE SNAPCHAT" while shaking a fist at the sky.
fuck this guy.
edited to add a part
#SkipIt #NotWorthThePaperItsPrintedOn
#bookreview #bookreviews #anxiousgeneration #book #books #bookstodon #haidt
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