There’s a good chance you’ve already come across an article or interview about a new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He offers a compelling thesis, which is that the introduction of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s has caused a cascade of mental health issues revolving around mood disorders.
In this week’s conversation we’ll listen to an 8-minute selection of an interview the author did for NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast (starting at 33:33 if you want to listen ahead of time, but I encourage you to listen to the whole podcast episode if you have time, or at least speed read the transcript).
While the impact the author traces is felt most profoundly by youth, particularly adolescent girls, I’m pretty sure you’ll find many of these “phone effects” relatable in one way or another. I look forward to the conversation!
Our warm-up question for this week:
If you could invent a smartphone app to do ANYTHING imaginable, what would it do and why?
See you soon,
Alex