Lonelier than Ever? Maybe It’s Your Fault.
What we lose in limitless leisure
Gen Z, the first generation of so-called digital natives, is depressed, lonely, and lamer than any other generation. They spend nine hours a day on their phones and get more than 200 notifications a day. In The Atlantic’s “Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out,” author Derek Thompson writes that “teenage depression and hopelessness are setting new annual records every year.” He proffers percentages to prove this phenomenon:
Since 2002, American men see each other in real life 30% less often
Teenagers hang out 45% less often
Only 1 in 4 teens see their friends almost every day
57% of teen girls report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness”
The article features the generational geometry of a line graph tracking the cliff dive of teenage social life based on an unexplained number of high school seniors. Major cultural milestones mark the descent: the iPhone’s connection as a currency service in 2007, Netflix’s streaming simulation service in 2007, Instagram’s envy emulation services in 2010 and Tinder’s on-demand desire dejection service in 2012 could easily be charted as causes here.
The chart, offered without methodology or sample size beyond “Data gathered from 12th graders,” is provided by psychologist Jean Twenge, who has forged a formidable career by proving the general insufficiencies of youth culture. She turned her relentless focus on Gen Z in a 2017 article in The Atlantic: “Are Smartphones Destroying a Generation?”
What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? It was after the Great Recession, which officially lasted from 2007 to 2009 and had a starker effect on Millennials trying to find a place in a sputtering economy… But it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent. More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.
Twenge has served as a go-to resource for generalizations about generations for years that one can only assume should be welcome literature in any nursing home. In 2014, she published an elaborately subtitled book explaining millennial youth culture: “Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before.” She moved onto Gen Z in 2018’s phosphorescently titled “iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us.”
Whatever else Dr. Jean Twenge intends to establish about younger generations, she’s sure about one thing: they’re sad. The data is clear. The consensus is clear. The damage is obvious. Almost every expert, pontificator, journalist, researcher, and parent would readily agree with Twenge that there has been a mass extinction of adolescent social activities, physical activities, personalities, and hobbies because of phones. Kids are suffering from isolation and alienation like never before.
Ask anybody and they will agree: Gen Z’s dependence on phones is a tragedy.
This is where the coverage gets it wrong. Since millennials exited the spotlight, the media mostly seems to pass over generational trends with a passive sigh, rather than the rather enjoyable snort of disdain that rattled so many recession-era millennials as they entered a job market with ten percent unemployment and record-breaking college loans.
We’re being too easy on Gen Z. Their dependence on phones is pathetic, not tragic. Wasting too much of your life doing anything is not the thing’s fault: it’s your fault for doing the thing. Gen iz depressed, because they’re lonely and they’re lonely because of phones and social media. So why don’t they just stop using those things as much?
Let’s allow that loneliness is often a choice, not a condition. If you’re lonely, it’s your fault and if your kids are lonely and you’re paying for their direct source of loneliness, it’s your fault. Pretending teenagers are powerless victims to a totalitarian technology willfully ignores the fact they ultimately have the power over their phones and robs them of the opportunity to try and reflect on their own behavior.
Sad? Lonely? Just put the phone down. On airplane mode. In a different room. And go and find your self in the present, instead. We know phones are the problem, but giving them up seems impossible. Let’s look at why in the next Litverse.
I moved around a lot growing up. In some of the places I lived there were lots of other kids around and I went outside and played with them. In other places there weren’t many kids, or they didn’t go outside much, so I sat in my room depressed and lonely. Sure, I probably could’ve figured out a way to find friends in those places if I tried harder or was more socially adept. But the increased difficulty made a big difference.
It’s not really helpful to tell people to get off their phones and go outside today in my opinion, because if they do they will find those spaces empty because everyone else is on their phone. Being with others online is worse than being with others in person, but it’s better than being alone, and for many (including me) that’s the choice they face. I can’t find anyone interested in forming a community in person, and yeah if I was a better person in some way maybe I could, but I’m doing the best I can, and right now for me that’s trying to find communities online. I don’t think this current situation is one that most people can change individually--it’s a collective action problem that something about the world needs to change to fix.
Twenge sure does know her way around a florid, alarmist subtitle. Then again, anecdotal and survey data seems to bear out many of her conclusions; more than a high school teacher like me would probably like to contemplate.
From my perspective, personal responsibility is something that needs modeled and encouraged. I think the nature of the social media sphere as a closed ecosystem complicates how kids can self-regulate within it, especially when phone dependency is itself what's being normalized by the old-heads.
I'm curious to see what other causes and effects you explore in subsequent pieces. I think sane public policy through regulation of how these companies operate has a role to play, too: especially when you consider Frances Haugen and the Facebook Papers testimony, which expose pretty clearly how the prerogatives of the attention economy let these companies treat young women's mental health like a petri dish of market research.