Thanks to bestselling authors like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, the public has become increasingly aware of the rapid rise in mental health issues among younger people […] Their warnings about the destructive impact of social media have had an effect, reflected not least in a wave of schools across Europe banning smartphones.
While it’s good to draw attention to the rising rates of depression and anxiety, there’s a risk of becoming fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables like “screen time”.
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A hallmark of Twenge and Haidt’s arguments is their use of trend lines for various types of psychological distress, showing increases after 2012, which Haidt calls the start of the “great rewiring” when smartphones became widespread. This method has been criticised for overemphasising correlations that may say little about causality.
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Numerous academics […] have pointed to factors such as an increasing intolerance for uncertainty in modernity, a fixation – both individual and collective – on avoiding risk, intensifying feelings of meaninglessness in work and life more broadly and rising national inequality accompanied by growing status anxiety. However, it’s important to emphasise that social science has so far failed to provide definitive answers.
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It seems unlikely that the political and social challenges we face wouldn’t influence our wellbeing. Reducing the issue to isolated variables [such as the use of smartphones], where the solution might appear to be to introduce a new policy (like banning smartphones) follows a technocratic logic that could turn good health into a matter for experts.
The risk with this approach is that society as a whole is excluded from the analysis. Another risk is that politics is drained of meaning. If political questions such as structural discrimination, economic precarity, exposure to violence and opioid use are not regarded as shaping our wellbeing, what motivation remains for taking action on these matters?
I don’t think that causation is evident or certainly or obviously factual. The negative interpretation is something you learn and internalize from your environment. You seem to already be in it, so I’m sure it may be hard to see an alternative. But I imagine education is neutral. And having zero power is an absolut defeatist mindset that is a conclusion of a lot of input and experience rather than a natural mindset from access to education.
I’m sure there is an alternative way of life, if the environment were different, if education were different, not less, but a different environment and approach, that people could become concerned but confident and active rather than scared and defeatist.
You said zero power. But looking back, every big social shift was in situations where individuals felt powerless. I can certainly see and feel powerless. But looking back into history, I feel like that individual conclusion should not be extrapolated to our society overall, and in consequence, ourselves as individuals within that society.