Adolescents these days live in a time of prosperity. Around the globe, life expectancy is rising, education is widespread, homicide rates are dropping, and diseases are increasingly curable. If one is lucky enough to have been born in a high-income country, they’ve come of age at a time when risky teenage behaviors, such as sex, drug use, and crime, are in steady decline. Schools now provide increased social-emotional learning and mental health support. Yet contemporary teenagers are experiencing rates of anxiety at all-time highs.
This has prompted social psychologist Jonathan Haidt to label Gen Z (and older Gen Alphas) “the anxious generation.” If you happen to be an educator or parent these days, you are probably familiar with the playground summary of his book: The current mental health crisis dovetails not-so-coincidentally with the rise of smartphones and social media, and parents should take steps to limit their use.
I’m a mindfulness director at a PK–8 school, and have two young kids of my own, so I’m very familiar with the doomsday discourse around devices. But I also have an additional perspective that I hope parents can consider before getting too wound up about the problem of phones.
Haidt’s work brings to mind something that many of us think of when the latest innovation is held up as evidence of the downfall of civilization: We’ve been through this before. In the 1800s, medical journals were concerned about “railway madness” and trains traveling so fast they would make people go crazy. In the 1920s people railed against the radio as a vapid deliverer of ads and indistinguishable jazz. And the rise of teen car culture in the 20th century led to rabid fears about promiscuity, delinquency, and moral decline.
Each generation, it seems, believes that the unique conditions that it (or its progeny) encounters are the most challenging. And in a way, each generation is right. We may know intellectually that things were stressful in the past, but the present is the only time in which acute discontent can be felt. Our capacity for anxiety is not caused by the latest gadgets, it is innate; an evolutionarily advantageous trait that causes us to avoid danger and seek reward. Don’t knock it: It’s helped keep Homo sapiens alive and nourished for the last 190,000 years or so.
The truth is that we are hardwired for dissatisfaction, considering our ancestors who sat contentedly on their laurels tended not to pass on their genes. Today, some humans face genuinely dire straits. Extreme tragedy and hardship certainly exist. We face a major threat as a species: climate change. But even in the best of circumstances, most of us spend our day-to-day yearning for more, despite the general lack of predators and the abundance of supermarkets. It’s a phenomenon the Buddha identified 2,600 years ago as the first noble truth: Life is suffering.
There is something very unique about angst today—and it’s not the phones. I think of an anecdote in sociologist Liah Greenfeld’s prescient 2005 paper, “When the Sky Is the Limit: Busyness in Contemporary American Society.” She is aghast when her teenage son dyes his hair blue, yet he counters that he never approved of her dyeing her gray hair. When she points out that she is dyeing her hair a natural color, he states, “You wished to pass for somebody you are not, while I am just trying to see who I am.”
For most of human history, identity was ascribed at birth: pauper, peasant, preacher, princess. Of course, inequities could cause suffering. But social position was a period, not a question mark. Today, modern teenagers are more engaged in the process of trying to see who they are than any other generation that has come before. This is not about identity politics but ennui: Even minuscule choices, like what socks to wear, are part of a larger cultural self-definition and viral conversation. Getting dressed in this context is certainly preferable to fleeing a saber-toothed tiger—but it’s not without its edge.
Today’s teens face a yawning chasm of potentiality. “The natural limitations of human existence are the only limitations life imposes on contemporary Americans,” wrote Greenfeld. “In comparison to other societies, our sphere of freedom, and choice, is greatly extended.” It’s not just about the freedom to pick (or avoid) a religion, and whether or not to have kids. It’s the choice of where to live, what to buy (there are so many choices about what to buy), what to decorate your walls with—everything down to how to groom the hairs on your head. Teens today are taught they can be whatever they dream.
This is no less anxiety-inducing than being in an environment of scarcity. In an infamous study on purchasing jam, consumers were attracted to the display with more choices, but ended up purchasing a jar much less frequently than consumers who had stopped at a smaller display. “The presence of choice might be appealing as a theory,” one of the researchers has said. “But in reality, people might find more and more choice to actually be debilitating.” As Greenfeld put it: “Lifting limits from our desires, paradoxically, places very heavy burdens on our shoulders.”
Though I don’t think this generation is unique in its sense of anxiety, I don’t disagree with Haidt on the fact that devices can play a role in the modern teen’s sense of unease. Smartphones can act as anxiety incubators, amplifying the sense of abundant possibility like a prism refracting light. The solution to this anxiety, though, is the same as it ever was. The Buddha suggests that we work with the fundamental dissatisfaction we feel by releasing craving, and attuning to the sensory richness of the present moment. As a seminal Harvard study showed, people are least happy when their mind is wandering, and happiest when their mind is focused on the activity they are engaging in. In other words, being a scrollbot stokes anxiety. Meditating or drawing or hiking or dancing might help mitigate it.
But we’d also do well to remember that suffering is not abnormal—it’s human. Rather than pathologizing the valid feelings of the current generation, it might be wiser to normalize them. Your teen might feel dissatisfied because they spend a lot of time on their phone. But also, they might feel dissatisfied because that’s what it means to be a teen.
