Honestly, the one thing I hope to hold onto is never wondering what's wrong with kids these days.
We've seen too many generations asking that question for me to conclude that there is anything wrong with them. There's just a lot of ways to be human, and they're exploring a different channel than my generation did.
That's kind of what I mean. Every generation thinks this new tech is ruining kids: we thought it for radio, we thought it for television. Hell, we thought it for writing:
"O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own."
I'm sure there are different stressors and challenges on young people that I didn't experience at their age, but "what's wrong with" is immediately the wrong framing. It flies in the face of a history of human adaptation to their environment. The notion that the newest batch of challenges is different, fundamentally, from previous ones is the kind of thinking that leads people to hold up THESE ARE THE END TIMES signs in the streets generation after generation for thousands of years.
(Having a couple teenagers in my life: the challenges they experience are special and different from what I experienced, but mine were different from my parents and their parents lived through one or two world wars).
I think you can be aware of the history going from newspapers to radio to portable explicit music, and TV, and still see that a kid having a smartphone truly might be something worse than what came before. As in this time it really is different.
When I was a kid I had Saturday morning cartoons, but was bored a lot. Video games existed, but you got bored of those fast and rarely got new ones. We went outside a lot. Kids these days (as well as adults) have access to 24/7 dopamine hits. That doesn't mean we're in the end times, but I don't think humans were meant to live in our own curated digital bubbles. People are now less used to socializing in person and it seems to be causing exacerbated feelings of loneliness and depression.
Of course my father complained whenever I wasn't hard at work, but the difference seems to be the magnitude of the modern problem. At times I think humanity is rapidly evolving into something else and the physical bodies we have can't keep up. I can't imagine the next thousand years of progress.
Valid points. I will say though that this new era of instant gratification: smartphones, streaming services, engaging/addicting video games...etc is leading to large amounts of people choosing to not have kids. Heck, forget the having kids...people aren't even dating at the same levels as historical norms it would seem. Birth rates are below the replacement level in many countries already and that is concerning. Maybe we just drop back to older population levels after a sharp adjustment period.
The smartphone in their pocket connects them to services designed by psychologists to keep them engaged for as long as possible. I can't think of a historic analogue.
Technology development appears to follow an exponential curve while human psychological development has remained relatively static.
It is entirely possible that without equivalent biological change, the attack upon the human spirit by various forms of media will become critical and at some point the kids really will not be alright.
What other explanation is there for the evidence we have that teenage girls in many counties across the globe report being more anxious and depressed and also are admitted into emergency services for self harm at a higher and increasing rate each year with an inflection point in 2012 specifically?
This is a pretty underrated comment. Yeah we've had world wars and stuff, but never some kind of service that makes young women hate themselves to such a degree. In my day they had the teen magazines, but not the 24/7 feed of polished celebrity faces and people with filters and stuff.
We've seen too many generations asking that question for me to conclude that there is anything wrong with them. There's just a lot of ways to be human, and they're exploring a different channel than my generation did.