Today’s Kids Need Elders. And That’s Us.

From Rebekah Berndt with her graciously expressed permission and well worth your time and consideration, very well worth your time and consideration…and appropriate action (highlights mine) —

I read this interview today with the sociologist Jean Twenge whose latest book, Generations, is on my to-read list:

“Twenge (51, Gen X) began looking at the differences between generations as a 22-year-old doctoral student. She documented the rise in individualism that began with the baby boomers and continued with millennials. But it wasn’t until 2012 that she noticed the data really beginning to change. ‘There were abrupt shifts in teen behaviours and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs and many of the distinctive characteristics of the millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data – some reaching back to the 1930s – I had never seen anything like it.’”

The key changes are that Gen Z and young Millennials have a drastically increased rate of depression, anxiety, and self- harm, and a persistent belief that everything is terrible— that things like sexism and racism are worsening, even though there is strong material evidence that they are not. Twenge believes that social media (in the setting of already-rising individualism) is primarily to blame for this.

I know there are some of you who will say “But what about climate change?,” and it is undoubtedly true that this is a real problem for today’s kids’ to worry about. But there is pretty incontrovertible evidence that social media is clearly harming kids (and all of us), replacing actual embodied relationships, the kind that stimulate the release oxytocin— promoting emotional regulation, social learning, and neuroplasticity— with fake relationships that leave us dopamine-addled.

It also promotes simplistic, black and white thinking, the kind that fits neatly into algorithms and creates click-bait headlines. This is undoubtedly why we have an epidemic of nonsense cancel-culture driven by rigid ideology and emotional fragility. It’s driving polarization and represents a real threat to our culture. People in this state of mind are not going to be up to the task of responding to climate change.

Twenge’s solution:

“I think it’s in the hands of the older generations to turn this around. In the end we need social media companies not to be making billions from designing their algorithms to keep people coming back and on their apps as long as possible. And we need older generations to stand their ground when it comes to free speech.”

That’s when it hits me. As a late Gen X/ Millennial cuspie, I am part of the last group of people that remembers the beforetimes, the times when you could just sit and read a book uninterrupted for hours or spend 45 minutes closing alternate eyes to ponder the changes in color perspective and perception (okay maybe that was just me). Before our brains were constantly injected with memes and mindviruses and all the other things that are making us crazy.

Which means when she says “older generations,” she means me. Yikes.