A Zoomer explains her generation's malaise to older generations
jonathanhaidt.substack.com
jonathanhaidt.substack.com
1. Car dependent cities.
2. Housing crisis
3. Wage suppression
Young people can't go anywhere because they can't afford a car because all their money goes to rent. Even if they WANTED to go somewhere, there isn't anywhere to go because car dependent infrastructure has killed all the places that young people used to hang out.
They don't make enough money to survive, much less thrive. I know a lot of GenZ people living in rotting camper trailers, sheds, tents, and cars. Many of my millennial friends are going through the same thing. They have no savings, no house, and they could never afford to start a family. A child is a ruinous event instead of joyous. There is no safety net and the tight rope is made of silly string.
But what they can afford are cell phones and Instagram/TikTok where they talk to each other.
On top of the physical impoverishment, young people are being starved of meaning and face to face social interaction. Online "communities" are not real communities. Hell, many face to face ones aren't either, at this point.
Substituting online interaction and faux "community" for the real thing is like giving a baby Karo syrup and water instead of milk. It seems sweet and it's even addictive. Eventually, it will harm or even kill the subject.
Agreed, but what community do they have as an alternative? Especially after they leave school.
https://www.villages-news.com/2023/11/05/do-not-buy-a-home-i...
I think it's way more than car dependent infrastructure. It's also the pressures of monetizing everything including social spaces. The only place I know in my town where you will be unharassed for hanging out in the open free of charge for hours out of the weather is the library. The mall will encourage you and your group to leave with security. The coffee shops and lounges require purchases of drink. Even my local makerspace requires at least one purchase to hang out in their scheduled "free" hangout meetups.
Nominal fees are like congestion pricing. If you don't have them, the space loses its ability to fulfill its original purpose.
I'd say it's actually just two things: financial insecurity and climate change.
Both feel hopeless and both make them feel like there is no future no matter what they do.
Just because there is no hope now, doesn't mean an opportunity won't eventually fall into our laps. There is already a lot of change underway in our cities to address these issues because they MUST address them to survive. It will happen, hopefully in time for our children to experience a better society than we did.
I think financial expectations are warped, too.
Look at the viral TikTok video from a few weeks ago, where a recent marketing graduate was wondering why she wasn't making $100k right out of school. Or I recently saw a Twitter discussion where someone said, "Sure you can raise a family on a $100k, but you'll have to do it in 1000sqft. Who wants to do that?". We, I am, and I'm as happy as I've ever been.
Financial inequality has completely skewed what is seen as "normal". We need to fix both that perception, and the actual inequality.
It's not the absolute quality of life that's infuriating. It's seeing how previous generations plundered the country and then pulled up the drawbridge behind them.
As for previous generations, the Boomers are steadily dying off or moving into retirement communities. Lots of homes are coming on the market, although you might have to be flexible on location if you want to buy one.
Go ahead and cite yours, then.
Medium home size in the US has never been under 1,000 sqft. In 1960, it was ~1,500 sqft[1].
1. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/programs-surveys/a...
We have solutions to wage suppression, car dependency and housing costs. We just need the political will to implement them.
Teens are not sitting around sulking because they can't ride the train somewhere. They're all glued to their phones doomscrolling until they can't take it anymore
Please, talk to the people in your lives about politics, or the polarization will only continue to intensify. Common ground is found through dialog, not through cutting everyone in your life out because they fall to one side or another of an arbitrary ideological goalpost that you've decided is the critical opinion everyone needs to agree with in order to be blessed with your presence.
I say this because Jon Haidt started this website, among other things:
If Haidt and those like him are getting lumped in with the MAGA election-denying types, we're all screwed.
Love — “Monogamy is so outdated.”
Community — “I have enough friends online.”
Country — “I’m embarrassed to be an American.”
Work — “I’m quiet-quitting.”
Family — “I’m not bringing kids into this melting world.”
Faith — “My parents are such naive Bible thumpers. By the way, what’s your star sign?”And you certainly don't have to be a conservative to become dissatisfied with internet dating. It genuinely sucks for a lot of people who just want to find somebody who understands them. Getting your dick sucked is great but wanting something more than that doesn't intrinsically make you a conservative.
I think you're just seeing what you want to see. These are the kind of things anybody with liberal or progressive political opinions can find themselves feeling.
> Having [an] entire grab bag of [concerns] listed like this is undeniably conservative.
Ridiculous. Anybody who has multiple concerns in their life will have a list of concerns. Articulating this isn't a conservative trait, it's just basic self reflection. If you don't have a list of concerns with your own life then you're obviously doing very well. But just because you can't relate to people who's lives aren't as great as yours doesn't mean those people are conservative.
(You see I swapped out "the" with "an". Because that list is not The entire grab bag of characteristically conservative concerns. There's no mention of immigration, guns, abortion, voter IDs, crime rates, fear of carbon taxes and corporate regulations, drag-queen story hours, critical theory and progressive school teaches or really anything like any of that. It's clearly not "The" list of conservative concerns. You're characterizing it that way because that's what you want to see for some reason. Maybe you tripped over the mention of religion, but if you put stereotypes aside and look at public opinion polling, you will find that religion in America is largely bipartisan. Even the denominations that lean strongly one way still have millions of adherents who lean the other, e.g. 28% of evangelical protestants who lean Democrat. 55% of American Democrats report that their belief in God is absolutely certain and an additional 21% say their belief is fairly certain.)
I don't think you can give me a substantive response to this, but give it a shot. You could at least try.
There's only one person that I see in this branch of comments trying to lump Haidt in with the MAGA-hat-wearers. One can be a conservative without a red hat. To put it another way, what, you're going to argue that Haidt is progressive? It doesn't take much of a glance at the URL you listed to determine that just isn't the case.
I live in a low cost of living area, that's car dependent. Yes, houses are expensive because _everybody_ is moving to these areas and there's construction everywhere. House prices went up here because so many people started fleeing dense areas when remote opportunities became common. But even 2 miles from my current house you can get a big 3 bedroom apartment for about $900 / month in a good location. Get 2 roommates and your rent is $300 / month.
But the flip side of this should be cause and effect. If people are leaving other areas in higher numbers then there should be deals in those areas.
Only if people are leaving for reasons other than housing availability.
My kids aren't allowed to use social media and we are "the mean parents" now because of it since "everybody else's parents let them." Some of these kids were on Instagram in 4th grade. It took years of explaining what we were protecting them from before they started to really get it, seeing their friends at school who's entire life is on a 4 inch screen.
They understand now, but the pressure is very real.
I expect the vagueness doctrine would also present an obstacle. How could legislators even define social media in a sufficiently precise way? Is email or group chat social media?
(Technically it's not a complete ban because it has an exception for parental permission, but it's a de facto ban because companies don't want to deal with it.)
vs kids in Japan, Europe etc who are meaningfully independent from a far, far earlier age and have far, far more opportunities for socialization than kids in the US do
this is not to say they do not also have their own issues (in many cases device related), but yeah, let's not pretend like car-centrism has nothing to do with it, because it absolutely does
I had a medium-range breakfast the other day... waffles coffee and a mimosa with bacon on the side: $66. Jesus that's more than 4 hours with the local minimum wage before taxes. Realistically the take home from an entire shift -- for a standard breakfast.
If I go out to a bar, every drink is $10.
If I want to go visit a friend, there's no parking anywhere on a Friday night unless you live miles and miles away from the city center. And people keep getting shot/stabbed on public transit. You can laud it all you want but it feels unsafe for a tall dude in his 30s... a lot of young people aren't going to feel comfortable with the local public transit.
The rent is too high, there's nothing to do that's affordable. What the fuck else are young people supposed to do?
https://matduggan.com/developers-guide-to-moving-to-denmark/
I'm talking about waitresses, cashiers, shelf restockers, CNAs and whomever else on the bottom scale of pay not being able to afford anything but rent.
I also don't think orange juice with a little bit of cheap sparkling wine should be an unattainable luxury for anyone with a job.
I don't think my breakfast was worth a day's labor for a big chunk of the society I live in.
Any kind of wine at breakfast has always been considered a luxury reserved for special occasions.
No person is entitled to have others serving them on the cheap; if we want servers and cooks to be well paid, then restaurant food will have to cost a pretty penny.
By the way, you can make the very same breakfast at home for less than $10/person, including the mimosa, and barely $5/person without it.
hell, i'm in Canada in a big city with high COL and my quick in-and-out breakfast on Saturday was 15 bucks for a brekke and 3 for coffee. even with a tip i'm just over $20 for pancakes, bacon, and a couple of refils of diner coffee.
are you paying for the table of 4?
I was lucky to be able to walk to school as a kid in the 90s, and found that time to be a delicious moment of early freedom each day as kids from my neighborhood and I chose our route and cut through backyards and patches of woods to pick up other kids. I lived in a small town without wide or fast roads, so this was largely safe, but I understand why it's not possible in most suburbs today. I loved my ability to ride my bike to friends' houses and down to the town beach in the summer, without having to ask my parents for a ride.
I think I would have been a very unhappy kid growing up in the typical American suburb of today, shepherded between structured activities and constantly monitored by adults. Retreating to a private online world may be an unhealthy coping mechanism, but it makes sense.
^ http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...
Pieces from the New York Post would prolly make parents not want their kids to take MUNI regularly.
It takes as a given the article's point that the proximate cause of the issue is phone / social media centrism (IMO this is also right), but then it asks why? Why is youth culture so centered on devices and social media?
It wasn't phones or the contemporary version of social media for me (missed that by just under five years), but I already felt this when I was an adolescent. For me it was the late-90s wave of internet-connected video games, and the forums about the ones I played - absolutely a form of social media. And I very much relate to, "well what else would I be doing?". Everything else I could do required a parent to do it with me, and while they spent a huge amount of their time on involvement in fruitful things for me to do, in the form of things like sports and organized group activities (boy scouts, etc.), they also very reasonably had their own lives and couldn't just chaperone their kids all night every night and all day every weekend day. And then, what in the world else was I going to do? Where could I go to just hang out with friends, when I was 13, and what could we do on our own? Nowhere and nothing. My impression is that this has only gotten worse.
The respite from this was college, and I'm convinced this is why pretty much everyone fortunate enough to go to a residential college looks back on it very fondly. Colleges have everything their students need, within short walks, and like an infinite number of places for young people to just independently hang out with each other, without having to pay for anything. It's such a revelation! But you do that for just a few years, and then you discover that it only worked because it was absurdly subsidized, either by someone else - parents, taxpayers, wealthy scholarship / grant funders - or by your own future earnings. And out in the real world, all the gathering spaces - bars, coffee shops, restaurants - suddenly become impractically expensive, and all the distances between people become impractically large.
Do places in the US and other countries with good public transit or are walkable like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc somehow not have any of the problems the article is referring to? I kind of doubt it
There's plenty wrong with how car dependent we are in most of the US but it's both not new to the latest generation and not uniform across the entire country yet there IS something that is uniform across the entire country AND new for this generation. Spoiler alert: it's not suburban sprawl.
But your last paragraph seems to be once again missing the "takes as a given ... that the proximate cause of the issue is phone / social media centrism" part. Nobody in this thread has argued against that problem.
Having a bunch of friends within walking distance was nice, but I certainly wouldn't want to return to that lifestyle even if it was free. It was ultimately very limiting and insular.
I guess I think the common immediately post-college model of moving to a small apartment in a dense city with a mix of people smushed together is a better way to get out of a bubble.
But I wish it was more common to go back to more like the campus model for family-raising, with kids of all ages around each other with lots of common spaces they can walk and bike to, with shared lighter touch supervision by all the adults.
But I recognize that this is largely just utopian wishful thinking :)
> Parents ask me: Why are my kids so anxious and depressed? Where do they go all day on their devices? How can I get them back?
The answer is to give them somewhere else to go!
For fuck's sake, there's a complex near me [0] that has STUDIO apartments that start at $1,690. This is a suburb. It's not even close to anything. Even the metro line is about a mile walk. The nearest grocery store is over a mile away.
Granted, our minimum wage is somewhat high at $15.45/hr. But even at that rate, it would take 110 hours of pretax wages to pay for it. Post-tax, it'd be at least 75% of your monthly pay.
The horror.
I thought all the young people are doing things like DoorDash, Hello Fresh or Amazon Fresh etc.
Not saying they should be doing that so much, but seems like they aren’t interested in shopping at a Grocery store.
It's a clear short- vs long-term thinking issue, but the reality is most young people are living with so little hope for the future that denying immediate pleasures in search of a future payoff seems naive and pointless.
I don't think this is really a solvable problem short of giving explicit city government subsidies to grocery stores in certain neighborhoods.
But of course the "driving out to a big store" is also subsidized. It's only cheap because of all the roads that have been built, all the subsidies over the decades that have made fuel so cheap, and the ability to freely "socialize the externalities" of burning fossil fuels.
But what I want is the ability to do a trip to a "big box" store further out once or twice a month, but be able to go somewhere close for smaller things day to day. But I definitely understand why the economics of this don't really work in most places. I just lament it.
But something else worth mentioning is weather. This is the Pacific Northwest. It rains a LOT here. From mid-October to April, the rain feels non-stop.
Walking two miles in the rain nearly every day for six months starts to take a mental toll.
If you want a walkable city lifestyle but you also think walking a mile is unreasonable, your need a reality check. I'm going to walk to the park today to see the ducks, it's 1.5 miles away one way. I'm going to get groceries on the way back. I do this often, it's literally no big deal.
If you have a park and a grocery store both on the same path, and sidewalks, i'd argue that your neighborhood is already walkable.
> "It's not even close to anything. Even the metro line is about a mile walk. The nearest grocery store is over a mile away."
If you want to take advantage of a walkable neighborhood, then you shouldn't be complaining about a mile. A mile is nothing. Before WFH I was walking two miles to work and two miles back every day, and that doesn't count all the other places I walked to every day (another one or two miles for lunch, and another one or two miles in the evening.) And I still managed to gain weight with that routine.. Somebody complaining about one mile sounds like a joke. If you actually want a walkable neighborhood, you should be prepared to walk.
It's odd to me that at these prices, roommates (the kind you share a room with) are not more common.
I feel like you need to be a bit more precise when it comes to walking distance. Is "over a mile away" closer to 1 mile, or 2? A mile walk isn't far, but a 2 mile walk can be if you're doing it both ways without much in-between.
That being said, that apartment building (and area) is clearly designed with driving in mind. Parking spaces, right next to a 7 lane highway, more asphalt than rooftop.
Do you think that cities used to be less "car dependent"? What point in American history are you imagining where people weren't taking cars around?
You could look back to maybe the early 20th century, but what that meant is that you had to live right next to the factory where you worked, which was obviously terrible. Cars meant that you could have separate areas for living and working, and this was considered a good thing.
edit: people keep making the same point, so I'll reply to all of you at once: do you think you could find a single person on any public transportation anywhere in America who wouldn't take a free, brand new Tesla model X with free charging and a free place to park it over riding the bus? Or if they had that brand new Tesla: would any of them trade it straight across for a free lifetime bus pass? Of course not. Having your own car is objectively better in every meaningful way.
The reason people take public transportation is because they can't afford a car, and yes owning a house with a garage is part of affording the car.
Los Angeles, now a car-dependent hellscape, once had a robust and far-reaching street car network.
Post-WW2 we went full car-dependent suburbs. Why? Racism has a lot to do with it.
I'm trying to find photos or accounts, but most of them seem to be people talking about or showing off how happy they are about having their own cars.
Los Angeles has busses that go absolutely everywhere, and even has a subway system, and yet people happily pay tens of thousands of dollars to own their own car so that they can go wherever they want.
I've never heard of somebody intentionally selling their car to take public transportation instead, certainly not in an American city. People take public transportation because they can't afford a car.
As it exists now, however: public transportation is terrible, and having a personal vehicle to take you where you want safely is universally preferable.
In the meantime: google image search photos of some of the Indian commuter trains I’ve ridden on and ask yourself why everybody with even a tiny bit of money hired a private driver.
Your comment about “broader perspective” is insulting, and I guarantee you that my perspective is quite a bit broader than “traveled to some glorified Disney land parks in Western Europe.”
Actually some of the nicest walkable neighborhoods that I’ve visited since moving here, I was the only tourist that I saw.
If you’re genuinely curious, I’d love to give you more information about my city (as an American that moved to Europe). Let me know.
But I have 5 grocery stores within a quarter mile of my home, I take public transit and bike for all of my daily errands, and haven’t driven a car once since moving here. I see my friends whenever I want, often by either walking or taking transit depending on distance.
Just last weekend, I took a train to another city to buy a new racing bike, and took the train most of the way home before riding it the last mile or two. It was easy, and I went all the way to a neighboring town to shop for it (since they had a model that I wanted to try).
You can minimize it by calling it a glorified Disneyland park, but then you’re basically just skipping over the hundreds of millions of people who work non-tourism jobs (engineering, law, business, farming, medicine) and live within these generally well designed places.
You're right, of course, that unpleasant public transportation is very common worldwide. But it's not universal, which, to me, suggests that it's possible to learn from those success stories.
And your own transportation system is vastly inefficient in the task of getting you and thousands of other people where they need to go. In a world where people's destinations are wildly divergent and travellers are few, cars make more sense. But when you see a clogged interstate filled with cars all mostly going to the same or similar destinations, whose occupants could easily fit into a couple of buses, you start to see the logic behind public transportation.
Financial insecurity, and needing to spend 30 mins and 2 gallons of gas just to see a friend, means that it is prohibitively expensive and hard to see people.
Community has become fractured in many ways, like what’s specifically referenced in the article, but the requirement to drive just to meet up with anyone just compounds the issue further.
I had this same problem when I lived in the US as a young millennial. You could never just accidentally run into your friends, you all had to plan and commit to a whole drive just to see each other.
I moved to Europe, and now I can just ride my bike over to a friends place in 10 mins, or take an approximately free tram/bus. I think this would greatly help those in the US as well
Here is a small quote:
Around this time of day, I’d be taking my time walking home with my friends from Most Blessed Sacrament School, or “MBS” as everyone called it. Once home, I’d quickly get out of my school clothes, put on my play clothes, and be on my way to my favorite place in the world, Myers playground.
I always felt so safe on Cecil Street. On warm summer nights, lots of adults would sit on soft cushions on the top step of the four concrete steps that led from the edge of our front porches down to the sidewalk. Neighbors would sit out for hours, talking with other neighbors, many of them enjoying a cold beer or some other cold drink. At least one neighbor would have the Phillies game blasting on their transistor radio. So we’d be able to keep track of the Phillies game while we were running up and down the street having fun. I knew everybody on Cecil Street, and they all knew me. In fact, I knew almost everybody in our section of the neighborhood. And I felt safe no matter where I went. All us kids knew that most parents around here looked out for all the kids, not just their own.
The way I heard it: right after I was born, Dad simply didn’t renew his license, sold his big black Chevy, and never drove again.
Years later, when I asked Dad about it, he said, “Kev, I could take the “13” trolley on Chester Avenue to work. I could walk to the grocery store. I could walk to the bar. And I was tired of driving your mom and Nonna all over the city. What the hell did I need a car for?”
I have heard personal anecdotes from family relating similar stories.
I'm honestly curious: Have you ever spent much time traveling or talking with friends in Europe or other places with much lower car ownership, about this particular point?
I have met while traveling or known socially or through work quite a few people who, sure, they would gladly accept a nice free car (who doesn't want $50k for free...), but would still prefer to walk or ride their bike or take the train most days, because it is actually a lot more convenient than lugging around a vehicle while going about their daily business.
Even in the US, there are tons of wealthy people in our cities who don't own a car (or keep it in the garage nearly all the time), not because they can't afford one, but because it just isn't as convenient.
a car is not objectively better. the greatest pain point from my perspective: parking.
do you know how ridiculously expensive parking is in los angeles? it's insane.
public transport, even as bad as it was in those cities gave me a lot more freedom to go to the places that i wanted to go to within the city at least.
the only benefit for a car would have been to go on road trips, explore the rural areas, etc, but that's not something i'd have wanted to do on my own anyways.
Absolutely, yes.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/2/20/the-history-of...
> Having your own car is objectively better in every meaningful way.
Only if it's free. Also, consider the tragedy of the commons. Maybe it's great for the one person getting a free Tesla, but not so much for the taxpayers that pay for the road, the parking, the noise, and the danger to others.
What do you mean "robbed of public space"? What public space was taken away? The only public space which seems inaccessible to me that used to be is: parks and sidewalks, both of which have become open air drug markets/tent cities. The city where I live has no parks I am comfortable taking my children to, and we actively avoid walking on the sidewalks because it's dangerous.
The parks are unusable and the sidewalks are campgrounds for drug addicts. What is the link to cars here?
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/10/21/the-other-rea...
you have to pay exorbitant prices to be somewhere (the third place) in society with people. it's expensive to socialize.
On the wages only, I wonder what justifies that Canadians make so little in comparison to their American peers living just an hour away across the border. Taxes alone don't seem enough to justify that gap. My take is that Canadians just... accepted it.
> 2. Housing crisis
Ugh… you can improve the situation by spreading out. Cheaper housing requires cheaper, less dense, populations. Using cars enables cheaper housing.
If you want cheaper cars and transportation in general, it’s cheaper energy & cheaper vehicles. Both require less regulation.
You can’t save in a city, where your paying a landlord and the wages are perfectly at market equilibrium. You can only get ahead by moving out, living cheaper and making decent pay.
It’s exactly what the older generations realized.
Not to mention that these days, even doing that won't save you much, or in some cases, post pandemic you'll be paying a premium.
Cars and their supporting infra take up space.
Less regulations will never get rid of increased cost of individual transportation. Public transportion is the only way to push energy demand significantly.
Advising your boomer strategy "to just save" in the current era is so ignorant. This ignorance combined with the ever prospect of passive growth is imo the reason why rent extracts much more out of a life since the golden 50s.
This could not possibly be more the opposite of the case.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/10/21/the-other-rea...
This doesn't make sense to me.
Generations previous were equally car dependent but got by. The current generations are choosing to not go anywhere because they believe they can get the experience by phone. I think the assumption that "if they could get there, they would" is incorrect; they don't want to.
Only a couple of them! You are aware that the mass adoption of cars was a mid-20th-century phenomenon, yes? US cities were radically reshaped around interstate highways during the '50s and '60s. This car-dependence is quite a recent thing in the human experience.
How much more prosperous would our nation be if we had not invested such a significant amount of our time and wealth into cars? We could have built colonies on the Moon with the amount we spent on building more lanes for people to be stuck in traffic.
Real wage growth has been stalled out since the 1970s, several generations before Gen Z.
I think the couple generations in between experienced the problems more as boredom and ennui. Indeed, "gen x" is pretty famous for this, and I think "millenials" are just a mish-mash of the late stage of "gen x" and the early stage of the "zoomer" generations.
Before then, cars were unaffordable for almost everyone. It was kind of like owning an airplane nowadays. It was doable, but most didn't bother unless they really needed one since there were more affordable alternatives and you could walk everywhere you needed to go anyways.
Since then, things have only gotten worse as we slowly make cars the only viable method of transportation through land use requirements and neglected infrastructure.
Up until the teenage years kids need to feel useful. They need to be able to help fix things, etc. They need to get into a little bit of trouble and get dinged up a bit.
Teenagers need a lot more freedom. Every ounce of their body is pushing them to distance themselves from their family, have sex and take risks. Instead parents insist on this "no drugs, no sex" policy. Of course both of those things can present major problems, which is why they should be discussed but not forbidden. Even sex ed today is maximizing fear and pushing waiting until marriage which is just as bad.
As the parent points out, living in a car dependent city with nowhere to go and no way to get there leaves you no choice but to stay home. Staying home means tv, internet and video games. Parents are out on a holy war against that as well.
Are you suffocating yet? Now remember that in addition to everything above your texts, location, browsing history, grades, etc. are all being tracked and reported for your parents to further control you. Could you imagine if you were treated like this as an adult. You'd have a civil war.
Let them fuck. Let them work. Let them do drugs. Let them make mistakes for christ sake. All of these things have consequences and are worth keeping in mind. But coddling them until 18 and expecting them to be functional is like raising an elephant from birth isolated until adulthood then releasing them to the african savannah. They'll be dead before sunset.
My impression is that there is far less of this now than there was thirty years ago or fifty years ago.
Is it possible it actually might be the phones somehow as she argues?
And I might suggest that the author of the essay very likely hasn't considered this next level deeper, because "this is water".
As for housing affordability and wage suppression, these are just established facts. One visit to Zillow to look at a place you used to live is enough. My old apartment that cost $800/month is currently going for $2400/month 8 years later. Minimum wage hasn't changed since 2009 and is currently $7.24/hour.
This is a big one IMO.
We moved to a Northern NJ suburb in the late-90s. However, NYC Metro suburbs are very different from the "suburbs" that are a dime a dozen here in Texas.
The town was small --- about a mile in square area. You could walk pretty much everywhere within it, even though some points were far. Almost every street had a sidewalk that was maintained by the city. Since the city followed a grid system, routes from one persons house to another could be done on foot. I spent a lot of time walking in my teens because of this, though not being allowed to have a car played a big part in that.
(Walking a lot comes naturally to me because of this; in fact, a big reason why I hated living in these suburbs was because of how difficult it was to walk somewhere interesting instead of "mandatory walking" around a fake pond.)
By comparison, suburbs in Texas (or at least here in Houston, and definitely in Dallas) are gigantic. You could walk for miles before you hit literally anything. The nearest business in the suburb we lived in when we moved here was 1.5 miles away on foot. The first 0.5 mile within the neighborhood was fine since the neighborhood had nicely curated sidewalks. Once you left the neighborhood though, you were walking on the 45mph-rated streets that people definitely drive 15+ over on (usually on their phones, since we're on the subject).
None of these neighborhoods have a grid system, so going from one house to another within the neighborhood could take a shocking amount of time despite being a short distance away. This design is done on purpose to "increase safety," which is at best farcical considering how unbelievably spread out these communities are and how distant they are from anything.
I hope the next generation of parents opt for smaller, more walkable towns with smaller houses and proper city centers instead of gigantic, cavernous and mostly empty sets of endless houses. I think this can be done while also remaining affordable, but we, collectively, have to want it.
Otherwise, yeah, the screens will "win" because the Internet is cheap, immediate and has basically anything you can think of.
1. Phones and social media 2. Anomie
- They get paid less (in terms of actual purchasing power) than any prior generation in memory.
- They are saddled with mountains of education debt their elders told them to take on if they want a good job (which they usually never got).
- They cannot get the security and long-term investment that is owning a house, which was much easier for older generations.
- Food and college and other basics of survival and upward mobility are costing more and more every year, outpacing inflation, which itself is outpacing wages.
I really think this is a much simpler explanation for a generation-wide malaise than the popular (with older generations), but infantilizing, explanation of a social media addiction. Not getting paid a fair amount for your hard work, and it being so obvious that you are indeed not getting paid a fair amount, will be demoralizing to anyone of any background.
The Gen Z adults I know are struggling to survive, and they're left wondering, "_These_ are supposed to be my golden years? Going to the food bank and ignoring my student loan bills?" And the older people they look up to are more often than not completely out of touch. They had time to grow savings when it was easier to do so. Everyone I know has a story about some family member who can't understand how they're struggling because they purchased a house with a part time job with no college degree.
But not all older people are like that. My parents never had time to save and buy a house, and today they find themselves hopelessly incapable of doing so. They would never make remarks you hear all the time about "people don't want to work these days." They have the exact same problem as the Gen Z adults except they have a quickly-approaching deadline where they can't work anymore.
I do think social media can be a problem. Besides this site, I am not active anywhere else. A lot of people in my generation already have deleted their accounts, or they _want_ to but can't because it's free and they feel somewhat dependent on it. But you'd be surprised how many fewer people would be feeling depressed if they didn't need to fight to put food on the table.
Disclaimer: Not technically Gen Z, but I don't think I'm far off. The author states they received their first iPhone at 10. I was already spending hours every day on the internet by that age, and bought my first smartphone at 14.
I would not want to work either, if the best I could do was $20/week for 30 hours a week (30, so the employer can avoid paying benefits). $600/week pre-tax won't even pay rent in many cities, let alone other basic living expenses.
I agree with your points but I want to highlight that this perception is part of the cause of the housing issues. People really do want to consider their house to be an investment which incentivizes them to be opposed to changes which might lower their house price. I do not own a house but see a house as a long-term security choice more than an investment. It doesn't need to be an investment for me to prefer a house to an apartment.
Still, I agree with the points, housing included!
It's not a failure of willpower but rather it's you losing (predictively) to decades of market research and teams of PhDs employed to exploit your brain. It's asymmetrical warfare. It's like cigarettes of the past except instead of chemists optimising addictive additives it's programmers optimising attention stealing notifications and dark patterns.
We bring the big bad banhammer down whenever someone cannot deal with their addiction. Every ban erodes our freedoms, bit by bit.
Why not just go live in China? There the authorities are happy to tell you what you can and cannot do with every aspect of your life.
You are not everybody. There are people more susceptible to addiction than you, and likely people less susceptible to addiction than you as well. Should the Sacklers have been allowed to keep lying about the addictive qualities of Oxycontin despite there being people who "cannot deal with their addiction?"
That's basically reductio ad absurdum and a common refrain I see on HN. Restricting the worst dark patterns in software is not an affront to human freedom. Banning selling cigarettes to kids is not the same as Uighur concentration camps.
Broken hearted at what I've seen as university professor for the past 10-15 years... a generation who seem empty and bereft, I wrote a book to try to help [0]. The central metaphor of it is that the data you consume is much like the food you eat, and entreating people to be more selective about their consumption.
But most of what I wrote there was dismissed by my own generation, especially fellow developers and technical people, as "Luddite". Those of us seriously challenging the "smart-phone crisis" are always dubbed marginal throwbacks and non-conformist oddballs.
Yet if this article is genuine, and representative it turns out we were right all along. I am not sure if I am happy or sad. Sometimes you just really want to be wrong.
I feel I should take more courage, and renewed vigour to be even more vocal in denouncing smartphones as a scourge. And yet I remain sceptical, perhaps out of hopeless optimism that this catastrophe isn't happening.
Are there any articles countering this one? Written by Gen-Z who are delighted with being addicted to always-on tracking and surveillance devices that fill their minds with doom and poison?
[0] Digital Vegan (https://digitalvegan.net)
Very true. Indeed, with my understanding of addiction one thing I fear we'd have to endure with a step change - like a backlash where millions of young people dump their phones, or an large scale failure of technology, is that they wouldn't know what to do with themselves. Plunged from a superficially meaningful digital holding-pen into an empty real world would be insane. Positive cultural change has to happen slowly enough.
> The author of OP's link has a net worth of $1.5 million. She absolutely has no idea of the problems non-millionaire zoomers have.
I don't believe wealth is a factor in understanding per se. To my eyes, the poverty of life that accompanies a smartphone lifestyle is equally hurtful to rich and poor alike.
When I take my kids to the park or their sports, grandma and grandpa are usually the ones scrolling Facebook.
There’s no shortage of “grandma, I can see you not watching! Watch!”
Doom scrolling is impacting everyone. Quitting Facebook and Reddit is the best thing I did for my sanity. That shit was all bigotry and racism at this point anyway.
The author would be advised to find something creative that engages them. No, doomscrolling doesn't count, and "creative" is a pretty broad term. Even for, especially for, someone who believes that everything is doomed - activism can be creative. It requires little more than intrinsic motivation, energy, time, and the dedication to see it through.
It may have been a mistake to give children social media from too early an age, but at some point, it became the author's responsibility to give up an energy sink that is not serving them anymore and find a better use for their time.
Zoomers are in this very forum - hi Zoomers.
Hang in there.
Whatever precipitating causes led to such suffering, know that we're _here_, _now_, together.
You aren't as alone as it might seem.
And hey, try to relax a little. We'll figure it out.
The article comments on this though:
"All the things that have traditionally made life worth living — love, community, country, faith, work, and family — have been “debunked.”
This is absolutely true and no wonder young folks are feeling down. I think the counter-culture types starting 50+ years ago wanted to tear down the old, but forgot to put something constructive in its place. (Well the leftist/Marxist types tried, but then the USSR imploded)
From the article...
Monogamy is the corollary for the debunking of love.
That's very silly. Love is much more than marriage.
"Church" foibles is the corollary for the debunking of Faith.
That's also very silly. Faith is much more than church or religion.
In other times and other cultures, spiritual insight removed the roots of suffering.
Little (probably hard) advice for if/when you're going to say something like that to a zoomer irl (based on personal experience from the receiving end):
The "you aren't as alone as it might seem" gets the "what you're saying is just factually incorrect and what you're trying to do is to bullshit me and maybe possibly yourself" thing going. I have never heard something like that from a person "in the weeds".
Same for "We'll figure it out". How much time have you personally spent "figuring it out" and how much time have you spent playing hot potato with the problem? How important is it compared to your own problems? I guess, not very, so there is no "us" figuring it out.
Basically, don't be a disingenuous dense motherfucker and don't bullshit other people and yourself. Not saying you personally are doing it, but there are definitely more people that do, than that don't.
Attitude is a potion or a poison.
Make the choice.
Want demons? You'll find them.
Want help? You'll find it.
Many, many people have spent time figuring it out.
Many, MANY people have went into professions or made life style choices to help.
The will to overcome your own narcissism and self pity are key to any healing.
- 2000: "Almost all 6-17 year olds (99%) watch television in their leisure time, and on average spend *two and half hours almost every day* in front of the screen."
- 2023: "On average, children ages 8-12 in the United States spend 4-6 hours a day watching or using screens, and *teens spend up to 9 hours.*"
I think this screen time increase, and, specifically, the lack of regulation around social media consumption is a crisis. Data on the harms that social media is directly and indirectly accountable for is abundant. The increase in children getting a tablet thrown in front of them is particularly concerning to me.
This might be me (a Millennial) channeling Socrates[^2] about the next generation, but I am increasingly strongly believing that insufficient life skills development and the achievement gap in general will be significantly wider in the coming years because of this, and that wage/class inequalities will increase with it.
[^0]: https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/21172/1/Young_people_New_media.pdf
[^1]: https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Fam...
[^2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a4vnuv/old_g.... Yes, I know it's misattributed to Socrates and is a much more recent quote than oft-believed.
The conclusion of the article is "phones bad, take them away and everything good" which is the same talking point politicians from the era of leaded fuel want you to believe. She appears to solely blame phones for zoomer depression and completely ignores everything else. It's gross. I don't know why any reasonable person would ignore everything else other than them wanting to push an agenda or they're completely oblivious to the situation.
It's probably both, she's a wealthy individual (sites state her net worth is $1.5 million, how many zoomers do you know that have such a net worth or can ever achieve such a net worth?) and constantly tweets conservative culture war stuff on Twitter.
Another thing I'm reminded of is the articles that sometimes make the rounds with headlines like "This teen just purchased their own house!" and other "rags to riches stories" and every single time it turns out their parents are extremely wealthy and inherited the wealth from their own parents. It's grossly dishonest.
I agree this is a major problem, especially here in Canada.
But what makes you think these people will suddenly be satisified when they own a home or live on their own? It's more cost and more responsibility, and isn't automatically fulfilling in any special way, is it?
It starts out, off the bat, by reframing structural social issues as individual failures: it's mental illness, suicide, anxiety, cancel culture, coddling. Then it tries to make the point that phones enable this sort of collective doom-scrolling escapism.
Then it tries to present an actual anecdote from a Gen Z person to reinforce the viewpoint that liberal ideology (non-monogamy, shame about American issues, quiet-quitting, climate change, anti-religion) are the cause of this discontent... but then instead of addressing any of them, it tries again to reframe those issues as a personal addiction to smartphones. As if Gen Z would be happier simply by turning off their phones (which is probably true, granted, but doesn't really address any of the underlying social issues).
It's a weird strawman: Nevermind that the world is broken. You're just on your phone too much.
Then what happens after they turn it off? Still a shit economy, no good jobs unless you want to work in tech or finance (and even then...), climate change getting worse, nobody can afford housing, education is increasingly worthless, culture wars are getting more polarized...
I'd argue the opposite cause/effect: People are on their phones so much because that's all that's left to do in a dying world, because previous generations hoarded so much for themselves there's nothing left for the future.
You've missed and/or are proving the point.
Would it shock you to learn that there are large segments of the population who aren't in a doom loop of "the world is broken"?
It doesn't go away if I don't read about it, but why subject myself to such needless anguish in the first place? Doomscrolling is a choice. Reading the news is a choice. Yes, this is my privilege speaking because I live in the middle of nowhere where nothing ever happens so I don't have to stay informed for my own safety. I choose to live somewhere with that level of safety cushion, and I give up all the "benefits" of living in the city for this privilege.
Even if you turn off your phone, all those social issues making it hard for these generations will still be there, in a way that wasn't the same for our parents and grandparents. Even if you can't do anything about these, they still directly affect your livability and haunt your life in profound ways.
All the generational peers I know are basically separated into two groups: the tech people are fine (or better), and everyone else is struggling. Of the latter group, the better-off among us can rent alone or with a partner, maybe buy a cheap house in a rural area. The majority cannot.
And our predecessors' political and environmental failures compound every year to the point where they can't just be ignored even if we wanted to just hide, between wildfires and shootings and abortion and homophobia and transphobia... these have real everyday impacts to many of the people I know, even though none of them are doomscrollers. You can't just hide from the world and pretend like there are no issues when they're actively affecting you.
I suspect that even BeReal will do this at some point unless they pivot to e.g. Cohost’s [1] model of paying a monthly fee.
Unfortunately achieving the network effects required for a successful social media app is at odds with the friction involved in paying for a subscription service. As such, “cool” apps like BeReal don’t stay cool for very long IMO.
[1] cohost.org
Bah, get off my lawn so I can yell at a cloud.
And, I will admit a lot of indicators and below the surface trends were in the wrong direction since the 80s at least--the 00s are just went everything finally collapsed
Are you sure this isn't just nostalgia? There was a lot going wrong in the 90's.
Were the 90s perfect? No, of course not. We had a very long economic boom, technology advancing in a very optimistic way (vs. today where technology is actively making things worse)
Now, what fed a lot of that caused a lot of our problems today--the 24 hour news cycle spun up, there were troubling economic trends like the fact that wages basically never went up after Reagan so I'm not saying that time has nothing to answer for
You are the exact target of this article and you are being persuaded by it.
This article discusses Gen Z diving into their phones as a symptom of the generational malaise, but don't mistake the symptom for the cause.
You (a teenager) can invite your peers to your house to hang out for some hours after school or on the weekend. In the past they would accept because they had nothing better to do, or if they did, that would be communicated and everyone would join. Today your peers are likely to just decline the invitation. There is plenty of entertainment at home: their phone. And if they came over to your house, they would mostly scroll on their phones anyway. It's a widespread, untreated, mostly-unrecognized addiction.
Imagine how difficult it would be to quit heroin if all of your friends and all of their friends had to quit heroin at the same time or else no one can. The government will step in eventually.
As can be expected, Haidt and the poster argue that solutions are found at the level of the cell phone and limiting access to it, rather than improvements at the social level where the boomer, gen x, and increasingly millennial generations continue to fail to deliver meaning through the aforementioned institutions.
If Gen Z could look to society and especially older generations for
- interpersonal relationships based on cooperation rather than competition
- work that was meaningfully compensated rather than exploitative
- governments that were responsive to their constituents rather than self-serving
- social support systems that reward rather than punish parenting, or
- religious institutions that delivered compassion and moral goodness rather than prejudice and contempt,
then I think it could be argued that folks could find meaning in these institutions instead of behind a phone screen. Until then the complaints about social decay are almost insulting.
Ultimately people are looking for meaning and purpose to their existence. There are productive ways to get there, and then there are destructive ways. Everyone needs to pick their own path.
We live in a utopia of usurers, we've forced our children into unforgivable debt to "get a good job" before they have a chance to earn a cent, we've pushed education, housing and now automobiles beyond all reason via debt finance. When they complain we say "Well, you signed the contract" because we've lost all sense of morality in financial and economic matters. We even deny the language necessary to understand their situation to our children: when is the last time the church, let alone an economist, even mentioned the term usury?
We need a debt jubilee, as Steve Keen has been saying for a decade now. But we won't, for the same reason he's been ridiculed for a decade now.
We small time usurers will find, very late in the game, that our money doesn't mean much when the social contract has been shattered.
What we have nowadays is mainly a case of mismatched expectations. All children are told that they are special, and that when they become an adult, a car, a nice job and a McMansion awaits them. These statements glossed over the reality of hard work and mapping skills to outcomes. It was never possible to guarantee this for everyone. Now kids are finding out the hard way that not all of them will get what they were promised, and in fact most won't.
I would be willing to wager that have read far more, and far different, history that you.
As you can see, it's not even close to the 150 year peak. Now, US is a new country, relatively speaking. Let's look at Europe. From Rutgers, have a look at the graph on page 8 detailing interest rates from 1300 CE to now:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...
Speaking of debt jubilees, we are in one right now as far as university and college students are concerned.
But certainly, don't let facts get in the way of your rhetoric.
What on earth are you talking about? Provide a link of all student loan debt forgiveness please. Don't let facts get in the way of your rhetoric.
During the pandemic, the federal govt. paused all interest payments on student debt, effectively setting the payable interest rate to zero. That moratorium ran from 2020 and expired just last month, in Sept 2023: https://studentaid.gov/announcements-events/covid-19
Prior to that, the Obama administration launched a student loan forgiveness programe called PAYE (Pay As You Earn) in Oct 2011, which was later expanded to the REPAYE program to reduce the barrier to entry. Lots of sources available online to read about this, here's one: https://www.debt.org/students/obama-pay-as-you-earn/#:~:text....
https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/usury-faq-or-...
As a millenial, things weren't that different for us. We had AoL, ICQ, MSN messenger. Folks played Quake, Starcraft, Everquest. WoW came out just as many of us entered university. Some of us flunked out because we gamed too much.
To Gen Z: Look, there are no substitutes for hard work and self control. If it's important, work at it. If it's bad for you, put it down. Delay isn't going to change anything. An 18 year old smoker is just as addicted as a 10 year old smoker.
We can make progress once people start taking responsibility for themselves.
Can you talk more about this and cite some sources?
To be clear I'm glad some things are regulated, but being in hundreds upon thousands of those meetings doesn't appeal to me, and it eventually didn't speak to them.
If I think of what jobs would be most meaningful to me, it is things that are not paying. I could be a computer science teacher and after a long career still make less than I did in my first software job out of college.
If I want to afford to own a house or have a family, it's clear which career choice I have to make.
And I do think that we should build more housing in California, and other high cost areas. But realistically that's not going to happen soon. Zoomers who want to improve their lives today should look outside the fashionable cities.
Today there are many other employers hiring rocket engineers. Try Boeing, Northrop Grumman, or RTX. A lot of experienced engineers are retiring so there are opportunities available. But you can't be picky about location.
Every generation thinks its suffering is unique and worse than those before it. Read Douglas Coupland's early 90s novels (Generation X and Microserfs) to see how Gen X fared in contrast to their parents. Watch Eden of the East to see how middle-Millenials struggled with the rising concept of the NEET (in Japan, the US, and western Europe alike) as our Gen X and Baby Boomer parents couldn't understand the difference in economic and life circumstances between being 23 in 1980 and being 23 in 2008.
Smartphones and social media are accelerating the decline, but there's evidence collected over the past ~60 years that points to a trend of diminishing quality of life. A great non-fiction economics-oriented book on the US version of this is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert Gordon. (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147727/th...)
Every recent generation has felt like they have it harder than their parents, and it is usually brushed off as just hindsight bias. But I feel like we don’t look at it enough that maybe things have actually gotten worse overall (for those of us in relatively rich countries).
I think a lot of things have gotten better in the last ~60 years, especially medicine, in terms of improving the lives of people. But some things, especially community related, have definitely gotten worse. And maybe those things are more important to our health than we’ve given credit to.
The whole self-destructive behaviour is clearly addiction.
And no one, except the addict, is ever going to cure it.
Real life sucks. People have sought escapism for ever. Do you really think there's something called a "dream job"? Seriously? A job is something people endure so they can live inside, with electricity.
This myth that there used to be engaging stimulating employment that made people feel fulfilled is just part of the escape mentality.
Having to face physical reality is what's missing for gen z. It's not fun, or fulfilling, but in the aftermath there is a sense of self preservation that will never come from the opium of twerk tic "influencers".
I was a teenager of the '70s, we pursued PLENTY of escapes from reality. But the big difference is that after 6 or 8 hours, the LSD wore off! The phone is 24/7, and this is the root of the problem.
Sorry to break it to you, but this idea that the world is what's the problem is just plain wrong. The world has ALWAYS been an exploitive murderous place, but previously people had to come to grips with that, whereas with the cyber-escape, people can live forever in a goggle fueled delerium.
Put down the phone, go outside, talk to people IRL.
That's your only hope...
I've talked to veterans at bars and the stories they tell about how they worked and lived is entirely alien to anyone who grew up with the internet and smartphones. These people worked the same jobs for 30+ years and are now retired with pensions or disability benefits. The kind of stability that was afforded to the older generations is no longer available to anyone. No one will ever work at a single job for 30+ years and then retire with full benefits. Whatever economic and social circumstances made that possible are long gone.
I would prefer not to.
It’s this myth that gen z if the fist generation growing up with modern tech that goes unchallenged
I think it’s of more what the adults are teaching the kids that’s harming them. Ideological stuff, not tech.
Maybe the bigger problem is society's tolerance of mega companies that become so large that no one employee feels responsible for their abuses.
> We’re conservative moms. This is how we raise our kids in a woke city
And
> the canceling of the American mind
And
> Climate protesters will never get people to change if they keep acting like this
Provocative right wing trash
All three of my kids are in Gen Z. They all have anxiety disorders, some severe. I got bad news for everyone: this started before they had smart phones. Premise blown.
But now that they're okay (after 10 years) I've been talking with my kids what happened. They all said the same thing: high school. In high school, they said, they had College! College! College! pounded into their heads all day, every class period, of every day. The unspoken message they loudly received is if you don't go to college then you're doomed. You're going to drown, college is the only means to tread water or get ahead.
I've been in group therapy sessions with anxiety-ridden, suicidal Gen Z kids. They all identify the same source for their problems. Pressure. Intense pressure. You want to play sports for fun? Nope. Gotta be serious about getting a scholarship. Can't go out and play a pick-up game with your friends, either. They're all consumed in playing league sports.
Want to do an activity? Better consider how that looks on the college resumé. Better excel at that activity. Be a leader. Can't just join Boy Scouts because you want to hang out with your friends and go camping. Oh no! You need to be an Eagle scout! You need to be a leader! If you do martial arts then there had better be a black belt coming at the other end. All activities serve the college resumé.
College! College! College!
But wait, there's more! My daughter recently pointed out that the United States had been at war since the day she was born. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a constant background narrative throughout her life. It seemed surreal because life proceeded as though we weren't at war. But you always heard about it. Always saying thanks to those who'd served several tours fighting it.
Finally, I, being a Gen X'er, was the first of the divorce generation. My generation was hit hard by divorce. What did Gen Z get hit with? The housing crash of 2008. Gen Z is the generation of foreclosure. They saw their families lose their home. They saw their families who struggled to afford their home kicked out of their home and then forced to rent where the rents would go even higher than what they were paying for their own home.
Gen Z is the first generation in American history who's not doing as well as their parents. Don't be surprised when they call bullshit on American Exceptionalism or say Okay Boomer! And don't think for a second that the problem is with smartphones. They may not be helping, but they're not the source of all their problems.