ANXIOUS GENERATION (Part 1): What Social Media Is Doing to Our Kids

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Self-improvement, Arts, Books, Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2024

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s rare these days for a book to go viral, but that’s exactly what happened with “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” by Jonathan Haidt. Now in its seventh month on the New York Times bestseller list, the book shows how the mass adoption of smartphones and social media has led to record rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide among teens. 2️⃣ The second part of Rufus’s interview with Jonathan will be out on Thursday. If you can’t wait to hear it, you can listen to the whole thing right now by subscribing to our Substack: bookoftheday.nextbigideaclub.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn presents.
0:05.0	I'm Rufus Griscombe and this is the next big idea.
0:10.0	Today, the kids are not all right. Jonathan Heights new book, The Anxious Generation, begins with a metaphor.
0:37.0	Imagine that a visionary billionaire invites your daughter, a bright and cheerful 10-year-old,
0:45.2	to join the first human settlement on Mars. Your daughter begs you to let her go. She loves outer space.
0:52.1	All her friends will be there. And you don't want to
0:54.8	quash her dreams, so you agree to learn more. Here's what you find. She's been
1:00.8	recruited because children adapt better to the unusual conditions of Mars.
1:06.0	If she grows up and goes through puberty on the red planet,
1:09.0	her body will be permanently altered by the low gravity environment.
1:13.7	As a result, your daughter may never be able to return to Earth.
1:18.4	So would you let her go?
1:20.9	Of course not.
1:22.4	And yet, as John goes on to explain, we have in effect let our children
1:27.8	go to Mars. They didn't have to leave the Earth's atmosphere. They didn't even need to leave
1:32.3	their rooms. We just gave them smartphones.
1:35.2	They signed up for social media with or without our permission and now these technologies are
1:40.1	warping their minds and bodies just like life on Mars would.
1:44.0	You may think this sounds outlandish, even ridiculous.
1:50.0	Are iPhones and Instagram really that bad?
1:54.0	Well, consider these statistics.
1:57.0	One in seven American girls spends more than 40 hours a week on social media. 40 hours a week, that's a full-time job. And those
	...

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