Smartphones went mainstream in 2010, and Gen Z, the kids born between 1997 and 2012, became the homegrown rats in a massive social experiment.

Between 2010 and 2018, teen anxiety surged 134% and depression, 106%. Rates of self-harm more than doubled. The tragic consequences of what Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, calls a full-scale rewiring of childhood. Now those kids are starting to sue. Mark Zuckerberg recently took the stand in an L.A. courtroom to defend META.

He denied charges that Facebook and Instagram were designed to be highly addictive for children.

He lost massively.

The jury found that META's apps, including Instagram and Google's YouTube, were deliberately

built to be addictive, and the company's executives knew this and failed to protect their

youngest users.

But it's not just kids.

The great rewiring is affecting us all.

Gen Z spends the most time on their phones at an average

of six hours and 37 minutes daily. Millennials aren't far behind at 5 hours 57 minutes,

with boomers taking up the rear at 3 hours 38 minutes a day on their smartphones. But

there's no denying it. Gen Z seems to be the worst off. One in five

young adult zoomers are either unemployed, not in school, or not in any kind of training for work.

56% of 18 to 24 year olds are single, and on present trends over half of them will never marry.

And 70% report anxiety and depression as major generational problems.

Haight calls it the greatest destruction of human capital in history.

Digital tech created a whole new world of information and convenience, but it also made us sadder,

less social, and less connected.

And yet, knowing this, as we prepare for Gen Alpha to hit high school in 2027, have we

learned our lesson?

Today's teens average not five or six hours a day online, but nine.

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