Jonathan Haidt on How to Free the Anxious Generation (Part One)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Leila Ismail. Our guest on the podcast today is renowned social psychologist and best-selling author Jonathan Haidt. He joined us live on stage at the Emanuel Center in London on April 24th, 2025 to discuss his book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

In conversation with broadcaster and journalist Johnny Diamond, Haidt explored how smartphones, social media and overprotection have transformed childhood and what we can do to reverse the damage.

Thank you.

Thank you very much and welcome. In a moment I'll just trot you through the format of what we're going to do this evening. I have a long biography of Jonathan in front of me. I'm not going to read it out because if you don't know who he is you're probably at the wrong event. Suffice to say a social psychologist, an author, the author of The Anxious Generation with its deep

deeply disturbing subhead, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. If you haven't read the book, the good news is it is fantastically written and in various points uplifting as well as depressing and deeply worrying as well.

So that all said, let's kick off with a fairly simple one. And that is, I guess, about what drove you to write the book. What was the inspiration and what took you through it? Sure. Let me just first start by saying this is the fourth time I've done an IQ Squared event. I'm very grateful to IQ Squared for putting me in conversation with such interesting people in these beautiful, beautiful venues. And

I was here a year ago when the book came out and it was clear so much was happening here in Britain with regard to this, with regard to getting a handle on this.

So, I said a year ago to, in various settings, we're going to fix this and we're going to fix it first in Britain because you really, there is a lot happening here. And now I come back a year later and so much is happening in schools going phone free, legislation that is working its way through. So, it's thrilling to be back. I love coming to London. I love coming to IQ Squared. And now I will answer your question.

So what drove me to write the book was almost an accident. I had a contract to write a book on capitalism and morality back in 2014, but...

The world around me kept falling apart at universities and then more broadly in my country. So I kept writing things about that. I wrote a book called "The Coddling of the American Mind" about the overprotection, strange things happening on campus. And it's because of that that I began looking at teen mental health. Why are our students in 2015 suddenly so anxious and depressed?

And part of the story is the overprotection that we've done, not just in the US. You did it the same here in Britain and in Canada. And you don't have the same crime we did, but we all overprotected our kids to stop letting them out in the 90s. So I wrote that book, put it out, and then I was going to go back and finally write the book on capitalism. But things started getting weirder and weirder in American politics. And...

And I kept thinking about how is the digital transformation, how is social media changing everything? You know, if democracy is a conversation, what happens if the conversation moves on to Twitter? Boom, it just blows up.

So once again, I put off the book on capitalism and I plan to write a book on what social media is doing to democracy. The title, it's a very depressing title, Life After Babel, Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share. Okay, so I start writing that book.

And chapter one, I think, oh, I know. Chapter one is going to be called Canaries in the Coal Mine because I have all this data on what's happening to teen mental health. And I can show that as soon as the kids move their social lives onto Instagram in particular, but social media around 2012 is the big transition year. So I'll just start off, you know, we'll start chapter one would be that. And then I'll say what happens to democracy when it moves on? So I wrote that first chapter, which became chapter one of this book.

But once I had all the graphs in place, once I could see it's not just America and the UK, it's also Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, Europe. We don't have data from much of the world, but

something happened in the early 2010s in multiple countries at the same time hitting girls harder. And this was like, I can't just drop this in chapter one, now onto a regularly scheduled program about the decay of democracy. So I said, okay, I need another chapter on childhood. How does this mess up childhood? So I wrote that, that became chapter two. And then...

"Well, I have to have a chapter on girls because the girl's story is very different from the boy's story." By the time I got to four chapters, I realized I have to split this book in two. And so I called my editor and my agent and said, "Can we break it in two?" And they said, "Yes." And so that became The Anxious Generation. So it was sort of an accident that I ended up writing this book, but it turns out to be by far the most important thing I've ever done in my life.

At the heart of the book is a kind of seesaw, isn't it? You mentioned some of this, that what happens in the 80s and the 90s is what you describe as the sort of overprotection of children and their withdrawal from society.

public spaces, communal spaces, and communal play. And on the other hand, on the other side of this seesaw, the introduction of phones and social media. Can you talk first of all about that withdrawal from public spaces and why you think that is so important to Charles' development or lack of it? Yes. So I often describe the book as a tragedy in two acts.

In Act 1, we lose the play-based childhood in the 1990s. And in Act 2, we gain the phone-based childhood between 2010 and 2015. It's a very narrow time window. So those are the two tragedies. But after the book, after we turned to the manuscript, and we kept writing and thinking about this and writing Substack posts, there was always this nagging question. Why did we lose the play-based childhood?

Why did we stop letting kids out in the 90s? In the US, life got so much safer. I grew up in the 70s. There were crazy people everywhere. They were drunk drivers and some of them were us. So, you know, life was quite dangerous in the 70s and 80s. And then in the 90s, the crime rate plummets. And sociologists don't know why. I think it's because we banned leaded gas 15 years earlier. But for whatever reason, crime plummets in the 90s. And that's exactly when we stopped letting our kids out. Why?

And what we've come to see since writing the book is that it's the collapse of adult trust in each other and in institutions. Because if you trust other adults and institutions, you send your kids out. When I was a kid, if we wiped out on our bicycle and got hurt, you could knock on anyone's door, "Can you call my mom?" But what happened, you have a great sociologist here, Frank Ferretti, who wrote a book called "Paranoid Parenting," and he has a phrase, "The collapse of adult solidarity."

Once we no longer trust other adults, it's every parent for herself, and it falls especially on the mothers. So a good mother is one who's always careful. Anything could happen. If you let your kid out, she could be abducted. How can you let your kid walk to school? So it really falls especially on the mothers. And this weird thing happens in the 90s that even though by the 90s we're having much smaller families and women are working a lot more compared to 20 years earlier, but yet...

Women are spending a lot more time mothering and fathers are spending a lot more time parenting. So things really change in the 90s. But it goes back to the loss of trust and social capital that hit both of our countries. What I guess we didn't realize before we lost it was how important...

Getting children out of the house. Yeah, that's right was not just to get them from under our feet But also for their development. Can you tell me about that? Sure. So So I'm a social psychologist, but really I just use lots I love to using lots of perspectives to look at everything and

And so I do evolutionary psychology, cultural psychology, positive psychology, a little sociology. I love taking multiple perspectives. And it's always helpful to take an evolutionary perspective as part of it. And so I make a big deal in chapter two about the fact that we're mammals.

Mammals have this long, long childhood. We nurse our babies from skin that secretes milk. I mean, it's this incredible evolutionary adaptation. So we have this long childhood. Why? Well, it allows you to have a much larger brain and a lot more learning. And we are the champions of that. We have by far the largest brain for our body size. We have a very long childhood. And we have this attachment system. And the attachment system

It doesn't just keep kids safe. The whole idea of it is that the child stays as close to the parent and they're safe, but then they go out to explore because that's where the learning happens and they practice the skills they'll use for adulthood. They don't learn that much with their home with the mother or father. It's out there that you practice. And then if something goes wrong, you come running back, you check in, you go back out.

So that's the normal process that's been going on for literally tens of millions of years until the 1990s. In the 1990s, we kind of decided it's too dangerous to do the out thing, how about we just always stay together? You're always under the care of an adult. So kids don't have that interplay with the world. They don't have the unsupervised play which always involves conflicts, rule-making, rule adjudication. That's the most nutritious part of unsupervised play.

My kids grew up in New York City. They went to New York City public schools. There was always someone on the playground blowing the whistle. If there's any conflict, the adults come in. Somebody even had rules no running on the playground. Now, New York City has small playgrounds, but just like crazy over-regulation of children's play, and it blocks development. The specific skills they learn from...

being outside unsupervised with their peers. You talked about, was it the fragile puppy? Yes, my puppy, my little puppy Wilma. Yeah, and about how the puppy

acted and learnt from being outside as well. And you drew lessons from that. Can you just pick that up? - Yeah, so I'm kind of obsessed with my work and I'm always thinking about it. And this, I'm told by people in my family, this makes me a more boring person. But it does help me see things. And so while I was writing chapter two and chapter three in the book on childhood, we got a puppy for my daughter's 13th birthday. It was about two and a half years ago.

She's a very small little thing, a pouton, half toy poodle, half coton de tulio, totally adorable. There's a picture of her in the book. And it's not a gratuitous picture. It really illustrates a story. So what happened was she was very afraid, especially in New York City. There's no grass. There's lots of big dogs everywhere. It was scary for her. But I would take her into Washington Square Park.

And in the morning, before the rangers come, you can let the dogs run around. And there was a German shepherd on a leash, thank God, but a big German shepherd. And Wilma kind of went over towards it. And then the dog moved at her and she went tearing away. Now you might think, oh, she's afraid. Of course she's afraid. Okay. But she comes running towards me. She comes running around me. Then she runs back to the German shepherd.

And then the same thing happens over and over again. And it's clear her brain is motivating her to seek out experiences, take risks, try to judge your abilities. How quickly can you turn? How fast can you run? How do you deal with other dogs? Big dogs are different from little dogs. And so you could just see her little brain guiding this adorable little body to get itself trained up.

And here I was writing a chapter on what happens when we don't let kids, you know, we don't let kids move away and take those risks. So there's not just a photo in the book. I actually got it on video. And if you go to anxiousgeneration.com, we have files for every chapter. In the file for chapter three, you'll find the video of Wilma and the German Shepherd. I highly recommend it. You can't beat a dog story. The other side of the seesaw.

is the introduction of phones and the meeting point of phones and social media. You have a generation that is already, you suggest, much more indoors, much more separate from their peers than many generations before them, and then in come phones. Tell me about what you see as the damage that phones have done to essential children's skills.

So it helps to tell this story, the weaving together of the childhood and the text side. So I'll just do that briefly if you don't mind. So the way the story goes is this. We've already talked about... So really, it's a tragedy in three acts. In Act 1, we lose trust in each other. In Act 2, we lose the play-based childhood. In Act 3, we get the phone-based childhood. So in the 90s, we start keeping our kids in, but...

Part of the reason we're able to do that is that now we all have computers. They come out in the 80s, but they're kind of boring. But by the 90s, they're a little more interesting. They have some video games, and then we get the Internet. And so by the mid-90s, late 90s, our kids are on the Internet. And it's fantastic. Older people here, you remember when you first saw a web browser? It's the most miraculous technology ever. It was like God came down and said, do you want to know everything instantly? Here you go.

And we were amazed by it, and we're all techno-optimists, and we think the Internet's going to be the best friend of democracy, and our kids take to it, and they're learning to program, and they can do amazing things, and they start companies. You know, they're starting companies in their late teens, early 20s. So we're all thinking, maybe more so in America, maybe we're all thinking, "Oh, my kid's going to be a Silicon Valley guy. Oh, this is great. Play on your computer."

And their mental health is fine. So here we're talking about the millennial generation born 1981 through 1995 so the Millennials are the ones who gradually lose Outdoor childhood by the end, but they're growing up on the internet and it's amazing and they're fine So we're all techno optimists and then social media comes out 2003 2004 you get Friendster MySpace things like that and Kids are going on that

But that's not pernicious. It's just, here's my page, here's yours, I can see your page. Hey, what's up? Oh, you have a dog or whatever. There was no algorithm, there was no news feed. And so it's pretty cool. And then the iPhone comes out and it's even cooler. So by the, that's 2007. So by the time we get to 2010, we're all techno-optimists. Wow, the kids are, they're always on their devices, but you know, that's gonna make them super smart. They're gonna be digital natives, we said. So we're still all techno-optimists.

And what we didn't realize is that the business model of the companies that own our kids' childhood changed. There was no business model early on. It was just growth. Just get growth and we'll figure out how to make money later. And it's 2009 that Facebook comes up with the like button, Twitter has the retweet button, and now suddenly it's super viral.

And every engagement gives you information to algorithmize the newsfeed. And it's no longer, "Here's my page, here's yours." It's now all about the newsfeed keeping your attention and then trying to get people to make content to go super viral. So things begin changing 2010, 2011, 2012. It starts getting darker. But the Arab Spring happens in 2011, and so we're still all techno-optimists. "Oh, it's just, this is amazing stuff. Look, this is just great."

And it's really not until the Brexit vote and the Donald Trump victory, those are the two events that suddenly made people on the left say, wait a second, this stuff is like getting weaponized. What's going on? So we start getting more of the sense of like, well, maybe there's something wrong here in 2016, 2017. But now it's too late.

Now, our kids are deeply addicted. We've all learned, just give the kid, you know, it's a pacifier. I just learned last month, in America, 40% of our two-year-olds have their own iPad because it works. It shuts them up. You can do your email. You can make dinner. You can do your social media. So we're all giving our kids touchscreen devices because they work to shut them up. Everyone's happy, it seems.

So by the time we get to 2017, 2018, we begin thinking, wait, something is dark here. And I don't know if you have the show Black Mirror. Like, that's all coming true. So basically, that's the story. And we start, and so a few of us, Jean Twenge and I, start saying in 2017 for her and 2018, 2019 for me, wait, this is hurting our kids. And we're beginning to make progress. And then COVID happens.

And what kids really needed before that was far more time outside, far less time on screens. And what happens? In both of our countries, we overreact. In New York City, they locked up the tennis courts. They banned baseball. These are socially distanced sports. Like, no, you can't play outside because you might get COVID.

So the kids had to sit inside on screens all day long. And so that's why it's only, that's why it's moving so fast now. It's only because COVID suppressed our understanding of the dark side for several years. And the kids by the end of a COVID were a mess. The mental illness rates, the anxiety levels, the suicides, a mess. And people are thinking, well, now that COVID's over, they'll get better. And there's been a little bit of a reversion, but not

It's more just a reversion to the trend line. So that's, I think, why when my book came out, I was very lucky with the timing. My book came out a year ago as we were emerged from COVID and as we were realizing, wait, the kids are not getting better. Something is deeply, deeply wrong. Okay, that's the whole story.

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breathtaking and very depressing in the book is that you are not writing about anecdotal experiences here. You've got an awful lot of data and in graph after graph after graph we see this sort of lift off between 2010 and 2015, with the hockey stick, you talk about when it comes to anxiety, depression, suicide, self-harm.

You have been criticized in reviews that have come out since the book on the sort of hoary social scientist issue of causation and correlation, that correlation is not causation. How have you responded to that criticism? Yeah. No, thank you for this opportunity, because this is the thing that critics or skeptics keep saying is, "Oh, it's just correlation. Sure, you know, things got worse around 2012, but lots of things happened around 2012."

And I'm a social scientist. I mean, that's like, we all know that. Correlation does not prove causation. It points you to a question. These two things happen together. Now let's look into it. And there's one primary negative review that came out in Nature. It was by a professor at UC Irvine. And she accuses me of not knowing the difference of mistake and correlation for causation.

And if you look at the review, it's a very strange review because nothing in the review indicates that she'd read past chapter one. Chapter one, I have all these graphs, it's true. And then the rest of the book lays out the case for causality. And I have three chapters, five, six, and seven that are full of data and reviews of experiments, including experiments with random assignment.

And I have a whole section called correlation and causation. So I've been dealing with this since before I wrote the book with these Google Docs where I organized everything. I deal with it in the book. And since then, I've collected so much evidence of causation. And if you don't mind, here's-- - Please, please. - This is a thing I'm developing in my mind for something I'm writing. So I'd like to tell you a story and let's try to figure out at what point we know that there was causation. So here's the story.

So a 15-year-old girl is lured into an alley by a young man who she knows. She's known him for a long time. In fact, she spends five hours a day with him. And the man beats her and takes her jewelry and runs off.

And she goes to the police and she says, "This guy that I know well beat me and took my jewelry." Now, would you consider that to be evidence of causation? She was there, she saw it, she's reporting it. Is that nothing or is that... It's not decisive, it doesn't prove it, but raise your hand if you think that would be some evidence of causation. You think that's evidence? Raise your hand, please. Okay.

So the analogy here is when we survey kids about why they're so depressed, the number one thing they point to is social media. And so if the victims themselves, if the kids say, who did this to you? And they say, he did, not you, sir, but just like, you know, they say, you know, they identify like, here's the guy who beat me and robbed me. Okay, that's a piece of evidence. And in a court case, that's pretty powerful, not decisive. She could be lying, but it's pretty decisive.

Step two, they call in witnesses. It turns out three people saw this happen. So she brings in witnesses. And they say, "Yeah, we saw it. We saw the beating happen." And the three witnesses are the parents, because when you survey parents, this is their top fear. Do you think this is helping your kid or harming your kid?

And another witness is the teachers. Almost everybody who works with kids sees this problem. Hardly anyone who works with kids says, oh, the phones are great. It gives them freedom. It makes them creative. So the parents, the teachers, and then the third witness is therapists and pediatricians. It's very hard to find anyone who thinks this is helping kids, and they mostly think this is really harming them.

So if these groups are all testifying and saying, "We saw it. We think this is harming kids." Do you think that's evidence that maybe social media and the phone-based childhood is harming kids? Raise your hand if you think that would count as evidence. Okay, eyewitness testimony. Okay, but it gets better. It turns out that the guy who did the beating, he took a video of it and he posted it on Instagram. And he says, "Look what I did today."

And you see the beating. And so we have that. It's not exactly a video, but I'm going to read you what we have because there are thousands of parents who are suing these companies because their kids are dead or damaged. And there are 50 states in the U.S. and the attorneys general are suing these companies for the incredible cost they're imposing.

So there are all these legal briefs, and they're all available online, although with redaction, some things are blocked out. And so my group, we've been collecting, we've collected all these, and we just took out the quotations, because in the process of discovery, they get internal reports, they get emails. So we have a lot of their internal communications from the three companies, Meta, Snap, and TikTok. So I'll just read you a couple of quotes. Here we are from TikTok. This is an internal report. TikTok employees talking about this. Quote,

Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects, like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety, in addition to interfering with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work, school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones. So this is their internal conversation about what they are doing.

And there's all kinds of stuff about how hard they're working to maximize engagement, which essentially means addiction. For example, here's a quote from Snapchat. They came out with streaks in 2017, you know, where you have to do it every day to keep up your streak. Quote from internal email, quote, wow, we should add more addicting features like this. They say it. We have it. They admit it.

Snapchat, it turns out, gets 10,000 reports of sextortion. This is just the reports, which is only a tiny portion of it, just ones that have been reported by users. 10,000 reports, not a year, a month. A month. So on the order of a million kids, mostly teenage boys, are being sextorted

going through the most frightening, horrible, shameful time of their life. Dozens of them we know have committed suicide. They've been identified. It's probably hundreds are dead because they were sextorted. Now, was that correlation or causation? Would they have killed themselves anyway if they weren't sextorted? I don't think so. So if we have...

by the perpetrators, and we have them talking about what they're doing to kids deliberately, intentionally. Not that they want to hurt kids, but they want to hook them. They want to keep them. And they're instructed from on high to do it. So how many of you think that these quotes from the companies would count as evidence of causation, not correlation? Raise your hand.

Okay, so we have three different kinds of evidence that strongly suggest and I would say prove Causation it's not a figment of our imagination It's not a statistical illusion and then there's two other bodies of evidence which are much weaker because the only people who actually know what's going on are The people in the companies they have the data. We can't get that what we social scientists get is a pale

reflection of data, which is we can ask kids, "How many hours a day do you spend on social media?" And on a one to five scale, we get an answer. That's it. We have a one to five. And then we see, "Does that correlate with depression?" And the answer is, "Yes, it does, but the correlation is small." But here's what I've learned, my team has learned.

The reason why we get relatively small correlations is because when you blend all the platforms together, just social media, even though they all have different effects, blend all the platforms together,

blend boys and girls together, blend all the outcome variables together, you get small correlations. But when you separate it, when you say, for depression, anxiety, let's look at Instagram and girls, you get much bigger correlations. So it doesn't prove causation, but it sure doesn't suggest the null hypothesis that there's nothing going on.

So, the studies that, the reason why some researchers think that I don't have the evidence is that we academics focus on the published literature on correlational studies and experimental studies where you ask people to get off social media for a few weeks. We focus on that, there are effects, they're not huge, so some people say they're too small to matter, I say no, they're not.

And so this has been going on for years now, this debate. And that's why I'm starting to say, wait, we have all this other evidence, eyewitness testimony, confessions. So sure, we need more research. We always do. But policymakers and parents are not asking, how many RCTs do we have on this? Can we be 100% certain? Policymakers and parents want to know

"Is this probably hurting kids or probably not?" Or even more than that, they want to know, "Is there at least a reasonable chance that it is hurting kids, or can we be confident that this is safe?" I don't think anybody says, "Oh, we're confident that this is safe. We can be quite sure that talking with strangers on Snapchat is safe. We know that." Like, no.

Sorry, I get kind of worked up about this. I can hear. I will welcome any pushback. If anybody in the audience, I'm sure there's some social scientists here, if anybody wants to state the case, I'm sure I have not stated the other side in its strongest terms. So if you have objections, please come up to the microphone because this is the way that I can improve my thinking.

In about 20 minutes, we'll take questions from the audience here. Oh, yeah, not now. And on the live stream, and that'll come through the iPad here. When you read out the quotes like that, the first...

Biggest comparison that really springs to mind is the fact that tobacco companies knew full well That their products damaged their customers. Is that the comparison or amongst the comparisons? You would draw it definitely is in that it was a giant national public health threat and

the medical community began to suspect and even to know that tobacco was addictive and caused cancer by the 50s, the 1950s. But it took really until the 90s before we could really, you know, it was sort of very gradual to ban it.

And, you know, and now we know, we know that they knew and they were lying about it. We know that they knew that they had to get kids. If you don't get kids, if you don't get kids smoking by the time they're 24, 25, they're never going to smoke. They knew that they had to get children. So the comparison is actually very good, but I think it's a little bit insulting to the tobacco companies. And the reason is because the tobacco companies, you know, yeah, they were hurting kids, but it was going to be like decades later when they were adults. They're

Whereas I think as you read through these lawsuits, you read through what they knew, you read through the fact that a lot of their employees, their employees are good people who don't want to hurt kids, and they would say, "Hey, we're doing this, and we could fix this in this way." Arturo Bejar at Meta, Francis Haugen. There are internal people who say, "Wait, if we put in this feature, it'll make things better." And then they don't do it. And you read through these lawsuits, and there's an element of, I would almost say cruelty,

That you don't find in the tobacco industry and by cruelty I don't mean that they want to hurt children but what I mean is they just they know that they are and they're not doing anything about it and Especially of you know, the stories about suicides. I mean you read this it just breaks your heart and you know And most of you saw adolescence. Okay. Sorry, I'm getting distracted by that. Yeah, I understand I understand now there was some I think you had a sub stack out recently some very moving pictures in fact of

children who had taken their lives. I want to move on to a part of the book where you shift away from social science, away from empirical, towards a little more what you might call theological. And it's where you talk about the spiritual degradation. You say the phone-based life, and this isn't actually about just children. It's

It's more broadly the phone based life produces spiritual degradation not just in adolescence but in all of us. Yeah, it's a huge huge statement and it's and it's much more about your belief rather than something which you can show with graphs and with data. Can you just give us a little taste of why you think that? Yeah, so

So first, for starters, I'm not a religious person. I'm secular, I'm Jewish, I've called myself an atheist since I was 14 or so. But as a social scientist, religion and the psychology of religion has come up in my work a lot. It's a huge part of human nature. I study morality. You can't understand morality without understanding our evolution as religious creatures.

And so my first book, "The Happiness Hypothesis," was about ancient wisdom. And I went through all the writings I could find, East and West, about the advice that the ancients had that is still applicable today. Okay, so I wrote that book. It had nothing to do with my main research on morality, but that was there. And then I go into politics and morality and the coddling of the American mind and mental illness and kids.

And I finished chapter seven, which is the last of the main data chapters, and I'm about to move on to the recommendations, like what do we do, when I realize, okay, this whole book has been about kids, but this is affecting all of us. In fact, when I would tell people about this, oh yeah, my kids are having this problem, but I am too.

And I realized, wait, I'm not saying anything to adults, but we're all feeling this. And when I went and I sort of sat and said, okay, what is it doing to us? And then I realized, I just took out the happiness hypothesis. And it was like almost everything the ancients told us to do, a phone-based life does the opposite. So it's things like, judge not lest ye be judged. You know, be slower to judge, quicker to forgive. Has anyone been on Twitter?

Okay, you know the rule on a lot of social media is judge now judge quickly because if you don't judge this person that we're all judging with no Context no humanity no forgiveness if you don't judge them now someone's gonna judge you for not judging and so it's it's it's the absolute opposite of any sense of mercy or grace or forgiveness that's what life online does and our

And a lot, so a lot of my understanding of spirituality comes from Emil Durkheim, the famous sociologist. He's, I think, the greatest social thinker in human history. And Durkheim taught us to see religion not as a set of beliefs about heavens and the afterlife, but as a thing that creates a community through ritual.

which involves synchronous moving, singing, holding something sacred, and when we do that together, we move from the realm of the profane, the ordinary, the everyday, into the realm of the sacred for a little while, maybe an hour or two. And if we do that periodically, maybe once a week on Sundays, we're more bonded to our community, we're in touch with the divine, we get a little distance on our lives. And so that's the way religion works.

But once everyone goes online, now there's no embodiment, there's no body, there's no synchrony. I mean, you can have a, you know, you can jointly watch a Netflix or something like that, but there's no real synchrony. There's nothing sacred. In fact,

If you look at the feed that most kids are getting, especially the boys, it's the most profane stuff you can possibly imagine. Just so many videos about people being punched or pushed out a window or stabbed or, you know, getting hit in the balls and just, you know, things like that that are just, they're degrading. And if this is what our kids are taking in, if that's even a small part of what they're taking in, again, it's just pulling us downward. I could, I could, there's so many, it's like, so...

In part, it just is degrading as opposed to elevating or uplifting. Now, of course, there's a lot of great things you can do on your phone. Phones are amazing tools. I love my iPhone. For me, it's a digital Swiss Army knife. I don't have social media on it. I just use it for tools.

The phones can be great and I use Insight timer for meditation, you know, so you can see all kinds of beautiful things. So they can be useful. And when I talk about this with my students, we go through, you know, in what ways does it improve your spiritual life and in what way does it harm it? And everyone kind of agrees, like, yeah, there's a couple little things it can do, but overall it brings us down. And so I think we need to recognize that.

Even if we're not seeing increases in mental illness among adults, so when you go through this period, adults are not showing these hockey sticks. But even if we all feel overwhelmed, frazzled, unable to focus, unable to have time for the people we love, I would say our lives are worse. Our lives are degraded. We are less human. And so that's what I think is happening to most of us.

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Hannah Kay and myself, Leila Ismail. The second part of this conversation is available now for Intelligence Squared Premium subscribers, ad-free and with exclusive content. Visit intelligentsquared.com forward slash membership or hit the IQ2 extra button on Apple for a free trial.