Beyond mental health, Haidt said this has physical manifestations. Children are “growing hunched around their phone,” he said, with phone addiction literally “warping eyeballs,” leading to a global rise in myopia (shortsightedness). Screen time is also known to harm sleep, he added. He went on to describe the “great rewiring” of humanity, brought on by the smartphone.
The evidence of decline is seen in objective behavior, not just self-reporting. For instance, data tracking nonfatal self-harm among early teens (10- to 14-year-olds) shows the girls’ rate “more than quintuples” between 2010 and 2015. Around the world, wherever the internet is in kids’ pockets, Haidt argued, young people are becoming less happy and flourishing less.
The transition Haidt describes occurred in two acts. Act one involved the gradual decline of play-based childhood, which began in the 1980s. Act two was the arrival of a phone-based childhood, a sudden and universal shift that started in the early 2010s. Haidt summarized the tragic change by saying, “We have overprotected our children in the real world, and we have under-protected them online.”
The crisis extends into cognitive ability. Haidt points out, “Fifty years of progress ended in 2012” in educational achievement metrics, specifically the National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP, also called the “nation’s report card.” This decline suggests a “broader erosion in the human capacity for mental focus and application,” leading to what Haidt calls a “complete disaster for humanity”: a loss of that capacity. “We’re getting dumber exactly as our machines are getting smarter and taking over more areas of life,” he said.
The paths to this “pit of despair” differ by gender. For girls, social media remains the “clearest culprit,” altering development, social relationships, and moods. For boys, the danger centers on a dopamine addiction crisis, with companies competing to “hook them” via highly addictive video games and increasingly available high-definition porn.
Haidt asserted the theory suggesting the rewiring of childhood is the only one that can account for the synchronized collapse in mental health globally. Given that this is a collective action problem, the solution must also be collective action, he argues.
Haidt proposed four key norms to reverse a phone-based childhood and restore the play-based model:
Haidt stressed that although there will be a “permanent echo of diminished potential” in the generation that has already passed through puberty with these devices, “it’s not too late for individuals if they make an effort and they make it collectively.”
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
