The Haidt of psychosocial absurdities
With society fragmented into hate-groups operating in various private realities, is anyone really surprised that kids feel as fucked up as they look?
Executive summary: Because a single beady-eyed computer-science student couldn’t stop choking his chicken in a Harvard dorm room, he was forced to create a metastatic concept with infinite reach that, with the help of its clones and competitors, has systematically elicited the worst in collective citizen behavior while turning everyone into flesh-and-blood marketing devices, dissolving their freedoms, disseminating logs of their purchasing behavior to anyone with a sales pitch, magnifying government propaganda, and funneling the average person’s wealth in the general direction of spaceship-coveting, private-island-owning kiddie-fuckers—mostly to these citizens’ own wild applause.
No matter the masturbator’s real intent, the upvote-retweet-block format that now dictates online “discussions” has done humankind the grim but necessary favor of revealing the frailty of the species and accelerating its already inglorious demise, making flamboyant political ideas like peace between nations, affordable housing, healthcare that heals, and most of all unity—a requirement for keeping government overreach to a minimum—more jocular than ever. Instead, we* should embrace the fragmentation, endemic ignorance, and throaty hopelessness; we should party with our friends and loved ones while we can still breathe and waggle our bare asses at anyone who holds contrary values, because our misinformation is probably better than theirs.
Above all, if you think Gen Z is a mess, just wait for the next batch.
For most of my adult life, and certainly throughout the many years most teenagers would consider me old, I have been interacting with runners and students as young as thirteen. By definition, these coaching and tutoring roles have been limited in psychosocial scope. But I’ve gotten close to many of these kids and their families, and for a childless person, I have a solid sense of what life as a college-bound teenager feels like nowadays.
Since I naturally carry my own youth experiences into my coaching and tutoring, I can’t help but imagine how a version of me born programmed with all of the same inclinations but born in, say, 2005 would be faring today. I do know that my precocious use of computers would have landed me in a world of shit had social media or simply a crude Internet existed when I was in high school. At best, I would probably still be in high school at 52.
The advent of interactive, community-judged-and-amplifiable social media is the worst thing to happen to kids since electricity was invented. How could it not be? It’s the worst thing that happened to the rest of us, too. Everyone with a conscience knows this. But like drunken car crashes, the uncountable detrimental effects of social media are here to stay, because the people and businesses responsible are as likely to disappear from modern civilization as potable ethyl alcohol is.
Social psychologist and commentator Jonathan Haidt has offered his voice twice this month on the topic of tech-accelerated societal decay. His essay “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” was published on April 11 in The Atlantic, and he was a guest on The Ringer’s podcast “Why Are American Teenagers So Sad and Anxious?” on Friday.
In his piece for The Atlantic, Haidt’s detached, almost breezy style and yen for metaphor does little to deflect from his insistence that America is in the midst of an accelerating and systemic catastrophe that, should no one care about anything else, will soon render the United States economy little more than a massive, abandoned strip mall for China to loot ad libitum. The basic reason? Communication platforms are set up so that the loudest morons on both political extremes can dominate any conversation through corrupt and corrosive tactics, leading to mass cowardice and paralysis and the predominance in media, and online discourse generally, of straight-up bullshit: About covid, about race, about Russians, about Substack and other independent reporters, about other corporate anger-stokers.
Every representative of the corporate media is either paid to suck the cock of some government official or lobbyist or gobbles the knob voluntarily in the hope of being promoted to even more influential positions of whoredom. If you watch that trash, you and I can only enjoy brief and probably stunted conversations, even in real life.
Despite the relentless production schedule for bullshit and the rate at which its masochistic targets consume and spread it, much of this nonsense is recognizable as such by a silent faction of stubbornly capable American thinkers numbering—please let this be true!—in the tens of millions, while plenty more achieves its disseminators’ aim of being treated as truth; in neither case do most ordinary citizens feel empowered to present countervailing narratives, even and sometimes especially if these narratives contain simple evidence sufficient to sunder a mountain of bullshit with a single helpful selection of data.
Here’s Haidt on the transformation of Twitter from a podium into an air-raid siren:
This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”
Not for nothing, when describing how Wokish people remain ignorant twat mites, he used a metaphor a young child could understand.
People who think differently and are willing to speak up if they disagree with you make you smarter, almost as if they are extensions of your own brain. People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider, almost as if they are shooting darts into their own brain.
[W]hen an institution punishes internal dissent, it shoots darts into its own brain.
This also describes the entire running and fitness media, dominated as it is by self-hating white women and overfed, gibbering minorities of various taxa lumbering around in workout gear, margaritas in hand, demanding handouts from the slack-jawed, enchanted mob between taking racist and sexist potshots at whatever out-group needs abuse that day.
Haidt assures us that there is no end in sight to the descent into information chaos:
We can never return to the way things were in the pre-digital age. The norms, institutions, and forms of political participation that developed during the long era of mass communication are not going to work well now that technology has made everything so much faster and more multidirectional, and when bypassing professional gatekeepers is so easy. And yet American democracy is now operating outside the bounds of sustainability. If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.
Haidt has some suggestions for Congress and Silicon Valley for mitigating the disaster, but is clearly not deluded enough to think that, say, Facebook would ever nix or meaningfully amend its “share” or “like” functions. That’s as likely as convenience stores deciding to not sell tobacco, beer or lottery tickets because the people who buy that stuff always cause the most delays and disturbances by paying from wheelchairs, mostly in coins or using invalid credit or debit cards. Who cares about profits when the tiny trickle of regular customers you retain are all happier?
“Why Are American Teenagers So Sad and Anxious?” is, to me, as much a rhetorical question as it is a catchy headline. Let’s think for a moment.
First of all, if you’re 17, you’d probably better go to college if you ever want a meaningful job, since the kids who used to go into the manufacturing sector after high school now have little choice but to work at 7-11 or an Applebee’s, and, if male, slide inexorably into gamer culture and far-right online cesspits lorded over by pimply incels. If you’re college-bound, your every high-school move is geared toward getting you into the right institution. If you go to a tuition high school, you know that your classmates are cutting corners and calling in favors and basically blowing people to get what they want, which is far in excess of what they need or deserve. You learn far younger than my generation did that the world operates like this no matter the lies smiling adults tell you, sometimes believing the lies themselves.
If you’re a talented athlete, your enjoyment of your sport is invariably tempered by knowing how well you perform might make the difference between a partial scholarship to a state school and a full ride to a Big Ten program.
Your parents can only associate with parents who adhere to a rigid and incoherent set of political beliefs, unless everyone in a group simply agrees to talk only about the weather and sports. You can’t talk with classmates from households who get news from sources your parents don’t, because those discussions are fueled by differing “realities.” All of this assumes you can avoid your portable device for long enough to care about the government’s version of current events, which often contradict various past versions of those same events anyway.
Not all of this, or the basic pressures of being a teenager, is new. But everything about it is worse than it ever was, and worsening by the week.
With so many of today’s adults reduced to childish facets of social behavior, how are teens supposed to behave themselves? If I thought “behaving like an adult” meant behaving like a New York Times reporter, I’d consider coloring my hair, lopping off my tits, and being done with taking any advice from “grown-ups” seriously, too.
In his podcast on The Ringer, Haidt agrees with host Derek Thompson that the data are clear: Starting in around 2012, when the first wave Gen Z kids were old enough to start legally using social media, kids began experiencing a great deal of anxiety and depression; the only question is the mechanism. Haidt believes that while too much exposure to other people’s perfect photos can be painful, more painful still is getting just a few unkind comments on your own photos, or, often worse, no activity at all.
If you think it’s worse to be ridiculed than ignored outright, you may not be thinking like a rudderless teenager. All of that purple and blue hair—now persisting well into adulthood—didn’t color itself. Better to make statements that can’t be completely ignored, and send signals to like-minded peers, than wait for someone to ask you how you’re doing.
As he does in his essay for The Atlantic, Haidt emphasizes that the negative effect of social media isn’t just the addition of poison, but also the subtraction—really, the robbing-by-smartphone—of a critical phase of social development that occurs between the ages of 7 and 12 or so: Random, unsupervised play with peers. He points out that anyone born in the U.S. after around 1982 was likely over-supervised during this period. (The early 1990s featured repeated, failed promises of “superpredators”—code for “lawless black males”—soon appearing in unprecedented numbers to steal people’s children and other property. This was during the Bill Clinton administration; don’t think this one won’t come back into circulation under a President Hawley or a President DeSantis.)
To lightly paraphrase Haidt, he says that the reason so many liberals under forty seem to be complete pussies, dribbling frazzle-heads who split at the seams when someone offends them or confronts them in any way, is that they are in fact pussies. These are adults who never learned to take a punch as kids, that discourse and nuance and the internalization of others’ personalities is both necessary for the formation of a completely socialized adult and an on-the-ground, hands-off process only. In short, if you don’t let your kids get a little dinged up as kids, they’ll turn into slouching, narcissistic cunts and twatboys as adults, serving the public by hijacking media jobs, cyberfellating their way into positions of in-group prominence, and blinding their hapless selves to facts and criticism that stymie their quests for gain and perfectly unblemished positions in the public eye.
I’m not sure if this has anything to do with why kids are more and more “off,” but if the boys seem more…listless than teenage or young-adult boys should, there may be a hormonal basis for this. I mean, as crude as it is to reduce what’s below to a throwaway line, it seems like America’s men really are becoming less and less ballsy.
The effect on me of living in a uniquely stupid time has been profound and, if you’re into piety, fairly grave. This post is deflating enough without that shit, so I’ll save it for later.