A book recommendation

from Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff:

The social psychologist Jean Twenge has just written a book, titled iGen (which is short for “internet generation”), in which she analyzes four large national datasets that track the mental health of teenagers and college students. When the book is released in August, Americans will likely be stunned by her findings. Graph after graph shows the same pattern: Lines drift mildly up or down across the decades as baby boomers are followed by Gen-X, which is followed by the millennials. But as soon as the data includes iGen—those born after roughly 1994—the rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicide spike upward.

Due out one month from now.

6 thoughts on “A book recommendation

  1. “But as soon as the data includes iGen—those born after roughly 1994—the rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicide spike upward.”

    I don’t want anyone to commit suicide or to feel bad. But when I read something like this I start to shudder to think how it’s obviously going to be abused to justify all kinds of new prohibitions and interventions. And in the nature of things, they won’t be the ones Haidt and Lukianoff would prefer. “Clearly the safe spaces are neither safe nor spacious enough, so we must double down.”

    • After adults have deliberately trained a generation of kids to be passive, dependent, whiny, by-the-book rule-followers, risk-averse, to have no heritage to value and measure themselves against, to look to authority to deal with any adversity (real or perceived), to see themselves as victims of some “oppressive” omnipresence in the sky, and at the same time to see themselves as entitled “winners” regardless of any actual accomplishment — maybe, after all this, it’s not so surprising that the results aren’t so good.

      But of course, that doesn’t mean the Nurse Ratcheds won’t double down on all of this. Because, in the end, they really like the bad results. Just as Nurse Ratched was not really interested in curing anybody.

  2. I read her first book and thought it was solid. I’m not competent to evaluate in the sense that I have no training in psychology, but it seemed to me she was on to something.

    Her first book was _Generation Me_.

    A big problem with much social science on themes such as hers is that it seems to be hard to convince people of something they don’t already agree with. I had the sense that if you were fair minded and really read _Generation Me_ with an open mind, you would conclude that Twenge was on to something and the more recent age cohorts were getting more narcissistic.

    Part of the challenge is just getting data–data to compare what 20 year olds are like at 20 y.o., now, compared to the previous cohorts when they were 20 y.o.

    • I’m not sure what to make of that long, discursive essay about Hipsters on Foodstamps.

      One aphorism popped into my head. “Earnest beats hip,” which is from Randy Pausch’s _Last lecture_.

      Hip is ironic, with it…”look at me, aren’t I cool, witty, etc.”

      Earnest is the opposite, somehow.

      Probably the internet promotes hip, not earnest. One reason (not the main reason or the only reason) for greater narcissism.

      The hip, ironic person needs an audience.

      The earnest person does not. He can “be in a room by himself,” as Pascal might have put it.

      There is a nice quote from de Tocqueville that foreshadows Facebook narcissism. I don’t recall it from free memory. Probably provided by Mark Steyn.

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