One well-known professor has begun loudly warning that this new Generation Z is putting the future of America in trouble due to their both mental and physical fragility.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, expressed that the almost total uselessness of the teens of today and their young adult counterparts is just a prime example of the “national crisis” we are dealing with. Haidt is most well known as the author of a number of books such as “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.”
“We have a whole generation that’s doing terribly,” Haidt expressed in a recent interview to The Wall Street Journal.
Normally, Gen Z is defined as all Americans that were born between 1997 and 2012 who as of this year are in their teens to early 20s. They are the first generation to entirely grow up in an era of social media and the internet. As explained in a few surveys, they report struggling with mental health far more than all previous generations, even the historically, and notoriously anxious millennials, who are seeing their oldest start to break the 40-year-old barrier.
As expressed by Haidt, there has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.” “When you look at Americans born after 1995, what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.”
Due to the fact that the kids of today spend so much time online, they have seemingly been kept from building the “skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” alongside other kids, explained Haidt. They hang out with their own far less and even choose to drive much less frequently.
On average, girls have been noticeably more vulnerable because they are more frequently drawn to activities that are more isolating such as scrolling through and posting to social media such as Instagram, which Haidt has labeled “compare and despair,” while more often than not boys take part in group events such as bonding over video games, explained Haidt.
The overall mental weakness of Gen Z has resulted in the majority of them being stuck in a “defend mode” instead of a “discover mode,” explained Haidt, and that mindset has started to extend out into college campuses.
“Here they are in the safest, most welcoming, most inclusive, most antiracist places on the planet, but many of them were acting like they were entering some sort of dystopian, threatening, immoral world,” he explained.
