Derek Thompson

Every few decades, it seems, the Western world seems to experience a social crisis in the face of new technology.

120 years ago, as I wrote in a recent Substack essay, a nervous disorder first diagnosed in the US gradually made its way across the Atlantic.

The doctor George Miller Beard called it neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion.

Europeans at the time, in the 1900s, sometimes referred to it as American nervousness, or even New York-itis.

According to Beard, the affliction was most common among, quote, the indoor classes of civilized civilizations, end quote.

That is to say, the illness mostly affected white-collar workers operating at the frontier of technology, handling new, fast machines.

And at the time, there were plenty of things in America that were fast and new.

In 1875, there were no skyscrapers, no electric lighting, no Coca-Cola or basketball, few bicycles, no aspirin, no cars or sneakers, no cardboard boxes, no hamburgers or Kodak cameras or recorded music players.

By 1905, just 30 years later, everything I just named, from the skyscrapers to the Kodak cameras, was invented.

In one 30-year swoop of history, the modern world was conjured into being.

And throughout the West, people lost their minds.

In Germany, the number of patients in mental hospitals rose from 40,000 in 1870 to 220,000 by 1910.

Many of them suffered from this nervous disorder that contemporary doctors blamed on a world of vertiginous speed and nerve-shattering newness.

As Virginia Woolf famously wrote at the time, quote, on or around December 1910, human character changed, end quote.

The modern world changed our personality.

115 years later, it's changing us again.

According to new analysis by the Financial Times writer John Byrne Murdoch, something extraordinary has happened to America's personalities in just the last decade.

According to longitudinal tests that he'll describe in just a moment, we have collectively become meaningfully less extroverted, less agreeable, and more neurotic.

But the most important thing Byrne Murdoch found is that measures of conscientiousness among young Americans appear to be in a kind of freefall.

Today's guest is John Byrne Murdoch.