Jonathan Haidt

It's the reports of people in business who are hiring Gen Z. And when I saw that the same trends were happening in the UK and Canada and Australia at the same time,

That's when I knew something big is happening here.

You know, if it's just the US, oh, maybe, you know, Obama did something or said something.

Like, you know, you can make up a hundred theories if it's just the US.

But if all the English-speaking countries go through the same mental health collapse

At the same time, in the same way that is much sharper for girls, there has to be some factor working that is cross-national.

And that's what led me, and I should also give credit to Jean Twenge, the professor who first really identified those graphs, those changes.

That's when Jean and I started thinking technology is the most likely cause.

So there is a pervasive set of changes and the best way to sort of put them all together, I found it very useful in my previous book to think about our minds are organized to go into certain configurations very quickly.

And so the clearest one, we can call it defend mode.

When you, you know, there's a threat, your brain, a lot of systems organized to do fight or flight.

So let's call that defend mode.

You can be in a defensive position.

The opposite of that is called discover mode, where you look like you come into a room and there's all these great toys to play with, or you're a kid in a candy shop.

And the more technical terms for those in psychology are the behavioral inhibition system, BIS, which is the defend mode, and the behavioral activation system, BAS, which is discover mode.

And we're used to thinking of college students as being mostly in discover mode.

You know, girls just want to have fun.

But all of a sudden, if you're born after 1995, on average, you're shifted over to defend mode.

And what that means is it's not just that you're anxious and depressed.

Most of them are not anxious and depressed, but what I'm saying, like, for the girls, their numbers are in the 30s.