Jonathan Haidt

But if all of a sudden everyone starts doing something bad, you've got to say, wait, why is everyone doing?

They can't be that everybody suddenly turned bad.

And the key idea at the heart of the anxious generation is that the tech companies have put us all into a series of collective action problems.

So I might say to my daughter,

no, you cannot have a smartphone, it's bad for you.

And then she would say, but everyone else has one.

This is what we all hear as parents.

Everyone else has one.

And this puts pressure on you to give in too.

And so the tech companies, both for the smartphone, but especially for social media have engineered it.

And we know this from internal things that they said and documents we've got from them.

They want to play upon adolescent fears so that they're not missing out.

They really play upon the intense adolescent fear of missing out.

So we cannot, of course, parents should set boundaries.

Of course, parents have ultimate responsibility, but the environment in which we're trying to raise our kids now is so full of temptations, addictions, and engineered social pressures that most parents are, they find themselves unable.

So I do not blame parents for this.

I blame first and foremost, a few tech companies.

No, you're absolutely right.

A lot of social psychologists, when they would get their PhDs 10, 20 years ago, would go work in Silicon Valley.

Now let's remember that from the 90s through the mid-2010s,