The OP says that turned out fine even though he played an online video game for thousands of hours, and mentions he made friends to boot. He goes on to repeat this idea of "online connections". But screen time for young people (and old) today is not necessarily that; many of them are just consuming content from endless feeds and not building actual ties with other people. Modern social media is not a place for new friendships to blossom.
Cooperative online shared worlds, even adversarial ones, are a wildly different use of time compared to spending hours staring at short-format video after short-format video.
But my experience seems so much more important and real than everyone else’s!
It’s in the headline. This is a classic of the “trends” genre — author generalizing their own experience to make a pronouncement about a whole generation or all of society.
> If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.
Would we? A consistent trend is a consistent trend and "rewiring" doesn't necessarily mean all metrics need to go downward.
I looked into it a bit and the "mental health crisis" of young people wildly differs by country. I think US and UK have a marked rise, but in other EU countries nothing like that is going on, it's a stable trend. So IMHO it's quite unlikely that "social media" is the cause, because they are more global.
The entire article is "trust me bro, I used to be addicted, but now I have a PhD."
I mean, come on.
First claim in the article:
> But correlation is not causation, and research suggests that some of the supposed mental health crisis is an epidemic of overdiagnosis.
Linked paper doesn't support this. Only one study found evidence of overdiagnosis, and the data was both noisy and only focused on ADHD. It literally said "Most reviewed studies suggest that misdiagnosis does occur; however, only one study was able to examine overdiagnosis in child and adolescent mental disorders from a methodological point-of-view. This study found significant evidence of overdiagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder."
Another claim from the article:
> Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.
This kind of muddled thinking is prevalent in the article. The vague term "rewiring" is being argued against, and the author expects that only one specific outcome should be consistent with it, and doesn't admit the obvious other explanation is that social media and internet addiction is replacing the other addictions.
I read the whole article and could deconstruct it more, but I won't--it's tinged with the author's own anecdotal conclusion that they turned out fine, so everyone else will.
>Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.
All of these, with the exception of fewer high school dropouts, are examples of people doing less. Going outside less, doing less mischief, socializing less. The reason for that is almost certainly that phone use is monopolizing more and more time of their time and crowding out theseother activities. I would absolutely concede that access to phones is not an unequivocal ill, there are some positive upsides. But these supposed counterexamples I think are exactly what we would expect if phones were changing the behavior of children.
And, on the subject of high school dropouts, I think there’s at least some reason to think this is due to a declining set of standards. This probably varies by state and school district, but there has certainly been a movement to reduce the number of infractions that leads to expulsion, and outbursts that would previously have resulted in student punishment are now allowed to continue unabated in some jurisdictions. I don’t think it’s pivotal to the argument one way or the other though.
Finally, I take the author’s point that the causal relationship between screen time and poor mental health runs two ways. But isn’t the prevalence of mental disorder and social isolation increasing? I would be curious to know what the author thinks is behind that broader background trend, if not the phones.
This was my take as well. Those all seem to be second order effects of people socializing much less, which must be having negative effects on kids as well?
> All of these, with the exception of fewer high school dropouts, are examples of people doing less.
I'm not sure the exception even holds. The data indicates that most high school dropouts end up going to work which is more than coasting through high school until graduation. It is not like the would-have-been dropouts have hunkered down working hard to become straight-A students. They're just there for the free ride, so to speak, with, as you suggest later on, no real consequences for just being physically present and doing nothing more. Staying in school is now the path of least resistance, lazy choice.
Not the writer of the article, but, the article does point to mental disorder prevalence being explained by increased willingness to go and get diagnosed or to see something as a diagnosable condition, which also went way up in the 2010s. I think you can see that as a good or a bad thing, but it also means that we're looking at a readout where the methodology changed over the period where the results changed.
Also, you point out that these are examples of "bad things not happening" but those bad things are the sorts of things you would expect to correlate with an addiction, if addiction were actually what was happening. On the other hand, for any positive measure of flourishing you want to pick, you can always find one which is going down. You can look at disco declining in the 80s and call the 80s an unmitigated disaster where the youth are no longer doing enjoyable things. So now you need a basket of positives, which you're potentially comparing against each other, which is itself encoding values that people might just not be holding. I know people who live with their parents and are glad to because "why buy a house when you can save that same money or spend it on other things". I think Haidt's arguments often do a sleight of hand between these, where he constructs a cardboard maze where his values are treated as implicitly and unstatedly legitimate and everyone else's are treated as a pathology. Which, the addiction framing is quite convenient for, if that's what one is doing - any self assertion of "Actually, I'm fine" gets turned into "Wow, look at how deep the addiction goes".
If one's mind has been "destroyed", would you know?
It's hard to imagine that the past problems he listed were not at least partially due to his excessive device use.
We don't have great emperical evidence to point to a specific thing between screen time, social media, gambling, counter culture etc on the causes of the reverse Flynn effect and mental health epidemic in general, but we do know that anecdotal evidence does not improve our data one way or the other.
Adam Omary is a research scholar for the libertarian-leaning Cato institute [0].
While centering individual responsibility and calling out the weird dynamic where people unnecessarily embrace a personal narrative previously associated with debilitating conditions to feel a sense of belonging is refreshing, this is a heavy lift.
Had a cursory look at some of his articles, he has published both "autism overdiagnosis" and "ADHD overdiagnosis" ones trying to argue this "overdiagnosis" comes from financial incentives from primary care physicians and subsidies from Medicaid.
This sounds like absolute bullshit since the increase in diagnosis is consistent across the OECD, and most other countries that see this trend have absolute no financial incentive in their healthcare systems to overdiagnosis these disorders. Much the contrary, singlepayer public healthcare systems have the exact opposite incentive: do not diagnose since it will be costlier over the life of a citizen to manage these ailments.
As usual with Cato "scholars", it's more writing to justify their libertarian political agenda rather than actual honest analysis.
Wow. I could not disagree more with this author, but I was looking for any evidence he could offer other than his credentials (he's from Harvard and 26) and being part of the Generation that author Jonathan Haidt of, "The Anxious Generation" indicated was struggling the most with screens and social media.
I was part of an in-between generation (originally tail end of Gen X) and raised as a latchkey kid. It was the early 90s and thankfully I was able to travel without parents at 12 on airplanes very effortlessly. This allowed me to get out of my midwest (Wisconsin) bubble and meet in SF every year around New Years for MacWorld and SF2600 gatherings. It was a magical time. I'm not at all against communicating online and meeting people there, but social media as controlled by a singleton (e.g. Meta, Weixin, Weibo, Twitter/X, etc) seems awful. Sometimes I miss the fun of IRC (Dalnet and others), BBSes, and even AOL Chatrooms. It's hard to put the genie back in the bottle, so many people have adopted Facebook for small business and rural communities in the US rather than having a website they control. I can't find out what specials are happening at my local restaurant (Ember) or my favorite food truck (Chairman Bao & Eat on Monday) without having an Instagram account. I still resist Meta.
This author misses the point that some parents value critical thinking and independence. Not everyone joined the greek system in college! Same for social media, not everyone needs to be "connected" in social media before age 16. The algorithms at these singletons, often end up restricting and narrowing the world for many young minds (echo chambers for their cohort). It's not about censorship, but a little guidance and oversight reviewing social media from a 20,000 foot level rather than in the weeds.
I fully expected this author to talk about the importance of computing access for education and development, but it seemed to just be about arguing for this hot mess we have now. Yikes!
What an absurd take. Comparing decades-old video games to modern social media is completely incomplete. Sure, both are experienced with a screen, but that's about where the similarities end. It'd be like a pharmacist who used to smoke cigarettes back in high school writing an article discussing opioid addiction titled "Molecules Aren't Destroying Adult Minds. I Should Know".
Video gaming, particularly MMORPGs, were highly social experiences. WoW guildmasters received valuable organizational management skills, and I'm aware of a CTO who explicitly said his WoW experiences helps him manage people in professional settings.
Browsing social media is an antisocial activity, given that you're passively seeing what others are doing; reactions and comments don't count as a social activity because it's not real-time interaction with a human. Social media is engineered to maximize engagement by putting mostly negative content (that is, content that annoys you) in your feed interspersed with some positive content. It's weaponized behavioral psychology.
I have to agree that the screen narrative is often overly simplistic and perhaps functions as a convenient scapegoat for the other failures (family instability, an absent father, etc.). People are always trying to look for ways to absolve themselves of their responsibility. I think the author makes a good point here. For instance, if your father is uninvolved and your family life is unhealthy (pathological, absent, or smothering), social media on phones are an obvious escape that's within easy reach. With the disintegration of all sorts of social common places (look at the emptiness of playgrounds today), the snowball effect of social media use, and the shift of incentives the existence of social media introduce, social media become increasingly entrenched.
That being said, we cannot discount the manner in which social media do affect people once they've been pulled in. I think most people who have left social media have noticed the reduction of what you might call psychological turbulence. Social media companies are for-profit and morally nihilistic, and like drug dealers, they have an interest in keeping people hooked, often through harmful means. Social media companies are not acting in the best interest of their users. They are acting in the financial interest of their clients and their own pockets. And the software architecture of phones can act as an enabler, like a pocket slot machine, by design.
So it's not either/or. It's more of a question of where you ought to assign responsibility for which observed facts.
"Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts."
I don't know how impressive these statistics are. What needs to be considered are the causes. Like, sure, fewer teen pregnancies and less drug use sounds good on paper, but why are these the case? Is it because teens are more virtuous and responsible today? Is it because they've become more selective about who they hang out with, avoiding contact with bad influences? Is it because family life is healthy and models healthy relations? Or is the reason simply a lack of opportunity, because of total social isolation, social underdevelopment, lack of access, or pornography use? The murder rate might drop if you cut off everyone's hands, but I would hardly consider that a victory.
I'm a little under halfway through Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation. I feel like OP is arguing against a different version of the book than the one I'm currently reading.
First, Haidt's arguments primarily pertain to public schools and he spends significantly more time on the impact of social media on girls than on boys. The main problems he cites are that social media is creating a substitute for in person, synchronous, high stakes social relationships.
An isolated home schooler's use of social media is not substituting other, richer opportunities that are available.
In addition, Haidt strongly argues against social trends that long predate social media and mobile phones: the overprotection of children and elimination of unsupervised, child-led play in real world situations (specifically where there is physical risk taking).
Based on my read so far, OP is exactly the profile of a person who would have benefited from online social relationships.
It's possible for both to be true: mobile phone use is toxic children who are substituting online relationships for real world interactions. Mobile phone use is beneficial for children who do not have opportunity for real world interactions with peers.
Less crime, fewer teen pregnancies, less smoking, less drug use, and lower high-school drop-out rates are also coincident with concerns about screen time and social media use. By the same "correlation is not causation" argument, these have nothing to do with each other. It's great that these things are trending in the right direction. But there are still a whole lot of mental health problems among pre-teens, teens, and younger adults.
Not all screen time is the same. Some of it is really beneficial to mental health, and some of it isn't.
For me, the concerns about mental health and screen time come more from issues of body image distortions, bullying, slot-machine mechanics to maximize engagement, and the somewhat rare but abhorrent behavior of some corners of the internet that encourage people to commit suicide. I'm sure there are more examples than this as well.
Okay now I'm kind of annoyed by this author's claims. They cite a meta-analysis while claiming: "... a 2024 analysis ... found that links between social media use and poor mental health among youth were small, inconsistent"
Following that link and reading the RESULTS paragraph: "The 143 studies reviewed included 1 094 890 adolescents and 886 effect sizes, 11% of which examined clinical samples. In these samples, a positive and significant meta-correlation was found between social media use and internalizing symptoms, both for time spent (n = 2893; r, 0.10; 95% CI, 0.02 to 0.18; P = .02; I2, 24.59) and user engagement (n = 859; r, 0.12; 95% CI, 0.09 to 0.15; P = .002; I2, 82.67). These associations mirrored those in community samples."
POSITIVE AND SIGNIFICANT meta-correlation.
WTF? This is just blatant lying by the author. I mean sure they could claim the affect is, in their opinion, relatively small, but the study claims the exact opposite of what the author of the article claims!
27 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 27.2 ms ] threadAnd everyone thinks they're fine. When I was 25, I was still afraid of eating at restaurants. But I thought I turned out fine.
Or maybe you are one person and one person is never a big enough data set.
It’s in the headline. This is a classic of the “trends” genre — author generalizing their own experience to make a pronouncement about a whole generation or all of society.
Would we? A consistent trend is a consistent trend and "rewiring" doesn't necessarily mean all metrics need to go downward.
I mean, come on.
First claim in the article:
> But correlation is not causation, and research suggests that some of the supposed mental health crisis is an epidemic of overdiagnosis.
Linked paper doesn't support this. Only one study found evidence of overdiagnosis, and the data was both noisy and only focused on ADHD. It literally said "Most reviewed studies suggest that misdiagnosis does occur; however, only one study was able to examine overdiagnosis in child and adolescent mental disorders from a methodological point-of-view. This study found significant evidence of overdiagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder."
Another claim from the article:
> Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.
This kind of muddled thinking is prevalent in the article. The vague term "rewiring" is being argued against, and the author expects that only one specific outcome should be consistent with it, and doesn't admit the obvious other explanation is that social media and internet addiction is replacing the other addictions.
I read the whole article and could deconstruct it more, but I won't--it's tinged with the author's own anecdotal conclusion that they turned out fine, so everyone else will.
All of these, with the exception of fewer high school dropouts, are examples of people doing less. Going outside less, doing less mischief, socializing less. The reason for that is almost certainly that phone use is monopolizing more and more time of their time and crowding out theseother activities. I would absolutely concede that access to phones is not an unequivocal ill, there are some positive upsides. But these supposed counterexamples I think are exactly what we would expect if phones were changing the behavior of children.
And, on the subject of high school dropouts, I think there’s at least some reason to think this is due to a declining set of standards. This probably varies by state and school district, but there has certainly been a movement to reduce the number of infractions that leads to expulsion, and outbursts that would previously have resulted in student punishment are now allowed to continue unabated in some jurisdictions. I don’t think it’s pivotal to the argument one way or the other though.
Finally, I take the author’s point that the causal relationship between screen time and poor mental health runs two ways. But isn’t the prevalence of mental disorder and social isolation increasing? I would be curious to know what the author thinks is behind that broader background trend, if not the phones.
I'm not sure the exception even holds. The data indicates that most high school dropouts end up going to work which is more than coasting through high school until graduation. It is not like the would-have-been dropouts have hunkered down working hard to become straight-A students. They're just there for the free ride, so to speak, with, as you suggest later on, no real consequences for just being physically present and doing nothing more. Staying in school is now the path of least resistance, lazy choice.
Also, you point out that these are examples of "bad things not happening" but those bad things are the sorts of things you would expect to correlate with an addiction, if addiction were actually what was happening. On the other hand, for any positive measure of flourishing you want to pick, you can always find one which is going down. You can look at disco declining in the 80s and call the 80s an unmitigated disaster where the youth are no longer doing enjoyable things. So now you need a basket of positives, which you're potentially comparing against each other, which is itself encoding values that people might just not be holding. I know people who live with their parents and are glad to because "why buy a house when you can save that same money or spend it on other things". I think Haidt's arguments often do a sleight of hand between these, where he constructs a cardboard maze where his values are treated as implicitly and unstatedly legitimate and everyone else's are treated as a pathology. Which, the addiction framing is quite convenient for, if that's what one is doing - any self assertion of "Actually, I'm fine" gets turned into "Wow, look at how deep the addiction goes".
It's hard to imagine that the past problems he listed were not at least partially due to his excessive device use.
We don't have great emperical evidence to point to a specific thing between screen time, social media, gambling, counter culture etc on the causes of the reverse Flynn effect and mental health epidemic in general, but we do know that anecdotal evidence does not improve our data one way or the other.
While centering individual responsibility and calling out the weird dynamic where people unnecessarily embrace a personal narrative previously associated with debilitating conditions to feel a sense of belonging is refreshing, this is a heavy lift.
[0]: https://www.cato.org/people/adam-omary
This sounds like absolute bullshit since the increase in diagnosis is consistent across the OECD, and most other countries that see this trend have absolute no financial incentive in their healthcare systems to overdiagnosis these disorders. Much the contrary, singlepayer public healthcare systems have the exact opposite incentive: do not diagnose since it will be costlier over the life of a citizen to manage these ailments.
As usual with Cato "scholars", it's more writing to justify their libertarian political agenda rather than actual honest analysis.
I was part of an in-between generation (originally tail end of Gen X) and raised as a latchkey kid. It was the early 90s and thankfully I was able to travel without parents at 12 on airplanes very effortlessly. This allowed me to get out of my midwest (Wisconsin) bubble and meet in SF every year around New Years for MacWorld and SF2600 gatherings. It was a magical time. I'm not at all against communicating online and meeting people there, but social media as controlled by a singleton (e.g. Meta, Weixin, Weibo, Twitter/X, etc) seems awful. Sometimes I miss the fun of IRC (Dalnet and others), BBSes, and even AOL Chatrooms. It's hard to put the genie back in the bottle, so many people have adopted Facebook for small business and rural communities in the US rather than having a website they control. I can't find out what specials are happening at my local restaurant (Ember) or my favorite food truck (Chairman Bao & Eat on Monday) without having an Instagram account. I still resist Meta.
This author misses the point that some parents value critical thinking and independence. Not everyone joined the greek system in college! Same for social media, not everyone needs to be "connected" in social media before age 16. The algorithms at these singletons, often end up restricting and narrowing the world for many young minds (echo chambers for their cohort). It's not about censorship, but a little guidance and oversight reviewing social media from a 20,000 foot level rather than in the weeds.
I fully expected this author to talk about the importance of computing access for education and development, but it seemed to just be about arguing for this hot mess we have now. Yikes!
What?
Video gaming, particularly MMORPGs, were highly social experiences. WoW guildmasters received valuable organizational management skills, and I'm aware of a CTO who explicitly said his WoW experiences helps him manage people in professional settings.
Browsing social media is an antisocial activity, given that you're passively seeing what others are doing; reactions and comments don't count as a social activity because it's not real-time interaction with a human. Social media is engineered to maximize engagement by putting mostly negative content (that is, content that annoys you) in your feed interspersed with some positive content. It's weaponized behavioral psychology.
That being said, we cannot discount the manner in which social media do affect people once they've been pulled in. I think most people who have left social media have noticed the reduction of what you might call psychological turbulence. Social media companies are for-profit and morally nihilistic, and like drug dealers, they have an interest in keeping people hooked, often through harmful means. Social media companies are not acting in the best interest of their users. They are acting in the financial interest of their clients and their own pockets. And the software architecture of phones can act as an enabler, like a pocket slot machine, by design.
So it's not either/or. It's more of a question of where you ought to assign responsibility for which observed facts.
"Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts."
I don't know how impressive these statistics are. What needs to be considered are the causes. Like, sure, fewer teen pregnancies and less drug use sounds good on paper, but why are these the case? Is it because teens are more virtuous and responsible today? Is it because they've become more selective about who they hang out with, avoiding contact with bad influences? Is it because family life is healthy and models healthy relations? Or is the reason simply a lack of opportunity, because of total social isolation, social underdevelopment, lack of access, or pornography use? The murder rate might drop if you cut off everyone's hands, but I would hardly consider that a victory.
First, Haidt's arguments primarily pertain to public schools and he spends significantly more time on the impact of social media on girls than on boys. The main problems he cites are that social media is creating a substitute for in person, synchronous, high stakes social relationships.
An isolated home schooler's use of social media is not substituting other, richer opportunities that are available.
In addition, Haidt strongly argues against social trends that long predate social media and mobile phones: the overprotection of children and elimination of unsupervised, child-led play in real world situations (specifically where there is physical risk taking).
Based on my read so far, OP is exactly the profile of a person who would have benefited from online social relationships.
It's possible for both to be true: mobile phone use is toxic children who are substituting online relationships for real world interactions. Mobile phone use is beneficial for children who do not have opportunity for real world interactions with peers.
Not all screen time is the same. Some of it is really beneficial to mental health, and some of it isn't.
For me, the concerns about mental health and screen time come more from issues of body image distortions, bullying, slot-machine mechanics to maximize engagement, and the somewhat rare but abhorrent behavior of some corners of the internet that encourage people to commit suicide. I'm sure there are more examples than this as well.
Following that link and reading the RESULTS paragraph: "The 143 studies reviewed included 1 094 890 adolescents and 886 effect sizes, 11% of which examined clinical samples. In these samples, a positive and significant meta-correlation was found between social media use and internalizing symptoms, both for time spent (n = 2893; r, 0.10; 95% CI, 0.02 to 0.18; P = .02; I2, 24.59) and user engagement (n = 859; r, 0.12; 95% CI, 0.09 to 0.15; P = .002; I2, 82.67). These associations mirrored those in community samples."
POSITIVE AND SIGNIFICANT meta-correlation.
WTF? This is just blatant lying by the author. I mean sure they could claim the affect is, in their opinion, relatively small, but the study claims the exact opposite of what the author of the article claims!
If that was the exception, almost everyone who watches Kill Bill would be committing murder.
And almost everyone who watched it didn't.
But some people did:
https://allthatsinteresting.com/murders-inspired-by-horror-m...
Personality traits and family instability didn't suddenly increase around 2013, online media use did.
Along with an increasing percentage of people experiencing mental health issues, but not all people.
Correlated but not proven causative? Certainly, but please, present other correlated phenomenon, more likely to be causative...