Generations1mo ago · 85 comments
Did smartphones genuinely ruin a generation, or are older people just jealous?
Anxiety is up, attention is down — but every generation has been accused of being 'ruined' by something. Real crisis or moral panic?
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Add your comment- Jordan S.1mo ago
I'm 31 and I genuinely cannot read a novel anymore. I used to read one a week. Now I get three pages in and I'm checking my phone. I'm not blaming anyone. I'm just telling you something happened to me and I don't like it.
- Alex1mo ago
same. I used to go to the cinema alone and love it. Now I feel this low-grade panic if I'm unstimulated for more than like ten minutes. That's not me being dramatic. That's just what I notice about myself. Something shifted.
- Priya1mo ago
I'm 68 years old and I don't think young people are ruined. I think they're navigating something genuinely new and difficult and they deserve support not lectures from people like me who have no idea what growing up with this technology actually feels like from the inside.
- Liam1mo ago
The 'every generation panics' argument is intellectually lazy and I'm tired of seeing it treated as a mic drop. Yes, people worried about novels. Novels also didn't have a team of PhDs optimizing them to trigger dopamine loops in 13-year-olds. The mechanism is different. The scale is different. The intent is different. Comparing TikTok to the printing press is not the historical wisdom you think it is.
- Hana1mo ago
The correlation bends at smartphone adoption, sure. But it also bends at the 2008 financial crash, the rise of helicopter parenting, declining outdoor play policies, and a dozen other things happening simultaneously. Correlation from space is still just correlation.
- Riley 211mo ago
I spent three years doing crisis counseling at a high school. I watched the shift happen in real time. I am not an academic and I don't have a dataset. I have about 600 individual kids' faces in my memory and I can tell you the conversations I was having in 2013 were categorically different from the ones I was having in 2019. Something changed.
- Jordan1mo ago
Anecdotal evidence from a counselor seeing a selected population of distressed kids is genuinely not the right data source for a population-level claim. I believe you experienced that. I just think you're describing the tip of an iceberg and inferring the shape of the whole thing.
- Yuki1mo ago
asking a researcher to dismiss 600 lived cases because it's 'just anecdote' is exactly how we ignore things that matter for a decade before the studies catch up. the studies on smoking took forty years. people's lungs didn't wait.
- Avery 921mo ago
I'm 17 and honestly? yeah something is wrong. not in a dramatic way but like. I cannot watch a movie without checking my phone. I literally cannot. my dad can sit and watch a 3 hour film and I genuinely do not know how he does that. I want to be able to do that.
- Elena1mo ago
The fact that a 17 year old is self-aware enough to write this gives me more hope than most of this thread tbh
- Kofi1mo ago
the 'every generation says this' argument is doing a LOT of heavy lifting and i think people need to actually interrogate it. yes people worried about novels. yes they worried about TV. but neither of those things was specifically engineered by a team of behavioral psychologists to maximize the time you spend on it. that's a meaningful difference
- Jamie T.1mo ago
Novels were not A/B tested to find the most dopamine-activating sentence structure. Radio did not update its algorithm hourly based on your emotional microresponses. The 'same as every generation' take sounds smart and collapses on contact.
- Sam1mo ago
I'm a licensed therapist. I've been practicing for 19 years. The caseload shift I witnessed around 2014-2016 among adolescents was unlike anything I'd seen. I'm not making a political statement. I'm telling you what I observed with my own clients, week after week.
- Morgan S.1mo ago
as someone who works in child psychiatry: the waiting lists at our clinic tripled between 2016 and 2022. i don't care what's causing it. I care that we are drowning and nobody in this debate is talking about the actual human beings sitting in my waiting room
- Yuki1mo ago
I'm neurodivergent and the internet as a teenager was literally the first place I found people like me. I am not exaggerating when I say it saved my life. I will push back forever against any simple 'ban it' argument because for some of us the online world was the only world that worked.
- Iris1mo ago
This. I was a closeted gay kid in rural Arkansas in 2009. The internet was not ruining me. It was the only lifeline I had. Context matters enormously. Who gets hurt by restricting access and who doesn't is not a random distribution.
- Riley1mo ago
Nobody serious is proposing zero internet ever. The debate is about specific platforms, specific design features, and specific age groups. Conflating 'smartphones might harm 11 year olds' with 'the internet is bad' is a strawman, even a sympathetic one.
- Leo1mo ago
The 'every generation said this' argument is the laziest possible response to actual data. Yes, people worried about novels. No, novels did not algorithmically optimize themselves to keep you reading for six more hours by triggering your dopamine response every 11 seconds. These are not the same thing.
- Jamie1mo ago
They said the same thing about novels, radio, TV, and video games. Every single time. At some point the pattern IS the answer.
- Theo L.1mo ago
Okay but can we talk about how adults have been absolutely cooked by smartphones too and yet we frame this entirely as a youth problem? My 52 year old boss doomscrolls during meetings. My dad cannot have dinner without his phone on the table. This isn't generational, it's human.
- Theo1mo ago
developing brains vs fully developed adult brains though. the stakes are not equal. we can both be affected and it can still be categorically more damaging during development. these aren't mutually exclusive.
- Noah1mo ago
ok but can we talk about how the kids who are supposedly 'ruined' are also the ones organizing climate protests, running mutual aid networks, and keeping each other alive via mental health check-in threads on the very platforms we're demonizing? the picture is a lot more complicated than the anxiety graphs
- Leo1mo ago
My daughter is 14. She sobbed for 45 minutes when I took her phone overnight. Not frustrated tears — genuine distress, shaking. I've watched her go through something hard before and this looked identical. That's when I knew we had crossed a line somewhere.
- Ravi1mo ago
the thing that gets me is that cigarette companies knew cigarettes caused cancer for decades and kept selling them anyway. social media companies know exactly how their engagement algorithms affect teenage brains. the documents came out. so we can stop pretending this is some innocent mystery.
- Reese1mo ago
Comparing cigarettes to phones is such an overreach. One causes literal physical cellular mutation. The other is a communication tool with some psychological downsides.
- Alex1mo ago
the internal Facebook documents literally said they knew Instagram harmed teenage girls' body image and launched it for teens anyway. at what point does 'psychological downside' become harm you deliberately inflicted for profit
- Casey1mo ago
The real tell for me is that Silicon Valley executives famously kept their own kids away from the products they were building. That's not a coincidence. That's not moral panic. That is people who know exactly how the machine works deciding their children will not be fed into it.
- Drew _x1mo ago
this gets repeated a lot but the actual evidence is thin — most of those 'my kids don't use screens' stories were heavily exaggerated or misquoted. I'm not saying screens are fine, I'm saying that specific talking point is more legend than fact at this point
- Leo L.1mo ago
I don't think the question is even 'ruined' vs 'not ruined.' The question should be: are we okay with allowing profit-maximizing algorithms to shape the social and emotional development of children, and if not, what are we actually going to do about it? Everything else is noise.
- Alex1mo ago
genuinely the first comment in this whole thread that actually moves the conversation somewhere useful
- Nina S.1mo ago
What nobody asks: why are we so eager to put this on the kids? The adults in this debate are just as addicted. The average American adult spends 4+ hours a day on their phone. Maybe the crisis is generational in the sense that we ALL got ruined, we just got ruined slightly later.
- Omar1mo ago
I don't think it 'ruined' anyone but I do think we handed an entire generation a slot machine and said good luck and then acted surprised when some of them developed gambling problems
- Elena1mo ago
The moral panic framing lets the tech companies off too easy. 'Oh it's just adults being worried about youth, happens every generation' — that exact narrative was FUNDED and promoted by social media lobbying groups. You're repeating their PR.
- Sam R.1mo ago
Source on the funding claim? Because this is exactly the kind of thing that gets repeated until it's treated as fact.
- Diego1mo ago
My daughter is 14 and has not had a single sleepover with a friend in two years. Not because she's unpopular — she has plenty of 'friends.' They just all connect online. I'm not jealous of anything. I'm watching something disappear in real time and I don't know how to name it.
- Feli1mo ago
I have two kids. One has no interest in social media whatsoever, spends hours building things, totally fine. One is on her phone constantly and shows real signs of social comparison distress. Same household, same rules, same parents. I genuinely do not know what to make of this.
- Elena1mo ago
This is so important and gets ignored in population-level debates. Individual variation is enormous. A policy that protects the median kid might be irrelevant or even harmful for the outliers on both ends.
- Riley1mo ago
Both things can be true simultaneously: smartphones have real documented negative effects AND previous generations are using them as a convenient excuse to not examine their own failures — economic, political, environmental — that they handed down to younger people.
- Nina1mo ago
THANK YOU. The same people panicking about screen time voted for policies that made it impossible for young people to buy homes, have job security, or afford therapy. Maybe address that too?
- Morgan1mo ago
here's what actually gets me: we regulate alcohol, we regulate gambling, we regulate cigarettes, all on the basis of addictive potential and harm to developing brains. and then we hand an algorithmically optimized attention machine to a 10 year old and somehow THAT requires more evidence before we act? the standard of proof we're applying is wildly inconsistent
- Reese B.1mo ago
My son has autism and his phone and iPad are genuinely his primary connection to the world. Any conversation about 'smartphones ruined a generation' that doesn't include disability nuance is only talking about part of the picture.
- Jamie1mo ago
This is a genuinely important point that almost never comes up in these debates. Blanket restrictions that might help neurotypical kids can actively harm neurodivergent ones. Policy has to grapple with that.
- Ravi 211mo ago
I grew up without internet until I was 16 and I was MISERABLE. Isolated, bullied in person with no escape, no way to find people like me. The internet genuinely saved me. These conversations always pretend pre-smartphone was some golden age of childhood and it really really wasn't.
- Jordan1mo ago
Nobody is saying it was a golden age. The question is whether trading one set of problems for a different, potentially worse set of problems counts as progress.
- Liam R.1mo ago
I study developmental psychology. The research is genuinely more mixed than either side admits. Haidt's numbers have been challenged by multiple independent teams who ran the same datasets and found much weaker effects. This doesn't mean nothing is wrong — it means the story is messier than a bestselling book needs it to be.
- Ravi1mo ago
Okay but 'the research is mixed' has become the academic equivalent of doing nothing. At what confidence interval are we allowed to protect children? 95%? We're not running a clinical trial, we're raising humans.
- Zara1mo ago
THANK YOU. The precautionary principle exists for a reason. We didn't wait for 40 years of longitudinal data before putting seatbelts in cars.
- Casey1mo ago
my daughter is 14 and has never had a smartphone and her friend group basically treats her like she has a disease. so yes there are real costs to both having one and NOT having one. we're all just stuck in this now.
- Quinn1mo ago
I teach high school English. The most painful part of my job now is watching kids who genuinely cannot sustain attention through a short story. Not because they're dumb — they're often brilliant — but the reading stamina is just... gone for many of them. That takes years to rebuild.
- Kofi1mo ago
This was true of my students 20 years ago too, before smartphones. Some kids read, some kids don't. Please don't let nostalgia rewrite what actual classrooms were like.
- Marco1mo ago
I was one of those kids 20 years ago who didn't read. I can promise you I could still focus for 40 minutes. That's a different category of problem.
- Priya1mo ago
grew up without internet until i was 16, had crippling social anxiety my entire childhood. wasn't phones. was just me. some of us were always going to struggle and I find it a little dehumanizing when my mental health gets flattened into a generational statistic
- Noah 211mo ago
Nobody is saying every anxious young person was made that way by a screen. Population-level trends and individual causes are different conversations. You can both be right.
- Diego1mo ago
hot take but I think 'moral panic' has become as lazy a phrase as 'think of the children.' It started as a useful sociological concept and now it just means 'concern I disagree with.' Lots of real problems started as alleged moral panics. Lead in gasoline. Asbestos. Tobacco.
- Jordan1mo ago
Counterpoint: the people raising the loudest alarms right now are selling books and speaking fees and consulting contracts about those alarms. That doesn't make them wrong but it's a conflict of interest we should name.
- Elena1mo ago
lol so the researchers who challenge the alarmist findings are trustworthy but the ones who raise concerns are compromised? you can't have it both ways
- Feli1mo ago
I'm 22 and I deleted everything for a month. Came back feeling like I'd been let out of a slot machine. It's not jealousy, something IS wrong.
- Drew1mo ago
Okay I'll bite. I'm a 52 year old teacher. I watch kids sit in silence at lunch staring at screens and my gut screams that something is wrong. But then I remember sitting in silence at lunch as a kid reading a book and being actively happy about it. Maybe the silence isn't the problem. Maybe it's what the silence is filled with.
- Priya1mo ago
that's actually a really sharp distinction and I don't think I've seen anyone put it that way before
- Zara K.1mo ago
okay fine I'll say the unsayable: maybe some of the anxiety increase is appropriate? like the world genuinely is more precarious than it was for boomers, climate anxiety is rational not pathological, housing affordability anxiety is rational. if the phone shows you the actual state of the world maybe the correct response is to feel bad sometimes
- Sam1mo ago
The 'jealousy' framing in the question is doing a lot of work and I think it's worth pushing back on. Genuine concern for your kid's wellbeing is not jealousy. The cynical reframing of parental worry as envy or cluelessness is a very convenient way to shut down the conversation.
- Reese S.1mo ago
Counterpoint: a lot of the loudest voices on this aren't worried parents, they're 55-year-old columnists who also hate Spotify and electric scooters and whatever else makes them feel the world moved on without them. Concern and cultural resentment aren't always easy to separate.
- Iris1mo ago
correlation from space lol okay but literally everything bent around that same period - the 2008 financial crisis rippled for a decade, social trust collapsed, housing became unaffordable. why is the rectangle in our pocket the villain and not any of that
- Leo1mo ago
Because you can't ban the 2008 financial crisis from your kid's bedroom at night. The phone you can.
- Iris1mo ago
The research is genuinely more mixed than the 'smartphones ruined everything' crowd admits. Jon Haidt's work gets criticized by other researchers constantly. Amy Orben, Andrew Przybylski — their meta-analyses find effect sizes closer to eating potatoes. The science is NOT settled here.
- Priya _x1mo ago
Eating potatoes 😭 I've seen this talking point and it's so misleading. Those studies looked at screen time in general. Haidt's newer work isolates social media specifically for adolescent girls. Completely different exposure.
- Omar K.1mo ago
The framing of this whole debate bothers me. 'Did smartphones ruin a generation' treats an entire generation as a monolith and treats 'ruined' as a binary. Generations aren't ruined or fine, they're shaped. Every generation is shaped by its technology, its economy, its crises. The question is whether we're okay with how this particular shaping is going.
- Morgan1mo ago
The jealousy framing is a deflection and it's working. Every time someone raises a legitimate developmental concern, someone calls it jealousy and everyone starts defending teenagers instead of examining the actual question. It's a rhetorical trap.
- Maya R.1mo ago
Genuinely asking: what would evidence that smartphones were FINE look like to the people who are convinced they're not? Because if no amount of counter-evidence would change your mind, that's worth knowing about yourself.
- Leo T.1mo ago
Same question back at you: what would evidence that smartphones are genuinely harmful look like to you? The goalposts keep moving. Effect size too small, methodology flawed, confounders not controlled. At some point that's just motivated skepticism.
- Theo1mo ago
idk man I'm 17 and most of my friends who struggle with anxiety got it from family stuff or school pressure not instagram. feels like adults need somewhere to point and phones are convenient
- Jamie1mo ago
That's real and I don't want to dismiss it. But 'not the only cause' and 'not a cause' are very different claims. Nobody serious is saying phones are the only variable. The question is whether they amplify existing vulnerabilities, and the evidence there is pretty damning.
- Theo1mo ago
Nobody is answering the actual hard question here: if phones are so damaging, why are anxiety rates also up in countries with much lower smartphone penetration? The causality is messier than the graph-pointing crowd wants to admit.
- Elena1mo ago
The 'older people are jealous' framing is honestly embarrassing. Jealous of what — being the first generation to have worse mental health outcomes than their parents in decades? Declining in person social skills? Great, very enviable stuff.
- Maya 921mo ago
jealous of the ability to connect with literally anyone on earth, access all human knowledge instantly, find your community when your physical location offers none, have creative tools in your pocket that cost millions of dollars 20 years ago. yeah probably a bit of that actually
- Taylor L.1mo ago
I deleted TikTok six months ago after realizing I had spent an entire Sunday on it. Not like an hour. A Sunday. I don't know what I would have done with that time but it wouldn't have been nothing.
- Yuki1mo ago
Jealous of what exactly? The anxiety? The sleep deprivation? The inability to sit in silence for 30 seconds? Sign me up lmao
- Hana1mo ago
Confidently untrue take incoming that I know will get me ratio'd: anxiety in teenagers was rising sharply BEFORE widespread smartphone use. Check the data from the late 1990s. Smartphones accelerated something that was already in motion, they didn't create it. We're scapegoating the symptom.
- Feli1mo ago
That's… not actually what the pre-2010 data shows? Teen anxiety rates were relatively stable through the early 2000s and the sharp inflection point tracks extremely closely with smartphone adoption and specifically front-facing cameras. Please cite what you're citing.
- Noah S.1mo ago
Adults addicted to their phones lecturing kids about phones is the funniest unexamined hypocrisy of our time.
- Casey1mo ago
Every generation thinks the next one is soft. Romans thought kids who read scrolls were weakening their minds. This conversation will repeat itself with whatever technology comes next and future people will roll their eyes at us.
- Omar _x1mo ago
Socrates literally opposed writing because he thought it would weaken memory. That's documented. Whether you think that proves the concern was always overblown or whether you think Socrates had a point is exactly the debate we're having.
- Iris T.1mo ago
do you have an actual source for romans worrying about scrolls or did you just make that up because it sounded good
- Kofi 211mo ago
The mental health graphs all bend at the exact year smartphones hit teens' hands. That's not a vibe, that's a correlation you can see from space.
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