In 2024, We Decided Smartphones Were the Problem

For more than a decade, a steady stream of warnings has pointed to the unsettling possibility that social media and smartphones were damaging our children. Tech insiders, mental health experts, and parent-led campaigns like Wait Until 8th and OK to Delay have sounded alarms and called for change. The 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma—produced in conjunction with the Center for Humane Technology—offered a disturbing look at how algorithm-driven platforms manipulate attention and behaviour, bringing the conversation into mainstream awareness.

The evidence is clear: smartphones—and the social media they deliver—have coincided with, or perhaps contributed to, a troubling rise in anxiety. Managing them is important, but we must not lose sight of the real issue, which is to understand the root cause of our mental health issues.

Teenage girl on phone. Photo by Mart Production (pexels)

The Anxious Generation

In March 2024, American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt released The Anxious Generation, a book that has quickly become the defining text in the conversation about youth mental health in the digital age. The bestseller has had a massive influence, drawing praise from across the political spectrum—from Barack Obama and Bill Gates to Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt, US and UK Versions (fair use, obtained from book website)

Haidt makes two central claims:

1. Gen Z is in the midst of a mental health crisis.
2. Smartphones and social media are significant drivers of that crisis.

His argument is backed by sobering statistics: beginning around 2010—the dawn of the smartphone era—rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide began to climb, particularly among adolescent girls. Haidt draws on data from across the Western world, revealing an eerily consistent pattern.

American social psychologist and author, Jonathan Haidt. (Source: Wikimedia)

Yet The Consensus Isn’t Settled

The Anxious Generation has received both acclaim and pushback. A viral review in Nature accused Haidt of stoking “rising hysteria” about screens and social media, cautioning that such narratives risk oversimplifying the complex roots of youth distress.

“We have a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer,” wrote psychologist Candice Odgers. “Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research and that do little to support young people who need, and deserve, more.”

Others argue Haidt is right to sound the alarm. Psychologist Jean Twenge, author of iGen and Generations, notes there is a “reasonably robust” academic consensus that smartphones and social media are at least partly to blame. She points out that critics have failed to provide plausible alternative explanations for the spike in teen distress.

“If smartphones and social media are not behind the increase in teen depression”, Twenge asks, “what is? Because over and over, the answers that they have given have not been supportable.”

Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, founder of Sapienship, has similarly warned that social platforms are designed to “hack our brains and manipulate our emotions.” He stresses the need to disconnect—not just to preserve attention, but to protect mental well-being.

Looking Beyond the Screen

There seems little doubt that smartphones and social media have contributed to the ‘anxious generation,’ but what is the root cause of that anxiety?

Candice Odgers points to “a complex set of genetic and environmental factors,” while Haidt himself concedes that devices are not the sole culprit. In The Coddling of the American Mind, he and co-author Greg Lukianoff trace the broader crisis to a culture of “safetyism”—an overcorrection toward protection, which, when paired with helicopter parenting, has stifled children’s independence, physical play, and emotional resilience.

But what lies beneath these cultural shifts? What forces are driving our collective turn toward emotional fragility and digital refuge?

Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, of the World Transformation Movement, argues that blaming smartphones is a superficial diagnosis. The real problem, he suggests, is not the devices themselves, but what we’re trying to escape through them. In Death By Dogma, Griffith writes that communication technology like smartphones,

has very greatly increased and spread alienation by exposing children to all the now overwhelming levels of upset in the world,… its overuse, even addiction, is the result of an immense need for distraction from overwhelming internal psychological pain from all their encounters with the human condition, especially during their infancy and childhood.

In other words, today’s young people aren’t simply overwhelmed by screen time—they are overwhelmed by life itself. The smartphone is not the fire—it is the smoke. The deeper blaze, Griffith contends, is a crisis of meaning and unresolved emotional distress that has been accumulating across generations.

Australian biologist and author, Jeremy Griffith (Fair use, from authors website)

Psychologist Arhur Janov put it even more starkly:

The brain [of young people today] is busy, busy, dealing with the pain…when there is stimulation from the outside…it meets with a very active brain which says ‘Whoa there. Stop the input. I have too much going on inside to listen to what you ask for.’

He added,

Of course, the kid is agitated out of their mind, driven by agony inside. We want her to focus on 18th-century art and she is drowning in misery.

American Psychologist & Psychotherapist, Dr Arthur Janov (Source: Wikimedia)

Seen through this lens, smartphones are less a cause than a coping mechanism—an ever-present tool to avoid confronting the deeper human condition that society is yet to fully understand.

Toward A Deeper Understanding

There is growing recognition that we are in the midst of a youth mental health crisis, and that smartphones are, in some way, entangled in it. But whether the roots of that crisis are technological, cultural, psychological, or existential, one thing is clear: we won’t solve it by managing screen time alone.

If we’re to help this generation—and the next—we must look deeper. Not just into their devices, but into their distress. Not only into algorithms, but into our alienation. The answers we need will require science, compassion, and, above all, the courage to confront what we’ve long tried to avoid: ourselves.