Teens, Tension, and Technology: The Loneliness Epidemic

irina

Gen Z has grown up in the age of the smartphone and their existences are deeply intertwined. Father and teacher Dan Schank looks at the interconnectedness of isolation, loneliness, and technology how today's youth are effected, both positively and negatively.

My favorite local place to take my kids is Headwaters Park. It's 35 acres of interwoven trails, wrapping around Mill Creek, offering a variety of bridges, pathways, rock formations, and pools of water for my daughters to explore. Its patchwork of forest is sparse enough that I can keep an eye on them without constantly intervening. They can make a mess without damaging public property. And unlike other local favorites — Frontier Park, for example — their play at Headwaters is mostly improvisational. Since there are no slides, swings, or monkey bars, they are forced to invent games. They sprint across bridges, skip rocks, and search for salamanders. Within 15 minutes, they'll typically concoct some activity with loosely-defined rules that keeps them occupied for an hour or so, often with minimal conflict.

Headwaters exemplifies the kind of childhood activity championed by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his insightful and occasionally annoying bestseller, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. According to Haidt, "it is in unsupervised, child-led play where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children's emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair."

My kids are five and seven as I type this. And providing them with enjoyable, screen-free outdoor activities is perhaps easier now than it will be in six or seven years. Soon enough, they'll have to reckon with a firehose of unregulated digital content, the highs and lows of social media, and the anxieties of early adolescence. And their anxieties will undoubtedly differ substantially from my own teen years in the early 1990s.

Haidt's Anxious Generation is perhaps the most famous book to examine the so-called "loneliness epidemic" among young people. His argument goes something like this — Gen Z (born after 1995 or 1997, depending on who you ask) came of age at a time where smartphones had become ubiquitous, when social media had allowed us to quantify our experiences through liking and sharing, and when camera phones had encouraged us to endlessly document our lives through images.

Concurrently, reported mental health struggles shot up substantially (even prior to COVID lockdowns) on account of what Haidt describes as a "great rewiring" of kids' minds. He believes we have moved away from a "play-based childhood" and toward a "phone-based" one. Haidt, who wants a return to the former, argues that parents should be far less protective about physical activity (encouraging greater outdoor risk-taking, longer recess times in school, and less overprotective parenting) and far more protective about online activity (by limiting screen time, banning cellphones in schools, and only allowing social media accounts after a child turns 16).

Anxiety and ambiguity

I decided to write this article because of the mixed feelings I have about Haidt's claims — and about the discourse surrounding adolescent loneliness in general. As I read his book, I was keenly aware of his agenda as a centrist public intellectual prone to marketable generalizations and occasional crankiness. I also couldn't help contrasting his claims with my experiences as a professor at Penn State Behrend. Like Haidt, I've noticed (anecdotally) an uptick in students who "check out" as the semester unfolds, paired with an increasing inability to meet deadlines and maintain schedules. If, seven years ago, I'd have one or two students per class who simply stop showing up, that number is now often between three and five. At the same time, I find Gen Z students cultivate sharp critical thinking skills, having shed some of the shallow optimism of the millennials that preceded them. In my experience, they are also more tolerant of cultural and sexual/gender differences than any past generation — arguably due to the influence of the same screen-based behavior that Haidt assumes is rewiring their brains.

Haidt identifies a real problem, even if I'm not fully on board with his focus on curtailing smartphone usage as the silver bullet for fixing it. Adolescent mental health struggles are genuinely way up for Gen Z. According to the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, "4.5 million youth (ages 12 to 17) had a major depressive episode" in 2022. To put that in perspective, the same survey notes that major depression among teens has more than doubled since 2004, with increases of 145 percent for girls (from about 13 percent to nearly 30 percent) and 161 percent for boys (from about 5 percent to around 12 percent). Locally, the Pennsylvania 2023 Youth Survey shows a modest decline in mental health issues, but the results are still alarming. Using data from 34 middle and high schools in Erie County, the report indicates that "41.5 percent of students reported they felt sad or depressed most days in the past 12 months," and "18.1 percent of students had seriously considered attempting suicide."

But there are positives as well. According to the same survey, alcohol and tobacco use have declined substantially — only 30 percent of students claim they have ever tried alcohol, which is a 16 percent drop since 2009. Only 7 percent have reported ever smoking a cigarette. A recent study from Penn State found that students seeking counseling services rose by 40 percent between 2009 and 2015, with increases continuing up to the start of COVID lockdowns. In the University's 2023 annual report, 61 percent of students seeking mental health services had received prior counseling.

Part of this rise is the result of increased access to resources — something Haidt neglects in his analysis. For example, the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 requires insurers that offer mental health benefits to provide the same level of benefits for those services that they do for medical and surgical care. If mental health crises have reached epidemic proportions, Gen Z at least has better options on-hand and a willingness to use them. And they don't appear to be "self-medicating" to the same degree that many of us did in decades past, when our struggles were more likely to be endured in unquantifiable silence.

If we can agree that these trends are alarming, to what degree should we blame them on technology? Doing so makes intuitive sense — who among us doesn't resent our hours spent doom-scrolling, or feeling inferior to Instagram influencers, or daring to peruse the comments on a GoErie Facebook post? But when experts tally the data, the results are more ambiguous. In a critical review of Haidt's book, psychologist Candice L. Odgers notes that several meta-analyses and systematic reviews produced by researchers have found minimal correlation between "well-being and the roll-out of social media globally." Instead, Odgers argues that "when associations over time are found, they suggest not that social media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers."

Unstructured time in nature and the freedom to use one's imagination without the interference of technology starts to dwindle as children enter adolescence and with it comes a whole host of anxieties, pressures, and neural pathways corresponding with open access to social media. Photo: Erin Phillips

What the young people are saying

You can make it through all 295 pages of The Anxious Generation without any clear idea of what actual adolescents think of Haidt's hypothesis. As a 40-something who fears falling prey to outmoded preconceptions, I wanted to hear more from Gen Z themselves.

Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (And Adults Are Missing) was the book I needed to help complete the picture. Social scientist Emily Weinstein and sociologist Carrie James surveyed over 3,500 teens to see what they thought about growing up in a heavily digitized world. The duo paint a more nuanced picture of modern adolescence than Haidt, one that occasionally inverts my Gen X assumptions. For example, a great deal of seemingly-antisocial smartphone behavior is actively tending to the friendships we fear are disappearing. This occurs through group texts, multiplayer video games, likes, comments, and reshares. And in some cases, there are real interpersonal consequences to not keeping up with the online habits of one's closest friends.

Take "Snapchat streaks," for example. Weinstein and James note how the platform allows users to tally how many days you've sent and received Snaps with a friend. The more consecutive days you interact with someone, the longer the "streak" continues. If you are feeling alienated, you can open your phone and see quantifiable data about how committed people are to your friendships. But many of the teens interviewed in Behind Their Screens also find these streaks exhausting. How long do they need to go on? And if you take a break, do you run the risk of insulting someone you care about?

Behind Their Screens makes it clear that the same young people who seem rude and affectless at the dinner table are often reckoning with a web of social protocols that would leave the friendliest of us exhausted. Here's how the authors put it in a Time magazine editorial inspired by their book: "Even before a social media post is made public, close friends can be pulled into photo selection, editing, and final vetting. Once posts appear, friends are expected to step up — and fast. Liking posts is the bare minimum."

For a local perspective, I reached out to some Behrend students. And I deliberately targeted video game aficionados because they are the demographic I have (anecdotally) seen struggling the most in my classes. This led to a revealing conversation with two of our Digital Media, Arts, and Technology majors, Sean Martin (age 19) and Dev Vyas (age 20).

When given a quick overview of my article topic, Martin was quick to assert that games like Fortnight actually encourage a sense of community because they require people "to find ways to work together. And that leads to friend requests, which leads to conversation."

Vyas is quick to note that when games like Fortnight or Call of Duty are in multiplayer mode, "they cannot be paused," which causes conflict with his mother. She doesn't understand that if he walks away from the game, the other members of his team can no longer rely on him. Vyas has also found that a sense of community comes from playing a Minecraft-style game called Genshin Impact, "because random people can join your world and you can talk to them through chat." He also notes that a few of these friendships have carried over into real life as well.

Both Martin and Vyas have purely online friendships as well — i.e., genuine friends that they've never met in person. In Martin's case, shared interests led to a four-year-long interaction with an aspiring animator in Turkey. "We found that we have a shared passion for making films," he says. "I had an online presence at one point because I take comic books very seriously. And he had seen me online. And he was an up-and-coming artist who asked if I would take two or three minutes to see his video. And I said that's great, because I want to do animation but I'm a writing person and I don't know the technical stuff. And from then on, we just connected." Martin also says that gaming has helped sustain the friendship.

It's not all positive though. The same multiplayer games they've used to cultivate friendships can also be havens for bullying. "There's a thing called proximity chat," says Vyas, "where you can hear everyone — even the players who are not on your team — talking. And it can get really bad sometimes. They'll say plenty of words that you don't like!"

Cultivating "third places"

I began this article by praising the time my children spend at Headwaters park. The park meets the definition of a "third place" — i.e., a social space that is not your home or where you work. Many experts concerned about adolescent mental health point to the decline of such spaces, especially for young people who are too old for the playground and too young for a bar. If "screen time" is synonymous with alienation and hang-out time is labeled as "loitering," then what exactly are adolescents expected to do with themselves?

Seph Kumer, director of community engagement at Erie's First Presbyterian Church of the Covenant, is keenly aware of the problems of social alienation. The students he encounters often seem "distracted, with short attention spans, and awkward about what could be deemed 'routine and normal' social interactions." To address these issues, his team works with Gannon University to host a late-night Study Space, open from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. during finals week each semester, featuring quiet rooms and an area to gather for snacks and socializing. "We offer a time for students to gather for announcements and a very brief exam prayer," says Kumer. Students are asked to participate in exercises like "greet two people you don't know, share your major and what you are studying… or what you are most worried about during exams. By the end of the six nights, students feel very comfortable with one another, and they linger longer in the refreshment area. They speak of the space we create as extremely special and valuable."

The Study Space is part of a larger effort within the Church of the Covenant to establish ties to the Erie Community that extend well beyond traditional religious gatherings. In recent years, they've prioritized summer block parties, picnics at Presque Isle, game nights, "Sunday Supper" meals that feed the needy, and a whole host of outreach endeavors targeting our growing immigrant community. "There is something about a shared goal or task, and using your hands, that allows for some valuable interactions," says Kumer. "Enough to start or kindle a deeper friendship."

Unmediated "third places" aren't extinct yet, and the past decade has been a (mostly) positive one for Erie. Consider the revitalization of the Federal Hill neighborhood, or the rise of coffee shops like Pressed, Purrista Cat Cafe, and Ember + Forge. And if your disillusioned teenager seems like a visitor from another planet, consider your own relationship with technology. Exhausted by social media? Unable to put down your phone? Longing for a place to spend time that isn't your house or your workplace?

Maybe we have more in common with our children than we think.

Dan Schank can be contacted at danschank@gmail.com