As humans, we love to follow the path of least resistance, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that our technologically administered society has embraced the trifecta of quick, simple, and easy. As technical innovations have brought the whole world on demand and within easy reach of our fingertips, the pursuit of the “here and now” has triumphed over delayed gratification; we aim to numb ourselves from all friction, pain, and aggravation. Lest we prematurely and euphorically celebrate our perceived triumphs over such friction, we might pause and inquire as to the cost? What might be the unintended consequences to our personal well-being and performance as we continue along this trajectory?

So much of our resilience is forged in the crucible of discomfort. Muscles and mental acuity both require resistance and stimulation; like a body builder working out at a gym or a scholar studying for long hours. Inertia and inaction lead to boredom and frailty. Where will we acquire our grit, our perseverance, our anti-fragility in a world served up with the click of a button or voice command? In particular, where will the youth of today experience these things when the accelerationism surrounding AI promises to reduce our cognitive load in the same manner that earth moving machines and relieved the burdens on our muscles? How has this already impacted education? How will it impact it in the future?

In his indispensable study on the life and times of Gen Z – contemporary digital natives for whom submission to smartphones and social media have become rites of passage – Jonathan Haidt sheds light on additional challenges stemming from, and also augmenting and amplifying, the aforementioned concerns. In The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Haidt underscores an increase in mental health issues which have been brought about by unprecedented societal changes in the wake of the great migration indoors, and away from the worrisome and often inconvenient nature of real-time face-to-face contact with actual people. The breadth of our unmediated experience, having been shrunk to the size of a small screen, has given us a false sense of security, and a wider but shallower, sense of connection.

Tracing the roots of this phenomenon, Haidt points to the rise of frequently misplaced concerns associated with “safetyism,” the sense that the real world  is filled with strangers and dangers and that the only way to shepherd kids through the potential harm that may come to them is to be hyper-vigilant, chaperoning their every move. Unstructured and unsupervised activities become infrequent. In this mindset, it’s better to shelter in place, to retreat and plug-in to the world wide web of dopamine-inducing scrolling. What Haidt demonstrates is that we, as a society, consistently over-emphasize real world dangers, while routinely  underestimating the damage online activity presents. Moreover, he is not merely harping on the extremes of predatory online behaviors that target naïve adolescents, but rather he lays out a broad spectrum of conditions that tend to produce social isolation in place of connection amongst peers. Under the cloak of online anonymity, the worse forms of human nature often present themselves in the form of vitriol and cyber-bulling. Worse still, in pursuit of monetized attention, the algorithms themselves frequently promote risk-taking, extremism, and vulnerability.

All this has led to a hollowing out of meaningful friendships and a major spike in depression amongst teens – increases of 145% for girls and 161% for boys from 2010 to 2021 according to the 2023 U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Citing mounting evidence, Haidt points out that these factors are not merely correlated, they are causal. Given these trends, Haidt suggests we return to in-person, face-to-face, device-free disintermediated interactions in the great outdoors (or at least indoors away from our screens). He even promotes taking on added risk for kids, insisting they be encouraged to work out their own disputes on the playground, to allow them to fail and fall (a little) and learn to get back up again.

What really benefits all of us, especially kids, is to get out of what he refers to as ‘defend mode,’ where we are scanning our environment for potential danger, and to move into ‘discover mode,’ enthralled and enchanted by the awe of direct contact with nature and other people. So much of formalized education has been dubbed a process of “touristification,” where the road is paved in front of students and they must simply follow the well-defined path, veering neither to the right nor the left, in the pursuit of confirming a pre-defined codified answer – the one right answer which stifles curiosity and reduces learning to regurgitation and reproduction. Such disposition towards pre-defined answers avoids or ignores the great unknown. It eschews true discovery.

Perhaps the example which best captures the whole tenor of Haidt’s book surrounds the necessity of “wind for trees.” Transporting us back to the 1980s, we read of an attempt to create a Biosphere 2 as a self-contained and closed ecosystem. To the experimenters’ surprise, the trees they planted within the sphere had a tendency to fall over under their own weight as they matured. Without wind, which acts as the stressor that transforms the cell and root structure of the trees as they resists it, they failed to gain the necessary strength to thrive. Seizing on this as the perfect metaphor for child-development, Haidt contends that our children will not emerge as adults with the resolve to stand up to life’s tests and adversity in the absence of consistent real-world stressors.

Parents and educators should ensure an ample supply of wind.

Asher is a Technology Futurist who speaks and consults globally for a wide range of companies. In addition to being a policy researcher and advisor to CFV, he is also a ninth generation Vermonter

Updated 12/11/2024