More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.
The Atlantic's Jean Twenge asks the most crucial question of our age... "have smartphones destroyed a generation?" Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, [teens today] talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”
I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.
Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data - some reaching back to the 1930s - I had never seen anything like it.
What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? It was after the Great Recession, which officially lasted from 2007 to 2009 and had a starker effect on Millennials trying to find a place in a sputtering economy. But it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.
The more I pored over yearly surveys of teen attitudes and behaviors, and the more I talked with young people like Athena, the clearer it became that theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet.
More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.
Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives - and making them seriously unhappy.
Brayden King
interesting choice of picture
Jaxon Bennett
HELLO! I represent millennials of MY DISTRICT!
College Conservative: "Hillary's Crafty Moneymaking Schemes End in No Consequence Except Human Rights Violations"
HUGE NATIONAL MEDIA STORY - COLLEGE (19) CLIMATE DENIER TO WIN LOCAL OFFICE!!!
do you think it will ever be possible for mankind to significantly negatively effect the climate via pollution and industrial/developmental activities?
Maybe in 50 or 100 years, signs might show? 200 years?
Michael Baker
explain
Chase Roberts
>2012
Jack Bell
Cheesepizza
Isaiah Ramirez
MASHA
fucking pedos
Jack Miller
>Implying you never fapped to her
Julian Ward
>people dropping out of society >blames new technology >not the economy >not the information readily available showing hypocrisies the world over >not the stigmatisms brought on by the previous generations parenting styles >blames a fucking phone
Man, fuck these stupid ass fucking people with their backward ass conclusions. It's like when people thought video games would be the beginning of serial killers training. How the fuck do people with this mindset still have a steady paycheck?
Daniel Long
They're also having less sex, which means I might actually be able to find a wife that isn't a whore to settle down and have pure white babies with. Don't you or anyone else go fucking this up.
>mfw i won't have to settle for a non-virgin millennial whore
Ryder Edwards
me? never 2d only for me
Colton Adams
>"have smartphones destroyed a generation?" pretty lame to blame smartphones for that
Jordan Moore
How very telling that all the first posts here at Sup Forums know who the girl in the picture is. It's almost like this board and its ideas attracts pedo scum.
Elijah Roberts
Russian kino
Caleb Clark
Tinder, mate. No such thing as pure goods.
Matthew Garcia
Welche to Sup Forums. As an oldfag you know girls like her.
David Nelson
das rite
Aaron Mitchell
>finding a wife on tinder What the fuck have you been smoking?
Only a virgin is worth having as a wife, no exceptions, ever.
Joseph Flores
18 yr old user here.
Some could say I'm /r9k/ tier, I've never had a girlfriend and have no friends my age.
What they don't realize is it literally doesn't bother me at all, I would rather stick a bullet through my brain than involve myself with this modern-day pop-culture brainwashing bullshit.
Also, I'm a virgin because I want my wife to be a virgin, and I believe in God.
Nicholas James
Same here, only older. The average woman is full of diseases. Just get your shit together, be able to afford a house etc. Then get a girl much younger than you (legal) and have many babies. Simple life.
Mason Richardson
i'm pretty sure you're a gen z kid
Adrian Phillips
It's almost as if people on Sup Forums are older then the underaged fags on the other boards
Blake Gray
Oy vey the goyim aren't spending their money on alcohol and interracial breeding grounds™ night clubs. Whatsoever shall we do?
Christopher Turner
>We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones.
They would if they had parents who actually did their fucking job.
It's no real surprise though. Almost every living thing on this planet is lazy, because energy conservation is a very effective strategy in most places. When they don't feel any pressure to do something, they most likely won't. So removing all kinds of pressure from children fucked them up.
Charles Murphy
yes, 18 is gen z
Kevin Collins
Generation Z is post-Millennial.
Luis Nelson
Pretty much every negative shift in society's behavior can eventually be backtraced to shitty parenting. But it's those very same parents conducting studies about the negative shifts and they don't want to admit that they were shitty parents, so they just find some other boogeyman that was not available when they themselves grew up.
In my country we had reports that a worrying amount of children cannot swim, and the conclusion was that it's because the schools do not put enough of a focus on it. Like, fuck you. Those are basic life skills the kid should have before it even gets to the point where it's a topic in school. If your child cannot ride a bicycle or swim because you were a lazy fuck and never taught them, that is 100% on you and not the teachers, recession, smartphones or whatever other shitty excuse you want to come up with.
