The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt was a Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of 2024. His book describes what he calls the transition from the “play-based” childhood to the “phone-based” childhood. He discusses the reengineering of the brains of America’s children by Silicon Valley’s social media. He asserts that the dopamine-reward systems of social media create undesirable, addictive feedback loops. Ground zero for this operant conditioning is the Gen Z cohort (1997-2012).
Older generations, like the Baby Boomers, had play-based childhoods. Boomer mothers made them breakfast in the summertime, and they left to play with their friends. Boomers went to play baseball, walked down to the drug store for a ten-cent soda, had a party, or went over to a friend’s house. Boomers had friends, played together, talked about the opposite sex, played at grown-up roles, and as the sun was setting, they went home for dinner.
The magic of the smartphone stole the childhoods of Gen Zers. The engineers of Silicon Valley slowly but methodically rewired their brains and behavior patterns. Instead of spending five to eight hours a day in PHYSICAL contact with friends, Gen Zers began to spend five to eight hours a day alone with their phones. Moreover, Gen Zers are also likely to suffer from sleep deprivation. Since social media apps are designed to excite and titillate, salacious and contentious exchanges are the rule. Social media apps do not make money by boring their users. Gen Zers, particularly females, want to hear or see dirt on their classmates. Males want to play exciting video games like Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and Call of Duty: Black Ops.
Instead of learning social skills with real humans, these reengineered Gen Zers learned the logic of addictive games and how to survive the texting wars among high school cliques. Social media and video games created anxious young people who were conditioned, like lab rats, to crave computer-like perfectionism, the visual attractiveness of AI-generated images, and a false sense of group belonging. Additionally, the personalized, algorithmic allure of the devices used by men created a communication disconnect with women. Gen Z men and women were not only in different physical worlds, but also in different virtual ones. The Gen Z cohort was the first to fully transition from the social world of real people to a world of imaginary or virtual people. Some in the prior generations, such as the Millennials, were significantly affected by social media and phone addiction, but Gen Zers were fully engulfed in the Silicon Valley contagion.
One of Haidt’s key insights is that parents overprotect their children in the real world but underprotect them in the virtual world. Their physical overprotection tends to keep children away from unsupervised playgrounds and activities that allow them to grow up. Conversely, parents think, “What could go wrong in the virtual world? My son is in his room, safe and sound.”
If parents stunt the development of their children, what happens when the children reach chronological adulthood? What does this mean for the future of American families?
Several self-described experts on family bliss, children, and marriage, such as Elon Musk, JD Vance, and Donald Trump, are alarmed by the declining birth rates in white America. Since it is true that the USA, like most societies with advanced economies, has a declining birth rate, let’s first summarize the basic statistics.
Forming American families is starting later with each generation. Obviously, birth rates decline when people begin later in life to marry. In 1975, the median age at first marriage for men was 23.5, and for women, it was 21.1. Today, it is 30.2 for men and 28.4 for women. As late as 1990, the percentage of women between 18 and 29 years old who were married was 86.5%. By 2019, their marriage rate dropped to 46.3%. Similarly, the rate for men fell from 64% in 1990 to 35.7% in 2019.
Today, 51% of all young men (18-29) are unmarried, whereas only 32% of young women are unmarried. What is happening? Several studies have noted that the courting habits of younger men have changed, causing young women to seek older men, resulting in more young men remaining unmarried.
“Getting out there” also seems to be on the wane. A recent study reported that young people (18-29) attend parties 70% less today than twenty years ago. Several studies report that 25% of all young American men (15-34) report feeling profoundly lonely, while 18% of young women feel the same way. These studies indicate that young women might be lonelier in their teens, but become less lonely as they get older. The opposite is true for young men. They tend to become lonelier and more desperate as they get older.
A 2024 study found that 44% of Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) young men had never had a girlfriend or boyfriend during their teenage years. For Baby Boomers (1946-1964), only 20% of young men lacked a girl or boyfriend in their teenage years. These statistics are aggregations that do not apply to every individual. There are mature Gen Z males and immature Gen Z females. However, these statistics indicate a significant overall shift in dating and marriage practices.
The 2024 study also found that Gen Z men were so afraid of rejection that they chose not to try. Gen Z women are said to be more sociable, while the men sit alone behind their video games and social media screens. Young women initially have similar problems in making connections, but often turn to older men because these men are more emotionally grown-up. Sadly, many Gen Z men are caught in an infinite loop of self-delusion and loneliness.
It is widely reported that a large percentage of today’s young men make matters worse for themselves. Instead of growing up and learning to communicate with modern women, they become incels. The incel subculture is an expanding online community of mostly male heterosexuals who claim that they cannot find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one. Instead of reaching out to women, they stay in their man caves and blame women for all their problems. Their lack of courage causes them to objectify women and only pursue women who are willing to accede to their macho relationship games. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes incels as “part of the online male supremacist ecosystem.”
An unscientific review of the recent young, high-profile male violent criminals checks most of the incel boxes. Among the more famous apparent incels are the 27-year-old alleged murderer of the UnitedHealthcare CEO (ironically, his back pain prevented him from having girlfriends before his crime, he now has many anti-corporate, platonic girlfriends), the 28-year-old confessed murderer of the four Idaho college students, the 22-year-old Air National Guardsman who shared highly classified information in a chatroom, the 22-year-old guy who killed six people near UC/Santa Barbara in 2014, the 19-year-old Parkland, Florida, shooter who killed 17, and the 25-year-old who killed eight women in Toronto by driving on a sidewalk in 2018.
The consistent response to these young gunslingers by conservatives is “Thoughts and prayers.”
The political gap between Gen Z men and women is striking. 37% of Gen Z women voted for Trump in 2024, while 58% of the men voted for Trump. While no one would expect political conformity within the Gen Z population…this is a huge difference. The emotional immaturity of male Gen Zers, plus the political chasm, helps to explain why younger males struggle to find dates. Unless male Gen Zers kidnap women and hold them as sex slaves, it is pretty clear that they cannot meet the birth rate quotas set by President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Elon Musk.
In an ironic twist of fate, the MAGA fertility cheerleaders, Trump, Vance, and Musk, reinforce the macho, white nationalism that produces incels. Trump, Vance, and Musk want more white babies, but they also encourage a hate-filled, incel mindset. Incels cannot get a date, let alone father children.