There’s no doubting the harmful effects on children due to the loss of independence and unsupervised outdoor play (point #6), as I point out at length in my book “Life Before the Internet”.
But this cannot be separated from smartphones and social media, and here’s why.
Before the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, the internet was just a tool. You had to go and find a computer, sit down in front of it and log on. And when you were done, you left and got on with the rest of your life.
This advent of smartphones completely upended this reality by putting the internet in one’s pocket. We now no longer had to go and find a computer, sit down in front of it and log on. We just had to pull our phone out of our pocket. Suddenly, the internet spilled over into our previous everyday activities and changed our lives forever. The idle time we used to spend playing outside, socializing and reading, soon gave way to social media. And the rest is history.
Indeed, it's as if three keys were required to open Pandora's Box. 1) Loss of independence / outdoor play, 2) social media, and 3) smartphones. And now the genie is out of the bottle.
Outstanding work. Living back and forth between Italy and the USA, I see more young people meaningfully employed in small businesses in Italy than in the USA. Yesterday in a small town in Asiago, walked into two beautiful little shops that had several generations of family working in the shop. I wonder if Corporatism (who heavily fund what we consume on social media) is also not killing purpose and hope for young people? I am not anti-capitalist, or even anti-"corporate" but there is definitely some negative incentives there that we need to address. B Corps are a good start.
As a trog who never got a cell phone it's increasingly apparent to me that they have won the battle. A trip to a big city finds everyone, all classes and ages, holding the phone in their hand as though it had been there since birth. Through it all the most remarkable thing about the way this device has colonized our lives is that it has not seemed remarkable at all. It is generally accepted that the convenience the gizmo offers trumps all the downsides. The only solution I can see is we will run out of the precious metals needed to provide everyone on planet with a phone. At that point having a cell phone will revert to the status object it was in the beginning.
Love your work. Looking at Figure 9, do you have any theories about why the depression rates for 12–25-year-olds keep going up and up? One might expect the social media/smartphone effect to have gotten 'saturated' at some point and the rates flatten out.
Interesting question. I suspect it's because in-person time with friends and sleep time continued to decrease. Social media time may also have increased, though that's a little harder to prove because of inconsistent measurement (the Gallup survey showed 5 hours a day, and before 2017 it was 1.6 hrs, though using a different survey question & sample).
I think the lack of adequate sleep (because phones again) among adolescents is largely to blame. It became my #1 concern and partially why I left teaching (but not my involvement with teens). The bottom of the pyramid of needs must be met first. Sleep and nutrition don’t exist for too many teenagers.
The true cause of these epidemics is a multiannual population-wide dopamine oscillation: dopamine in excess levels causes feelings of 1) depression, 2) loneliness, and 3) self-harm.
An ~80 years long multiannual hormone cycle, aka. the Strauss-Howe generational cycle, is behind all of these epidemics. It's the very same multiannual hormone cycle that drives all of the other cyclical animal populations as well! It's really that simple as the embedded statistics clearly show:
All of the are statistics are mysteries to researchers even after decades of reserach:
A) Low dopamine causes criminal behavior that peaked during early 1990s. No one knows why.
B) Sex hormones modulate fertility that peaked close to 1960 and no one knows why. Sex hormones also modulate the rate of sexual maturation, while a decade later close to 1970 maternal age and breastfeeding (oxytocin levels are inverse to sex hormones) hit nadir. No one knows why.
C) Cortisol is the main cause of type 2 diabetes, and even though obesity is still on the rise, T2D incidence peaked close to 2010 and is still on the decline to this day. No one knows why.
D) Growth hormone modulates height, and while calory intake has increased steadily, generations born after the 1980s are growing shorter. No one knows why.
-
-
PPS. Dopamine also increases the feeling of social dominance, and this is quite obviously the cause for the constantly deepening intra-group polarizations inside (and between) countries, which has been increasingly visible since roughly 2010, and this trend will peak close to 2030. Dopamine in excess also causes fear, hence the xenophobia, and when you combine increasing feelings of xenophobia and social dominance you will especilly get anti-Semitism.
This is the simple reason why the 2010s and 20s have been repetition of what happened 80y ago during the 1930s and 40s regarding pretty much every societal aspect.
Go back 80 years from there and you land at the US Civil War.
Go back 80 years again and you land at the American Revolutionary War.
So, we're essentially living in those times again due to the 80y hormone cycle, where increasing dopamine levels pit in-groups against opposing in-groups: men vs women, left vs right, and the West vs the East in the end.
As the hypothesis is very novel, I totally understand your sentiment. I'm collaborating with a professor of ecology and a research professor of chronobiology. Especially chronobiology has advanced greatly during the past five years, as we now know for example that the menstrual cycle can use either the moon's luminance (synodic month, 29.5d) or gravitation (anomalistic month, 27.3d) as the zeitgeber, and that men too have monthly hormone level oscillations. We know that humans have periodic annual hormone level oscillations. We also know that animals can synchronize their biological rhythms via airborne molecules. So, now you just extend these monthly and annual oscillations to be multiannual, which doesn't seem to be anything like pseudoscience to me.
The main reason for me being quite certain about the hypothesis is that I made the initial model of the hormone level oscillations about four years ago, when I wasn't aware of the youth mental health crisis or it having started after 2010. But, for one reason or another, the dopamine oscillation that reached equilibrium during the summer of 2010 is a pretty perfect explanation to why the dopamine related adverse mental health effects have been statistically detectable beginning from the year 2011.
By chance, the hormone cycle's model also explains these previously unexplainable phenomena that occurred quite simultaneously across the Western countries, with a lag of about 1-5y inside the "Cold War Western Europe" as disctance from the epicenter grew.
-Why did fertility peak during the late 1950s (early 60s in Europe) and then suddenly crash? (Sex hormones.)
-Why did the age of mothers hit nadir close to 1970 and has gone up since then? (Sex hormones.)
-Why are cohorts born after 1980s shorter than the peak heigth cohorts of 1970s and 1980s? (Growth hormone.)
-Why did violent crime peak during the early 1990s and then decline as quickly as it rose? (Dopamine.)
-Why did type 2 diabetes incidence begin a fast increase close to 1990, peak close to 2010, and then begin to decline. (Cortisol.)
If there was an accepted explanation for even one of these phenomena in even one country where the phenomenon occurred, I would worry about the hypothesis being correct on its main premises. There have been plenty of attempts to explain these phenomena, but all that remains are guesses that are repeated in the absence of a good explanation. One example:s: almost everyone seems to think that the age of mothers has increased since the 1970s because of women are studying and working more, but if that would be the case, why did the age of mothers decrease during the decades before that? No one can explain this, because the statistics don't agree with the initial premise beyond the period people like to refer to. The same goes for other attempted explanations regarding the other phenomena.
The reason I'm focused on the USA is mainly because the Strauss-Howe generational theory focuses solely on the generational cycle in the US, where the previous cycles' lengths have been roughly 80y, 90y and 100y before the current cycle begun in ~1950. There wasn't a global cycle before the current cycle, because travel between continents, most countries, and even cities was quite limited before the 1940s and 50s. And by the look of current statistics, it seems there still is a lag of ~15y between the US and parts of the Far East.
And finally, to get back to the topic at hand, the studies that Twenge and Haidt use (i.e. smartphones + fast internet + social media are the main culprit for the youth mental health epidemic) are truly full of holes, and the models do not work widely outside the few countries where some levels of correlation has been observed. The studies do not present properly dissected evidence that would prove causality from the periods the studies concentrate on, and when the observation period is extended longer (than the typical ~5y in these studies), the models hold even less predictive power. You should take a closer look at the articles if you have the time to see these problems for yourself, and I'm not the only one who has noticed these significant shortages. One obvious problem here is that the social media companies don't give very much data out to researchers.
An article being peer-reviewed does not mean that the conclusions are entirely true and could be cited as such, as the conclusions include predictions, estimations, presumptions and assumptions. This is unfortunately what Twenge and Haidt have largely done, and it seems to me that Their tone indicates that they are certain that they're correct. But they may be as much correct as thinking that violent movies and games incited the violent crime during the crime peak of the 1990s. It seemed like a good correlation and causality at the time, didn't it?
The work will be peer reviewed in many parts, but modeling a hormone cycle first on the basis on the Strauss-Howe generational theory, then finding that several population-wide statistics from the US and Europe are in agreement with the model, and only afterwards finding out that the same hormone cycle is occurring during All of the known animal population cycles in nature and in the same order as the model depicts... it's basically been a coincidence after a coincidence x 500.
I know I'm repeating myself here, but the fact remains that the model appears to provide a very simple yet highly effective explanation to the previously unexplained societal phenomena, with an average accuracy of 0-2 years in the US. (Only the growth hormone oscillation is more vague than that, possibly because the amount of calories has increased significantly during the past five decades or so.) The enigma of animal population cycles has remained unexplained from the days of Aristotles, but by pure accident, the model explains those cycles too, as the model is universal from humans to crabs to moths to cods to grouse.
Of course, all of this could be just a coincidence. But if you look at the hypothesis from the point of its evolution, it's like always throwing a dice and getting the number 1 a hundred times in a row.
The hypothesis is certainly not attempting to be a theory of everything, but because hormones affect humans without us realizing it most of the time, there's really nothing I've come across that could refute the hypothesis' core premises. No one has been able to point out anything in the hypothesis that would be pseudoscience. If you can, please do, so I can move on to something else. :)
I think y’all might find this relevant, some more info on the reality on the ground in my and so many other school districts, how school time has become 100% screen time:
Hey, do you REALLY want to get to the ROOT of this problem, and throw the proverbial One Ring into the fires of Mordor for good? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) shows us the way:
There’s no doubting the harmful effects on children due to the loss of independence and unsupervised outdoor play (point #6), as I point out at length in my book “Life Before the Internet”.
But this cannot be separated from smartphones and social media, and here’s why.
Before the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, the internet was just a tool. You had to go and find a computer, sit down in front of it and log on. And when you were done, you left and got on with the rest of your life.
This advent of smartphones completely upended this reality by putting the internet in one’s pocket. We now no longer had to go and find a computer, sit down in front of it and log on. We just had to pull our phone out of our pocket. Suddenly, the internet spilled over into our previous everyday activities and changed our lives forever. The idle time we used to spend playing outside, socializing and reading, soon gave way to social media. And the rest is history.
Indeed, it's as if three keys were required to open Pandora's Box. 1) Loss of independence / outdoor play, 2) social media, and 3) smartphones. And now the genie is out of the bottle.
Brilliant and helpful. Appreciate the “dialogue” between Gray’s work and your own.
Outstanding work. Living back and forth between Italy and the USA, I see more young people meaningfully employed in small businesses in Italy than in the USA. Yesterday in a small town in Asiago, walked into two beautiful little shops that had several generations of family working in the shop. I wonder if Corporatism (who heavily fund what we consume on social media) is also not killing purpose and hope for young people? I am not anti-capitalist, or even anti-"corporate" but there is definitely some negative incentives there that we need to address. B Corps are a good start.
As a trog who never got a cell phone it's increasingly apparent to me that they have won the battle. A trip to a big city finds everyone, all classes and ages, holding the phone in their hand as though it had been there since birth. Through it all the most remarkable thing about the way this device has colonized our lives is that it has not seemed remarkable at all. It is generally accepted that the convenience the gizmo offers trumps all the downsides. The only solution I can see is we will run out of the precious metals needed to provide everyone on planet with a phone. At that point having a cell phone will revert to the status object it was in the beginning.
Love your work. Looking at Figure 9, do you have any theories about why the depression rates for 12–25-year-olds keep going up and up? One might expect the social media/smartphone effect to have gotten 'saturated' at some point and the rates flatten out.
Interesting question. I suspect it's because in-person time with friends and sleep time continued to decrease. Social media time may also have increased, though that's a little harder to prove because of inconsistent measurement (the Gallup survey showed 5 hours a day, and before 2017 it was 1.6 hrs, though using a different survey question & sample).
I think the lack of adequate sleep (because phones again) among adolescents is largely to blame. It became my #1 concern and partially why I left teaching (but not my involvement with teens). The bottom of the pyramid of needs must be met first. Sleep and nutrition don’t exist for too many teenagers.
No, it's not the phones nor social media.
The true cause of these epidemics is a multiannual population-wide dopamine oscillation: dopamine in excess levels causes feelings of 1) depression, 2) loneliness, and 3) self-harm.
An ~80 years long multiannual hormone cycle, aka. the Strauss-Howe generational cycle, is behind all of these epidemics. It's the very same multiannual hormone cycle that drives all of the other cyclical animal populations as well! It's really that simple as the embedded statistics clearly show:
https://jannemiettinen.fi/FourthTurning/hormone-cycle-humans-loneliness.png
https://jannemiettinen.fi/FourthTurning/hormone-cycle-humans-depression.png
https://jannemiettinen.fi/FourthTurning/hormone-cycle-humans-self-harm.png
Link to the full hypothesis: https://jannemiettinen.fi/FourthTurning/
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-
PS. This picture shows the statistical evidence for the other hormone levels in the US, and these statistics too repeat very similarly all over the Western countries: https://jannemiettinen.fi/FourthTurning/generational-hormone-cycle-us-examples5.png
All of the are statistics are mysteries to researchers even after decades of reserach:
A) Low dopamine causes criminal behavior that peaked during early 1990s. No one knows why.
B) Sex hormones modulate fertility that peaked close to 1960 and no one knows why. Sex hormones also modulate the rate of sexual maturation, while a decade later close to 1970 maternal age and breastfeeding (oxytocin levels are inverse to sex hormones) hit nadir. No one knows why.
C) Cortisol is the main cause of type 2 diabetes, and even though obesity is still on the rise, T2D incidence peaked close to 2010 and is still on the decline to this day. No one knows why.
D) Growth hormone modulates height, and while calory intake has increased steadily, generations born after the 1980s are growing shorter. No one knows why.
-
-
PPS. Dopamine also increases the feeling of social dominance, and this is quite obviously the cause for the constantly deepening intra-group polarizations inside (and between) countries, which has been increasingly visible since roughly 2010, and this trend will peak close to 2030. Dopamine in excess also causes fear, hence the xenophobia, and when you combine increasing feelings of xenophobia and social dominance you will especilly get anti-Semitism.
This is the simple reason why the 2010s and 20s have been repetition of what happened 80y ago during the 1930s and 40s regarding pretty much every societal aspect.
Go back 80 years from there and you land at the US Civil War.
Go back 80 years again and you land at the American Revolutionary War.
So, we're essentially living in those times again due to the 80y hormone cycle, where increasing dopamine levels pit in-groups against opposing in-groups: men vs women, left vs right, and the West vs the East in the end.
Wow, interesting theory. So I guess it really is (largely) cyclical. Linear thinkers (i.e. most people) just don't seem to understand, lol.
I’m fascinated.
Hi and thanks for the reply.
As the hypothesis is very novel, I totally understand your sentiment. I'm collaborating with a professor of ecology and a research professor of chronobiology. Especially chronobiology has advanced greatly during the past five years, as we now know for example that the menstrual cycle can use either the moon's luminance (synodic month, 29.5d) or gravitation (anomalistic month, 27.3d) as the zeitgeber, and that men too have monthly hormone level oscillations. We know that humans have periodic annual hormone level oscillations. We also know that animals can synchronize their biological rhythms via airborne molecules. So, now you just extend these monthly and annual oscillations to be multiannual, which doesn't seem to be anything like pseudoscience to me.
The main reason for me being quite certain about the hypothesis is that I made the initial model of the hormone level oscillations about four years ago, when I wasn't aware of the youth mental health crisis or it having started after 2010. But, for one reason or another, the dopamine oscillation that reached equilibrium during the summer of 2010 is a pretty perfect explanation to why the dopamine related adverse mental health effects have been statistically detectable beginning from the year 2011.
By chance, the hormone cycle's model also explains these previously unexplainable phenomena that occurred quite simultaneously across the Western countries, with a lag of about 1-5y inside the "Cold War Western Europe" as disctance from the epicenter grew.
-Why did fertility peak during the late 1950s (early 60s in Europe) and then suddenly crash? (Sex hormones.)
-Why did the age of mothers hit nadir close to 1970 and has gone up since then? (Sex hormones.)
-Why are cohorts born after 1980s shorter than the peak heigth cohorts of 1970s and 1980s? (Growth hormone.)
-Why did violent crime peak during the early 1990s and then decline as quickly as it rose? (Dopamine.)
-Why did type 2 diabetes incidence begin a fast increase close to 1990, peak close to 2010, and then begin to decline. (Cortisol.)
If there was an accepted explanation for even one of these phenomena in even one country where the phenomenon occurred, I would worry about the hypothesis being correct on its main premises. There have been plenty of attempts to explain these phenomena, but all that remains are guesses that are repeated in the absence of a good explanation. One example:s: almost everyone seems to think that the age of mothers has increased since the 1970s because of women are studying and working more, but if that would be the case, why did the age of mothers decrease during the decades before that? No one can explain this, because the statistics don't agree with the initial premise beyond the period people like to refer to. The same goes for other attempted explanations regarding the other phenomena.
The reason I'm focused on the USA is mainly because the Strauss-Howe generational theory focuses solely on the generational cycle in the US, where the previous cycles' lengths have been roughly 80y, 90y and 100y before the current cycle begun in ~1950. There wasn't a global cycle before the current cycle, because travel between continents, most countries, and even cities was quite limited before the 1940s and 50s. And by the look of current statistics, it seems there still is a lag of ~15y between the US and parts of the Far East.
And finally, to get back to the topic at hand, the studies that Twenge and Haidt use (i.e. smartphones + fast internet + social media are the main culprit for the youth mental health epidemic) are truly full of holes, and the models do not work widely outside the few countries where some levels of correlation has been observed. The studies do not present properly dissected evidence that would prove causality from the periods the studies concentrate on, and when the observation period is extended longer (than the typical ~5y in these studies), the models hold even less predictive power. You should take a closer look at the articles if you have the time to see these problems for yourself, and I'm not the only one who has noticed these significant shortages. One obvious problem here is that the social media companies don't give very much data out to researchers.
An article being peer-reviewed does not mean that the conclusions are entirely true and could be cited as such, as the conclusions include predictions, estimations, presumptions and assumptions. This is unfortunately what Twenge and Haidt have largely done, and it seems to me that Their tone indicates that they are certain that they're correct. But they may be as much correct as thinking that violent movies and games incited the violent crime during the crime peak of the 1990s. It seemed like a good correlation and causality at the time, didn't it?
I generally agree with your statements.
The work will be peer reviewed in many parts, but modeling a hormone cycle first on the basis on the Strauss-Howe generational theory, then finding that several population-wide statistics from the US and Europe are in agreement with the model, and only afterwards finding out that the same hormone cycle is occurring during All of the known animal population cycles in nature and in the same order as the model depicts... it's basically been a coincidence after a coincidence x 500.
I know I'm repeating myself here, but the fact remains that the model appears to provide a very simple yet highly effective explanation to the previously unexplained societal phenomena, with an average accuracy of 0-2 years in the US. (Only the growth hormone oscillation is more vague than that, possibly because the amount of calories has increased significantly during the past five decades or so.) The enigma of animal population cycles has remained unexplained from the days of Aristotles, but by pure accident, the model explains those cycles too, as the model is universal from humans to crabs to moths to cods to grouse.
Of course, all of this could be just a coincidence. But if you look at the hypothesis from the point of its evolution, it's like always throwing a dice and getting the number 1 a hundred times in a row.
The hypothesis is certainly not attempting to be a theory of everything, but because hormones affect humans without us realizing it most of the time, there's really nothing I've come across that could refute the hypothesis' core premises. No one has been able to point out anything in the hypothesis that would be pseudoscience. If you can, please do, so I can move on to something else. :)
I think y’all might find this relevant, some more info on the reality on the ground in my and so many other school districts, how school time has become 100% screen time:
https://gaty.substack.com/p/school-time-has-become-screen-time
To really fix the internet, do this first and instead:
https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms
Hey, do you REALLY want to get to the ROOT of this problem, and throw the proverbial One Ring into the fires of Mordor for good? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) shows us the way:
https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms
Big Tech can go EFF off!