The Gen Z Intimacy Recession

In 'The Anxious Generation', Jonathan Haidt examines the sudden decline in the mental health of adolescents starting in the early 2010s. He attributes this decline to the shift from a 'play-based childhood' to a 'phone-based childhood', highlighting mechanisms such as sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, and perfectionism that interfere with children’s social and neurological development. Haidt proposes four simple rules to address this issue: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, phone-free schools, and more opportunities for independence, free play, and responsibility. The book offers a clear call to action for parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments to restore a more humane childhood and end the epidemic of mental illness among youth.

Written in 1919, 'The Second Coming' is a poem that reflects on the chaos and anarchy following World War I and the Irish War of Independence. It uses the metaphor of a 'Second Coming' to describe a transformative, potentially cataclysmic event. The poem is characterized by its apocalyptic imagery, including the 'widening gyre' and the 'rough beast' slouching towards Bethlehem. Yeats draws on his cosmological views, as outlined in his book 'A Vision,' to depict a world in turmoil and the cyclical nature of history.