The worry and wellness complex
Banning smartphones may be a popular concept, but it won't protect teenagers from the pressure to perform.
“That's the duty of the old,” said the Librarian, “to be anxious on the behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old”.
This quote manages to stay in my head, but I often forget its origin - cue some frantic, unsuccessful Googling until I remember where I saved it.
And if even it’s from a work of fiction (Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, one of my favourite books, alongside the other two titles in the His Dark Materials trilogy), the sentiment rings true - even more so now that I’m a parent.
We can’t help but worry about our children, and that worry applies at both an individual level, but also at a broader, more generational level.
When researching a presentation on attracting “Gen Z” to a large consultancy last year, I found that tier-one media in the UK had published nearly 5,000 articles about the cohort of people born (roughly) between 1997 and 2012.
Google autocomplete (always a fascinating window into our worries) highlights such popular questions as “Are Gen Z lazy workers” and “Is Gen Z having less sex”:
Interestingly, these worries often combine with our hopes for the young people in our lives. Looking back over the headlines for all previous generations (Millenials, Gen X, Baby Boomers), we see a desire that each new cohort of young people will bring dramatic change into the world.
Society looks for revolution, but that revolution can also be scary, as we struggle to imagine a world radically different from our own.
And as ever in our modern world, our obsession with technology, via its outsize influence on the media agenda, magnifies the intensity of these hopes and fears for our young people. This intensity is most sharply brought to life in the consistent bubbling legislative threats to ban smartphones for under-16s.
Policy often follows the prevailing winds, and the winds suggest that social media, alongside ubiquitous screen time and connectivity, are especially bad for young people’s still-developing brains.
The trouble is, these worries appear to be misplaced. A recent piece in The Guardian, featuring a range of interviews with scientists, highlights the lack of clear, repeatable evidence to back the claims that smart devices have any effect on our brains.
The studies that grab the headlines (most notably Jonathan Haidt’s book from last year) lack credible evidence and research methods to support their findings.
This is not to say that our worries are invalid. It’s more that we need to focus them in the direction of more complex answers to the modern questions our society poses. But historically, society has often reached for the simplistic answer first. Think of previous media headlines about TV warping people’s minds, or the dangerous effects of rock ‘n’ roll on teenagers. With the benefit of hindsight, we know just how sensationalist and misplaced those worries were.
The thing is, we can’t help but worry about young people and teenagers. We likely remember our own teenage years with a mix of fondness and no little embarrassment. We know that being a teenager is a confusing time, where you’re genetically predisposed to take more risks and test boundaries, a time when you make mistakes as you take more control over your life.
Having a smartphone and increased connections to other people during this period is a net positive; removing that connectivity could have myriad unintended consequences.
That’s not to say there aren’t also negative consequences stemming directly from our smartphone-powered world. But perhaps we should put more thought into other factors. Factors such as the need for many apps to consistently show investors that the numbers go up. The incessant thirst for more users, more time spent in-app, more eyeballs to show to advertisers.
If we’re looking for a simple enemy to blame for the state of everything, perhaps we need more perspective and a broader view of how there’s seemingly nothing in our world that we won’t try to scale and monetise.
The world of wellness represents a point of tension worth exploring in this regard. I particularly enjoyed this article in The Walrus last month about the rise of the “urban bathhouses” that aim to build a scalable model around offline connections and community building.
One of the companies, Othership, has a cute origin story. A couple in Toronto installed an ice bath and sauna in their garage and invited folks to join and connect with others. But once it started to grow in popularity, the cuteness dissipated:
“Can we get more people at scale who never had access to therapy or yoga or meditation—maybe their brain doesn’t work that way—to explore this stuff?”
The wellness industry has been a thing for a long time now, fuelled by wider societal shifts towards health and fitness. And the rise of wellness as an aspiration in and of itself shouldn’t be problematic - in a world where we’re constantly connected, constantly online, taking time away from that connection to focus on yourself is undeniably a good thing.
However, there are unintended consequences that come with our focus on wellness. As Josh Greenblatt outlines in that same Walrus article, “Wellness pedals vibes, not science”.
“That doesn’t make a business harmful, just hokey. But as mental health care migrates from the domain of practitioners to entrepreneurs, our emotions become a commodity. The industry doesn’t explicitly claim to treat psychological conditions, but businesses slyly position themselves as alternatives to traditional therapy.”
Reading this, I can’t help but think of that episode of Peep Show (there’s a Peep Show reference for everything) where Jeremy becomes a life coach, with particularly chaotic and ruinous results for all those involved.
Comedy stretches out the scenario for effect, but there’s a grain of truth in the episode - using an app-based service, particularly one fuelled by investor capital and focused on growth, is no substitute for professional support.
The other consequence of seeing the wellness industry front and centre of our culture and our social feeds is that it can make the whole self-care exercise feel performative and competitive. It’s (back to The Walrus again):
“The grim notion that self-improvement is not only a cultural imperative but a spectator sport, like professional wrestling. Othership calls its cult-y theatrics “wellness entertainment,” and journeyers are both audience and participant. Consciously or not, everyone is performing.”
Emma Jacobs, writing in the FT on the rise of “teen wellness” packages at high-end spa hotels, echoes this sentiment. Wellness, rightly or wrongly, has become “tied to productivity, aesthetics and consumerism. It adds a pressure that you have to be working on yourself.” Or, as in another quote, Jacobs pulls out, “You can never be too well, that’s why it’s a massive growth industry”.
Banning smartphones or restricting access to social media will do little to restrict teenagers’ access to such messaging. The exponential growth of everything and the monetisation of everything are inescapable in society.
And as much as we might like to wrap our children in cotton wool and protect them from all the myriad harms that exist in the world, we can’t. Part of growing up is forging your own path and making your own mistakes. All we can do is help the young people in our lives navigate that journey safely. And yes, it is undoubtedly more complicated to be a teenager in the 2020s than when I was a teenager in the 90s. But it’s not completely unrecognisable.
The way in which certain political factions and media outlets latched on to the “smartphones are evil” hypothesis is an important reminder to us all of how influence spreads across our ecosystem. That, as misleading as the headlines may be, it’s the headlines and soundbites that stick in people’s minds. And once a notion becomes sticky, being repeated by politicians and talking heads, it can be difficult to dislodge.
It’s also a reminder that the best, most effective campaigns are those that generate an emotional response from audiences. Messaging rooted in human truth, as cliche as that sounds, will always pack more of a punch.
And, as the Librarian outlines to the Master of Jordan College in the early chapters of Northern Lights, we can’t help but worry about our children. But perhaps we should express our worries differently because who knows what adventures we might be closing off by turning our worry into heavy-handed, misguided action.