Anxious Generation: Book Review

Book Title: Anxious Generation

Book Author: Jonathan Haidt

I started high school around 2010 in a military-run boarding school in Bangladesh. It was a girls' school. We were kept out of communication devices, so no phone was allowed. We used to write letters to our parents, which they would receive much later, sometime not altogether—it was no longer an era of mail communication. Parents and children preferred communication via phone calls. We were allowed to call our parents via some dedicated phones once a week under teacher’s supervision. There were so many things about cadet college that seemed like irony to me, but the thing that came to my mind while reading this book is—how awful, lonely, left out I felt when rest of my classmates started using smartphones, keeping them in hidden places and I did not have a clue or guidance on how to cope with my peers whose attention was hijacked by flashy rectangles which connected them to the boys of other cadet colleges, or to the globe, whatsoever.

The topic of Anxious Generation is very interesting to me—how to bring back childhood to the earth, while kids, parents, everyone are trapped in the virtual world. The context of the book is more related to the Western world. So the scope of the problem and the solutions are catered more towards the West. The book heavily referenced different research results, that is okay, but too many facts actually made it hard for me to focus on the book compared to my favorite non-fictions which rely on storytelling mechanisms rather than textbook-style factual presentation.

Along with the problem and solution of the anxious generation, I was pleased to know about brain development, how we “learn” things, and how these evolutionary processes are hampered by 21st century online products. This part was very interesting to me. The knowledge that enlightened me the most— 

animal learning is “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness.”

I thought about this for a great deal, after reading about an example of research on it. The things we learn have less to do with its facts, than how many times we have done it. For example, we may consciously agree that using phones at bedtime is not good for us, but this is not going to prevent us from using phones, practicing to not use them again and again is the key.

The two big lessons were—limit phones and be more engaged in the real world. The book goes on in detail to explain the reasons and how to achieve them.

I have highlighted the book so much, more than my high school textbooks! And I am going to revisit them, to remind myself of the guidelines I want to follow to live a more meaningful life.

My highlights from the book