Five Days with an Anxious Elite
My dispatch from the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Happy Friday, everyone! As I’ve mentioned, I recently attended the Aspen Ideas Festival — an annual gathering of leaders in business, media, politics, art, and science — as a Gwen Ifill Journalism Fellow. It was a fascinating experience, which (as promised) left my mind (and Notes app) crammed with ideas, some of which I’m still thinking through (and hope to think through out loud in future newsletters!)
As a start, I wanted to sit down and try to straighten some of them out. So, for this week’s paid subscriber column: here are the insights and takeaways I gleaned from five days of panels and conversations.
For me, one of the highlights of attending the Aspen Ideas Festival was having lunch with Jonathan Haidt.
Well, I didn’t sit down with him myself. But I did pile into a bus, with about 50 other attendees, which took us to an expansive nearby home — “off-campus,” in the parlance of the conference — where we enjoyed a spread of canapés (or so I was told) and heard Haidt expound on the issues that were on his mind.
The CNN host Fareed Zakaria and David Leonhardt, a contender to be the next top editor of the New York Times, were also in the audience. It was very Aspen.
It was also, like the entire festival, highly enlightening. Haidt is a moral psychologist at NYU, and probably the only moral psychologist who has made himself into a household name, at least in certain households. Among his many initiatives is a group called the Heterodox Academy and, true to that title, he has repeatedly made splashes throughout his career by being a liberal who challenges liberal audiences to question their assumptions, both about the morality of their rivals in The Righteous Mind and the closed-mindedness of their universities in The Coddling of the American Mind.
His latest work is The Anxious Generation, which argues that social media and smartphones have had a destructive impact on Gen Z. He told us in Aspen that he’d pretty much put everything else on hold for the last year to raise alarms about this cause.
When the book was first generating online discourse last year, I was initially skeptical of its thesis, perhaps out of a reflexive defense of my age cohort and the technology that’s raised us. But I’ve become steadily Haidt-pilled as time has gone on, both because of the voluminous (and terrifying) data he’s collected, and out of consideration of how my own attention span has been warped by social media. (Everyone who asked a question of Haidt during the lunch introduced themselves by describing their relationship with technology. “What’s your phone story?” the nice professor next to me asked as were chatting.)
At this point, my only criticism of Haidt’s argument is not that it’s too broad, but too narrow. I’m not so sure mine is the only Anxious Generation, although we are certainly the best test case for what the mind looks like when subsumed by constant digital dopamine. There may not have been a theme for this year’s installment of the Ideas Festival, but when considering the tone at many of the sessions, it may as well have been anxiety.