Are we being anxious about anxiety?

Haidt's diagnosis of a 'doomed' youth is off. Instead, we should learn from them.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A child sits atop a bunk bed holding a phone in front.

It’s common these days to hear about social anxiety, health anxiety, or climate anxiety – but I think I can see that a new pathology is beginning to emerge: anxiety anxiety. This is where parents, politicians, academics, or just members of society in general, start to get anxious about the fact that everybody is anxious. Diagnosis rates of clinical anxiety have shown a steep increase in the past decade, and numbers, we assume, don’t lie.

Of the many outcomes of ‘anxiety anxiety’, one is going to be people who (with the absolute best intentions) want to suggest solutions. One such person is Jonathan Haidt, with his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

From the spaceman on the cover to the opening vignette about sending our children to Mars, Haidt’s premise is clear: smartphones are the alien invaders of our society. These electronic parasites are feasting on the brain matter of our young people, directly causing what is now an epidemic of clinical anxiety and depression.

I’m quite ready to read a sensible analysis of the impact of smartphone culture on mental health, so I was disappointed to find that Haidt’s book falls so far short of that. From a scientific perspective, the argument is a barrage of statistics, arranged to the tune of ‘correlation equals causation’. Given Haidt’s seniority in his field, this approach is surprisingly unsubtle, something which has already been heavily criticised by peer review. Numbers, it seems, do lie – or at least they can be easily curated to prove your point.

But even if we accept Haidt’s point – which is that rates of smart-phone use (particularly social media) and rates of young people being diagnosed with anxiety disorders have increased over the same time period – what can be done? Haidt’s solution is to ban young people from owning smartphones at all until the age of 14, and from using social media until the age of 16, or even better 18. In this way, owning and managing one’s own device and its access becomes a rite of passage into adulthood. But note: whilst parents are urged to implement these unyielding boundaries for their children’s device-habits, Haidt does not ask grown-ups to make any changes to their own. Adults can continue with their current norms of smartphone use, ostensibly because their brains are fully developed, and they therefore have the maturity to handle their own risk to mental health.

Smartphones are not aliens – they were designed by humans, and are willingly bought by humans, in response to the human need to communicate.

Of course, it does not suit Haidt’s argument to analyse why adult mental health is also seeing an increase in diagnosis of anxiety disorders. It may be true to say that rates are rising more quickly amongst young people, but there is still no consensus as to how much of that can be attributed to young people simply being better informed about mental health and more empowered to seek help than the generations before them. Noticeably, young people today have a language to talk about anxiety that simply didn’t exist when I was a teenager in the 1990s, and ironically enough, it is social media that has made that possible. Although suicide rates are on the rise, they are still quite significantly lower among young people than they are for those aged over 35, and it should be noted that a proven pathway to suicide prevention amongst young people is access to self-help via smartphone apps.

So whilst I am quite ready to believe that smartphone culture is one of many factors impacting the health and wellbeing of young people today, I think characterising smartphones as alien invaders, or as invasive parasites that have been selectively bred by Silicon Valley billionaires to infest the minds of our young people, seems to be a disingenuous response – and one that only serves to increase parental anxiety by implying that smartphones are sly, sentient beings, and out of our control.

Smartphones are not aliens – they were designed by humans, and are willingly bought by humans, in response to the human need to communicate and a perfectly natural human desire to seek out entertainment and culture. True, technology and software are developed by billionaires, and marketing and algorithms can influence our choices – but at the end of the day, any developer will tell you that products only ever evolve in response to what the market demands. Adults: we have the money in our pockets; we are the market.

As a more empathetic and intelligent generation, it seems they could probably teach us a few things about how to harness smartphone culture.

In other words, we (the adults) selectively bred these ‘aliens’ ourselves – and rather than try (and no doubt fail) to lock up our experiment in a lab (or, as Haidt suggests, a lockable phone-pouch) we, the adults, have more than enough agency to continue that process of developing smartphones into devices that meet needs and provide entertainment in the way that they were always meant to do. In his defence, Haidt does refer to this approach briefly, but still only with a view to making the phones be for ‘us’ (the adults) and not ‘them’ (the young people) by removing content that appeals to a younger audience. To me feels like we are victim shaming the youth of today for the fact that they have inherited a problem created by their parents.

One day when Jesus was teaching a crowd of followers, he advised them “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own?” His point was about hypocrisy – it is far easier to judge someone else’s behaviour than it is to take responsibility for our own. Where did any of us last read or hear terrifying information about the decline in young people’s mental health? Was it on our smartphones?

Here are a few things that Haidt’s selection of statistics doesn’t say about the youth of today. They are the most compassionate and empathetic generation that we have seen for decades (Konrath et. al., 2023). They are able to wait longer for rewards than their parent’s generation (Protzko, 2020), they are also less lazy, less narcissistic, more cooperative and more intelligent (Kriegel, 2016). In addition, whilst obvious damage is done by ‘filters’ on Instagram photos, making some young people strive for unattainable standards of beauty, it was the previous generation of smartphone users who began this trend, and it is the current generation of young people who can be credited with the #nofilter #nomakeup countertrends. This same generation is now fuelling the rise of insurgent social media sites such as Bereal, which emphasise the importance of authentic photos and meaningful connection with friends online.

Overall, perhaps instead of restricting and controlling our young people’s online lives, as Haidt would have us do, we ought to be talking to them? As a more empathetic and intelligent generation, it seems they could probably teach us a few things about how to harness smartphone culture and develop it towards solutions to the problems that we ourselves created.

Review

Culture

Economics

Trust

21 November 2025

5 min read

Money’s hidden meanings in a contactless age

The Bank of England Museum reveals the symbolism, morality and power woven into the history of money

Susan Gray

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

The Bank of England vaults.

Bank of England.

Our era of contactless payments obscures the symbolism once lavished on money. But the rich history of meaning, morality and power, layered into everyday transactions, is uncovered at an exhibition at the Bank of England Museum

Building the Bank celebrates 100 years of the current Bank of England building, on the site of Sir John Soane’s original structure, completed in 1827. Surveying a century makes past practices seem quaint: until 1973 the institution was guarded by the Bank Piquet military guard. A 1961 photo shows 12 Guardsmen with bearskin hats and bayonets, together with a drummer or piper, a sergeant and an officer, marching into the Threadneedle Streer entrance. Even now, when the wealth of most people in developed countries is contained in data warehouses, 400,000 gold bars are held in vaults deep beneath the Bank.

Faiths have grappled with money’s impact for millennia. Christianity’s relationship with money is tinged with unease, as St Paul’s oft misquoted letter to Timothy illustrates: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Personally, the immobilising feeling of envy, particularly if it is towards friends, does feel exactly like being pierced with blinding toxicity.

Contrastingly, in Hinduism pursuing wealth is one of four pillars of faith, called Artha. In Hinduism attempting to attain material wealth is part of attempting to attain salvation.

Herbert Baker, architect of the Bank of England, embodies moral ambiguity around faith and money. Buried in Westminster Abbey, and architect of Church House next door, Baker established his reputation working for Cecil Rhodes, prime minister of the Cape Colony 1890- 96. Vicar’s son Rhodes is now seen as paving the way for apartheid in southern Africa, and imposing an economically exploitive, racist, and imperialist system on the region. Baker also worked with better- known Edwin Lutyens on government buildings in New Delhi from 1912, declaring of the British Raj’s new seat of power “it must not be Indian, nor English, nor Roman, but it must be Imperial”.

After World War One, Soane’s bank was too small to house the increased staff numbers needed to service the ballooning national debt and financial complexity of the Roaring Twenties. Bordered by major roads at the heart of the City of London, the institution’s footprint could not expand, so Herbert created a design incorporating some of Soane’s classical aspects, but with floors at a greater depth and height than its processor.

From grand gestures to tiny details, classical mythology is a key element of the Bank’s design. Sculptor Charles Wheeler modelled doorknobs showing the face of Mercury. Mercury is the patron deity of finance and communication. Tiles for an officials’ lunchroom show a caduceus, with two bright blue snakes, tails entwined, framing Mercury’s face. Caducei are the symbol of commerce, representing reciprocity and mutually beneficial transactions.

Forty caryatids, the classical female form used in place of a pillar in Greek architecture, were salvaged from Soane’s building and reused. Some caryatids are in the area where old banknotes can be exchanged, besides the museum, now the only part of the Bank open to the public.

Outside, on the dome at the northwest corner of the bank, a gilt bronze statue of Ariel, named after the spirit of the air in The Tempest, represents “the dynamic spirit of the Bank which carries Credit and Trust over the wide world.”

The image of banks as depositories of trust and positive relationships took a pasting worldwide during the 2008 Credit Crisis and lean years that followed. But in 2015 former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, argues that banking services are a key part of functioning communities, and banks should be able to put people before profit. “At the heart of both these expectations is the value of the person as sacred, and all other things as secondary to human dignity. It is a value rooted in many faiths and especially in our Judaeo-Christian tradition. Of course profits have to be made, but they need to be measured not only in terms of their absolute return on capital employed, but also in terms of the human cost of achieving that return.

“Large institutions with adequate balance sheets working to maximise returns from those who can most afford it do not produce a sustainable society in the long term. Such an approach is narrow-minded and short-termist, because sustainable societies are essential to the large companies within them. It is also an immoral approach.”

Mosaics created by Boris Anrep idealise the Bank’ of England’s sunnier intentions towards the wider community. Anrep also designed mosaics for Westminster Cathedral, Tate Britain and the National Gallery. For the Bank, a tiny coin from the reign of Henry VIII known as the George Noble, the first time St George and the dragon appeared on English coinage, was magnified into a roundel showing the galloping saint, visor up, lancing the prostate dragon at the base. The George Noble was one of 50 designs, based on advances in coinage, gracing the Bank’s corridors.

At the main entrance, a mosaic showing a pillar, representing the Bank, is guarded by two lions, referencing the sculpture from Mycenae. The Bank’s global role, and place at the centre of the then British Empire is shown by the constellations of the Plough and Southern Cross, representing the southern and northern hemispheres.

An image of the Empire Clock Baker made for the Bank, - now disassembled - shows an ornate dial, marked in 24 sections, with the sun representing India and an anchor symbolising the port cities of Singapore and Hong Kong.

In 1946 the Bank of England was nationalised, formalising its role as a public institution, operating in a post war decolonialising world, totally different to the one its building had been designed for just 20 years before.

Systems and symbols around money mutate with the times. Money’s intangibility in our time of app and tap payment, makes its power less distinct than in the days of gold sovereigns. But we fool ourselves if we say money is unimportant, because all of history says otherwise.

Building the Bank, Bank of England Museum, until 2026

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