smartphones exceeded 50%, there were abrupt negative changes in teen behavior and emotional states. dr. twenge is a professor in personality psychology at san diego state university. she has studied generational differences for 25 years, and she helped draft that letter. dr. twenge, welcome back. help me provide the cliff notes version of your book to my audience why. igen is the generation born 1995 and later. they are the first generation to spend their entire adolescence with smartphones, and that s had ripple effects across many areas of their lives, so they spend of course a lot more time on their phones, and online and they spend less time with their friends in person, and that s really not a great combination for mental health. the graphs from your book tell quite a story and i m going to flip through them in rapid succession.
less dating. less driving. less hanging out. less sex, which in and itself might seem like a good thing from a parent s perspective, but i would argue, not in this context. less sleep, and here s the kicker, dr. twenge, more lonely. so despite the constant connectivity, and the belief that, hey, you re in touch with your friends, the way that people my age are reconnecting with people they went to high school with, in reality, they re feeling more lonely. explain that. yes, so that s the interesting thing. you d think maybe that would be the exception, that even if we have some of these mental health issues that perhaps social media would help make us feel more connected to each other but at least among teens, right around 2012 when smartphones became common their levels of loneliness just spiked upward
revirginize, sarcophage, wenge. that s one of my favorite british words ever, whinge, but there s a crisis with that word, whinge, and all the other words it came from. they re all sourced to meand meanderings of memory, which presumably was owned by one of the early editors of the oxford english dictionary, which is why it s all throughout this wook. recently, when a modern staffer was working on the entry, revirginize, to render virge cardinal again, to purify anew. it was recorded in meanderings of memory, by an author known only at nightlark. when they went looking, the book is nowhere to be found. the chief bibliographer of oxford english dictionary took up the search.