Is modern technology Actually helping young adults succeed? Part 1

Part 1:

The purpose of technology is to alleviate problems or provide for a need or desire that may otherwise seem unattainable. Most people would associate technology and its advancement as a good thing. Not having to harvest a crop or dig tunnels by hand is helpful and downright appreciated. More food. Less waste. Having access to information and research without diving into books full of old journal articles and studies. Ideal. Traveling the world in hours instead of days opens the world to everyone. These are wonderful things. A blessing for anyone living in this day and age. Go back 200 years and these ideas would be unthinkable. The stuff of dreams.

Is it possible to have too much of a good thing though? Is there a tipping point where technology might be doing more harm than good? Yes, and I think our young adults are experiencing it head on. Let me explain. A Harvard Graduate School of Education study* from a few years ago found young adults struggle with anxiety and depression related to “lacking meaning or purpose” or “not knowing what to do with my life”. They felt uneasy, citing the world is unraveling and it was greatly affecting their mental health. Honestly, I think young adults have always struggled in this area. Nothing new here. And yet, this focus on failing mental health is way more prominent than when I was a young adult. In fact, a quick internet search will show a litany of articles and videos of folks commenting on this fact. The consensus is young adults today are really struggling with their emotions, aka, their mental health. Why?

In a word. Technology.

When you work out in the gym or swim a mile, you are doing something hard. Something physical. You are working against resistance. To allow you to continue to work against resistance, you build muscles or callouses or both. Your body changes. You acclimate to doing the hard thing. Over time it becomes easier. Bearable. For some, even welcomed. No matter how much technology changes over time, this fundamental tenet remains true. You need friction or resistance to build the muscle. To get stronger. If technology does the lifting or swimming for you, you don’t get stronger. Period.

Yet that is exactly what we are doing regarding mental health. Here, technology is removing all the resistance in our life that would have made us mentally stronger. Think about it. We don’t read books anymore; we listen to audiobooks. We don’t memorize phone numbers or locations or maps, we just hit a few buttons and technology does it for us. We don’t personally defend our homes or communities. Cars are starting to drive themselves. Physical activities are being replaced with video games and streaming services. A waiter or waitress doesn’t have to take orders, write them down, remember changes, who had what, or any kind of social skills anymore. You just order up front, online, or they have a screen in front of them and someone else brings out your food. And I am sure you could bring up tons of other examples like this. The point is, technology is being used to remove any mental resistance in our lives. Any mental friction. How are young people going to develop mental strength if everything around them removes the very resistance that makes them stronger? In our desire to remove drudgery, we removed the very thing that made us capable of coping with resistance in the future.

Put simply, technology is replacing the humanity in young people’s lives. At its core, our humanity is defined by our ability to persevere. Our greatest accomplishments, as a species, came not by removing problems but by persevering through them. We are here today because humans have continued to fight the good fight through every kind of obstacle and get back. We did it to make things better for our kids. For their future. The thinking was I endure today so they don’t have to. And it did wonders for connecting generation after generation of people as things were always difficult. Perseverance was a shared part of humanity. Everyone felt it because life was hard.

Yet technology, as it has improved, has slowly chipped away at hardships of every kind. Each generation now has fewer and fewer hardships, often from birth, so they lack an appreciation of what the previous generation went through. They don’t even know what it would be like to live in a world where that hardship exists because they have never had to do so. There are people alive today who lived before TV existed. Let that sink in. No screens except the movie theater. Or hot showers. Or washing machines. Or helmets. Or cameras with color film. Or ATMs. Or air conditioning. Or a consistent refrigerator. Go back 150 years and there are no planes. No cars. Often no flushing toilets. Again, my point is life was usually much harder for the generation previous and unless you are a bit of a history buff, you never really wrap your mind around it. Thus, you have no gratitude. And what does practicing gratitude do according to research*? Reduce stress and anxiety, improve mood and sleep, and most important, improve your overall mental health. Huh.

Is technology a good thing? Of course. Is wanting to build a better life for your kids a good thing? Naturally. But we need to stop kidding ourselves that unchecked technology won’t eventually lead to bad things. We cannot let the technology replace our humanity. Perseverance is a hallmark of the human experience and the relentless march by technology to remove all resistance in our lives is inherently dangerous to our psyche. You needn’t look any further than the growing problem with mental health in our young adults. We need to put obstacles back in their way, early, to allow them to strengthen their minds for adulthood. And we need to show them, teach them, or in some way reconnect them to the hardships previous generations have faced. They need to appreciate that hardship directly to truly find the gratitude we all should have for living in such a magical place as the modern times. Want to help young adults succeed? Don’t look for technological solutions. Look for human ones.

*On Edge: Understanding and Preventing Young Adults’ Mental Health Challenges. Making Caring Common. Harvard Graduate School of Education. December 2022. https://www.mentalhealthfirstaid.org/2022/11/practicing-gratitude/ The importance of practicing gratitude and celebrating small victories. National Council for Mental Wellbeing. Nov. 2022.