Everyone recognises that teenagers today are unduly anxious. Many people attribute this to a rise in smartphone use. Some even blame an education system that places too much pressure on young people. Yet the acute dysfunction of adolescents and young adults these days could have a more simple, and more serious, explanation: they don’t spend enough time outdoors mixing with other human beings.
The more you shy away from human contact, the more shy you become of humanity
A study commissioned by an online school, Minerva Virtual Academy, to explore the emotional, social and physical factors that make school attendance so troubling for some today, has found that half of secondary school pupils have avoided school in the past year because of anxiety. There are multiple reasons for this, although students in the survey of 2,000 teenagers cited pressure from tests, exams or grades as their number one source of anxiety, and the founder of Minerva Virtual Academy, Hugh Viney, has concurred that ‘the system is too overloaded.’
Yet there is nothing novel about teenagers being worried about tests or exams. What is new is the unprecedented levels of anxiety among young people now, particularly in previously uncommon or unusual ways. Among other main concerns unveiled in this study, students also cited: exhaustion from trying to keep up all day, finding it hard to sit still or concentrate for long periods, ‘classrooms/corridors too noisy,’ and ‘too many people in one place’.
It would be easy to apportion blame on a strenuous education system, or smartphone overuse, for our current ‘anxious generation’, but the symptoms outlined here betray a far graver problem: that youths aren’t interacting with the physical world enough. The problem is not only that the concentration levels of adolescents have been shot by too much time doomscrolling, or whose self-esteem has been shattered by comparing on social media. Young people appear to find the real world itself overwhelming. It’s ‘too noisy.’ There are ‘too many people.’
A dread of human interaction is indicative of a demographic that has spent, and continues to spend, too little time having to deal with other flesh-and-blood beings. This is hardly surprising. This is a generation that spent its formative years growing up under the veil of lockdowns. This was a time when they should have been intuiting the codes of socialisation, learning to engage with other human beings like themselves – and as corporeal beings just like them, not as disembodied, depersonalised entities who exist only in the online ether. They should have been inferring, through interaction with people as flawed in their looks and appearance as themselves, and through learning to read the codes of body language, eye movements and speech intonation, that their peers are much like themselves: full of doubt, hesitation and concern.
We see the symptoms all round us of a generation that has never learnt socialisation, and consequently lives in fear of others: a reluctance, bordering on terror, to answer or even speak on the telephone; the inclination to seek sanctuary from the real world through noise-cancelling earplugs; the blank, vague ‘Gen Z stare’ that at once conveys indifference and hostility.
Yet smartphones and lockdowns were visited on a society that was already becoming more cloistered and anti-social. A previous generation were taught to fear the outside world, with the 1990s seeing the emergence of what Frank Furedi called in his 1997 book of the same name a ‘culture of fear’. This was manifest not merely in an increasing mistrust of our fellow citizens, most conspicuously in the exaggerated and corrosive fear of paedophiles, but with a disproportionate aversion to risk itself.
The emergence of ‘health and safety’ protocols and ambulance-chasing lawyers at the end of the last century were banal signs of a more significant cultural shift, and one that has endured. The flustered and overbearing reaction to the Covid-19 virus illustrated how entrenched had become this risk-averse mindset, as has the less conspicuous emergence of ‘helicopter parenting’, a phenomenon that has deprived children of unsupervised time outdoors, time when they should have been learning to navigate the world independently and assess its risks by themselves.
Over the past thirty years the overall trend has been one-way: from the outdoors to indoors, from the public sphere to the private sphere, from the outer to the inner world. The increased tendency of children not to attend school at all, often with the connivance and blessing of their parents, may well be another legacy of lockdowns, but it also represents the continuation of this long-term tendency. The same goes for the normalisation working from home: many people would simply prefer not having to deal with other people.
This is what should be causing us all genuine angst. And the longer the phenomenon goes unrecognised or ignored, the worse it will get. Because the more you shy away from human contact, the more shy you become of humanity.
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