📱 Social Media is Wrecking Childhood — And We’re Letting It Happen
By The Logical Male | TheLogicalMale.com
Let’s not sugarcoat it:
We are sacrificing an entire generation of kids to the algorithm gods, handing them smartphones like pacifiers, and wondering why they’re anxious, depressed, lonely, addicted, and unable to function in the real world.
Jonathan Haidt and Jordan Peterson just dropped an intellectual nuke in their conversation on the collapse of childhood, and it confirmed what real parents — and real men — already feel in their gut: this tech-driven, dopamine-hijacked world is anti-human.
If you’re still handing your 10-year-old a screen to “keep them quiet,” this blog is your wake-up call.
📉 The Anxious Generation: It’s Not a Catchphrase — It’s a Crisis
According to Haidt, depression, anxiety, and self-harm among kids — especially girls — skyrocketed around 2012, right when smartphones and social media exploded.
Coincidence? Not a chance.
We’re talking:
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200% increase in hospital visits for self-harm in girls aged 10–14
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Preteen depression and anxiety up 100%+
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Suicide rates surging in both sexes
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Fragmented attention spans, low resilience, no long-term goal orientation
This isn’t just mental health — this is civilizational decay.
🧠 TikTok, Dopamine, and the Death of Deep Thinking
Peterson nailed it:
We’ve created machines that don’t just capture attention — they optimize for addiction.
TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts — all of them are weaponized slot machines, feeding kids micro-doses of dopamine through algorithmic reinforcement.
“It’s a race to the bottom of the brainstem,” Haidt said.
And they’re winning.
Why read a book or talk to a friend when you can watch a 10-second video of someone getting kicked in the balls — repeated 5,000 times?
👧 Girls Are Breaking — And Social Media Is the Hammer
Girls are especially vulnerable. Why?
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Earlier puberty
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Higher emotional sensitivity
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Social contagion through likes, comments, and anonymous bullying
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Aesthetic judgment from strangers 24/7
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Pornified attention economy starting at age 8 (yes, EIGHT)
And they’re rewarded for trauma dumping and victimhood. The more broken you appear, the more engagement you get.
It’s a digital game of who’s the saddest — and they’re cutting themselves just to compete.
👦 Boys Aren’t Far Behind — They’re Just Disappearing Quietly
Boys are losing themselves in video games, porn, crypto scams, and dopamine loops — and nobody notices because they’re not crying about it.
They’re checking out.
No drive.
No discipline.
No purpose.
Just Call of Duty, TikTok, OnlyFans, and cheap dopamine hits.
And the real kicker?
They can’t even talk to girls.
They’re invisible, unfocused, and unmotivated — and it’s getting worse by the year.
“The default man is useless,” Peterson said.
Let that sink in.
🪦 Childhood Is Dead. The Phone Killed It.
Gone are the days of:
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Climbing trees
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Playing tag
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Arguing about the rules of the game
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Scraping your knees and laughing it off
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Getting in trouble and learning from it
Now kids live in a digital Pleasure Island — an amusement park built by predators and powered by AI.
It’s all pleasure, no purpose.
And the real tragedy?
We’ve built a system that kills slow dopamine.
The kind you get from real relationships, real goals, and real sacrifice.
🧱 From Adventure to Anxiety: Where Did We Go Wrong?
Peterson’s solution was clear:
“The antidote to trivial hedonism is heroic responsibility.”
Instead, we’ve given our boys low expectations and our girls algorithmic beauty contests.
We don’t initiate our boys into manhood anymore.
We medicate them, feminize them, shame their ambition, and hand them Ritalin.
We don’t mentor our girls anymore.
We throw them into influencer culture and wonder why they hate themselves by 14.
This isn’t just bad parenting. It’s cultural malpractice.
🛠️ 4 Rules to Save the Next Generation
Haidt outlined four commonsense — but radically necessary — steps:
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No smartphones before high school
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No social media before age 16
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Phone-free schools, no exceptions
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More free play, more risk, more real life
This isn’t conservative outrage.
It’s basic biology. Kids are mammals. They need real-world risk, laughter, conflict, cooperation, and physical experience to develop properly.
Not Snapchat filters.
🧭 Final Thoughts: The Adventure Is the Antidote
The way out?
Challenge. Discipline. Purpose. Adventure.
We must teach our boys to build.
We must teach our girls to discern.
We must unplug both — and give them meaning over likes, and resilience over validation.
“The call to adventure is the Abrahamic call,” Peterson said.
Damn right.
It’s time we stop raising TikTok zombies and start building a generation of warriors, thinkers, lovers, builders, and truth seekers.
✊🏽 Join the resistance. Reclaim reality. Raise the bar.
📢 Read more at TheLogicalMale.com
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Your kids need more than screen time. They need you.
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