I'm Gen Z, which makes Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation an uncomfortable read rather than an academic one. He is describing my cohort, and the description isn't flattering.
The data he assembles points at a generation that's among the most anxious, most depressed, and most addicted in a long time, and he ties the timing closely to the arrival of the smartphone.
You can argue with the strength of that link, and people do. What is harder to argue with is the thing underneath: my generation isn't reporting greater fulfillment. If anything the opposite. We got the most powerful tools in human history and didn't get happier.
That should get our attention, and mostly it has not.
Technology isn't the villain
I want to say this clearly because it's the part people skip when they quote Haidt.
Technology has been transforming in genuinely good ways. I would not have this business without it. I would not be able to do what I do, or teach students to build things that used to require a degree and a team.
The problem isn't the tools. It is our unexamined and uncapped use of them.
There is a difference between using something and being used by it, and the line is not about the object. It is about whether you have decided anything.
Attention as the thing being extracted
Johann Hari's Stolen Focus is the other half of this for me.
Most people know, abstractly, that platforms are built to keep you scrolling. What Hari makes concrete is how aggressively that's engineered. Not as a side effect. As the product.
Your attention is what's being sold, which means anything that holds it longer is a win for someone whose interests are not yours.
Once you see that, the passivity becomes untenable. Being casual about your attention in an environment specifically designed to capture it's not neutrality. It is losing by default.
I read that book and started setting boundaries around my own technology use, and I will say plainly: I've never felt better about how I use technology than I do now. And yes, you can still work in AI while doing this. I do it every day.
Why AI raises the stakes
Everything above was true before AI. AI doesn't introduce the dynamic, it sharpens it.
Previous tools competed for your attention. This one can also do your thinking, which is a different category of dependency.
If a tool holds your attention, you lose time. If a tool does your reasoning, you can lose the capacity to reason, slowly, without any moment where it is obvious that something was traded.
That is what I mean by shaping us back. Not that AI will make us stupid. Rather that any capability you stop exercising quietly atrophies, and this is the first tool broad enough to let you stop exercising almost all of them at once.
Guardrails, not abstinence
The response is not to refuse. Refusal is not available and would not be good if it were.
The response is to be deliberate, which mostly means deciding in advance rather than in the moment.
Decide what you won't hand over. For me there are kinds of thinking I do myself even when a tool could do them faster, because I want to still be able to. That isn't principle, it's maintenance.
Put limits on the thing designed to have none. Every one of these products is built to be frictionless and endless. If there's a stopping point it will have to come from you.
Notice what it is doing to you, not just for you. The for is easy to see and gets measured. The to is slow, unmeasured, and where the actual cost lives.
Check whether you feel better. This sounds soft and it's the most reliable instrument you have. Haidt's whole finding is that fulfillment did not follow capability. You can run that test on yourself in a week.
The shape of the argument
If we are not deliberate, powerful tools will quietly begin shaping us more than we shape them.
I wrote that line about the iPhone and I think it applies more sharply to AI, because AI is more useful, which makes it more inviting, which makes the shaping faster.
None of this is an argument for fear. It is an argument for attention, in the older sense of the word. Watching what's happening to you while it happens, instead of finding out years later from a book about your own generation.
The tools are extraordinary. That is exactly why the question of who is shaping whom is worth asking on purpose, and worth asking now, while the answer is still up to you.