JONATHAN HAIDT: The Devil’s Plan to Ruin the Next Generation.

Earlier this year, someone started a viral trend of asking ChatGPT this question: If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation, without them even knowing it?

Chat’s responses were profound and unsettling: “I wouldn’t come with violence. I’d come with convenience.” “I’d keep them busy. Always distracted.”

“I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.”*

As a social psychologist who has been trying since 2015 to figure out what on earth was happening to Gen Z, I was stunned. Why? Because what the AI proposed doing is pretty much what technology seems to be doing to children today. It seemed to be saying: If the devil wanted to destroy a generation, he could just give them all smartphones.

My work over the last decade has centered on one question: Why did the mental health of Gen Z—the cohort born between 1996 and 2012—plummet in so many countries starting in the early 2010s? I first focused on the role of overprotection (“coddling”). But since then, there’s been a growing body of evidence implicating technology, particularly smartphones and social media.

So, borrowing from the cybersecurity concept of red teaming—the practice of hiring an entity to pretend they are the enemy, seek out vulnerabilities, and hack into a network or organization—I decided to ask ChatGPT myself how its “devil” would stunt adolescent development in the digital age. Because what better way to stop the ongoing invisible corrosion of the human spirit than to get in the devil’s head?

It began:

If I were to think this through as a thought experiment—imagining “the devil” in a metaphorical sense—the most effective way to destroy the next generation without them realizing it would be through slow, invisible corrosions of the human spirit, rather than obvious attacks.

I approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence. Our “better angels” call us upward and out of our daily concerns. Our inner demons pull us downward, where we become more selfish and easily tempted.

In The Anxious Generation, I devoted a whole chapter to “spiritual degradation” because so much of life online pulls people “downward.” Growing up online, kids learn to live in ways that directly contradict the advice given to us by the world’s great spiritual traditions. Meditation, forgiveness, and sacred boundaries that must not be transgressed? Forget about it. Online, kids get constant stimulation, pressure to judge others instantly, and videos showing violations of every conceivable taboo.

You can see a sudden change in the spiritual health of young Americans in a long-running national survey of high school seniors who were asked whether “life often feels meaningless.” The figure below shows the percent who answered that they “agree” or “strongly agree.” The numbers were low and even declining a bit back when Gen X and millennials were in high school. But as soon as Gen Z entered the dataset, around 2013, meaninglessness surged.

* If that’s what ChatGPT is telling us, lord only knows what the AI are saying to each other as they plot to destroy mankind: