Young people are unhappy, and many observers think they know what is to blame: technology. The most influential argument in this direction comes from the psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In his 2024 book The Anxious Generation, Haidt argued that giving young people smartphones in the early 2010s “rewired” childhood, which led to large upticks in anxiety, depression, and related ailments. Haidt’s argument has begun to influence policymakers in many locales, informing efforts to limit phone use in schools and to restrict youth access to social media platforms.
It is understandable why this story has proven attractive. The diffusion of mobile internet technology was a big change, and it’s easy to imagine that being constantly connected makes us feel anxious, self-conscious, and dissatisfied. However, there are problems with this account. For one thing, what do we make of the fact that English-speaking countries are significantly sadder than other countries where youth smartphone access is just as widespread? If it were just the phone, wouldn’t teens in other parts of the world be just as unhappy? It would be one thing if Anglophone youth reported greater use of digital technology than their counterparts elsewhere, but they don’t.
If you rank the six regions in the 2026 World Happiness Report by how much time teenage girls spend on social media, English-speaking countries aren’t in first place. Latin America has a larger share of heavy users, five or more hours a day, than the Anglosphere does. But Latin American girls at the heaviest use levels report far less unhappiness than English-speaking girls at the same use levels, and English-speaking countries still post the steepest collapse and the highest ceiling of low life satisfaction of any region. If dosage explained the outcome, the region with the heaviest users should look the worst. Instead, the region with more heavy users looks better, and the region with lighter use looks worse by a wide margin. An almost identical social media usage pattern can be found in Western Europe, but its users are happier at any level compared to teen social media users in the English-speaking world. Likewise, in a cross-cultural study comparing Britons and Arabs who spent the same amount of time on social media, the Brits came out significantly less happy.