The Rattled Generation: A unified theory of this American moment

And yet: University of Michigan consumer sentiment just hit its lowest reading in a half-century. Gallup finds most people think things will only get worse. Trust in every major institution — government, media, organized religion, higher education, science — is at or near record lows, both Gallup and the Edelman Trust Barometer find.

The gap between reality and feeling is the story of our era. A three-part shock helps tell it:

1. Social media's rise.
2. The chaos of COVID.
3. The rise of AI, political extremism and information bubbles in the aftermath of both.

This produced a perpetually Rattled Generation, one too unsteady and uncertain to believe things are truly good or getting better. That's a new phenomenon for a typically optimistic, can-do society.

• It's hard to see this changing anytime soon for one big reason: For the first time, no one — even us, sometimes — knows what to believe or who to trust. Our brains are now constantly calculating: Is this AI? Is it a bot? Can I trust this, share this or act on it?

Only by making sense of how we got here can we begin to fix it:

Shock 1: The Social Era

We trace the inflection to 2007, the year we helped launch Politico. The same month, Apple unleashed the iPhone. Twitter was a growing infant. Facebook crossed 50 million users. In roughly 18 months, the infrastructure for an algorithmically amplified social life fell into place.

• Suddenly, anyone, anywhere, anytime could say anything on a public platform for free at scale and watch as others engage or enrage.
• What followed wasn't a coincidence. Anxiety, loneliness and institutional distrust rose in near-perfect parallel with smartphone penetration and screen time. It's a correlation so consistent across age groups, income levels and democracies that we strain to call it anything but causation.

The institutions made it easy. Church sex abuse scandals. Media blunders. The 2008–09 financial crisis and its unpunished architects. Iraq WMD claims. Academic failures. Epstein.

• Each, on its own, would have been a generational wound. Together, they landed one after another on people already disoriented by the speed of technological change. Citizens trusted institutions until those institutions failed them over and over, in public and up close. Once broken, that trust never reset.
• The result: People didn't abandon community. They migrated it, both closer to home and closer to their screens. Local leaders. Their own employer. People they know in person. Their phone.

Shock 2: COVID

Just as the country was trying to get its footing after the social media gut punch, COVID hit. Its effects went beyond a public health crisis, building an isolation and distrust machine by severing the in-person bonds holding people together. Churches closed. Local businesses shuttered. Offices emptied. Youth sports stopped. The very refuges people retreated to after their trust in big institutions collapsed were gone overnight.

• For millions of people, COVID stripped away the coping mechanisms they'd built to survive the first decade of digital disruption. It produced in our young people what psychologist Jonathan Haidt called the Anxious Generation. But the problems were hardly contained to one age group. They hit everyone.

And we never really recovered. We got vaccines and reopenings. We did not get a restoration of the social fabric. Loneliness was classified by the U.S. surgeon general as a public health epidemic. The share of Americans who said they had no close friends quadrupled from 1990 to 2021. Young men, in particular, have retreated from nearly every traditional institution — civic, religious, educational, relational.

Shock 3: The Aftermath

As if social media and COVID weren't enough, everyone got smacked with three once-in-a-generation tectonic changes — all at once, and all worse since COVID.

• Politics grew more omnipresent and mean. Terminally online politicians played to terminally online audiences, with algorithms egging everyone on. The rest got stuck in this feedback loop, which makes people seem nuttier and more hateful than most are.
• AI exploded across screens and work. Everything started moving faster everywhere — how and what you learn, how you work and how you get and share information. All have changed, and keep changing. Our species isn't wired to evolve at this velocity.
• People flocked to smaller and smaller information bubbles based on their age, politics and jobs. Suddenly, we had infinite "realities" instead of a shared one. Now, two people sitting next to each other on a plane likely get their "news" on platforms the other person has never visited and trust people the other person never heard of. Same plane. Adjacent seats. Two different worlds.

Short of hiding in the woods without the internet, all of this was unavoidable for all of us, all the time.

• The result of this 20-year daisy chain of events: a public with less hope, less trust, fewer friends and fewer people to look up to for help.

What comes next: This is hard to read, much less make sense of. But it also provides a basis to think through where we go from here. It might not be the reality we want, but it's the one we've got. You only change it by reverse-engineering it to spot the glitches and patterns and cures.

• We clearly need to restore trust in some binding leaders and institutions, lift competent people above the noisy ones, ease people through the AI transformation, find more common ground and common truth, and shift attention to what works, not just what sucks.

The bottom line: The repair won't come from politicians or media or brighter economic data. It'll come from government, religious institutions, communities, schools, parents, and business repairing the small threads that weave a complicated country together.

• We'll end on the happy note we flicked at up top: We're actually in exponentially better shape than people think, and than our rival nations. America's advantages are clear and real. We just need people to see this clearly again, and build back and up from there.

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🫨 Go deeper ... "Behind the Curtain: Tectonic shifts & the Epicenter."