The After Babel Substack is about the technological and sociological changes that caused the chaos and fragmentation of modern life (i.e., the collapse of the Tower of Babel, around 2014). In our first year we’re focusing on the effects of smartphones, social media, the loss of childhood independence, and parental fears which combined to cause the international adolescent mental health crisis. Over time, we’ll be publishing many more articles on the democracy crisis that is now so apparent in the U.S.
In examining adolescent mental health, our posts have mostly been data-heavy and empirical. From my first post (The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012) through Zach and my most recent post (Suicide Rates Are Up for Gen Z Across the Anglosphere, Especially for Girls), we have documented that there is indeed a crisis, it is international, and the evidence points to two main causal factors: the end of the play-based childhood, and its replacement by the phone-based childhood. (I tell this story in The Anxious Generation, which you can pre-order now.)
It was necessary for us to start this way—to lay out our ideas and refine them, and to show readers and skeptics the many kinds of evidence we’ve been collecting. (You can find all of our review documents here.) But across our first 24 posts, we’ve given readers very little sense of what it is actually like to be a young person today. We’ve been writing about Gen Z, without hearing from Gen Z.