I’m typing this on a Friday morning. I just interrupted my AM meditation to make sure I captured the idea.
As I was settling into my meditation, a thought from the final pages of Jonathan Haidt’s powerful book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness bubbled up into my mind.
In the book, Professor Haidt makes the case that the catastrophic rise in anxiety and depression among the children and adolescents (and now adults) of Gen Z are caused by what he calls “The Great Rewiring.”
In the final chapters of his sobering book, Haidt encourages us to take collective action to solve this crisis.
Then he tells the story of a study about how people respond to crises in groups vs. when they’re on their own.
The study goes something like this.
Bring people into a lab. Have them sit in the waiting room. Then, after a few minutes, have a strange smoke come through the vents.
See how quickly they will get up and do something about it.
When the individuals are ALONE, 75% of them took action, with half of them leaving the room within two minutes of noticing the smoke’s appearance.
But…
When the person is in a room with OTHER people, they will look around and see if anyone else appears concerned.
And…
Haidt tells us that “Only three of the 24 students who were in that condition go up to report the smoke, and only one did so within the first four minutes, even though the smoke began to obstruct everyone’s vision by then.”
Same weird smoke.
Same potential danger.
Basically NO RESPONSE when they looked around and no one else seemed concerned.
As Jonathan says: “I should point out that the smoke was not smoke from a fire; it was titanium oxide, used to create smoke screens. This is crucial: Nobody in that room could understand what was going on. When there is ambiguity, people look to each other to see what everyone else is dong. Those cues help define the situation. Is it an emergency? If everyone else is just sitting there, then each individual comes to the conclusion that no, it’s not an emergency.”
He continues by saying: “The diffusion of digital technology into children’s lives has been like smoke pouring into our homes. We all see that something strange is happening, but we don’t understand it. We fear that the smoke is having bad effects on our children, but when we look around, nobody is doing much about it.”
And: “The most important lesson here is to speak up.”
And…
That’s Today’s +1.
I’m not a “sky is falling” kinda guy but…
There is (a lot of!!) smoke coming out of the vents in our society and it’s time we all take the lead and do something about it.
YOU (yes, YOU!!) need to be the one who gets up and encourages everyone else to get up and do something about these challenges.
Today.
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