In summer 2024, like many others, I read Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation. My wife read it next, and we asked our oldest son, then 14, to read the introduction. Within a week, he’d read the entire book.
Haidt shows how severely the mental health of American young people has plummeted. Beginning in roughly 2010, rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm rose sharply among young people, doubling in many cases. The three main causes of this new mental health epidemic, according to Haidt, are smartphones, social media, and video games. Haidt believes these factors caused a “great rewiring” of childhood in America, moving kids from a “play-based” to “screen-based” experience. Ouch.
The Anxious Generation had an immediate effect on my community. Our city’s public school district announced a sudden and sweeping no-phones policy across all school levels by the end of summer. To say I’m thankful for the book is an understatement.
But I have one problem with it. The title.
“The anxious generation” is now being used as shorthand to describe anyone between about 15 and 29. As a result, many of us millennials and older Americans are disparaging young adults as anxious, disconnected, and screen-addicted. It’s a major oversimplification, and I don’t think it’s helpful—or accurate.
This isn’t the first time a label like this has been put on an entire generation. My generation has been called “the burnout generation.” Gen X was initially labeled with a slacker stereotype and has more recently been called “the forgotten generation.” And boomers have been called “the generation of sociopaths.” Sheesh. None of these labels is helpful.
Americans are disparaging young adults as anxious, disconnected, and screen-addicted. It’s a major oversimplification.
With Gen Z in particular, there are so many encouraging signs of life that I’m grieved when older believers offhandedly refer to them as anxious (and whatever other negative term they might use). Gen Z didn’t create this world of smartphones, social media, and video games; older generations did. Young people today have been born into a culture designed to steal their attention, hold them captive to a screen, and monetize their screen use. This has made many of them more anxious, yes. But that one trend doesn’t have to define them.
My experience—as the pastor of a young church in a university town—has been that today’s young adults are some of the brightest, most prayerful, and deepest souls I’ve ever met. While they face unique challenges, they can reverse their own stereotype. By making a few important commitments, they can become the Nonanxious Generation.
But instead of speaking about Gen Z, let me speak to you directly.
You Don’t Have to Be the Anxious Generation
To my Gen-Z brothers and sisters: You’re not the anxious generation. Or at least you don’t have to be. You can actually become the most nonanxious generation ever.
It won’t be easy. You’ll have to swim upstream. You’ll have to make small sacrifices over and over. But it’s possible. And it’ll be worth it.
Here are four ways you can become the nonanxious generation.
1. Follow the true Jesus.
Although some statistics suggest church attendance is dropping in your generation (especially among young women), it seems those of you who are going to church are going purposefully, passionately, and contagiously.
Your generation seems to reject the dry, empty, superficial forms of American Christianity and embrace an authentic, relational, and experiential discipleship to Jesus. This is fantastic.
I haven’t seen your generation be entirely antitradition, and that’s positive as well. In many cases, you’re drawn to liturgical churches and embrace spiritual disciplines much sooner in life than previous generations.
Avoid lifeless, generic Christianity. Seek and follow the true Jesus of Scripture. Discover the wisdom of reading through the Bible every year. From beginning to end, focus your attention and affection on Christ himself.
2. Be filled with the Spirit.
Your generation seems to be drawn to a Spirit-filled, experiential faith. It’s not enough to believe the right things; you want to experience God. You have a genuine, biblical longing for the Spirit’s presence and power in your lives. As a result, God is working in deep ways among you and the Spirit is at work powerfully in your midst.
Paul urged the church in Ephesians 5:18, “Be filled with the Spirit.” Don’t be satisfied with a basic, superficial followership of Jesus. Ask the Father to generously pour out his Spirit on you, and live in the fullness of life with God (3:19).
Your hunger for worship and prayer is beautiful and inspiring. Tim Keller says genuine spiritual experience is seeing God as he truly is and seeing ourselves as we truly are. Continue to worship God for who he is. In prayer, realize your own dependence on him, confess your sins and receive his forgiveness, and learn to keep in step with the Spirit (Gal. 5:25).
3. Put down roots in offline community.
Being immersed in online reality can give you the impression that it’s OK to live a detached, disembodied, isolated life. The algorithm shapes you to seek meaning and happiness apart from real humans and local, embodied community.
Like the several generations before you, your peers are more likely to delay adulthood and to find their identity in fame, wealth, and personal achievement. The current you’re swimming in will continue to push you toward loneliness, love of comfort, greed, and even addiction.
The algorithm shapes you to seek meaning and happiness apart from real humans and local, embodied community.
Anxiety thrives on isolation. But when you ground yourself in a real, messy community, you gain all the beautiful strengths of multigenerational fellowship. In my church, I love seeing our young adults sitting between our midlifers and grandparents in Sunday gatherings and community groups. This is the way!
You can be impressive online. But you can only be fully known and fully loved in a local community. Don’t wait until later in life to join a church, build deep friendships, and become rooted in a transformative community.
4. Give your life away.
Counterintuitively, the path to nonanxiousness runs not through self-actualization but through self-denial (Luke 9:23).
Self-denial is an essential step on the road to joy. It was Jesus’s path and can be ours as well. True freedom comes through loss of self. True love comes through putting others first. True satisfaction in life is found through prioritizing others’ flourishing.
As C. S. Lewis wrote at the end of Mere Christianity,
Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
This is the challenge and opportunity of every generation. It’s yours as well.
Take your eyes off yourself and put them on Jesus. This isn’t self-rejection. It’s a refusal to give into the world’s self-absorption. Deny yourself. Follow Christ. Live in the boldness of his power and mercy.
The Gospel Coalition