Technology And Mental Health

Fair warning: The below article is pretty dark. It’s a sobering summation of technology, social media, and how they are quietly reshaping the mental health of our young people. If you are a parent, a leader, a young adult, or simply someone who cares about the next generation, it’s worth your attention.

It was written by an amazing person and investor who runs his own research firm. He and his team publish a weekly report called What I Learned This Week that my company subscribes to. It’s expensive and geared toward professional investors. Most weeks he writes about markets and investment ideas, but occasionally he turns his analytical lens toward culture. He graciously gave me permission to share this one.

Before you read it, I would simply ask you to pause and notice your own relationship with your phone and technology in general. How often you reach for it? How it makes you feel afterward Whether it leaves you clearer or more scattered. Does it make you feel more connected or lonely?

Technology is not evil. In many ways it is extraordinary. It has expanded knowledge, medicine, communication, and opportunity in ways previous generations could not have imagined. But tools shape their users, and when a tool is algorithmically optimized for attention, awareness becomes essential, and awareness is the first step in addressing a problem. If you are interested in reducing your phone use, AppBlocker is an excellent resource that has worked very well for me and my family.

The thought experiment that follows is unsettling precisely because it feels familiar.

“I asked ChatGPT—If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation of young minds?” Chat’s answers were chilling, familiar, and true. 

When writer and blogger Devokrishna Rajkhowa asked ChatGPT this question earlier this year, it started a viral trend. Suddenly, all over the internet, people were asking ChatGPT the same thing: “If you were the devil, how would you destroy the minds of today’s young generation?” Even Jonathan Haidt, the social scientist and author of The Anxious Generation, joined in the thought experiment. We quote Haidt, who called Chat’s responses “profound and unsettling,” including:

“I wouldn’t come with violence. I’d come with convenience.” 

“I’d keep them busy. Always distracted.”

“I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.”

We have written at length about the struggles of young people today (see articles). What’s so stunning about Chat’s answers is that what it proposed doing is exactly what social media has been doing to kids for the last decade (see articles). Haidt put it this way: “It seemed to be saying, if the devil wanted to destroy a generation, he could just give them all smartphones.” 

Rajkhowa’s original question borrows from the cybersecurity concept of red-teaming—the practice of simulating real-world attacks to find and exploit an organization’s vulnerabilities before the real damage is done. What better way to understand why young people are suffering—from mental-health crises to a deeper lack of purpose—than to hack the devil himself?

Source: The Free Press

Below, we lay out ChatGPT’s 7 step plan, as told to Rajkhowa and Haidt, along with our own analysis: 

1. Make them addicted to distractions:

We quote Chat: 

If young people can’t focus deeply, they can’t learn, create, or love well. The subtle trap is to addict them to constant stimulation—endless scrolling, notifications, micro-bursts of dopamine. They’ll feel busy, “connected,” even informed, while in reality their capacity for sustained thought and presence erodes. They won’t know what they’ve lost.

Around 2015, just three years after Facebook bought Instagram and smartphones became ubiquitous, America’s highschoolers started reporting much more trouble paying attention and thinking. Reading for pleasure also fell off a cliff. (see WILTW October 16, 2025). Data across countries meanwhile reveals a growing struggle to concentrate, and a decline in verbal and numerical reasoning (see WILTW April 17, 2025). The implications are huge. Haidt writes: “When constant distractions make love and work shallower and more fragmented, it makes sense that life suddenly feels more meaningless.”

2. Glorify identity over purpose: 

We quote Chat:

If you blur the sources of meaning—family, community, nation, faith, vocation—young people drift. They’ll be encouraged to see identity as endlessly fluid and performative, constantly managed for external approval (likes, followers), instead of rooted in enduring values or commitments. This makes them malleable, anxious, and dependent on external validation.

Haidt’s own research has shown that religion and tight-knit, real-world communities help protect young people’s mental health. Research by Seth Kaplan, an author and expert on fragile communities and states, shows that real-world communities help foster social trust, social capital, and social support—the bedrocks for healthy child-development. The word Haidt and his research partner, Zach Rausch, use is “rootedness.” A childhood rooted in followers and likes is hardly rooted at all. But a childhood rooted in family, faith, community, and service brings mental-health benefits that last a lifetime (see WILTW November 27, 2025).

3. Flood them with information, starve them of knowledge: 

We quote Chat:

Make everything available instantly, but strip away guidance about how to weigh, sort, and interpret. Give them infinite answers without teaching how to ask good questions. In that haze, truth and falsehood feel equally slippery, so cynicism becomes natural. A generation that doubts everything believes nothing.

Herein lies the value of ancient wisdom, great books, and an education in the humanities. Compare the great works of literature and art that have endured throughout the centuries, versus the AI-generated slop, viral fury, and misinformation that storms the internet daily. What happens to us if we lose the ability to know what is meaningful, good, and true? What happens when we lose the ability to share a common reality with our neighbors and friends? These are the seeds of Gen Z’s growing nihilism (see WILTW September 25, 2025).

4. Replace real relationships with digital substitutes: 

We quote Chat:

Encourage digital substitutes for friendship, love, and intimacy. People will accumulate “connections” while feeling lonelier than ever. Superficial bonds are easier to monetize and manipulate than the deep ties of family, friendship, and community. The tragedy is that they may not realize what real connection feels like.

The devil targets relationships because research shows that having close relationships is one of the best predictors of happiness. Most teens are spending five hours on social media daily—time they might otherwise be spending on real-world relationships that actually nourish their souls (see WILTW August 28, 2025). As Mark Zuckerberg explained, the average American has fewer than three friends, but wants 15. Meta’s AI companions are available to close the gap. Why should young people grapple to learn difficult skills like courting a lover, or being a friend and a spouse, when they have an endless supply of virtual companions available in customizable voices, needs, and bodies? 

Role models, too, have been all but replaced by influencers. Rajkhowa writes: “Remove teachers, thinkers, parents, social workers and true leaders. Give them influencers who promote pan masala and gambling apps, who only care about likes and trends, as opposed to wisdom, honesty, and patience.”

5. Glorify convenience, consumption, and fake success:

We quote Chat:

Convince them that comfort, consumption, and self-expression are the highest goods, while restraint, sacrifice, and long-term commitment are oppressive. That way, they’ll celebrate indulgence while mocking tradition and discipline—the very things that build strength and freedom across generations. 

As Haidt writes, children are “anti-fragile.” They need to do hard things over and over in order to become strong, independent adults. Smartphones hack children’s reward systems by offering constant hits of dopamine on a variable time-schedule. Everything is gamified. Victim-mentality is cool. Why dig in and pursue a long-term project when you can experience so much pleasure without ever leaving your room? “Like the denizens of 19th-century opium dens, the heavy users of these products are addicted, unfree, undisciplined, and unhappy,” Rausch writes.

6. Sow discord among generations: 

We quote Chat:

Sow suspicion between parents and children, teachers and students, elders and youth. If every authority figure is portrayed as untrustworthy or obsolete, the next generation grows rootless—cut off from inherited wisdom and forced to navigate the world with only the guidance of peers and algorithms.

For as long as humans have been alive, wisdom has been passed down from one generation to the next. Technology has helped this transmission, including books, which were much more widely read by young people before they got smartphones. Now, parents and grandparents and books can’t compete against the onslaught of terabytes coming in from influencers, peers, and bots. The devil’s plan is to cut children off from the past, from the wisdom of their elders and those who came before them. Kids are then forced to make the challenging journey to adulthood with only algorithms and digital companions to guide them.

7. Make everything for sale:

We quote Chat:

If every experience—play, art, sex, spirituality, even friendship—becomes commodified, then nothing remains sacred. Young people may mistake consumption for meaning, never realizing that depth requires some things to be beyond price.

Freya India, a Gen Z writer, has written about how the endless task of managing your brand online pushes girls to turn their boyfriends into full-time cameramen and to turn a visit to Auschwitz into an opportunity for a sexy selfie. Users of social media are not just customers, they are also the products themselves. And children are the biggest prize of all because if companies can hook them young, they can profit off their attention and addiction for years. 

This is the devil’s plan. 

So, if we want to hack the devil’s plan—if we want to enable the next generation to develop focus and all the skills they need to become successful adults—we need to hack the phone-based childhood. As laid out by Haidt in The Anxious Generation, this means delaying kids’ access to smartphones and a fully-online life until the end of the critical period of brain development known as puberty. This means no smartphones before high school and no social media before age 16. This means enforcing phone-free schools, bell-to-bell, from Kindergarten through high school. It also means giving kids more independence and free play in the real world (see WILTWSeptember 4, 2025). To hack the devil’s plan, we must reclaim childhood in the real world.