Haidt, who previously explicated many of his thoughts about Gen Z in the New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation, used a powerful metaphor to explain the neurological consequences of this change: tree roots. Saying they are great metaphors for neurons, Haidt explained that tree-root growth is structured by the environment where they are found. He referred to a picture of a tree growing around a Civil War–era tombstone, where the tombstone scratched the bark 100 years ago, and the tree adapted. The same is true for Gen Z, he argued: “Their brains have been growing around their phones very much in the way that this tree grew around this tombstone.”

Beyond mental health, Haidt said this has physical manifestations. Children are “growing hunched around their phone,” he said, with phone addiction literally “warping eyeballs,” leading to a global rise in myopia (shortsightedness). Screen time is also known to harm sleep, he added. He went on to describe the “great rewiring” of humanity, brought on by the smartphone.

A catastrophe of mental and physical health

This “great rewiring,” which Haidt places between 2010 and 2015, coincides with a synchronized global collapse in teen mental health. Haidt noted Gen Z is “suddenly much more mentally ill than the millennials,” primarily suffering from anxiety and depression.

The evidence of decline is seen in objective behavior, not just self-reporting. For instance, data tracking nonfatal self-harm among early teens (10- to 14-year-olds) shows the girls’ rate “more than quintuples” between 2010 and 2015. Around the world, wherever the internet is in kids’ pockets, Haidt argued, young people are becoming less happy and flourishing less.

The transition Haidt describes occurred in two acts. Act one involved the gradual decline of play-based childhood, which began in the 1980s. Act two was the arrival of a phone-based childhood, a sudden and universal shift that started in the early 2010s. Haidt summarized the tragic change by saying, “We have overprotected our children in the real world, and we have under-protected them online.”

The erosion of focus and meaning

The crisis extends into cognitive ability. Haidt points out, “Fifty years of progress ended in 2012” in educational achievement metrics, specifically the National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP, also called the “nation’s report card.” This decline suggests a “broader erosion in the human capacity for mental focus and application,” leading to what Haidt calls a “complete disaster for humanity”: a loss of that capacity. “We’re getting dumber exactly as our machines are getting smarter and taking over more areas of life,” he said.

Students themselves acknowledge the cognitive shift, according to Haidt. He related an anecdote from one of his students, describing the difficulty of reading: “I open a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok.” Furthermore, he said, high school seniors increasingly report “life often feels meaningless.” Haidt connected this directly to the time spent online, adding that he can’t fully disagree: “If you’re spending five hours a day on social media, you’re not doing anything. Your life actually is meaningless.”

The paths to this “pit of despair” differ by gender. For girls, social media remains the “clearest culprit,” altering development, social relationships, and moods. For boys, the danger centers on a dopamine addiction crisis, with companies competing to “hook them” via highly addictive video games and increasingly available high-definition porn.

Haidt’s comments came as part of a symposium organized by Dartmouth economics professor David Blanchflower, whose work has previously been covered in Fortune. Most recently, he and University College London’s Alex Bryson found the midlife crisis has become a thing of the past, with a quarter-life crisis very real in reams of economic data. Young workers really are full of rising despair, their research found. Blanchflower told Fortune in September he’s “freaked” out by what his research is showing: “Suddenly young workers look to be in big trouble … Now, both absolutely and relatively, the young are worse off.” The midlife hump in despair, commonly known as the midlife crisis, used to be one of social science’s most important patterns, he added, and that’s over now.

The symposium occurred just weeks after an authority no less than Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, acknowledged Gen Z is having an especially hard time in the economy of 2025. “Kids coming out of college and younger people, minorities, are having a hard time finding jobs,” Powell said in mid-September, at a press conference following the Federal Open Market Committee meeting.

The solution: Collective action

Haidt asserted the theory suggesting the rewiring of childhood is the only one that can account for the synchronized collapse in mental health globally. Given that this is a collective action problem, the solution must also be collective action, he argues.

Haidt proposed four key norms to reverse a phone-based childhood and restore the play-based model:

1. Delay smartphone use: Give children a flip phone or simple phone until high school or age 14 internationally.
2. Social media age limit: “No social media before 16,” Haidt stresses. “We are completely insane if we give puberty over to social [media].”
3. Phone-free schools: Implement “bell-to-bell” policies, which teachers have welcomed, and studies are already showing raised grades.
4. Promote independence and play: Encourage “far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.”

Haidt stressed that although there will be a “permanent echo of diminished potential” in the generation that has already passed through puberty with these devices, “it’s not too late for individuals if they make an effort and they make it collectively.”

For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing. 

“When you graduate, whether it’s high school, or community college, or college, you need the skills to get the job,” Dimon said in a recent interview with CNN. “It’s not enough anymore to say, ‘I can work hard.’ In the old days, you could be in 10th grade, go get a factory job in Detroit, and eventually you could afford a family, a home, a car, and that may not be true anymore.”

Dimon’s words will resonate with many. Even in the past few years, buying a home has become increasingly unaffordable for first-time buyers. Per data from the National Association of Realtors, in 2022 its housing affordability index stood at 108, with a value of 100 representing a family with the median income having exactly enough income to qualify for a mortgage on a median-priced home.

By 2025, this had dropped to 97.4, meaning the average American family trying to buy their first home doesn’t have the income to qualify for a mortgage on a median-priced home.

Likewise, childcare costs have skyrocketed compared with a few decades ago. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis charting tuition, school fees, and childcare across an average of U.S. cities has increased from an index of 100 in 1983 to 897 by September 2025.

In the face of an increased cost of living, younger workers now graduating and entering the workforce are more concerned than their older counterparts about the threat of artificial intelligence. Nearly one in five Gen Z workers reported being deeply worried that artificial intelligence will put them out of work within the next two years, according to a recent survey from Deutsche Bank Research. But their older peers are notably less alarmed: While nearly a quarter of young adults ages 18 to 34 gave high scores of concern on a 0 to 10 scale, only about one in 10 baby boomers and Gen Xers (ages 55 and above) expressed comparable anxiety.

Dimon said that AI and coding are areas where “we know we need the skills,” adding that speedy industry training courses also present paths to secure employment: “And it works, those things work. We just have to get people to invest in them.”

Many of the nation’s fastest-growing job markets are in highly specialized sectors—some of which require no degree but do require technical training. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for job growth in 2023–33, released last year, wind turbine service technicians came in first with a growth rate of 60% and median annual pay of just under $62,000. No degree is required.

Second was solar photovoltaic installers with a growth rate of 48% and annual pay of a little under $49,000—again, no degree required.

Plumbers and electricians in demand

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also urged job market entrants to explore skills-focused roles adjacent to the immediate technology sector.

While the billions being invested into AI have pushed up valuations courtesy of promised efficiencies and streamlining, Huang points out that it will also have real-world impacts when it comes to building data centers and the wider infrastructure needed to support the shift.

“If you’re an electrician, you’re a plumber, a carpenter—we’re going to need hundreds of thousands of them to build all of these factories,” Huang told Channel 4 News in the U.K. in September. “The skilled craft segment of every economy is going to see a boom. You’re going to have to be doubling and doubling and doubling every single year.”

Huang isn’t alone. Earlier this year BlackRock CEO Larry Fink told an energy conference he has warned the White House about the shortage of workers needed to support the rollout: “I’ve even told members of the Trump team that we’re going to run out of electricians that we need to build out AI data centers. We just don’t have enough.”

The JPMorgan Chase CEO, who runs a $4.5 trillion bank with 300,000 employees, still reads customer complaints himself, a habit that, he says, keeps him connected to reality inside one of the world’s most powerful financial institutions.

“I still read customer complaints,” Dimon said at the America Business Forum in Miami on Thursday. “If they ask you a question, you’ve got to respond to me directly and not go up that chain of command. The chain of command starts to edit it and fine-tune it. The bureaucracy does want to control you, so you’ve got to kill the bureaucracy.”

For Dimon, bureaucracy is a reflex that creeps into any large institution and shields leaders from reality. He sees it as a constant fight. 

“If you’re in a position like mine, you’ve got to break down those barriers all the time,” he said.

Instead, Dimon prizes what he calls constant curiosity. He starts every morning reading five newspapers and still takes time to visit branches with his management team. 

“Get on the bus and go to a branch,” he said. “Talk to people. You’ll learn something: something stupid we do, something that doesn’t work, or something they did better at another bank.”

That hands-on approach, he said, forces him to stay grounded inside a firm with 300,000 employees in 60 countries. 

“Once your mind closes, you’re not going to make a lot of progress,” Dimon said.

Culture, he added, is what keeps a company from collapsing under its own weight. “You better be relentless,” he told the crowd. “People don’t believe what you write in memos, they believe what you do. They see you fire bad people or a client who mistreats employees. That’s how they know you mean it.”

He’s also learned to value plainspoken communication. Early in his career, Dimon said, he underestimated its power. Now, every message from his office is written in his own voice, stripped of what he calls “corporate pablum.”

For Dimon, the danger is internal complacency. In his view, once bureaucracy takes hold, “it kills a company’s ability to think.”