Young Australians have plenty of reasons to feel anxious and angry. Blaming social media misses the deeper causes – and the challenge of navigating an increasingly complex world.

Why are we so angry? The easy, lazy, and entirely wrong explanation is that our technologies are to blame: the internet, smartphones, social media, artificial intelligence, and so on. That’s the argument behind Australia’s doomed social media ban for young people, which is inspired by the deceptive claims and cherry-picked statistics peddled by pop-psychology influencers like Jonathan Haidt in his roundly debunked book The Anxious Generation, and driven by a moral panic that was cynically manufactured by the Murdoch media.

So why are we so anxious and angry? Take the average 20-year-old in Australia: born into the aftermath of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, they have seen companies reap record profits while for ordinary Australians the prospect of affordable housing has slipped ever further from their grasp.

They grew up in the shadows of the unresolved conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and today encounter a daily dose of death and destruction in the reporting from Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and other conflict hotspots. They spent their most formative teenage years in COVID lockdowns and Zoom schooling, while conspiracy theorists tried to convince their parents that the pandemic was a hoax perpetuated by some global cabal. They’ve experienced more than a decade of the hottest years in human memory during their lifetime, most likely lived through one or more natural disasters in their area, and yet have seen utter political inaction on the climate crisis. And those of us who are older have simply experienced all that for longer.

So how could they, and we, not be anxious and angry – regardless of whether we use smartphones and social media or not? As David Weinberger wrote as early as 2004, in his fabulous take-down of the ‘echo chamber’ fallacy, “the problem with an extraterrestrial-conspiracy mailing list........

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