We can save future generations from spiritual devastation. We can bring down those high rates of agreement that “life often feels meaningless.” We can—and must—defeat the Devil and reclaim childhood in the real world.

Earlier this year, someone started a viral trend of asking ChatGPT this question: If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation, without them even knowing it?

Chat’s responses were profound and unsettling: “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.”

As a social psychologist who has been trying since 2015 to figure out what on earth was happening to Gen Z, I was stunned. Why? Because what the AI proposed doing is pretty much what technology seems to be doing to children today. It seemed to be saying: If the devil wanted to destroy a generation, he could just give them all smartphones.

My work over the last decade has centered on one question: Why did the mental health of Gen Z—the cohort born between 1996 and 2012—plummet in so many countries starting in the early 2010s? I first focused on the role of overprotection (“coddling”). But since then, there’s been a growing body of evidence implicating technology, particularly smartphones and social media.

So, borrowing from the cybersecurity concept of red teaming—the practice of hiring an entity to pretend they are the enemy, seek out vulnerabilities, and hack into a network or organization—I decided to ask ChatGPT myself how its “devil” would stunt adolescent development in the digital age. Because what better way to stop the ongoing invisible corrosion of the human spirit than to get in the devil’s head?

It began:

If I were to think this through as a thought experiment—imagining “the devil” in a metaphorical sense—the most effective way to destroy the next generation without them realizing it would be through slow, invisible corrosions of the human spirit, rather than obvious attacks.

I approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence. Our “better angels” call us upward and out of our daily concerns. Our inner demons pull us downward, where we become more selfish and easily tempted.

In The Anxious Generation, I devoted a whole chapter to “spiritual degradation” because so much of life online pulls people “downward.” Growing up online, kids learn to live in ways that directly contradict the advice given to us by the world’s great spiritual traditions. Meditation, forgiveness, and sacred boundaries that must not be transgressed? Forget about it. Online, kids get constant stimulation, pressure to judge others instantly, and videos showing violations of every conceivable taboo.

You can see a sudden change in the spiritual health of young Americans in a long-running national survey of high school seniors who were asked whether “life often feels meaningless.” The figure below shows the percent who answered that they “agree” or “strongly agree.” The numbers were low and even declining a bit back when Gen X and millennials were in high school. But as soon as Gen Z entered the dataset, around 2013, meaninglessness surged.

In the rest of this essay, I reprint Chat’s seven-step plan, in italics, followed by my own commentary.

1. Erode Attention and Presence

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.

So many of us in the education world have seen this precise change in our students over the past decade: They have more difficulty reading books, sitting through a 75-minute class, or doing their homework. This isn’t just a “kids these days” observation; it’s what the kids themselves began to say around 2015, when American high school seniors suddenly started reporting a lot more “difficulty thinking or concentrating.”

As soon as life and consciousness moved onto smartphones, students found it harder to engage in what Cal Newport calls “deep work,” and what the devil calls “sustained thought and presence.” When young people lose the ability to be fully present with a task, a book, a friend, or a romantic partner, they become less likely to be successful in love and in work—the two areas that psychologists since Freud have agreed are crucial for human flourishing. When constant distractions make love and work shallower and more fragmented, it makes sense that life suddenly feels more meaningless.

2. Confuse Identity and Purpose

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.

Here the devil uses the word that best explains why some kids have been pushed into a pit of despair while others have stood their ground: rootedness. In our research for The Anxious Generation, Zach Rausch and I found that those who were rooted in binding moral communities had some protection from the negative mental-health effects of the new phone-based childhood. Teens who said “religion is important in my family” suffered smaller increases in depression and anxiety. So did self-described conservatives, who generally live in a more constraining, binding moral matrix, while progressive moralities aim to grant people more freedom to choose their values and create their own identities. So what happens when we re-graph the data from Figure 1 by politics and religiosity?

We find that the differences between the four groups were relatively small between 1991 and 2011, but then the lines fan out. Figure 3 shows that liberals from secular families were most likely to be washed away into meaninglessness during the “great rewiring of childhood,” the period from 2010 to 2015 in which teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones loaded with social media apps.

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