The Unravelling Of Character: Disorder, Anxiety & Isolation

Forbes

a day ago

It is commonplace to observe that there is something deeply wrong with young people today. Socrates bemoaned the trend of the young to write things down. He feared it would weaken the mind and mean they 'seem to know many things' without truly knowing them.
The introduction of the telephone set off a moral panic that it would hasten life beyond human endurance and the new 'instant contact ' would encourage gossip, trivial chatter, and moral decline.
Now we read that a psychological earthquake is taking place amongst younger Americans (and presumably the rest of the rich west). Between roughly 2014 and 2022, people aged 16–39 experienced really big declines in conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extraversion, while neuroticism climbed.
John Burn‑Murdoch at the Financial Times graphically illustrated how dramatic this shift is. Trait scores like discipline, cooperation, and social engagement have fallen off a cliff, while emotional volatility is on the rise.
In the working world, conscientiousness is gold dust. It's the trait most closely linked to getting things done — showing up on time, following through on promises, and staying the course when challenges mount. If the trait is truly eroding among younger workers, organisations may find themselves managing teams less able to focus, deliver, and take ownership — a problem magnified by the constant digital interruptions of modern life.
The social fabric of work is no less vulnerable. Agreeableness and extraversion are the invisible threads that help teams gel, foster trust, and draw people into productive collaboration. When they decline, relationships become transactional and the easy camaraderie that makes work enjoyable and connected starts to fray.
Higher neuroticism means greater sensitivity to stress and negative emotion, which can tip into anxiety, depression, or burnout. People like this make poor team mates and just aren't fun to be around. The risks multiply with low conscientiousness: poorer self-care, inconsistent health habits, and a greater likelihood of chronic illness.
These data fit the common narrative about rising anxiety and depression, the fall in the numbers of friends young people have and the rise of loneliness, and the dearth of romantic opportunities.
What's Gone Wrong?
What changed? Jonathan Haidt calls it 'the great rewiring.' Beginning in the late 2000s, adolescents became the first generation to journey tethered to smart phones, those engines of attention which drive attention, isolation and social comparison.
On top of this, the pandemic was a multiplier. So was the enormous rise in economic inequality and diminishing job prospects for the young. Here comes AI. Would you really want to be young again in these times?
A Counterfactual View
However, we survived writing, the printing press, telephones, radio and tv. Instant contact didn't ruin a generation. Before we settle on a story of irreversible decline, it's worth asking: Is this a modern moral panic? What else might explain these shifts? After all, personality is much more malleable than we once thought, so could the data represent not a collapse of character, but an adaptation to a changing world?
Eminent psychologist Prof Fred Oswald suggested to me that these are average differences across groups. This hides how much variation there is at the individual level, nor the variability inherent in the measures themselves. Without person-to-person measurement over time we can't tell whether the pattern is a broad, population-wide shift or the average of many people moving in different directions.
Lower conscientiousness in young adults may partly reflect adaptation to an economy valuing flexibility, multitasking, and rapid information processing over long, sustained tasks. Things look different if we measure agility, digital collaboration, or networked problem-solving as core traits.
Personality traits, especially conscientiousness and agreeableness, typically rise with age. The pandemic may have delayed the traditional 'social investment' milestones (stable jobs, marriage, home ownership) that drive maturation, shifting the curve rather than changing the endpoint. The authors of these studies suggest the drop might be more of a pandemic aftershock than a generational inevitability. If so, these traits might rebound as social structures stabilise.
Surveys capture self-perception, which can be influenced by cultural narratives. In an era that normalises talking about anxiety and mental health, people may report higher neuroticism without there being a true trait increase.
What to Do?
For what it's worth, I believe the data are on to something. I know first-hand about Gen Z's struggles with mental health and anxiety, and I think Jonathon Haidt is dead-on in his analysis of attention economies, screen-saturated routines, and diminishing real-world play on building character. It's possible a generation has shifted in the way it shows up, but hold your fire for now.
In any event, we also know what helps: unstructured play in the physical world, meaningful offline connection, and institutional norms that prioritize psychological maturity over digital distraction. If conscientiousness can erode under the right conditions, perhaps it can be nurtured back through intentional everyday practices: exercise rituals, accountability, focused work, and rhythms that restore presence. (I really hope that doesn't sound too much like Jordan Peterson, but hey).