Jonathan Haidt has called this generation of students “The Anxious Generation.” That’s an interesting choice of words. Kierkegaard thought that anxiety is what we feel when we become aware that we are, despite everything we can point to as an excuse, fundamentally free, and therefore fundamentally responsible. We feel anxiety because we know we’re free; if we don’t feel it, it’s because we’re pretending we’re not free. We pretend we’re not free because freedom is a burden.
We talk about freedom as if it means we get to make choices. What freedom actually means is that we have to make choices and live with the consequences. Kierkegaardian anxiety is what we feel when we’re standing at the edge of a cliff. What we fear is not the fear of accidentally falling; it’s the fact that at any moment we might choose to jump.
This isn’t about suicidal thoughts. It’s not about whether you want to jump. It’s the sheer fact that you could. Out on that edge, we stare into the reality of our own freedom, a reality that most of the time we can ignore or forget. We confront the “dizziness of freedom.” It’s exhilarating, and terrifying (since if you did jump, you’d die). This is “anxiety,” and it’s how we know we’re a person with a soul, not just an animal with instincts.
Kierkegaard’s idea seems like the opposite of what Jonathan Haidt had in mind when he described the younger generation as “anxious.” Haidt uses “anxious” in the more familiar sense of the word: a psychological problem that drags us down, that makes us feel less alive, less aware of our own freedom, and therefore less capable of making real choices. Haidt’s claim, now widely accepted, was that “something big is happening, something changed in the lives of young people in the early 2010s that made their mental health plunge.”
The things Haidt referred to, of course, were smartphones and social media. Haidt’s book played a major role in catalyzing a global effort to limit the use of these devices and platforms by young people, and help our youth approach them with skepticism rather than enthusiasm. Public resistance to data centers can’t be entirely explained by aesthetic or environmental concerns, which can be raised about most industrial projects. It is also about what the data centers are producing — AI itself, the Next Big Thing, just like smartphones and social media were the Next Big Thing. We’re too aware now that the Next Big Thing out of Silicon Valley always seems to have a lot of downsides. Today, few people can seriously believe AI companions are going to make the anxious generation less anxious.
What could make Haidt’s generation less anxious might be some of Kierkegaard’s version of anxiety. Haidt argues, although in different terms, that the problem stems from “overprotection in the real world combined with underprotection in the digital world.” He refers to mundane things, like not letting kids ride their bikes down the street unsupervised. But mundane things like riding a bike down the street are just concrete versions of the existential reality that Kierkegaard is trying to describe. “Overprotection in the real world” means overprotection from anxiety. It means preventing young people from standing at the edge of the cliff and becoming aware that they’re free, that they are alive because they are choosing not to jump, which comes with the knowledge that they could choose otherwise.
At Christian colleges and universities, overprotecting students from Kierkegaardian anxiety may be a matter of institutional life or death. Like any university, our purpose is to nurture the life of the mind; unlike other universities, we aim to nurture the life of the mind of faith. Faith cannot be had without anxiety, without confronting our freedom and responsibility to choose without certainty. With faith, we cannot be certain; rather, we can be confident. “Now the dread of possibility holds him as its prey, until it can deliver him saved into the hands of faith. . . . This is the reason why possibility is so educative.” (The Concept of Dread, 141). If we cannot provide our students with “possibility” — with experiences at the edge of the cliff — then there is no real point to our existence. We may as well drop the pretense of Christian identity.
Although there are many ways that we overprotect our students from Kierkegaardian anxiety, the most familiar may be the attempt to give students certainties in place of faith. This usually comes with a corresponding effort to protect students from ideas that might unsettle those certainties. This insularity is no longer possible. At any time, our students can go online and encounter any idea. It can seem like the Internet offers the Kierkegaardian freedom we might hope for: perhaps as choices proliferate, so do cliff-edge experiences of choice-making. But the infinite “possibilities” of the Internet are very different from the possibilities that Kierkegaard considered “educative.” Online choices lack the context that makes them matter. We can make them freely, but the freedom we experience is not the freedom of responsibility. It is a false freedom — the “freedom” that we feel when we pretend that we are not responsible for anything.
One of Haidt’s arguments is that institutions must put more friction between people and the platforms that enable this pretense. Christian colleges have far more profound reasons to follow this advice than concerns about mental health. Like public schools everywhere, we ought to think very seriously about how to keep our students from spending so much time on these devices that they have nothing left for the real world of the classroom. In face-to-face confrontation, ideas matter in a way they cannot online, despite the frenzy of arguments that may fill the screen.
The anxious generation needs institutions that are refugees, not from cliff-edge challenges to faith, but from the anxiety that stifles the desire for such challenges. It needs more anxiety, in Kierkegaard’s sense. Our methods must change. Providing refuge is no longer primarily a matter of the messages to which we expose them, but rather of the medium from which we protect them. Our institutions must become counter-mediums, more than they are purveyors of counter-messages. If we can make that shift, Christian colleges can become leaders in the effort to raise up a less anxious generation.
