The Rattled Generation: A unified theory of this American moment

After years of talking to hundreds of CEOs, elected officials, social scientists and ordinary Americans, this is our best take on how things stand in our country right now and a guide to how we got here.On Tuesday, Jim will outline why he believes CEOs and business leaders are uniquely suited to step up and help fill the trust void in this moment.We're living through the most disorienting societal moment since World War II. Almost nobody in a position of power is explaining why, or what to do about it.This is so much bigger than politics. It touches our jobs, our companies, our communities and our realities.Why it matters: By most objective measures, it's an extraordinary time to be alive. Americans are wealthier, safer and longer-lived than at any earlier point in history. U.S. total wealth has soared. Violent crime sank to a 20-year low and is still falling. Life expectancy just hit 79 years — the highest in American history. The country produces more energy than ever after four straight record years.And yet: University of Michigan consumer sentiment just hit its lowest reading in a half-century. Gallup finds most people think things will only get worse. Trust in every major institution — government, media, organized religion, higher education, science — is at or near record lows, both Gallup and the Edelman Trust Barometer find.The gap between reality and feeling is the story of our era. A three-part shock helps tell it:Social media's rise.The chaos of COVID.The rise of AI, political extremism and information bubbles in the aftermath of both.This produced a perpetually Rattled Generation, one too unsteady and uncertain to believe things are truly good or getting better. That's a new phenomenon for a typically optimistic, can-do society.It's hard to see this changing anytime soon for one big reason: For the first time, no one — even us, sometimes — knows what to believe or who to trust. Our brains are now constantly calculating: Is this AI? Is it a bot? Can I trust this, share this or act on it?Only by making sense of how we got here can we begin to fix it:Shock 1: The Social EraWe trace the inflection to 2007, the year we helped launch Politico. The same month, Apple unleashed the iPhone. Twitter was a growing infant. Facebook crossed 50 million users. In roughly 18 months, the infrastructure for an algorithmically amplified social life fell into place.Suddenly, anyone, anywhere, anytime could say anything on a public platform for free at scale and watch as others engage or enrage.What followed wasn't a coincidence. Anxiety, loneliness and institutional distrust rose in near-perfect parallel with smartphone penetration and screen time. It's a correlation so consistent across age groups, income levels and democracies that we strain to call it anything but causation.The institutions made it easy. Church sex abuse scandals. Media blunders. The 2008–09 financial crisis and its unpunished architects. Iraq WMD claims. Academic failures. Epstein.Each, on its own, would have been a generational wound. Together, they landed one after another on people already disoriented by the speed of technological change. Citizens trusted institutions until those institutions failed them over and over, in public and up close. Once broken, that trust never reset.The result: People didn't abandon community. They migrated it, both closer to home and closer to their screens. Local leaders. Their own employer. People they know in person. Their phone.Shock 2: COVIDJust as the country was trying to get its footing after the social media gut punch, COVID hit. Its effects went beyond a public health crisis, building an isolation and distrust machine by severing the in-person bonds holding people together. Churches closed. Local businesses shuttered. Offices emptied. Youth sports stopped. The very refuges people retreated to after their trust in big institutions collapsed were gone overnight.For millions of people, COVID stripped away the coping mechanisms they'd built to survive the first decade of digital disruption. It produced in our young people what psychologist Jonathan Haidt called the Anxious Generation. But the problems were hardly contained to one age group. They hit everyone.And we never really recovered. We got vaccines and reopenings. We did not get a restoration of the social fabric. Loneliness was classified by the U.S. surgeon general as a public health epidemic. The share of Americans who said they had no close friends quadrupled from 1990 to 2021. Young men, in particular, have retreated from nearly every traditional institution — civic, religious, educational, relational.Shock 3: The AftermathAs if social media and COVID weren't enough, everyone got smacked with three once-in-a-generation tectonic changes — all at once, and all worse since COVID.Politics grew more omnipresent and mean. Terminally online politicians played to terminally online audiences, with algorithms egging everyone on. The rest got stuck in this f

After years of talking to hundreds of CEOs, elected officials, social scientists and ordinary Americans, this is our best take on how things stand in our country right now and a guide to how we got here.On Tuesday, Jim will outline why he believes CEOs and business leaders are uniquely suited to step up and…

After years of talking to hundreds of CEOs, elected officials, social scientists and ordinary Americans, this is our best take on how things stand in our country right now and a guide to how we got here.On Tuesday, Jim will outline why he believes CEOs and business leaders are uniquely suited to step up and help fill the trust void in this moment.We're living through the most disorienting societal moment since World War II. Almost nobody in a position of power is explaining why, or…