• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, 7 hours ago

Jonathan Haidt is in a somewhat unusual position right now. He’s simultaneously a respected social psychologist and professor, a bestselling author, and increasingly, one of the country’s most prominent advocates for changing how social media affects young people. Over the past few years, Haidt has moved well beyond academia into the center of a growing national debate about smartphones, youth mental health, attention, anxiety, and the unintended consequences of algorithm-driven platforms. That larger context mattered watching him deliver NYU’s commencement speech last week.

Because Haidt has become one of the country’s most visible critics of social media’s impact on young people, and of certain trends in university culture, his selection as commencement speaker had already sparked backlash on campus before he took the stage. A small group of students booed as he was introduced, and several dozen reportedly walked out during the ceremony.

But watching the speech itself, what stood out wasn’t confrontation or ideology. It was how measured and deeply human the message actually was.

Given all the noise surrounding him, I expected something sharper, maybe even defensive. Instead, he came across as what he actually is: a professor talking honestly to students at a major turning point in their lives.

It was refreshing. Haidt wasn’t scolding the graduates. He wasn’t romanticizing the past. He wasn’t telling students to reject technology and move to a cabin in the woods. What he was doing was something much simpler and, in 2026, surprisingly rare: asking young people to protect their attention, their relationships, and their humanity.

Watching him speak at Yankee Stadium, you could feel the audience settling into the message.

Part of what makes Haidt compelling is that he speaks with a kind of measured concern rather than outrage. So much of modern discourse, especially online, rewards emotional escalation. Everyone is expected to sound urgent, furious, absolute. Haidt doesn’t really operate that way. He sounds like someone who has spent years observing what technology and social media systems are doing to human behavior and has become genuinely worried about the consequences. That tone matters.

Because whether you agree with every argument in Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” or not, the broader questions he raises are impossible to ignore now. We have an entire generation that grew up inside algorithmic systems optimized for engagement, validation, and compulsive use. Anxiety rates are up. Loneliness is up. Political polarization is up. Young people increasingly describe themselves as exhausted, overwhelmed, and isolated despite being more digitally connected than any generation in history.

Haidt has been one of the few mainstream intellectuals willing to say that maybe these things are connected.

One line from the speech especially stayed with me: “What you pay attention to shapes what you care about, and what you care about shapes what you become.” That’s actually a profound observation, particularly at this moment in history.

One of the things I’ve been writing about for years is the idea that technology doesn’t just distribute information. It shapes behavior. It shapes incentives. It shapes emotional response. The architecture of digital systems increasingly determines what we notice, what we believe, what we fear, and what we amplify.

Haidt is really talking about the human consequences of that same transformation. What happens when attention itself becomes industrialized? And what happens to childhood itself when identity formation increasingly takes place inside systems designed not around well-being, but around engagement and retention?

Those are not abstract academic questions anymore. They are shaping how an entire generation experiences friendship, self-worth, anxiety, politics, and reality itself. And whatever disagreements people may have with Haidt, he deserves credit for taking those concerns seriously rather than waving them away as moral panic or generational nostalgia.

The other thing I appreciated watching the speech was that he treated the graduates like adults. He didn’t flatter them endlessly. He didn’t reduce them to victims. He acknowledged the difficulty of the world they’re entering while also challenging them to build meaningful lives inside it.

There was also something quietly courageous about the speech itself. Universities are under enormous pressure right now. Every commencement speaker now arrives pre-litigated by social media. In that environment, simply standing up and delivering a thoughtful, nuanced message without collapsing into slogans almost feels rebellious. And Haidt managed to do it without sounding performative.

Watching the video, you got the sense that he genuinely cares about students -- not as abstractions or demographics, but as human beings trying to navigate a world changing faster than most institutions can process. That may be why the speech landed for me.

Because beneath all the debates about phones, politics, social media, and generational change, Haidt is really making a profoundly human argument about attention, identity, and the kind of lives people want to build. He’s warning that if we outsource too much of our emotional and social existence to systems optimized for engagement, we risk losing something essential about being human. 

And for graduates stepping into a future increasingly shaped by AI, synthetic media, and algorithmic persuasion, that felt like exactly the right message at exactly the right moment.

As an NYU graduate, I was very proud of the the university’s decision to let him speak.