---
title: "Social Media and the Anxious Generation — Sami Miettinen on Futucast #465"
titleOriginal: "Sami Miettinen & Mikko Alasaarela | Sosiaalinen media ja ahdistunut sukupolvi #465"
description: "The other half of a twin recording made in Futucast's studio the same afternoon as Negotiator 258. Isak Rautio, Sami Miettinen and Mikko Alasaarela take Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation in a different direction: the RC-car experiment that showed how fast a recommendation algorithm drifts, why boredom tolerance matters, what happened to boys, and whether the family unit that was supposed to replace all this still works."
format: "podcast"
show: "Futucast"
episode: "#465"
hosts: ["Isak Rautio"]
date: 2024-07-01
duration: "1:04:24"
language: "fi"
original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFb7R-oWa_o
relatedEpisode: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep258-puhelinahdistus-isak-rautio-mikko-alasaarela/
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/futucast-465-social-media-and-the-anxious-generation/
---

# Social Media and the Anxious Generation — Sami Miettinen on Futucast #465

The same three people, the same book, the same studio, the same afternoon — and a conversation
that goes somewhere else. Negotiator 258 was recorded first; this one picks up where that left
off and, as Rautio predicts on air, wanders into different territory.

## The pre-roll argument about games

It opens mid-thought, on the question Miettinen wanted more of: is a game's addictiveness the
default, and is passive consumption simply the easier thing to build? Alasaarela's answer is a
friction theory — **whatever produces addiction most easily is what gets built**. Somebody may win
by other means, but it is harder, so passivity wins the market.

From which Miettinen asks the more interesting question: we have built games that are extremely
good at getting young men to cooperate at killing each other. Could you build something equally
addictive where the cooperation produces something positive?

His own history complicates his position and he says so. He once played in Finland's best *Clash
of Clans* team — twenty-nine badges, real collective effort — and there was genuine community in
it. Rautio's counter is that it too was conquest and violence. Neither treats that as
disqualifying: Rautio played airsoft as a child, which simulates shooting your friends, and it
hurts just enough to be a real game with unwritten rules you have to learn. Basketball and
football do the same thing more positively.

Miettinen's parental rule was cartoon violence at most; otherwise his daughters played what they
liked, and he considers the skills real. One of them he got playing *Baldur's Gate 2* as a
teenager, is now a working doctor, and currently suffers mainly from a laptop that will not run
the sequel — which her father has already finished.

## Haidt, restated for a different room

Alasaarela restates the thesis for Futucast's audience: Haidt's goal was to move from correlation
to causation, and to show that smartphones affect boys and girls through different mechanisms.

Rautio's own reading, which is more structural than in the sister episode, has two parts. Young
people now live in **distorted communities**: the ones that used to matter have shrunk while very
large digital ones have grown, and children are being raised by arbitrary people around the world
who managed to get their attention, usually by extreme means. And **you are never alone as a
child**. Previously the school day ended when you left; if you wanted to avoid your bullies you
went somewhere else. Now everything is on Snapchat, which is why the experience of loneliness has
risen so sharply — the social medium turned out not to be social.

Miettinen's addition is that the stalker need not even be a person: it can be the expectations of
the virtual world, the self-loathing, the rabbit holes you jump into yourself.

On games versus social media Rautio makes the distinction Haidt makes: games carry **immediate
interactivity** — you are usually on a voice channel with your friends, which is closer to natural
interaction than posting and waiting. What they lack is the other thing. The example is a pickup
football match where the ball almost crosses the line: the attacking side says goal, the defending
side says no goal, and the point is not the ball, it is **how the children resolve it between
themselves**. A game has the rules coded in and settles it for you.

## The RC-car experiment

The best single piece of evidence in either episode is Alasaarela's, and it is homemade.

A wellbeing influencer he was talking to mentioned giving his son a tablet to watch remote-control
car videos, a shared hobby. Alasaarela asked whether he let the algorithm choose everything after
the first video. He did. So they ran it.

Video one: genuinely good, fun, useful for a five-year-old. Video three, purely algorithmic:
*pack of dogs chasing RC car*. By the fifth or sixth: *explosions on RC cars*. It did not take many
steps, and the father concluded on the spot that the algorithm would no longer decide what his
child watched.

The generalisation is the important part. The recommendation engine is not trying to radicalise
anyone; its only objective is to keep you in the chair, because that is where the advertising
money is. But the fastest way to hold attention in the first three seconds is a strong emotional
trigger, and stronger triggers work better — so the examples drift steadily outward. A mild
interest in vegetarianism ends in militant veganism; the political version ends on one edge or
the other; the girls' version starts at glitter and arrives at anorexia content. Alasaarela cites
the *New York Times* piece headlined on how YouTube radicalised Brazil as the documented case.

## Boredom, long form and the anxiety itself

Miettinen's proposed counter-measure is unfashionable and simple: **lengthen the format**.
Everyone still listening to this conversation, he notes, has held their attention for a long time
— probably while walking a dog or cooking, which is fine. Children need the same desensitisation,
and he observes from his own household that sitting through even a good film has become painful.
Audiobooks work well as a substitute because the audio channel is strong enough when a secondary
activity absorbs the restlessness.

Which produces the episode's sharpest formulation. The book is called *The Anxious Generation*,
and Miettinen argues the anxiety **is the mechanism**: it is the negative feeling that makes you
need to do something quickly, that makes you a consumer of short video and snack content. Remove
it and you get resilience, antifragility, concentration, and the capacity to change things.

Rautio supplies the neurochemical footnote, and Alasaarela the correction that dopamine is a
neurotransmitter rather than a hormone. Haidt's one-liner is that dopamine is popularly
misunderstood as the feel-good chemical, when the dominant sensation after a hit is not *that was
satisfying* but **I want more** — which is exactly what the algorithms exploit, together with
**random reward**: unpredictable, variable payoffs, which produce the fastest addiction known.

## What happened to boys

Miettinen raises Haidt's *hikikomori* — the young man entirely content in a poor life inside his
parents' ecosystem — and the incel-adjacent version beside it. What is missing is the antifragile
route into healthy adulthood, which for a heterosexual man historically ran through wanting to be
interesting to women: you had to demonstrate status, capability or at least potential, which in
practice meant cleaning your room, exercising, studying and making an effort. His genuine
puzzlement is why the *hikikomori* has become the more attractive option.

Rautio's caution is that this discussion has been pushed around by the culture war into blame and
deflection, and that the strongest statistical correlation remains between having romantic
experience and a range of other outcomes.

## The family unit that was supposed to replace it

The longest stretch, and the most careful. Finland has one of the world's lowest ages of leaving
home — 19 — partly because strong social safety nets remove the need for loyalty to the family
that raised you, and because social mobility is exceptionally high, so there is little reason to
stay in the back room the way an Italian might. The cost is that the tie is cut somewhat cleanly
and a certain inherited cultural capital is missing, which is then supposed to be replaced by
finding a partner and building your own.

Miettinen's view of what a healthy version looks like is explicitly not about marriage or
heteronormativity: it is a **commitment through which two people become a unit that pools
resources and shares risk**, so that when one takes a larger risk the other covers the flank.
What he sees instead is individualism producing very weak cohabitation from which no commitment
ever emerges.

Alasaarela's account of why is demographic. Around 70 per cent of divorces are now initiated by
women. Women's education level has risen substantially, the traditional division has ended, and
on average there is no longer an equally educated man to be found — while expectations of men's
contribution to the partnership have risen at the same time. The gap between expectation and
contribution is what produces the dissatisfaction: both may bring the same money, but one carries
much more of the children and the household, because men have found the new role harder to adopt.

Miettinen raises **meta-work** as the concept worth teaching — the invisible management layer of
who decides what gets done — and notes it cuts both ways: there can be a reluctance to give up
the monopoly over that layer, which leaves a nominally equal partnership running as a command
relationship. Both agree that the missing skill is arguing well: people fail to recognise their
own triggers, run the same fight repeatedly, and now find giving up easier than before, because
the social expectation of permanence has gone.

Rautio's counterweight is worth recording: a household of constant conflict is not obviously
better for a child than two separate ones, since the child learns nothing healthy and may be used
as an instrument. Neither treats the nuclear family as the required answer — only that some reason
to have children has to exist, and smartphones, dogs and everything else are good reasons not to.

## Where it ends

Rautio asks the closing question: since we are not going back, what could actually be changed?

Alasaarela's answer widens to the whole frame. This is a competition for attention and for
resources, and the strongest wins; the question is what is strongest in future. He cites Max
Tegmark's *Life 3.0*: once AI is good enough, we will hand over decision-making willingly, because
the machine's decision is experienced as better than our own. We are, he argues, already close —
we have already ceded a great deal of our decision-making, our lives and our time to algorithms.
Whether synthetic intelligence eventually dominates the cognitive layer to the point where humans
are its appendages is, in his view, a fully possible scenario on an unknown timeline; and even
now, people frequently do not act in their own interest because of what has been done to their
attention.

Original recording (Futucast): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFb7R-oWa_o

From the same session: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep258-puhelinahdistus-isak-rautio-mikko-alasaarela/

---

Cite as: Sami Miettinen, guest on Futucast #465 — Social Media and the Anxious Generation — Sami Miettinen on Futucast #465, 2024-07-01, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFb7R-oWa_o. Record: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/futucast-465-social-media-and-the-anxious-generation/.