For years, parents have worried that their children’s endless scrolling on TikTok and Instagram was “rotting their brains.” New research suggests that fear is not only justified — it’s playing out faster than anyone imagined.

A Financial Times analysis of data from the University of Southern California’s Understanding America Study reveals a sharp and sudden collapse in conscientiousness — the personality trait tied most closely to responsibility, self-control, and follow-through — among young adults. For Americans aged 16 to 39, scores have plunged in less than a decade to the low 30th percentile. Older adults, far less tethered to smartphones, have seen no comparable drop.

The FT report points squarely at ubiquitous smartphones, hyper-engaging apps, and streaming services as likely culprits, arguing that the convenience and constant stimulation of the digital world have eroded real-world commitments, encouraged impulsivity, and normalized behaviors considered unacceptable not long ago.

Conscientiousness isn’t the only casualty. The data points to shrinking attention spans, declining extroversion, and plummeting levels of trust — signs of a generation increasingly absorbed in the “meta-world” of algorithm-driven feeds and less engaged with the messy, slower demands of face-to-face human interaction.

The implications, experts warn, are not just personal but civilizational. In the 15th century, the printing press rewired the world by spreading knowledge over centuries, allowing society time to adapt. The smartphone has transformed cognition, culture, and mental health in barely a decade — without any guardrails.

Unlike past technological revolutions, this one has created a behavioral slot machine in the palm of every hand. Instead of fostering deep thought and delayed gratification, it rewards novelty, validation, and compulsive engagement — a feedback loop that becomes harder to resist with every swipe.

Regulation, experts say, is unlikely. Silicon Valley’s profit model depends on keeping users hooked, anxious, and returning for more. And so-called fixes — app timers, grayscale modes, “digital detoxes” — amount to little more than band-aids on a bullet wound.

The first step, researchers argue, is acknowledgment: society has built an economy that monetizes human attention, treating focus as a raw material to be extracted until it’s gone. Like the industrial revolution’s pollution of rivers and skies, the smartphone era is polluting the mind — and it will take a cultural movement to clean it up.

Until then, the decline continues, red lines on personality charts plunging toward an unknown bottom — and an entire generation scrolling right along with them.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)