The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (400 pages) - Windy Saddle (5 miles)

Note: This might be a slow read, if it's like his other books, allow 3x the time you normally take to read something. Dense might be the right term.

In this book, Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the decline of free-play in childhood and the rise of smartphone usage among adolescents are the twin sources of increased mental distress among teenagers.

Haidt delves into the latest psychological and biological research to show how, between 2010 and 2015, childhood and adolescence got rewired. As teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones packed with social media apps, time online soared while time engaging face-to-face with friends and family plummeted, and so did mental health. This profound shift took place against a backdrop of diminishing childhood freedom, as parents over-supervised every aspect of their children’s lives offline, depriving them of the experiences they most need to become strong and self-governing adults.

Let's discuss "The Anxious Generation" while hiking at Windy Saddle. We'll start by going up Mt Zion and back, but then hike down the Beaver Brook Trail to "the cave". This has some non-technical scrambling on the trail, nothing crazy, but it's not always a normal hiking trail.

Copies of the book are available from the Denver Public Library. It's still too new for cheap used copies to be available.

We'll meet at the kiosk by the vault toilets at 5pm, starting down the trail at 5:15pm. Sunset is at 8:31pm so we'll have plenty of light. 5ish miles. 2mph pace, not super fast since we'll be discussing the book.

https://www.jeffco.us/DocumentCenter/View/9388/Windy-Saddle-Park-Map

https://www.jeffco.us/DocumentCenter/View/14152/Beaver-Brook-map

I prefer to hike without pets or children.

You'll want normal hiking stuff, hat, water, sunglasses.