3 Societal Ticking Time Bombs Nobody Is Connecting

I take no pleasure in being an alarmist. I hate the news and my dad repeatedly told me that constantly listening to the news makes you dumber. And honestly? He was right about that -- which is ironic because one of the time bombs I want to talk about is literally about us getting dumber. But we'll get there.

I’m not here to doom-scroll you. I’m here because there are three things that have crossed my radar recently that I can’t stop thinking about. Three slow-motion disasters that are playing out right in front of us and nobody is putting the pieces together.

1. SSRIs and the quiet failure of psychiatry
2. Gambling and the rigged game targeting young men
3. Collective IQ decline and the brainrot generation

These aren’t separate problems. They feed into each other. And the people profiting from all three are completely insulated from the damage.

SSRIs Freak Me Out

I’ll be honest – SSRIs scare the hell out of me. Not because of some abstract policy concern. Because I’ve heard the stories.

Let me be clear: SSRIs work. That’s not the debate. People take them and feel better. Psychiatrists prescribe them because they see results. The problem isn’t that they’re ineffective – it’s that they’re effective the way opioids are effective. They manage the pain. They don’t fix what’s causing it. And because they work well enough in the short term, people stay on them. And stay on them. And then they try to stop and discover they can’t.

I’ve heard about people who go on antidepressants and slowly turn into zombies. Not the dramatic “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” kind. The quiet kind. The kind where you stop feeling sad but you also stop feeling happy. You stop feeling anything. Your partner notices before you do. Your creativity dies. Your drive flatlines. You’re functional but you’re not really you anymore.

And then – this is the part that really gets me – when they try to come off the meds, all the feelings they’ve been suppressing for months or years come crashing in like a freight train. Their world gets obliterated. They fluctuate between feeling nothing and having full-blown mental health crises where they’re thinking about taking their own life. The thing that was supposed to help them has turned into a trap they can’t escape.

This isn’t rare – though exactly how common is hotly debated. Older studies reported withdrawal in over half of patients, while a 2025 BMJ meta-analysis put the rate at ~15% with symptoms directly attributable to stopping, and ~3% severe. The gap depends on how you define and measure withdrawal. But even the conservative numbers mean hundreds of thousands of people are experiencing brain zaps, insomnia, anxiety worse than what they started with, depersonalization, and suicidal ideation. And here’s the kicker – doctors can mistake this withdrawal for a relapse, which puts patients right back on the medication. It becomes a cycle you can’t break.

Let me tell you what a “brain zap” is.

A 2021 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 44% of long-term users who stopped did NOT relapse. Almost half of the people on these drugs long-term don’t even need them. They’re just stuck.

The Chemical Imbalance Was a Lie

You’ve probably heard the pitch: “Depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in your brain. SSRIs correct that imbalance.” It’s clean. It’s simple. It makes taking a pill feel logical.

It’s also not true. Dr. Josef – a board-certified psychiatrist and former FDA Medical Officer – explains it better than I can:

In 2022, a massive umbrella review led by Professor Joanna Moncrieff at UCL looked at decades of serotonin research and concluded: “There is no convincing evidence that depression is caused by serotonin abnormalities.” None. After decades of research across six major areas of study.

Even wilder – the review found evidence that long-term antidepressant use may produce compensatory changes in serotonergic signaling – your brain’s receptors adapt in ways that could work against you. The drugs might be destabilizing the very system they claim to fix.

And about those drugs “working” – Irving Kirsch’s meta-analysis of all FDA clinical trial data found that 82% of the antidepressant response was duplicated by sugar pills. The actual drug-placebo difference? 1.8 points on a 54-point scale. The UK’s threshold for clinical significance is 3 points. SSRIs didn’t even clear that bar.

The Incentives Are Hella Off

So if the science is this shaky, why are 11.4% of U.S. adults taking prescription medication for depression right now? Why has antidepressant dispensing for ages 12-25 increased 66% since 2016?

Follow the money.

55.7% of practicing psychiatrists receive payments from pharmaceutical companies – totaling $110.5 million in just two years. And it doesn’t take much to shift behavior. A JAMA Internal Medicine study found that a single pharma-sponsored meal – average value less than $20 – was associated with significantly higher rates of prescribing the promoted drug. A twenty-dollar lunch changes prescribing patterns. Doctors who received payments prescribed 58% more of the paid drug.

But it’s not just direct bribery. The entire system is structurally broken:

• The 15-minute assembly line: A psychiatrist earns $150 for three 15-minute “med checks” versus $90 for a single 45-minute therapy session. The math pushes them toward pills. Between 1996 and 2016, psychiatrists providing psychotherapy dropped from 44% to 22% of visits. Today, 53% of psychiatrists provide zero therapy to any of their patients.
• Primary care docs doing psychiatry: 79% of antidepressants aren’t even prescribed by psychiatrists – they’re written by primary care doctors in 10-15 minute visits with no therapy component. And 72.7% of those prescriptions are written without a psychiatric diagnosis even being noted.
• The DSM keeps expanding: The diagnostic manual went from 106 conditions in 1952 to 297 by 1994. More conditions = more prescriptions. And 69% of DSM-5 task force members had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies. The people deciding what counts as a mental illness are funded by the people selling the treatment.
• The revolving door: 9 out of 10 recent FDA commissioners went on to work for pharmaceutical companies after leaving the agency. The regulator becomes the regulated.

Therapy Actually Works. And They Buried It.

Here’s the part that should make you angry.

In the short term, talk therapy (specifically CBT – cognitive behavioral therapy) and antidepressants perform about the same. A landmark 2005 study by DeRubeis et al. randomized 240 patients with moderate-to-severe depression and found identical response rates: 58% for therapy, 58% for medication. The largest meta-analysis ever conducted on CBT – 409 trials, 52,702 patients (Cuijpers et al., 2023) – confirmed no significant short-term difference.

So they look equal at first glance. But watch what happens next.

The same research team followed those patients after treatment stopped. The relapse rates were:

Read that again. People who learned therapy skills and then stopped therapy had a 31% relapse rate. People who stopped taking their pills relapsed at 76%. And people who stayed on their medication still relapsed at 47% – worse than the therapy group that wasn’t doing anything anymore.

Therapy after it ends was more protective than medication during ongoing use.

Cuijpers’ 2023 meta-analysis confirmed this at scale: at 6-12 month follow-up, CBT significantly outperformed medication (effect size g = 0.34). A 2024 meta-analysis of 19 RCTs found that psychotherapy reduced relapse risk by 42% compared to medication alone.

Why? Because therapy and medication do fundamentally different things to your brain. Neuroimaging studies show that CBT strengthens “top-down” prefrontal cortex control over your emotional brain – it builds a skill your brain keeps. SSRIs suppress emotional reactivity “bottom-up” by flooding serotonin – an effect that vanishes the moment you stop taking them. Therapy is like physical therapy that teaches your muscles to work properly. Medication is like a painkiller that numbs the area. One builds capacity. The other creates dependency.

And here’s the kicker – exercise alone matches SSRIs. The Duke University SMILE study randomized depressed adults to exercise, sertraline, or placebo. After 16 weeks, exercise and medication performed about the same. But at 10-month follow-up? Relapse rates: exercise 8%, medication 38%. Exercise was nearly five times more protective than the drug.

So the thing that works best long-term (therapy) is being replaced by the thing that creates dependency (medication), while the thing that’s almost free (exercise) is barely mentioned. And adding medication to therapy doesn’t significantly improve outcomes – but adding therapy to medication does. The entire incentive structure is backwards.

The system isn’t designed to heal people. It’s designed to create customers.

And the results speak for themselves. Robert Whitaker documented in “Anatomy of an Epidemic” that as psychiatric medication use exploded, disability rates for mental illness didn’t go down – they went UP. From 1 in 468 Americans on disability for mental illness in 1955 to 1 in 76 today. More meds, more sickness. Something is deeply, fundamentally wrong.

The Real Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here’s what I think is actually going on. And this is where I might lose some people, but stay with me.

People don’t understand their emotions. They literally don’t have the language to describe what they’re feeling. They experience sadness or anxiety or anger and they immediately pathologize it. “Something must be wrong with me.” But the thing is – negative emotions are normal. They are a feature, not a bug. Sadness, anger, fear, anxiety – these are signals. They’re information. They’re your body and mind telling you something about your environment.

But we’ve built a society where inconvenient emotions feel abnormal. Where anything less than constant contentment feels like a disorder.

And here’s why.

Think about what’s happening to your brain every day. A hundred years ago, if you wanted to see a picture of a far-off land or something beautiful, you’d go to an art gallery. Maybe you’d see 20 paintings in an hour. That was the equivalent of scrolling Instagram for a person in 1920.

Now think about what Instagram actually is. You’re speed-running that art gallery – hundreds of images per minute. Incredible sunsets, perfect bodies, exotic locations, curated lives. Your brain is getting hit with dopamine spike after dopamine spike at a rate that no human being in history has ever experienced.

And then there’s TikTok. If Instagram is the art gallery on steroids, TikTok is the art gallery on quadruple steroids mainlined directly into your dopamine receptors. Short-form video is designed to keep your brain in a state of constant novelty-seeking. Research shows it causes prolonged Beta and Gamma brain activity even after you stop watching – your brain literally can’t calm down.

Because this bombardment is constant, your brain grows numb to it. You need more stimulation to feel anything. Regular life starts to feel flat. A conversation with a friend can’t compete with the infinite scroll. A walk outside feels boring.

And then there’s the escapism piece. We can always escape to some other realm with our phones. We don’t have to sit with uncomfortable feelings – we can just pick up the phone. Bad day at work? Scroll. Argument with your partner? Scroll. Feeling purposeless? Scroll. And it works. For a while. Until it all catches up with you. Until the mountain of unprocessed emotions becomes so large that it’s impossible to ignore.

These are external factors creating the conditions that make people think something is chemically wrong with their brain. The “chemical imbalance” isn’t some random glitch – it’s a predictable response to a world that constantly hijacks your dopamine system and never lets you sit with discomfort.

So a person goes to a psychiatrist with a pile of unprocessed emotions, a fried dopamine system, and no language for what they’re feeling. And the psychiatrist – who earns more from a 15-minute med check than an hour of therapy, who was trained in a system funded by pharma, who has 15 minutes to decide what’s wrong – writes a prescription that numbs those emotions. And it “works.” Until it doesn’t.

This Is What Conservatives Should Be Targeting

Quick sidebar. I find it strange that conservative energy around health issues has been focused heavily on vaccines. I get the skepticism toward institutions – that skepticism is warranted. But if you want to talk about a pharmaceutical industry running unchecked and causing widespread harm? SSRIs are the bigger story.

34 million Americans. A $6.8 billion market. An entire diagnostic system with 69% industry ties. A former FDA medical officer (Dr. Josef) who left the agency and now runs the world’s largest psychiatric drug tapering clinic because he saw the damage firsthand. A $3 billion fraud settlement (Study 329) where GlaxoSmithKline literally ghostwrote a study claiming Paxil was safe for kids when it wasn’t – and the journal still hasn’t retracted the paper.

This is the real problem. This is the fight worth having.

Gambling: The Rigged Game Targeting Young Men

Let me shift gears. This one hits different because it targets a specific demographic and it exploits a specific psychological need.

In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting. Before that, Americans legally wagered less than $5 billion a year on sports. In 2025? An estimated $157 billion, with some projections even higher. That’s a 3,000% increase in seven years. 90% of bets are placed on phones. The casino is in your pocket.

Saagar Enjeti from Breaking Points has been on his soapbox about this and I agree with him completely. He calls it a “predatory industry” and compares it to the opioid crisis. And he makes a point that should make everyone’s blood boil: cigarette companies are not allowed to partner with sports leagues, but gambling platforms are.

ESPN launched ESPN Bet. Barstool Sports exists basically as a gambling funnel. CNN partnered with prediction markets. Every sports broadcast integrates betting odds. A Ringer staffer admitted it’s “actively bankrupting some people on a regular basis” while acknowledging that gambling money “pays all our paychecks.”

But here’s what I really want to dig into – why this targets young men specifically.

The Psychology of the Rigged Game

Here’s the thing about sports betting that makes it different from slots or roulette. It has a skill narrative. You’re not just pulling a lever. You’re analyzing stats. You’re watching film. You’re reading matchup data. You know things about the sport. And that knowledge makes you believe you can beat the system.

This is what psychologists call the “illusion of control” – and the research shows something terrifying: knowledge actually amplifies the illusion rather than protecting against it. The more you know about sports, the more confident you become in your bets, even though the house edge hasn’t changed at all.

For young men specifically, this hooks into something deep. Research shows that sports betting is tied to masculinity, identity, and proving yourself. It’s a way to demonstrate knowledge, analytical skill, and risk tolerance – all things that our culture tells men they should have. The betting slip becomes, as one analysis put it, “a proxy for achievement when traditional pathways feel blocked.”

And those pathways are blocked for a lot of young men right now. The Equimundo 2025 report found that 86% of men define manhood by being a “provider,” but three-quarters say it’s harder for their generation to feel financially secure than their father’s. Over half say home ownership is out of reach. 69% of Gen Z males agree that “no one cares if men are okay.”

Into this void steps sports betting. It offers what these men are starving for: a sense of agency, mastery, competition, and belonging. Discord servers with 21,000+ members discussing picks. Group chats where not betting means being excluded from the conversation. Influencers who promise not financial success but what researchers call “masculine resurrection.”

The game is rigged and everyone loses – but the feeling of playing satisfies a need that nothing else in their lives is filling.

The Numbers Are Brutal

• 10% of men aged 18-30 meet criteria for gambling addiction
• 45% of men under 30 reported at least one gambling problem behavior
• 1 in 4 sports bettors have missed bill payments to gamble
• Survey data suggests 96% of sports bettors lose money
• Problem gamblers have among the highest suicide rates of any addiction disorder

And here’s the wealth transfer that should make anyone angry: the top 10% of gamblers generate 80% of industry revenues. 3% of users generate nearly 50% of sportsbook revenue. The business model literally depends on the addicts. Winners get throttled and limited. Losers get VIP treatment, phone calls, free bets, and personal attention designed to keep them losing.

In states that legalized online gambling, personal bankruptcy rose 25-30%. DraftKings spent $1.2 billion on marketing in 2024 alone. The elite profit. Regular people lose. Young men lose the most.

And then there’s Polymarket and prediction markets – same psychology, different packaging. “I’m not gambling, I’m predicting.” Over $3.3 billion was wagered on the 2024 presidential race, and after the election, volume plummeted 84%. Proving it was never about “information markets.” It was gambling with an intellectual costume.

Gambling is a tax on the desperate. Bill Maher recently called it a “tax on the stupid,” but that misses the point. These aren’t stupid people. They’re young men looking for any arena where they can prove they’re capable and smart and worthy – and the arena they found was designed from the ground up to take their money.

We’re Getting Dumber (And We Know It)

This last one might be the scariest because it’s the one we’re the most in denial about.

IQ scores are dropping. This isn’t speculation. It’s measured, replicated, and documented across dozens of countries.

The Bratsberg & Rogeberg study (2018) analyzed 30 years of Norwegian military IQ data and found that scores rose until roughly the 1975 birth cohort and then began a steady decline. The critical finding: the decline was observed within families – younger siblings scored lower than older siblings – which rules out genetics. This is environmental.

Norway, Denmark, Finland, France, the UK, Australia, the Netherlands, Estonia, Sweden – all show the same pattern. In the US, a study of ~394,000 Americans found declines in verbal reasoning, matrix reasoning, and letter/number series from 2006 to 2018. Estimates range from 2-4 IQ points lost per decade.

There are biological contributors – lead exposure, microplastics, phthalates – and those deserve their own conversation. But I want to focus on something else. The psychological factors. The things we’re doing to our own minds every day.

Start with screen time – the constant dopamine bombardment I described in the SSRI section. Sam Parr and Shaan Puri discussed this on My First Million (Episode 797), framing focus as “attention capital” – the scarcest strategic resource in the modern economy. They’re right. Gloria Mark at UC Irvine has tracked on-screen attention spans for two decades: 2.5 minutes in 2004. 75 seconds in 2012. 47 seconds today. Your attention span has dropped 69% in 20 years.

Your phone makes you dumber even when you’re not using it. A UT Austin study found that the mere presence of a smartphone – turned off, face down – significantly reduces your cognitive capacity. Just having it in the room taxes your brain.

Then there’s the collapse in reading. 40% of Americans read zero books in 2025. 32% of 8th graders in public schools scored “below basic” in reading on national tests – the worst in decades. Reading builds exactly the cognitive muscles that scrolling destroys: sustained attention, complex reasoning, the ability to hold an argument in your head long enough to evaluate it.

Young People Know – And They’re Laughing About It

Here’s the angle that really gets me. Young people aren’t in denial about this. They know. They embrace it. They call it “brainrot” and they make it a meme.

”Brain rot” was Oxford’s Word of the Year in 2024. Usage increased 230% in one year. Gen Z and Gen Alpha post captions like “my brain is so rotted” as a bonding ritual. Not being able to focus is “relatable content.” Not reading books is a punchline. Having the attention span of a goldfish is a badge of honor.

But underneath the humor is something darker. This is self-deprecating humor as a defense mechanism for shame and insecurity. Psychological research shows that self-defeating humor – joking at your own expense – has the strongest correlation with low self-esteem, depression, and emotional instability of any humor style. It’s not confidence. It’s “hiding negative feelings” behind a performance of not caring.

And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy through what researchers call “irony poisoning” – the process where repeated ironic statements gradually dissolve the ironic layer and become sincere beliefs. When you joke every day that “I literally cannot read anymore,” the joke eventually stops being a joke.

It gets worse. Stereotype threat research shows that simply being reminded of a negative expectation about your group actually impairs your performance. Every brainrot meme that says “our generation can’t focus” is functioning as a cognitive prime that makes it harder to focus. The identity reinforces the reality.

68% of young people say social media harms their ability to focus. 65% believe their digital habits will hurt them later in life. They know. And they feel powerless to change it. Researchers call this “digital learned helplessness” – a conditioned response to platforms specifically engineered to override your agency.

The Fear of Putting Yourself Out There

Here’s what nobody is saying about this generation. They’re not stupid. They’re terrified.

Think about what it was like to grow up before phones. You could try things. You could fail. You could say something dumb at a party and it would be forgotten by Monday. Your mistakes didn’t follow you. They weren’t screenshotted, posted, shared, memed, and cached on the internet forever.

Now? Everything is on the record. Every awkward moment can go viral. Every wrong opinion can get you canceled. 56% of Gen Z users say fear of rejection stopped them from pursuing a relationship. 32% are afraid of being judged for supporting the wrong brands. Gen Z may be the most risk-averse generation on record – fewer are getting driver’s licenses, having sex, or doing the messy trial-and-error stuff that previous generations did as teenagers.

Perfectionism has increased 33% since 1989 according to Thomas Curran’s meta-analysis of 41,641 college students. And the most alarming dimension – socially prescribed perfectionism, the feeling that others demand perfection from you – has skyrocketed. 66% of young people in 2016 scored above the typical 1989 level. They feel like the world is watching and the world has zero tolerance for mistakes.

So they don’t try. They lurk. They consume. They watch other people live instead of living themselves.

The Rebellion Nobody Expected

But young people aren’t just cowering. They’re also rebelling – rejecting the polished facade entirely. Gen Z is calling the curated Instagram aesthetic “cringe.” 71% trust creators more when they share unfiltered, behind-the-scenes content over polished posts. This explains the rise of streamers like iShowSpeed and Kai Cenat. They’re not polished guys. They’re real. Chaotic. Unscripted. Authentic in a world that feels fake.

And some are going darker – embracing edginess and transgression as their generation’s version of being punk. When political correctness becomes the establishment, saying something politically incorrect becomes the rebellion. The irony poisoning that turns “I can’t read” into a sincere identity works the same way here – say something “ironically” enough times and the ironic layer dissolves. (There’s a whole essay to be written about how transgression switched sides. For now, the point is this: shaming people doesn’t fix the behavior. It amplifies it.)

Fear, Shame, and Anger

OK let me land this plane. Because underneath all of this – the brainrot memes, the edgy rebellion, the lurking, the perfectionism – there are three emotions that young people are drowning in and have no tools to process.

Fear. Fear of making mistakes. Fear of being judged. Fear of putting yourself out there in a world where everything is permanent. This fear is rational – the environment created it. But it’s paralyzing an entire generation.

Shame. Shame about not being able to focus. Shame about scrolling for hours and knowing it’s destroying you. Shame about not measuring up to the curated lives you see online. Young people are tired of being shamed – by parents, by institutions, by each other. And when shame becomes unbearable, people either collapse inward or lash outward.

Anger. Young people are furious. About climate, about inequality, about the systems that seem designed to extract from them. And they’re coping with this anger in three ways, none of them healthy:

1. Repressing it. “Good vibes only.” Toxic positivity. Acting like the bad things aren’t happening. Research shows that suppressing emotions causes significantly more physiological stress – the body pays for what the mind won’t process.

2. Numbing themselves to it. Desensitization. Nothing shocks them anymore. They’ve seen so much violence, tragedy, and outrage that their emotional responsiveness is impaired. Even previously unremarkable young people show blunted emotional reactions after repeated exposure to content that would have been devastating a generation ago.

3. Making it their entire identity. Think Greta Thunberg. When outrage becomes not something you feel but something you are, it consumes everything. Researchers call this “identity fusion” – a visceral merging with a cause that strongly motivates extreme behavior. It also burns people out. Young activists report backlash, savior pressure, and mental health deterioration as the costs of fusing their identity with their rage.

None of these three strategies involves actually processing the emotion. And that’s the core problem.

Are People Actually Getting Dumber? Or Just Emotionally Drowning?

Here’s my honest take. I don’t think people are actually getting dumber. Not in the way the IQ data suggests.

I think when people cannot express their emotions – when they don’t have language for what they’re feeling – they do things that make them appear dumber.

And the science backs this up. Amy Arnsten’s research at Yale shows that even mild uncontrollable stress causes “a rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities.” Your prefrontal cortex – the part of your brain responsible for reasoning, planning, creativity, and impulse control – literally goes offline when you’re emotionally overwhelmed. High cortisol shuts down your thinking brain and hands the keys to your amygdala, which only knows fight, flight, or freeze.

This isn’t a metaphor. It’s visible on brain scans. When the amygdala activates, the prefrontal cortex deactivates. Logical reasoning, empathy, self-control, creative thinking – all offline. And stress specifically impairs divergent thinking – the ability to see multiple solutions, think creatively, make novel connections. The exact capacities you need to navigate a complex world.

A generation living in chronic emotional overwhelm – bombarded by content designed to trigger fear, shame, and outrage – is going to test as dumber even if their raw cognitive hardware is fine. The software is crashing because the emotional load is too high.

And here’s the kicker: global emotional intelligence scores declined 5.79% from 2019 to 2024 across 28,000 adults in 166 countries. Researchers called it an “Emotional Recession.” We are getting worse at processing emotions at the exact moment we need that skill most.

UCLA neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman proved with fMRI that simply naming an emotion – putting it into words – decreases amygdala activity and increases prefrontal cortex activity. The act of saying “I feel afraid” literally calms the fear response and brings your thinking brain back online. But you can’t name what you don’t have words for. And 10-30% of adolescents struggle with alexithymia – the clinical term for not being able to identify or describe your own emotions.

People who can’t name their emotions can’t regulate them. People who can’t regulate their emotions can’t think clearly. People who can’t think clearly make choices that look indistinguishable from stupidity. The whole chain starts with emotional illiteracy.

John Vervaeke at the University of Toronto calls this the “meaning crisis” and points out that 89% of 16-29 year olds in the UK say their life has no meaning. His metaphor for our time: the Zombie – a being that consumes without purpose, moving without agency. That’s what brainrot culture is processing. Young people sense they’re becoming zombies. They can’t stop it. So they laugh about it. And the laughter makes it worse.

These Are the Same Problem

These three time bombs aren’t separate issues. They’re a feedback loop.

IQ decline and the attention crisis make people more susceptible to gambling. When you can’t think through probabilities and your impulse control is fried, the sports betting app in your pocket becomes irresistible.

SSRIs cause emotional blunting that removes the alarm system that would normally make people feel bad about gambling losses or endless scrolling. The medication numbs the warning signals.

Gambling losses and screen addiction cause depression and anxiety, driving more people to psychiatrists who prescribe more SSRIs.

SSRIs reduce the motivation to address root causes – to do the hard work of understanding your emotions, changing your habits, building real meaning.

Screen addiction – which drives the IQ decline – is also the delivery mechanism for gambling apps and pharma advertising.

And in every case, the people profiting are insulated from the damage. Tech executives famously limit their own children’s screen time while designing addictive products for everyone else’s kids. The wealth flows up. The damage flows down.

All three disproportionately hit young men – the demographic with the highest increase in antidepressant use, the highest gambling addiction rates, and the steepest cognitive declines.

Each Person Who Talked About These Problems Also Pointed to the Fix

I don’t want to end this on pure doom. Because the thing I noticed is that every person who raised the alarm also pointed toward the solution. And the solutions all converge on the same thing.

Gambling: Don’t Be a Rat in Someone Else’s Experiment

Gambling is a loser’s game. You may win in the short term. In the long term, you lose big.

But more importantly – recognize what’s actually driving the behavior. The psychological engine of gambling is the same engine as scrolling Instagram. You get a dopamine hit when you place a bet. You get a bigger hit when you win, making you want to bet again. You get a cortisol spike when you lose, which creates discomfort, which makes you want to bet again to chase that sweet dopamine. It’s the same loop. The same rat-in-a-maze reward circuitry.

And the status piece: “I’m a winner.” “I know things.” “I’m smart.” You might be smart once. But over the long term, if you keep playing a rigged game, you will be proven dumb. The smart money doesn’t play a losing game. The only winning move is not to play.

Don’t be a rat in someone else’s experiment.

SSRIs: Learn to Grapple With Your Emotions

Dr. Josef says it plainly: SSRIs are ok for short-term crisis stabilization, but they only mask the issue. The solution is to learn how to grapple with and deal with your emotions. And the best way to do that is with other people.

This is also why psychotherapy crushes medication in the long run – 31% relapse vs 76%. Therapy isn’t magic. It’s practice. Practice at naming what you feel. Practice at sitting with discomfort instead of numbing it. Practice at understanding why you react the way you react. These are skills. You build them. And once built, they persist even after treatment ends – unlike a pill that stops working the moment you stop swallowing.

Now – I know the obvious objection. Therapy costs $100-250 a session. 56% of psychologists have no openings. Average waitlist is three months. Telling a struggling 22-year-old “just do therapy” when they can’t get an appointment or afford one is tone-deaf.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: professional therapy is basically a post-WWII invention. For the other 99.9% of human history, people processed their emotions with each other – with family, friends, clergy, community elders. The Harvard Study of Adult Development – 86 years of data, the longest study of human happiness ever conducted – found that relationship satisfaction at age 50 predicted physical health at 80 better than cholesterol levels. Having even one close confidant is a significant predictor of mental health, physical health, and quality of life.

And what’s happened to those relationships? Church membership dropped from 73% to 47%. 15% of men have zero close friendships – a fivefold increase since 1990. The Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic and said it kills as surely as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. We demolished the community structures that used to hold people together and then professionalized the thing that used to be free.

It says something about our society that the only place many people feel safe being vulnerable is in a room they’re paying $200 an hour to sit in. That’s not a therapy problem. That’s a community problem. And the real fix – the one that doesn’t require insurance or a waitlist – is finding people you can actually be honest with. That’s harder than it sounds. But it’s also what humans did for thousands of years before we decided emotions were a clinical specialty.

Getting “Dumber”: Address the Emotions Underneath

The fix here isn’t “read more books” or “delete TikTok” – though both help. The real fix is addressing the core emotions that are running the show.

Fear: Young people need environments where they can make mistakes without those mistakes being permanent and public. They need spaces where failure is expected, processed, and learned from – not screenshotted and memed. This is what free play used to provide and what the phone-based childhood destroyed.

Shame: The brainrot humor, the edgy rebellion, the numbing – these are all shame responses. Shame drives people underground. It makes them hide, perform, or lash out. The antidote to shame isn’t more shaming. It’s understanding. It’s someone saying “I see what you’re actually feeling and it makes sense.” This is what the Enneagram does well – it names the specific shame pattern of each type without judgment.

Anger: The repression, the numbing, the identity fusion – these are all mishandled anger. And as I described above, unprocessed anger triggers the same prefrontal shutdown that makes people test as dumber. The fix isn’t “calm down.” The fix is building the capacity to feel the anger without it hijacking your brain. And that’s a skill. One that can be learned. One that therapy teaches and medication doesn’t.

The Thread Through All Three

Every one of these problems traces back to the same root: people don’t have the tools to process their own emotions.

They get numbed by SSRIs instead of learning to feel. They chase dopamine through gambling instead of building real competence. They scroll through brainrot instead of sitting with discomfort. They perform ironic detachment instead of expressing genuine vulnerability.

And every one of the solutions converges on the same thing: developing emotional literacy. Learning to name what you feel. Learning to sit with it. Learning that negative emotions are normal – they are signals, not disorders.

That’s part of why I’m building 9takes – a place where people can see how different personalities experience the same situation. It’s a small piece of a much larger puzzle. But every tool that helps people name what they’re feeling and understand why other people react differently is a tool that chips away at the root cause.

The ticking time bombs are real. But the fuse isn’t intelligence or willpower or morality. The fuse is emotional illiteracy. And that’s something we can actually fix.