Opening Salvo // THE LOCUS OF CONTROL RESIDES IN GEN X
Locus of Control
Toward a Human Future
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
Volume 4 // Issue 4 // Spring 2023 // FATE
Few days go by that I am not grateful for being a part of Generation X: We were able to have largely analog, free-range childhoods devoid of cell phones and social media. Our self-images weren’t constructed by the gaze of thousands of followers on Instagram. Our self-esteem is not as heavily influenced by cartoon hearts and likes; we rely more on the substantive relationships we have with our friends, family, and colleagues.
My heart goes out to the digital natives, especially the teenage girls. Writing recently on Substack, psychologist Jonathan Haidt delves deeper into why the mental well-being of teen girls in politically progressive families is particularly bad. He observes that part of what’s going on is that these young people have taken up disempowerment as a primary way of experiencing the world, shifting their “locus of control” from themselves to outside forces that they’re constantly told are out to get them. “As first laid out by Julian Rotter in the 1950s, this is a malleable personality trait referring to the fact that some people have an internal locus of control —they feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them,” Haidt writes. “Sixty years of research show that people with an internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. People with an external locus of control are more passive and more likely to become depressed.”
The harm of believing you have no choice is real. According to research by Pew, cited by Haidt in his article, over 50 percent of left-leaning white women under 30 have been told that they have a mental health condition; that is an epidemic. So what should we do about it?
First, we should take heart in the word “malleable” cited in the literature. This is a solvable problem.* It’s clear that keeping kids away from social media in the first place would be a good start, but the adults have to model that behavior as well. If you need inspiration, I highly recommend Jaron Lanier’s book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.
One other solution I’d like to offer is this: Gen X needs to get serious about mentorship. We need to help the generations coming up behind us to understand that in the modern Western world, things are actually better and safer for them than for any other people over the course of human history. We need to model for them that, in fact, they have the agency to have happy, fulfilling lives. (This may include trying to make things better for people who are growing up in places around the world where girls don’t get to go to school, for instance.) We need to offer them opportunities to get off social media and start engaging with the real world. We need to listen to what they’re afraid of, but not let them be consumed by it. We need to make better arguments about why it’s good for them—necessary for their development in fact—to be interacting with people who don’t think like them, who have read different books, who hold different political beliefs, who don’t believe they can’t get ahead because someone is actively trying to hold them back.
If they are worried about systems of oppression, then let’s really talk about that in all its many forms: Surveillance capitalism worries me a great deal more than “the patriarchy” right now. Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand just how much information about our lives has been vacuumed up by unaccountable corporations who are ushering in a new age of serfdom, just when we thought we were at our most free.
“Surveillance capitalism commandeered the wonders of the digital world to meet our needs for effective life, promising the magic of unlimited information and a thousand ways to anticipate our needs and ease the complexities of our harried lives,” writes Zuboff. “Thanks to surveillance capitalism, the resources for effective life that we seek in the digital realm now come encumbered with a new breed of menace. Under this new regime, the precise moment at which our needs are met is also the precise moment at which our lives are plundered for behavioral data, all for the sake of others’ gain. The result is a perverse amalgam of empowerment inextricably layered with diminishment. In the absence of a decisive societal response that constrains or outlaws this logic of accumulation, surveillance capitalism appears poised to become the dominant form of capitalism in our time.”
Gen X remembers a time when the digital world didn’t dominate our lives, and we may be able to serve as guides at this interesting crossroads, where we must learn to use technology, but not let it use us. There’s an awful lot of experience and wisdom that we can offer younger generations that will make their lives better, and our country stronger. I am still learning and growing and marveling at what the older people in my life can teach me, but it’s also time that my generation gives back.
I am already an official crazy aunt to three wonderful young people whom I’m related to by blood—but I’m willing to be a weird Gen X auntie for other young adults. I’m doubling down on giving counsel to many younger people who seem to be struggling, as well as those who just need another place to go—somewhere where they’re reassured that Twitter isn’t real, and that the world needs them as leaders. If we make a point to have more intergenerational dialogue, we can work on getting through this strange period of history—together.
Zuboff argues in her book that we need a new approach to this issue that confronts it head-on names it, and tames it. It will take all of us staying focused on the idea that we have a choice about what we want the world to look like, and that we must pay close heed to the ethics we need to enact that vision. We need the locus of control to reside with us—as individuals and communities—not with manipulative algorithms programmed in black boxes by giant corporations. “If the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so,” she writes. “We will need to know. We will need to decide. We will need to decide who decides. This is our fight for a human future.”//
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