There’s been a lot of talk recently about how young people today are becoming less intelligent, their brains turned to mush by TikToks and Instagram reels, unable to string a sentence together without the help of ChatGPT or to get through any book that isn’t a “smutty” romantasy novel with page-long chapters. But there’s been some good news (kind of…?), or at least news that might dampen the hand-wringing smugness of millennials, Gen Xers, boomers and whatever generation Joe Biden is: it turns out everyone else is more stupider too.

It’s not that people are getting inherently less smart, and it should be noted that there is no singular way of measuring intelligence (an idea which is eugenics-adjacent at the very least.) But according to a recent article in The Financial Times, which analysed multiple studies from around the world, we are witnessing a steep decline in “the average person’s ability to reason and solve novel problems”. The OECD – a forum of countries which are generally high-income and located in the Global North – finds that 15-year-olds peaked at reading, mathematics and science skills in 2012, with test scores falling ever since. The number of 18-year-olds who report difficulties with thinking, concentrating and learning new things – which remained stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s – shot up dramatically in the mid-2010s, according to the annual Monitoring the Future study. These trends are not limited to any one generation: OECD figures also show that adults of all age groups are increasingly struggling with reasoning, numeracy and problem-solving, and the decline in literacy skills is particularly striking.

The explanations differ from country to country – the US, which has high rates of inequality and poorly funded public education, is experiencing sharper declines than somewhere like Finland. But at this point it shouldn’t come as a surprise that smartphone technology plays a significant role just about everywhere: there’s been a lot of studies lately which suggest that the internet is weakening our attention spans, affecting our memory and even shrinking our brains, and most of us seem to understand this instinctively – some people react defensively to the idea that there might be downsides to wracking up 10 hours of screen time a day, but studies show they are in the minority. 

In tandem with the rise of smartphones, we are reading fewer books and newspaper articles, and instead consuming more social media posts and video content (but even then we’re struggling to concentrate – Netflix now instructs its writers to work on the assumption that viewers will be scrolling through a ‘second screen’ and so require additional exposition). You don’t have to be an English Literature professor to find these trends concerning: the more that our capacity to read and think critically is diminished, the more vulnerable we become to manipulation by demagogues like Elon Musk. A savvy, well-informed public is a threat to the Right, while social media-induced gullibility serves it well – Donald Trump certainly wasn’t harmed by the millions of people who believe that there exists a dark web snuff video of Hillary Clinton killing a young girl and wearing her skin as a mask.

The cause of these problems isn’t so much the internet itself as the particular way it’s organised today: the endless feeds, the constant barrage of content which is presented to us rather than something we actively seek out. This represents “a move from self-directed behaviour to passive consumption and constant context-switching”, writes John Burn-Murdoch in The Financial Times. In some ways this is good news: it is in the interests of the companies which control the internet to make it as addictive as possible, but maybe there could exist a version of it which doesn’t fry our brains, which doesn’t wring out our attention spans for every last drop of profit. At least now we should stop pretending this is a problem which affects only the under-25s, as though older generations are spending all their time reading Heidegger and not watching Instagram reels on public transport like everyone else.