I've been reading about King Solomon lately. Some people call him the wisest man who ever lived. He is also the man who, according to the Hebraic record, had 700 wives and 300 concubines. He writes with a level of depression I’ve never seen before.

That made me curious about how someone who sets up camp on the mountain top got there.

His family story is brutal. His father, King David, watched Bathsheba bathing from his roof, sent for her, and got her pregnant while her husband Uriah was off fighting David's war. When the cover-up failed, David had Uriah put on the front line to be killed. For a long time preachers painted Bathsheba as a willing partner. A growing number of scholars now read it differently. Old Testament scholar Richard Davidson lays out the case that it was "power rape": a king summoning a woman who had no real way to say no. If you want to dive more deeply into that story and others – I wrote a book about character development called Nine70.

Solomon wasn't born yet. He came afterward, once the first baby had died. But he grew up inside the fallout. His half-brother Amnon raped their half-sister Tamar. Tamar's brother Absalom waited two years, then had Amnon murdered. Later Absalom led a coup against their father and slept with David's concubines on the palace roof in front of the whole nation. Then Absalom was killed, and David's grief over him is one of the hardest passages in scripture to read. Insane story right?!

Did all of that lead to a thousand women? I can't prove it, and the Bible never says. But the man who later wrote "I hated life" was clearly deeply troubled by his upbringing and its fruit.

So, I started reading some of what he wrote. One line in Proverbs got my attention:

He had it right, and modern science would add one thing. A meta-analysis of 66 long-term studies and more than 88,000 people found anxiety predicts later depression. It also found depression predicts later anxiety almost as strongly. The road runs both ways. But anxiety usually shows up first. In a national survey of more than 9,000 Americans, the median age anxiety disorders begin is 11 years old. For mood disorders it's 30.

Around the same time last week, I was listening to The Diary of a CEO with Professor Jiang Xueqin. He's a Yale-educated educator who runs a YouTube channel making geopolitical predictions, and plenty of people dispute them. For almost two hours he walked through a world order he sees coming apart, and he warned that AI will be repurposed as a "control grid" to "monitor and surveil all of us." To add fuel to that fire, Anthropic lost their appeal last week to be removed from the Pentagon's blacklist because they won’t agree to their technology being used for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.

In the interview, Steven Bartlett asked Jiang what the average person, watching all this from home, should do about it. Jiang didn't hesitate.

He said the best education in the world had taught him the world was purely material and God didn't exist. Through his 20s, 30s, and 40s, he said, he was "deeply angry, depressed, frustrated," because without God there's no order to anything, and there can be no hope in chaos. A wife he calls an angel and three kids changed that. His real belief, he said, only goes back about two years. His advice: believe in God, and focus on your family.

That stuck with me, because a friend of mine recently argued that Gen Z is so anxious and depressed because they've walked away from organized religion and have no connection to something greater than themselves – that they are hopeless.

So I went looking to see if the data backs that up.

Gen Z was born roughly 1997 to 2012, which makes them about 14 to 29 today.

The best national number I found comes from the federal government's 2025 survey on drug use and health. Among 18 to 25 year olds, 12.2 percent had moderate to severe anxiety. For adults 50 and older, it was 3.7 percent. More than three times higher.

That gap grew fast. Between 2008 and 2018, anxiety among 18 to 25 year olds nearly doubled, from 8 percent to almost 15, the fastest rise of any age group. Gallup found the share of adults under 30 currently dealing with depression went from 13 percent in 2017 to 26.7 percent in 2025.

Kinda.

Gen Z is far less religious than older Americans. In Pew's latest big study, 43 percent of 18 to 24 year olds have no religion, compared to 13 percent of Americans over 74. You may have heard about a youth revival in church attendance. Pew's newest analysis finds no clear evidence of one, just things holding steady since about 2020.

The most direct test of my friend's theory used surveys of 417,540 American teenagers from 1991 to 2019. The researchers asked: if teens had stayed as religious as they were in 1991, how much of the rise in depressive symptoms would have disappeared? About 13 percent of the jump after 2012. Real, but a slice. Religion declined slowly over two decades, while depression spiked after 2012 – when smart phones became our favorite addiction…

The same study found something interesting. Teens who said religion was important to them but never went to services had 2.23 times the odds of depressive symptoms of teens who said it mattered and went every week. Believing it and not living it was the risky combination.

Harvard followed more than 5,000 young people from their teens into their twenties. Those who attended services weekly as teenagers reported more life satisfaction, more positive feelings, and far less drug use later on. They were 33 percent less likely to use illicit drugs. The link to fewer depressive symptoms was small, and there was no link to anxiety at all. I’m curious if that just comes with connection with other humans in real life more than the religious exercises.

The Global Flourishing Study, run by Harvard, Baylor, and Gallup, surveyed more than 200,000 people in 22 countries. Two findings matter here. Young adults are no longer flourishing more than middle-aged adults, the way they used to. And people who attend services weekly scored 7.42 out of 10 on flourishing, against 6.86 for people who never go.

There's a caution worth hearing too. When researchers tracked people who stopped going to church, their health and mood were already sliding before they quit. Leaving didn't cause the decline. Sometimes the struggle comes first and the pew goes empty after.

Across studies of young people ages 10 to 24, saying religion is important to you, on its own, wasn't linked to less depression. Spiritual well-being was. So was showing up.

Which brings me back to the second half of Solomon's proverb: "a good word makes it glad." A good word comes from a person. Among college students, the connection between faith and better mental health was fully explained by emotional support. Other research finds churchgoers are more satisfied with life largely because of the friends they make there.

So my friend may be onto something. But it isn't a checked box on a survey that protects a young person. It's a room full of people who know your name and say a good word to you every week.

Religion is one thread. I think most of oerganizated religion has been a curse on the world but that’s for another day. We should applaud some of the bold who don’t want to be around the hypocrisy - but I think they are still sincerely looking for a Higher Power.

Ok lets look at the data:

Phones. A 2025 Florida survey of 500 adults found anxiety scores rose with weekly social media use, from 3.56 for people who don't use it to 7.08 for those on it 10 or more hours a week. Gen Z scored highest of any generation. The groups were small, so treat it as a signal. The stronger evidence comes from experiments. Pooling 10 randomized trials, cutting back on social media modestly lowered depression symptoms. And the length of the break mattered: breaks of a week or longer helped, while shorter ones made people feel worse. Serious researchers still argue about how big the social media effect really is, and that debate is fair.

Sleep. Researchers at Berkeley found that losing sleep raised next-day anxiety, and even modest night-to-night drops in sleep predicted more anxiety the next day. One mattress company's survey put Gen Z's average bedtime at 12:30 a.m., with TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram named as the reasons. It's a marketing survey, not a study, but anyone with a teenager won't be shocked.

Energy drinks. Among 16 to 24 year olds, energy drinks have passed coffee as the main source of caffeine, 30.6 percent to 27.3 percent, according to a Citi survey. A year earlier it was 20.6 percent to 40.4. Dose matters here. In people with panic disorder, a big hit of caffeine, around five cups at once, triggered a panic attack in about half of them, and none on placebo. At a normal single cup the effect mostly disappears. Some energy drinks carry 300 milligrams in one can.

A harder childhood. Gen Z adults are 9.5 points less likely than Baby Boomers to fall in the group with few adverse childhood experiences, and about 11 points more likely to land in a high-adversity group driven by household dysfunction rather than sexual abuse.

Loneliness. In a global survey, 80 percent of Gen Z said they'd felt lonely in the past year, against 45 percent of Boomers.

None of these is proven to cause the next one, but you can see how they could feed each other. The phone keeps you up. Short sleep raises tomorrow's anxiety. You grab an energy drink to get through the afternoon, and the caffeine revs a body that already feels on edge. An anxious, tired person pulls back from people and scrolls through the dopamine causing addictive doomscroll instead. And loneliness takes away the good word that Solomon said lifts the heart.

Solomon had wealth, wisdom, and a thousand companions, and he still wrote that he hated life. Jiang spent decades with the best education money can buy and called himself angry and depressed until he found God and his family. Solomon ends Ecclesiastes with what he calls the whole of life: "Fear God and keep His commandments." Jesus later summed up those commandments in two: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.

-Jared

P.S. - My wife Baddie Crocker has a beautiful newsletter where she shares her perspectives on tending the land, recipes, women’s health and more.

P.S. - This newsletter does not provide medical advice. The content, such as graphics, images, text, and all other materials, are provided for reference and educational purposes only. The content is not meant to be complete or exhaustive or to be applicable to any specific individual’s medical condition.

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