(End of the American Dream)—Our society is more addicted to the Internet than ever. So how has that affected us? Are we happier than we once were, or are we less happy? Are we more mentally healthy than we once were, or are we less mentally healthy? I don’t have to give you the answers to those questions, because you already know. Our society has gone completely nuts, and our suicide rate has soared. In particular, we are seeing historically high levels of suicide and depression among our young people. We have a major national crisis on our hands, but hardly anyone is talking about it.
We were not designed to endlessly stare at our screens.
Life is supposed to be about so much more than that.
Yes, the Internet can be used to do really good things. Personally, I use it to share the truth with large numbers of people all over the globe. But the Internet also brings out the very worst in humanity.
At this stage, the Internet is absolutely teeming with just about every sort of evil that you can possibly imagine, and most of us are spending an enormous amount of time wading around in that cesspool. In fact, a recent survey discovered that Americans with a home Internet subscription “spend nearly half their day online”…
Wired Americans spend nearly half their day online — splitting that time almost evenly between watching videos or TV shows and working, browsing and shopping, according to a new survey.
“This new survey was eye-opening,” said Eric Bruno, senior vice president of product management for Optimum, whose telecommunications firm interviewed 2,000 US residents who have a home Internet subscription with any company for the poll.
Many of us would simply not be able to function if the Internet suddenly went away.
Thanks to our phones, we take it with us everywhere that we go, and when we are at home we use it in a multitude of different ways…
They spend 5.4 of those hours browsing, working, gaming, looking at social media, reading email or paying bills, the survey found.
They spend another five hours streaming video or TV content.
I am not saying that the Internet is bad.
Ultimately, it is just another tool.
The problem comes when we get addicted, and young people are particularly susceptible.
One study that was just released discovered that the younger a girl is when she gets her first smartphone, the more likely she is to have suicidal thoughts when she gets older…
Nearly half of young women who received their first smartphone at age 5 or 6 now report having suicidal thoughts, compared to just over a quarter of those who waited until 13 to get their device. A sweeping new study tracking more than 100,000 young adults across the globe reveals a troubling pattern that should alarm every parent: the younger children are when they first own a smartphone, the worse their mental health becomes by early adulthood.
Kids in the United States are committing suicide in unprecedented numbers.
According to the CDC, in 2023 suicide “was the second leading cause of death for people ages 10-34”.
Reading that should absolutely horrify you.
Personally, it is my opinion that parents should delay giving smartphones to their children for as long as possible.
In addition to being more likely to have suicidal thoughts, those that get smartphones at an early age are also more likely to develop a whole host of other emotional problems…
Early smartphone ownership correlates with a troubling range of symptoms in young adulthood beyond suicidal thoughts. Those who got phones before age 13 show higher rates of aggression, feelings of detachment from reality, and hallucinations. Among specific mental health functions, early smartphone users struggle more with self-image, self-worth, emotional control, and resilience – particularly females. Males show greater difficulties with stability, calmness, and empathy.
Other studies have come up with similar results.
Here is another example…
A new study provides answers. Researchers at UC San Francisco found that as preteens used more social media, their depressive symptoms increased. Yet the reverse wasn’t true — a rise in depressive symptoms didn’t predict a later increase in social media use.
On average, kids’ social media use rose from seven to 73 minutes per day over the three years of the study and their depressive symptoms went up 35%. The study, which was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was published in JAMA Network Open.
The research team, led by Jason Nagata, MD, MSc, associate professor in UCSF’s Department of Pediatrics, examined data following nearly 12,000 kids aged 9 to 10 years and then three years later at 12 to 13. The study is among the first to use within-person longitudinal data, meaning researchers could track changes over time in each child to accurately assess the link between social media and depression.
If you endlessly put garbage into your mind, you are going to get garbage out.
Of course if everyone was using the Internet to read the Bible and to focus on things that are true, things that are honest, things that are just, and things that are pure, we wouldn’t have a problem.
But that isn’t how most Americans use the Internet.
Most Americans spend countless hours consuming content that is overtly evil.
As a result, our society has become lawless. Let me share yet another example of this with you…
In the shocking clip, a man in a white t-shirt is can be seen being shoved to ground by two men and repeatedly beaten as other members of the crowd jeer and join in.
The gang beat the man for nearly a minute as he lay in the middle of the street, seemingly stepping on his head multiple times.
When the barrage of attacks temporarily stopped, he is seen attempting to stand – but immediately fell over in apparent disorientation. One attacker yelled out ‘my man’s drunk’.
People are talking about this case all over the Internet.
At one point a woman rushed to help the man that had been beaten, and she was viciously attacked too…
A woman in a black dress rushed to his aid, but was attacked by the crowd, suffering two blows to the face.
The impact caused her to fall, with her head slamming the pavement. She became unconscious as blood spewed from her mouth.
This is our society now.
Whether you like it or not, we have raised an entire generation that has embraced lawlessness.
If we had raised them differently, we would have gotten different results.
Sadly, we still have not learned our lesson.
Most of us continue to run after things we should not be running after, and that is a recipe for societal disaster.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.