The good news is, it’s not you and you’re not crazy: Everyone really is getting dumber and dumber nowadays. The bad news is… well, everyone really is getting dumber. That’s according to some bracing new research that shows the human intellect’s best days may truly be behind us. Uh oh…

Human intelligence is rapidly deteriorating, according to multiple recent studies.

There’s actually more bad news — this isn’t just one outlier study showing a slight decline in people’s intellects. The data, compiled by The Financial Timescomes from an array of studies at an array of institutions looking at an array of intelligence markers.

All of them show that the main reason everyone seems to low-key be kind of an idiot these days is because they actually are. And before you start smirking, Europeans — y’all are included in this too, not just us notoriously dim-witted Americans.

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The studies show that attention spans, reasoning skills, and problem-solving skills are all tanking.

In its analysis, The Financial Times looked at everything from the University of Michigan’s yearly Monitoring the Future Study to analysis from Europe’s Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). They all showed the same thing: We are getting dumber in some key ways.

The latter organization, for example, administers the Programme for International Student Assessmentwhich measures educational skills in 15-year-olds worldwide, including in the U.S. It has consistently shown declines worldwide for years.

The declines are across the board, affecting everything from attention spans to problem-solving skills and numeracy, or the ability to work with and understand numbers and mathematical concepts. But it’s not just “kids these days” that are suffering. The OECD’s Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies shows declines among all age groups.

It is, however, worse here in the U.S. in some cases than in the rest of the world. The OECD foundfor example, that the proportion of people unable to “use mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements” (which includes logic skills, not just arithmetic) has risen by 25% worldwide. But it’s up by 35% in the U.S., which at least partly explains why so many Americans are so easily convinced of utter nonsense.

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The declines predate the pandemic by nearly 10 years, seeming to have begun in 2012.

The pandemic has become a convenient scapegoat for cognitive decline, especially among young people — it did present a major educational disruption, of course, and to be sure, the events of 2020 have had deep impacts that are likely to take years to fully comprehend. Just ask any teacher.

But while the upheavals of 2020 may have exacerbated this intelligence decline, it definitely didn’t start it. The tests show that intelligence seems to have begun falling in 2012, and some assessments show it declining more between then and 2018 than it has during or since the pandemic.

One key example is the Monitoring the Future studyconducted every year since 1975 by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, which asks 18-year-old high school seniors if they have difficulty concentrating, thinking, or learning new concepts. After decades of stability, the rates of young people answering “yes” began to climb in the 2010s.

Of course, it probably doesn’t need to be pointed out that that is the period when smartphones came into use, social media became ubiquitous and we generally began to shift toward the “post-literate society” educators have been warning about for more than a decade. Accordingly, reading rates have plummeted in recent years, especially among young people.

So what is the antidote? Well, there’s certainly plenty of data that shows our modern use of technology and the way we now consume content — mainly passively via an infinite scroll literally modeled on slot machines — is not doing us any favors.

Aside from its addictive tendencies, it’s been linked to everything from declining mental health to a frankly shocking crisis of illiteracy among American young people and kids. Combine that with our cultural and now governmental animus towards education and teachers, and it doesn’t seem likely this downward trend will reverse itself any time soon.

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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.