I've Seen the Smartphone and the Damage Done
“I sing the song, because I love the man / I know that some of you don't understand”
I've just finished
’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. After reading, I’m a proponent of both its thesis about the detrimental effect of a phone-based childhood—disrupted sleep; increased anxiety, decreased real-world skills, ability to focus, and self-esteem; and mental-health troubles, among others—and the slate of solutions Haidt offers to counter this technology-induced madness that has mentally scarred an entire generation.Haidt argues that the introduction of the smartphone bears the lion’s share of the blame for the surge in young people's higher rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and even suicide. Yes, smartphones can kill—just like cigarettes, alcohol, or heroin, substances society has had to interrogate and regulate in order to keep away from minors.
And the rise of smartphone culture dovetailed with another trend which exacerbated the problem of youth retreating into their phones socially: overprotective parenting, which began in the 1990s and went into turbo-drive in the 2000s and 2010s.
Haidt argues that kids are over-protected in the real world and under-protected in the digital world. The result is that Gen-Zers have grown psychologically weaker. They have not experienced enough risk, danger, and excitement in the real world, while at the same time they have endured too much of it, starting too young, while online.
All of us, with our phones, know full well how using it too much and worrying so much about little arguments and controversies online makes us feel worse. Having to think so much about fuckin' Donald Trump and fuckin' Stephen Miller and their fucking plans to build a national network of concentration camps brings us down.
Make no mistake: Bad or scary news is everywhere. However, this isn't about screen time: It's specifically about smartphones. TVs and laptops and home computers, even tablets, are not usually both available and socially acceptable to pull out and set up anywhere, anytime, as phones are.
We reading this are adults, responsible for ourselves, and we all know that if we want to use our smartphones less, then we can. Here's a tip: Are you worried that you'll miss a call or something important if you don't have it? Leave it in the same room—like an old-fashioned phone! Imagine that!—and then if it rings, go pick it up. But don't leave it within reaching distance or in your pocket.
(And I wish it went without saying: Turn off as many of your notifications as you can, and don’t even have social media apps on your phone, if you can avoid it. As an example, I only check Facebook and Facebook messenger on my computer, for years now.)
And adults can exercise restraint and responsible use for all sorts of potentially addictive activities—smoking, alcohol, and pornography are rightfully restricted to those 18 or even 21 and older. (I'd argue the alcohol age should go down to 18, BTW ...) Many people fall into abusing these products, but that's part and parcel of freedom. Adult brains are done growing, and if we see fit to use objects, substances, and interfaces that may be harmful to us, that's our business. That's our much-vaunted “free country."
However, children can't handle that kind of freedom yet. That's what being a minor is all about—your brain hasn't developed enough yet, so you can't think clearly and rationally: You don't yet have enough life experience and wisdom to assess the world with maturity. This is not up for debate; it's a foregone conclusion: It’s why children usually are not tried as adults in court.
Haidt presents the evidence that during these periods of brain development, particularly in adolescence, the absence of real-world stress and the over-abundance of digital stress could be understood to "carve grooves in the brain." In other words, the chemical-dopamine-centric mental exchanges intentionally built into apps like Instagram and TikTok - and certainly into pornography tube sites, too - simply impact minors differently than they do adults.
Thus, I think Haidt makes the case that smartphones, the addictive apps that run on them, and “Big Tech” more broadly should be regulated more heavily, akin to the guardrails we have built around physical drugs: After all, they also provoke dopamine hits and similarly carve within the brain, further impairing judgment, in just the way constant smartphone access does.
This doesn't mean that smartphones shouldn't be available to someone until they are 18. And they aren't a horrible invention to reject! They are incredibly handy. They must also have saved countless lives, simply by virtue of giving users the ability to look up numbers and call them in an emergency. And Sally, who is physically disabled and unable to to effectively use a laptop, does all of her writing from a smartphone, simply because it's smaller and easier to handle.
So it's not that we need to go backward and abolish a technology no one remembers how to live without. Rather, cultures should develop a broader understanding that children need more freedom in the real world and greater protection in the digital world, that smartphone usage should be restricted, that access to different technological capabilities should be granted at certain ages, and that likewise, technology companies can opt to build in key design structures that make it easier for parents to monitor and regulate their children's digital use.
To that end, after Haidt finishes laying out the problem and his evidence for it, he turns to the "Gee, what should we do about it?" section. And this was one of the aspects of the book that I most enjoyed.
Haidt doesn't put all the onus on governments to pass laws. He makes clear that there are multiple entities that need to be involved, beyond the passage of new laws, to create meaningful change:
Parents are the primary gatekeepers and need to come together in communities to agree on how to introduce smartphones to their children
Schools should shift to a no-phones during the day model
Tech companies need to stop using the business model that profits from children’s addiction to their apps. They need to be forced to more aggressively make their products safe for children.
Mark Zuckerberg and Elon “Sissy SpaceX” Musk are two of the richest men in the world. They can afford to have their products more heavily regulated, and so can their investors. They can afford to make less money. Their huge piles of speculative evaluations, based on estimates of their assets, are built on the suffering of regular people—including, for Zuckerberg, all the teenage girls crying into their pillows at night because they're too young to see that the ideals displayed on those platforms are nearly all smoke and mirrors; filters and Photoshop.
And little wonder: These platforms, especially Instagram, were intentionally made to be addictive, even for adults, and no effort was made to keep kids from falling into his dopamine slot machine. But teens and tweens would be able to handle social-media usage with much more equanimity if they were not at the same time suffering from a lack of age-appropriate real-world experience. To put it plainly, kids would be able to call on a raft of experiences demonstrating that women don't look like they do on Instagram in real life.
Zuck, Musk, there comes a point where you've made enough fucking money. Fix your fucking products. And Apple, Google, and the makers of smartphones:
“Don't Put your Blame on Me!”
Legislating the money-printing business efforts of the world's richest men is already proving to be a tall order. But that's good news, because there's someone else in the equation who can be of primary assistance to individual children: Ultimately, this falls at the feet of parents.
And it is in the home, under parental supervision, where this must change at root. Parents have failed to understand the smartphone and the damage done by giving unfettered access to children, and once they learn how bad this can be, they may feel paralyzed, unable to change. That's OK! At any time, we are all free to explain that we have learned more, and are therefore adjusting our opinions—and our rules.
Now we're at the education stage, and we need to provoke a gradual culture shift. Haidt is right to make the focus on Gen-Z and youth broadly—this is where the problem is the most severe.
But we all know, as we're addicted to our little devices, too: we're on these little rectangles too much. We need to start pivoting further and further away not just from a phone-based childhood, but from our current phone-based lifestyles. We’re a phone-based nation. That needs to change.
The hard truth is that smartphones are akin to cigarettes, weed, alcohol, pornography, romance novels, video games, sports, Popeyes buffalo wings, buying stuff—insert whatever pleasurable vice of choice you want.
The difference between medicine and poison remains dosage. And as anyone who has seen a box of cold medicine knows, appropriate dosage is wildly different for children than adults.
See here for more on this “Anxious Generation” Thesis:
Well written and very good points. Have you read any Neal Postman or Marshall Mcluhan? I personally still have a flip phone. I waste enough time on my laptop at home, I like to be present when im out in the workd! I agree with you 100% on limiting oneself, putting the phone on the other room etc etc.