The simple, terrifying truth about your phone

My biggest takeaway from Jonathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation"

I’m the perfect audience for books like social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s recent release The Anxious Generation. It’s a statistics- and research-based exploration of the decline in teen mental health, and Haidt makes an extremely convincing case for the blame lying almost entirely on social media-connected devices (and, for young men, online video games).

As someone who teaches Gen Z-ers in my university role, speaks and leads events with teenagers through my volunteer work, and is the father of two future teenage boys, books like The Anxious Generation are my version of true crime thrillers — I can’t help but keep reading between a gap in my fingers, too scared to look but too obsessed to stop looking.

The relationship between the mental health of kids/teenagers and connected devices has become a borderline obsession for me. I’ve read all the books claiming it’s about the phones, and a lot of the ones claiming it isn’t. This is a contentious debate among researchers, with most agreeing that it’s largely about the phones and a vocal, thoughtful minority arguing that it isn’t.

But The Anxious Generation hammered home a simple truth about the debate that I haven’t seen expressed as effectively anywhere else, and it comes down to two words:

Opportunity cost.

For phones to be terrible, they don’t need to be damaging. They just need to keep us away from everything else.

Haidt makes the argument time and time again that only focusing on research proving that phone use is directly damaging misses the point. A massive part of the equation is the sheer time we spend looking at our phones instead of doing other things.

Those other things, by the way, include all of the things that have taken up human attention for the entirety of our evolutionary history.

Basically: whatever you’re doing on a phone, whatever it’s doing or not doing to your brain, you’re not being in the here and now.

Now, let’s back up a little. This is not an essay about the horror of phones. If it’s any comfort, most of the research shows that most of the awful and irreversible damage they can do relates to developing young minds. If you’re a grown-up who has become addicted to your phone as an adult, things aren’t as dire — you can still get your brain back, if you want and are willing to make some changes.

(Just to make sure I don’t come across as some paragon of the analog life, it should be noted: I had a phone addiction so bad that I installed irreversible distraction blocking software that shuts down most apps on my phone past a certain amount of daily usage, and it cannot be undone. Like a gambling addict who puts themselves on a forbidden list at local casinos.)

But I found this idea of opportunity cost as it relates to our attention really striking. We’re always focused on whether the conversation around social media — or binge-watching, or doomscrolling — is all overblown. Didn’t they say the same thing about television, and the written word before that?

(Seriously — look up what Socrates thought about the “trend” of writing things down.)

But even if you don’t think something’s directly damaging, it can still damage you. It can damage you in the time it takes from what matters most.

Imagine yourself seated on a park bench. You’re waiting for something — maybe it’s a bus, maybe it’s a class that’s starting in a few minutes. Before you is the entire world, the real, tangible, living, breathing world. Some trees, the sky, grass swaying, birds calling.

What is worth you not seeing it, smelling it, being there for it all?

If our phones are a neutral force, neither good nor bad, how much of “neither good nor bad” are you willing to have occupy your minutes and hours?

If neutral keeps you from beautiful, then neutral is negative.