Not Just Kids: We're All Stuck In The Phone Hole

Discussing The Anxious Generation book and how it applies to all of us.

The Teardown

Wednesday :: July 24rd, 2024 :: Approx. 11 min read

👋 Hi, this is Chris with another issue of The Teardown. In every issue, I cover how we evolve in concert with the technology that enables our day-to-day lives. If you’d like to get emails like this in your inbox every week, hit the subscribe button at end of the post.

I am trying something new this week: a short audio introduction. It’s not a word-for-word reading of the post. Simply sharing some thoughts on top of the post. Let me know if you this sort of introduction is something I should keep doing.

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Gut Feeling: Mobile Phones Distract People

You probably read that line and thought, duh. If you didn’t, immediately respond or comment and tell me why!

I don’t envy the writer of a book with the title The Anxious Generation. The premise that young people are increasingly mentally unstable because of mobile phones stirs agreeable and disagreeable reactions.

In this book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt argues for phone-rooted causation, not only correlation. His basic point is simple: growing and now prolific mobile phone usage is the obvious change over the last fifteen years that causes deteriorating mental health in young people.

I finished the book, flipping over the long notes section feeling unsatisfied. Despite some clear suggestions on reducing mobile phone usage in life, from Haidt, I thought: what should I do now?

An open-ended question like that often works as a trigger in business conversations. Or in conversations with friends. You use that sort of question when you want someone to clarify an opaque point they just communicated. The question induces some anxiety, and during the proceeding moments, you watch the mind exercise to support a prior point with verbosity, or double-down with unexpected clarity. Sometimes people squirm.

I’m squirming because I don’t know what to do with my thoughts after finishing the book. A set of ordered rough conclusions stirs my neurons:

1. You can’t do much else if you stare at a phone for most of a given day.

2. Not doing things leads to a series of behavioral atrophies. You lose an edge in the ways of living that you might have practiced without a phone.

3. Intellectual, conversational, mental, emotional, and social skills slip away.

4. It’s hard to assimilate into the world when you haven’t practiced and aren’t skilled at doing so.

5. You might react, poorly, when you don’t fit in. That means isolating, or refusing food, or lashing out at people, or any number of other defensive tactics.

6. You may start, again, at the top of this funnel, and viciously repeat it until something shakes you out.

This cycle seems to obvious, and yet, the book is mostly based on correlative studies and observations.

There aren’t tons of randomized double-blind controlled trials measuring phone usage on teens. We don’t do lots and lots of robust testing where we pull phones from kids in one school and let others droll over Snapchat in another school, hoping to draw valid scientific conclusion. Parents from the second school would never let their kids get the short end of the stick like that. Can you imagine that PTA meeting? Hellacious.

I think Haidt’s book also misses a more explicit opportunity to remind adults that they use phones in an addictive manner¹. Pull them away from kids, sure, but pull them away from adults, too. Kids model behaviors. A kid doesn’t assume that a phone is a counterproductive device if their nearest parent is doomscrolling through Instagram or Reddit posts while perched on a droopy couch cushion.

Is what I just said jumping forward to a conclusive causation? No. It’s an observation at best. We need to be careful of correlations vs. causations.

And, Emily Oster, economist and author of Expecting Better (and others) agrees. Referencing the question of whether social media affects teens, she writes (emphasis mine):

The reason there is so much disagreement here is that we do not have the evidence we might want to conclusively prove the position of either side. The problem is not a shortage of published papers. In her Nature piece, Dr. Odgers cites this article, which itself is a review of meta-analyses, including dozens of papers with many thousands of people studied. Haidt has a (long) collaborative review, also including dozens of studies, with detailed notes. Estimates in these papers vary — some show very negative impacts, some are more neutral, some things look more positive. It’s all over the map. 

The problem is that the vast majority of this evidence does not have any credible claim to causality. It shows correlations that have many interpretations (mental health could drive social media usage, for example). Although there are huge numbers of these studies, they aren’t convincing — individually or together — about anything. 

There is more in her post, both roughly for and against Haidt’s main premise in The Anxious Generation. But she adds a teasing point later in her analysis:

Bottom line: We are not settling this debate today, or tomorrow. But — and this is important — we do not need to settle it in order to make some crucial policy decisions. 

I’ll abstract that question one more level, with rough agreement with a point Haidt makes in his book: we don’t need to settle the debate to change our approach on the phone, and not just for policy reasons. But, if there’s correlative evidence at best, then what?

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Forgetting About Opportunity Costs

I’ve long argued against lots of phone usage in my house by poking at a concept called an opportunity cost. In basic terms, time scrolling on a phone is time not doing something else. You can apply similar logic to TVs, iPads, and other devices that run full-fledged apps from all the big advertising companies. To be clear, I’m talking about Facebook, Google, etc.

Also, there are plenty of analog opportunity costs. I can do something else if someone else mows my lawn, as an example.

Haidt references categories of things you could be doing instead of scrolling on phones.

1. Interacting - as much or at all - with friends, in-person

2. Using your bodies to build, exercise, walk, etc.

3. Reading, books in print in particular, but in general

4. Writing, something that feels like a lost art.

There are other things of course. What’s especially nice about those four examples is they aren’t addiction creators, at least not like social apps on phones. They haven’t been tuned to capture, hold, and rewire your attention.

Almost everything on a phone is tuned that way, whether we like it or not. Even the esteemed privacy-marketing company - Apple - uses data to tweak its apps, making them friendlier, stickier, and easier.

I see this clear tuning when my older daughter receives, in rare moments, her cherished iPad.

Her hands practically explode forward to grab it. Other primal behaviors like finger-sucking end in an instant. She is completely locked on the target device.

She already sees and reacts to visual indicators on the screen in a manner that does not make me less worried for the future. And, of course, she doesn’t understand everything she’s looking at. So, the device is both wrapping its tentacles around her brain while distorting basic concepts.

No, I tell her, the battery at 31% does not mean that your iPad is about to run out of batteries, so stop screaming at the top of your lungs in horror. I can only imagine what will happen when she discovers notifications.

In that tense moment, I often ask myself why I’m bothering to entertain a conversation about the battery percentage on an LCD screen versus, well, almost anything else. She doesn’t quickly respond to polite requests to shut off her iPad. It’s hard to extract it when her prying fingers don’t want to let it go. The subsequent fix, if it happens, is loud, long, and obviously frustrating for everyone.

This is a kid who, to be clear, doesn’t get the iPad much at all. Maybe once every other week or so for a special moment. She’s six. Many kids her age are already deeper down the usage hole.

Is my rather restrictive view on phone use wrong or right?

After reading Haidt’s book, I’m tilted a bit more towards saying right. My intuition and my gut tell me that the best route for us - my family - is one where that sort of device - now an iPad, later a phone - is in very short supply.

Why? Well, I want that time for us to agree, together, to do things together or, if necessary, to flip on a bit of TV and let everyone get the couch time they want. There will be plenty of screen time to come, well beyond the reach of my control.

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In It Together Until We’re Not

Maybe, then, this topic is a fundamental Collective Action Problem. Haidt mentions this type of problem. Collective action problems are particularly interesting to me these days, both because of the book and because of their implications in so many areas of insurance (sorry).

Here is a base description from Wikipedia:

A collective action problem or social dilemma is a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action.

There is a lot to unpack in the broader (and longer) entry and in one of hundreds and more of resources about these problems. But, regarding phones, the practical solution sounds simple: everyone should cooperate to make sure kids don’t have phones before, let’s say, age sixteen (Haidt’s suggestion). As long as we all cooperate, we’re good, we’re friends, we’ll break bread.

But can one carefully placed rock derail an entire train?

This, I think, is the fundamental question about limiting or not limiting phones. Another way to think about it: we have to be willing to rewire people - kids and adults - if we feel that phones are counterproductive to otherwise productive life.

Haidt talks about a notable practical example in the book. It’s a classic case of feeling left out. Your kid, on the playground, is the one kid without a phone.

What do they do when that realization floods their brain? Do they care? Will they feel left out? Have you talked about it with them? And do you, as the parent, care that this happens? You may not.

Of course, there’s no phone-based problem if phones are absent. But, if just one parent and child acts against the interests of the group, the derailment begins in concept, and possibly quickly in reality.

That is where we are today, frankly.

My lovely bright-eyed six-year-old exploration machine is making statements like this: I’ll get a phone when everyone else gets a phone. They (her friends, classmates) are already talking about it. Some of them may already have phones. I really hope not.

What will I do when that moment pops up? I still don’t know the answer, despite what I wrote and what Haidt details in the book.

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A Conscious Turn In The Other Direction

I may sound holier-than-though when I present a solution on the topic, but I think this solution makes sense: adults need to reduce phone usage first.

That sounds probably moderately tough to most of you, and for others, absolutely a non-negotiable fuck-off Chris. I get it. It is very hard to ignore the demands of life - work and otherwise - centered in most ways around being on. A lot of on needs a phone.

The solution is not about being off so much that you lose touch with critical things such as your job, family, etc. It is about deliberate counter-habitual choices to be off in moments when being on seems so innocuous.

We all see the moments all the time. Walking away from the family dinner table because of a phone call or an email you just have to write, in that exact moment. Texting or emailing or doing something completely unrelated to a group of physical friends you’re sitting with, at a brewery, right next to you. Losing your train of thought during an ongoing lively face-to-face conversation because of a notification flicker that drags away your entire attention apparatus.

Haidt wrote a three-hundred page book talking about reducing phone use for kids, but I’m sure he could have written it about adults, too.

It will be hard for a bunch of adults attached to their phones to convince their kids that phones aren’t good, aren’t helpful, or whatever particular combination of actions and labels we’ll iterate in the press and scientific community.

In short: we have to fight our own habits and urges. We can put our phones away, in a locked box (or something similar) as a way of breaking our addictions to those phones and their ever-present notifications. And then we’ll rediscover what it’s like to occupy time some other way.

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A Fun Post Draft Example

The meat of my post ends there, with a share button. What better than a post about phone addictions and anxiety tied to a share-to-social button?

But I wrote most of this post last week. I’m writing now on Tuesday, July 23rd.

Over the weekend, I witnessed what might be a perfect example of a phone addiction.

My local pool is staffed by lifeguards. We pay for access to the pool and for, in concept, attentive well-trained lifeguards. As I watched my daughter splash and swim in the shallow section, I noticed something I didn’t expect: a lifeguard peering down at something in his hands.

He was checking his phone. He, active lifeguard, protecting people from trouble, was checking his phone.

I saw his head tilt up and down. The behavior mostly went unnoticed as there weren’t tons of people bobbing up and down in the water. He also hid the phone, placing it on his float and at an angle that made it hard to see. But, he was too obvious to me.

What he was doing on the phone doesn’t really matter. What stands out to me is the alignment of the situation. This is a college kid (I think) who was born in the early 2000s. He was between the ages of ten and twelve in the early 2010s.

I don’t know if he was exposed to a phone when he was an early teen or perhaps younger. But, if so, his behavior aligns with the problem. A lifeguard’s job is to protect people in a pool, and instead, this individual was too distracted by their phone, in their hand, to do the job.

1. My observation, to be clear