“We had no idea what we were doing.”
That’s a line from Jonathan Haidt’s recent essay in The Atlantic, End the Phone-Based Childhood Now, excerpted from his important new book The Anxious Generation – How The Great Rewiring Of Childhood Is Causing An Epidemic Of Mental Illness.
The headline: every parent and every person interested in the question of how technology is forming our lives needs to read and discuss Haidt’s book.
Haidt is a prophet disguised as a psychologist and he’s been ringing this alarm bell for years. His book may not stem the tide, but my hunch is it will launch a long overdue national conversation on what we’ve been doing to our kids.
Knowing what we do about secondhand smoke, none of us would smoke in front of our kids, much less in a confined space. The only parent we might look down on more than one who smokes in front of their kids is one who gives his kids the cigarettes.
Haidt, marshalling the empirical data to buttress his case, convinces that we are doing something just as dangerous or even more so in our how our families consume technology, particularly cellphones and social media.
Consider, if you spend 4 hours of your day on your phone, which is on the conservative end, believe it or not. And you start when you are 10 and live to be 80 and sleep eight hours a night, then, in your life, you will spend 17.5 years of your waking life on your phone! That’s a quarter of your life!
And when you account for all screen use, including tablets and television (but excluding computers), most of us will spend more than 20 years entertaining ourselves by ourselves. Neil Postman’s 1985 prophecy is coming to fruition before our eyes.
To quote Cal Newport, another prophet on this theme, “Philip Morris just wanted your lungs, the App Store wants your soul.” And the toll on our children, in the rising incidence of anxiety, depression, suicide rate and overall mental illness, has been devastating.
Jean Twenge talks about the generational effects technology use is having in Western culture. The sub-title of her book iGen captures it. “Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us.”
I’ve long predicted that someday, millions of parents are going to wake up and say, “What have we done to our kids?” So I was so struck by Haidt’s line, “We had no idea what we were doing.”
I was an early-adopter of Haidt’s message after I read the now-dated but still important book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain, by Nicholas Carr. Carr confirmed what most of us have expected, that for all of its amazing benefits, our technology is affecting our ability to focus, to read, to pay attention, to think long thoughts and engage in in complex conversations. And his book was written in 2010! Turns out google IS making us stupid. And according to Haidt, also miserable.
My favorite writer on this topic, the one who permanently shifted my ideas about technology in my life, my kids’ lives, and in our home is Johann Hari. His book, Stolen Focus, is just breathtaking. If you only read two books on this topic, read Hari’s and Haidt’s. Here’s what Hari says about Haidt’s new book:
“Every single parent needs to stop what they are doing and read this book immediately. Jonathan Haidt is the most important psychologist in the world today, and this is the most important book on the topic that’s reshaping your child’s life right now.”
Pair Hari’s book with Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, by Adam Alter, and with Ten Reasons for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, by Jaron Lanier (on which the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, was based). Silicon Valley isn’t merely capturing our attention in this attention economy. They are stealing it, to maximize profit, and they know exactly what they’re doing, which is why Silicon Valley executives won’t let their own children use the very technology they are creating and pushing you and your children to use.
All of the books I’ve listed above are the equivalent of Morpheus handing Neo the red pill in The Matrix. “You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” You can no longer pretend you don’t see.
One of the pioneer prophets in this field has been Sherry Turkle. Of all her amazing books, one of her most disturbing findings is from Alone Together, about how our kids learn to be glued to their phones – by living with us and observing what gets our attention.
Technology and Jesus
None of these siren calls is written from the angle of what effects our phones are having on our relationship with God.
If you’re a follower of Jesus concerned about spiritual formation (what shapes and forms our souls), you simply can’t ignore the monumental role that technology, and smartphones in particular, are having on our families, including communities of faith.
It doesn’t matter how compelling your church services are. Our habits form our desires far more than our good intentions and good theology do.
Andy Crouch’s Tech-Wise Family and Tony Reinke’s 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You were two recent attempts to help us discern how tech, more than our values, is shaping our homes.
Justin Earley and John Mark Comer both stress that if we don’t become more deliberate and intentional about scheduling our habits and structuring our days around what’s most important to us, then our hearts will increasingly be formed by a vision and values counter to Jesus’ loving wisdom for our lives.
The bottom line for us is to wake up, get informed. Technology has incredible benefits. No doubt you received this and are reading it through technological innovation.
But as this year’s best picture, Oppenheimer, reminded us, the technology we create to save lives may end up destroying our own.