Intro from Jon Haidt:

When I was nearly finished writing The Anxious Generation in the summer of 2023, I realized that I had left a gap. The book focused on the collapse of mental health, attention, and socialization of Gen Z—but again and again, older readers and friends would tell me: “this is happening to me too.” I realized that the global transition to a phone-based life is transforming everyone’s consciousness. But how? What exactly is happening to us?

I thought back to my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, which explored ten ancient ideas about how to live a good life—ideas found across continents and millennia. I began to see that the phone-based life, and social media in particular, push us to live in ways that are directly contrary to those recommended by nearly every ancient religious and philosophical tradition. These traditions tell us to be slow to judge and quick to forgive. They offer practices like meditation to quiet the mind and open the heart to deeper truths and greater communion.

In The Anxious Generation, I explored six of these contradictions in Chapter 8. A simple summary of that chapter is this: the phone-based life diminishes our humanity. Compared to the life we once lived, it degrades us morally, spiritually, socially, and cognitively.

Since writing that chapter, I’vebeen on the lookout for others who can express this loss of humanity better than I can. Here’s my short list: L.M. Sacasas for his Substack The Convivial Society; Nicholas Carr, for The Shallows and his more recent book Superbloom; and Christine Rosen, for her 2024 book The Extinction of Experience. (For a Gen Z perspective, see Freya India—especially the post we co-wrote “On The Degrading Effects of Life Online.”)

Today’s post is by Christine Rosen. Christine holds a Ph.D. in history with a focus on American intellectual history. She is a senior fellow at AEI, and she was my discussion partner when I gave a talk on The Anxious Generation at AEI soon after the book launched. That was when I learned about her book project, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.

So when her publisher invited me to consider reading an early draft and offering an endorsement, I was glad to say yes. I loved the book, and I hope the blurb I wrote captures its urgency and depth:

Rosen shows us that we are embodied creatures who are rapidly losing the analog world in which our bodies and minds evolved. She shows us that many of the technologically aided advances in convenience and efficiency exact a cost in our humanity, our civility, and ultimately our ability to live together in a democratic society. This is an extremely important book; its message is all the more urgent as AI threatens to make everything effortless and frictionless.

I invited Christine to present a section or idea from her book for After Babel. She chose one of my favorites: the loss of “interstitial time.” Interstices are the gaps between things, as with the cells in your body or the spaces between architectural columns. When applied to time, it means the many bits of time scattered throughout the day such as the five minutes that students have in between classes, or the unknown number of seconds that pass while you are waiting for an elevator. These moments used to be given over to silent reflection or conversation with whoever is around. Now, for most of us, nearly all of them are grabbed by our phones.

Christine traces out the profound consequences of losing those interstitial moments, for our creativity and for our humanity. She shows why it is so important to guard those moments for daydreaming.

— Jon

By Christine Rosen

Can you remember the last time you daydreamed? Or coped with boredom without reaching for your phone? Before the era of mobile technology, most of us had no choice but to wait without stimulation, and often, that meant being bored.

But today we need never be bored. We have an indefatigable boredom-killing machine: the smartphone. No matter how brief our wait, the smartphone promises an alleviation for our suffering.

Yet the smartphone’s triumph over boredom might prove a Pyrrhic victory. As Jonathan Haidt showed in The Anxious Generation, the rapid adoption of smartphones and social media, particularly by the young, led to many negative unintended consequences such as increased rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and self-harm. So, too, our efforts to vanquish boredom have had deleterious impacts such as on our ability to let our minds wander, to cultivate patience, and to experience anticipation.

As a member of Generation X, I took boredom for granted. Without access to any kind of mobile technology more sophisticated than a Speak and Spell game, my generation was expected to fill our empty hours in other ways, which usually meant going outside and doing things with our friends. Some kids stayed inside and watched television, of course, but the options for programming were limited. Boredom was part of life, and we accepted and adjusted to this reality. Several decades later, raising my own sons in the age of mobile technology, I saw how quickly expectations had changed for how to spend one’s free time. With access to an iPad or a smartphone, children in the twenty-first century never had to be bored; in fact, everything about the platforms and apps that targeted children habituated them to the idea that they ought never to be bored. I worried about how this might change their expectations and ability to deal with delay, frustration, and empty time as adults.

Boredom has a purpose. To understand and harness it, we need to give our minds more opportunities to experience it. In the rest of this post, I will explore the many ways our efforts to conquer boredom through technology have produced unintended consequences, including the near-total capture of our attention, the death of daydreaming, and the end of a healthy sense of anticipation in our daily lives.

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“Shepherds do it, cops do it, stevedores and merchants in their shops do it,” technology critic Marshall McLuhan observed in Understanding Media when discussing Greek men’s use of komboloi, or worry beads. The beads, which look like amber-­colored rosaries, were used throughout the day to pass the time, a secular version of praying the rosary. Their use of worry beads also reflects the deeply felt human need to fill interstitial time. We all engage in these weird little rituals: Some people doodle or fidget, others knit, a lot of people used to smoke. The late Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called these “the ‘microflow’ activities that help us negotiate the doldrums of the day.” These “small automatic games woven into the fabric of everyday life help reduce boredom … but add little to the positive quality of experience.”

Though the experience of boredom is deeply human, what we reach for when we experience it is socially structured, unique to our moment in time. The worry beads and cigarettes of previous eras have given way to smartphones. Ours is a less carcinogenic but more commodified distraction, with long-term impacts which we’r