The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

by Jonathan Haidt

In Sum When people see morally beautiful actions, they feel as though they have been lifted up—elevated on a vertical dimension that can be labeled divinity. When people see morally repulsive actions, they feel as though they have been pulled downward, or degraded. A phone-based life generally pulls people downward. It changes the way we think, feel, judge, and relate to others. It is incompatible with many of the behaviors that religious and spiritual communities practice, some of which have been shown to improve happiness, well-being, trust, and group cohesion, according to researchers such as David DeSteno. I described six such practices. First, Émile Durkheim showed that human beings move up and down between two levels: the profane and the sacred. The profane is our ordinary self-focused consciousness. The sacred is the realm of the collective. Groups of individuals become a cohesive community when they engage in rituals that move them in and out of the realm of the sacred together. The virtual world, in contrast, gives no structure to time or space and is entirely profane. This is one reason why virtual communities are not usually as satisfying or meaning-giving as real-world communities. Second, religious rituals always involve bodily movement with symbolic significance, often carried out synchronously with others. Eating together has a special power to bond people together. The virtual world is, by definition, disembodied, and most of its activities are conducted as...

a lot of these issues don't seem phone-specific