A New Addiction!

I am addicted! To my phone.

I check an email and before I realize it, I’m watching TikTok videos: lions fight hyenas, military dads reunite with kids, athletes do amazing things ...

I look up, and an hour has passed. I’ve wasted time, ignored my family and friends, and accomplished nothing.

But who cares? I’m old. I’ve already achieved what I’m likely to achieve.

Still, what about kids?

“Attention spans are declining,” says psychologist Jonathan Haidt. “Levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm were pretty stable ... all of a sudden, the rates go way up, especially for girls.”

His bestselling book (on bestseller lists for more than a year!) blames smartphones.

“Once they get a smartphone ... time with friends plunges. One of the best things you can do as a kid is hang out with friends, joke around, have adventures. If your kids went through puberty on a smartphone with social media, they came out different than human beings before that.”

My son, Max, once worked for social media companies. Now he makes his living speaking to students about how phones hook them.

He compares smartphones to casino slot machines.

“All the things we love about social media, those are the reward in the slot machine ... we get that ‘hit’ once in a while ... That’s there to keep us scrolling for hours.”

Haidt agrees, calling smartphones a “gambling machine.”

They say some apps are worse than others.

“Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok. Those really shatter attention spans. In terms of exposure to things that are really dangerous, Snap is the worst,” says Haidt. “In terms of destroying your ability to pay attention, TikTok is the worst. In terms of destroying a teenage girl’s sense of confidence, self-esteem, body image, Instagram is the worst.”

He says social media affects boys and girls differently.

“Check in on the kids at age 14, girls are doing worse. They’re more depressed and anxious, more messed up.”

But a few years later, he says, “Girls are more likely to have gone to college, gotten a job and moved out of their parents’ home. Boys are more likely to still be in their parents’ basement playing video games. They never grew up. Real life is incredibly boring compared to a video game or porn.”

Teachers say phone addiction makes it harder to teach.

“When you and I were in school,” says Haidt, “Suppose they let you take your TV into class. You couldn’t possibly learn.”

These are big problems, but I’m a skeptic. Do phones really wreck kids’ lives?

We don’t know that, say researchers like psychologist Chris Ferguson. “Correlation does not equal causation.”

“But teen depression is skyrocketing,”

I push back, “up 145% for girls since 2010!”

“Teen suicide was actually very high in the early 1990s,” he replies, “then it decreased ... way before social media. ... Dr. Haidt has cherry-picked a lot of data and presented only the data that support his narrative.”

“I am not cherrypicking!” Haidt replies. “I’m the only one in this debate who has picked all of the cherries and laid them out on a blanket.”

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