Stepping Aside
Fighting the battle for our minds
Last year, Jonathan Haidt’s book ‘The Anxious Generation’ shook me up. It was the topic of many conversations with my wife. I went around recommending the book, particularly to young parents. I take this chance again to recommend it. Haidt has given plenty of excellent interviews about the book; you could start by watching or listening to some of those (see here, here, here).
The central thesis of the book is that the combination of social media and smart phones - and the entire digital economy built around them - is wrecking our minds. This might seem obvious; we are all seeing this happen - to us, to others around us. But with tons of data, Haidt systematically paints the picture of how bad the situation really is.
And while we are all affected, the impact has been significantly worse for people in Gen Z - the ‘Anxious Generation’.
Most Millenialls (like myself) were in their late-teens or early twenties when the first smartphones hit the market, and were perhaps in their early-to-mid twenties when smartphones became affordable enough to be widely prevalent. Similarly, social media when we Millennials were in our teens was either non-existent or was primarily text-messaging based; it was only in the mid-2010s that image and video-based media became the norm. By this age, the Millenials’ mental, emotional and social ‘wirings’ had firmed up. Thus while Millennials too have been impacted by the digital deluge, we have perhaps been hit to a lesser degree.
Most of the Gen Z, on the other hand, were sub-10-years when the iPhone hit, and entering adolescence - the most vulnerable and most formative period - when it became a default. It is social media plus smartphones that dealt the hammer blow. It is one thing to have an Orkut account that you log in to on your family’s shared desktop (on a painfully slow internet connection), it is completely different when you have notifications from 3 or 4 social media platforms ringing from your pocket all through the day. Many of the Gen Z could not handle this; the stats from the developed world are sobering. They have simply been swept away.
Remember that time when you were 14 and made a gaffe in front of the class? Remember how terrible it felt to see everyone - including the girls - laughing? Now imagine if your embarrassing moment was instantly broadcast to the entire school - by your classmates on their smartphones. Perhaps someone even recorded it. All your social media platforms are ringing with notifications - everyone is laughing at you. It can destroy you.
The impact of all this - in measurable terms, in rates of depression and self-harm - has been a lot worse for girls in Gen Z than it has been for the boys. Girls are a lot more socially clued-in; they perceive signals and cues a lot more sharply; social dynamics and shifts in status impact them a lot more. They are intensely image conscious. What they need in their formative years is the space to make connections, understand about themselves, come to terms with who they are (and how they look). What they certainly do not need is for all their minor anxieties to get amplified a hundred-fold (‘Why did nobody like my post? Let me check again, it has been 2 minutes. No one has liked it even now! My God, this is so embarrassing!’), for their looks to get judged by everyone (including anonymous strangers on the web), for their self-worth to be shattered by stray incidents that go viral.
While the impact in terms of diagnosed mental illness is the worst for girls in Gen Z, nobody is really safe from the double whammy of smartphones and social media. The older generations might not get washed away, but everyone’s attention spans have collapsed. We have become addicts to the machines and their constant stream of (mostly) senseless content, scrolling our way through Insta Reels, not even pausing to laugh before we flip to the next video, our heads hunched over our phones for most of the day.
Gen Z might be the most impacted given the timing of when this digital deluge went mainstream, but this is a humanity-wide problem. Do we feel the urge to pick up and scan our phone the moment it goes ‘ping’? Do we mindlessly - at various points in the day - pick up our phone and flip through various apps? Do we reach for our phone when we have to go more than 2 stories up or down in an elevator? Are we walking around crowded main roads with our eyes glued to our phone screens? Do we get a sinking feeling when we are at a place without WiFi? Do we have the irresistible urge to scan our Twitter or LinkedIn feeds, to see if anyone has liked our latest post? Do we spend hours on various WhatsApp groups, clicking on every link shared, getting into every argument? Do we find it hard to sit in one spot and read (and ignore that ‘ping!’ from our phone) for an hour… for 30 minutes… for 10 minutes?
It has impacted almost all of us.
Our minds and hearts are getting weakened, our attention lies shattered. Children’s formative years are getting violated. We can’t let this happen.
This piece was triggered by a Substack essay I read this week, by the sharply perceptive (and hilarious) writer Nirmalya Dutta. His essay summarizes the new meta-analysis report in Psychological Bulletin that examined 71 studies from across the world on what the endless loop of content - in particular short-form content - is doing to our minds. From Dutta’s essay -
They examined simple behaviours like time spent scrolling, but also deeper patterns: whether checking the feed feels automatic, whether stopping feels oddly difficult, whether small bursts of stimulation become the default way of filling emotional or cognitive emptiness. They studied attention, memory, impulsivity, anxiety, sleep, loneliness, self-esteem and overall well-being.
The findings are fully aligned with what Haidt and others have been observing - attention spams are demolished; there is a steady rise in anxiety and depression in short-form video users; there is widespread emotional dependence on access to an unending stream of short-form content. And the problem is seen across age groups. From the essay again -
Adults often insist they use the feed “mindfully,” “sparingly,” or only to “unwind,” yet the nervous system processes the rapid novelty in the same way regardless of age. The feed interacts with human architecture, not life stage. Vulnerability here is not developmental. It is universal.
Unbridled use of AI is going to make the problem exponentially worse. The internet is already filling up with AI generated content. Kids are being bombarded with attention-draining AI-created audio-visuals. Photos of peers that teenagers see on Instagram are increasingly ones that have been morphed - or ‘enhanced’ - with AI, making the image that they find looking back at them from the mirror seem so much worse. AI ‘companions’ are filling the hole left by retreating social connections.
We will get further and further enmeshed in this dizzying and ultimately degrading world of digital and AI slop.
This is the world that our kids are growing up in. What can parents do to prevent their kids from slipping away?
I think we first need to get a handle on ourselves; we parents need to restrain ourselves from drowning in our phones and endless online loops. We need to live by example.
And then - this is something my wife and I strongly believe - we need to ground our children in our traditions. Place them on the firm foundation of our religion, our philosophical ideas, our customs, our festivals. Make them realize that they are a link in the line of tradition coming down many millennia. A lot of this can certainly be done in ways that are relatable and joyous. But it will not always be fun - sometimes the children will resist when they are asked to participate in a ritual; that is when parents need to enforce the family rules. We are their parents first, not their friends. We carry the responsibility of equipping them for the world they will enter. And - in my opinion - being grounded in tradition is essential for holding firm and finding contentment in this world; my wife and I want to do whatever we can - with all our imperfections - to give our daughter this grounding.
It is interesting that the last chapter of Haidt’s book explores the problem from a spiritual lens. He makes the case that this combination of screens and social media leads to a general spiritual decline. He defines this in general terms, such as an increasing tendency toward shallowness (versus depth), toward momentariness (versus permanence), toward sensual overload (versus clarity). He does not spend too much time on this topic - I wish he had - but what he does indicate, with data, is that children from families and communities that have strong rootedness in their traditions are significantly more resistant to the deleterious effects of screens and social media. These ‘grounded’ children - the ones who have a strong sense of family and community, who assemble together with their community members in prayer and music, who have daily or weekly religious rituals - are not washed away.
What strikes me is that the modern world seems to be pulling us, with tremendous force, in exactly the opposite direction to what our spiritual teachers point us to. Take, for instance, the shat-sampatti (‘six-fold treasures’ or ‘six virtues’). In the Hindu Advaita sampradaya, the shat-sampatti - taken as a unit - form one of the four essential pre-requisites (sadhana chathustaya) for spiritual progress. The shat-sampatti are shama (gaining control of the mind), dama (restraint of the sense organs), uparati (drawing the the mind inward, away from sense signals), titiskha (forbearance; the ability to be unshaken by pain and pleasure alike), samadhana (inner stillness; concentration of the mind), shraddha (a reverential and open minded attitude toward the Guru and the Vedantic teachings).
Does not almost everything in our world today work against these 6 virtues? The shat-sampatti are important not just for spiritual progress but - at least to some extent - for success in all ‘secular’ endeavours. And we have created a situation in which each of the six virtues is much, much harder to cultivate.
For spiritual seekers it is essential that we fight against the creeping takeover of our minds by this supersensorium (Eric Hoel’s phrase). This is something I have realized a while back, and I am taking steps - however imperfectly - to get back control. I am setting achievable goals to ramp down the time I spend looking at screens, the time I spend scrolling online - apart from, of course, what I have to do professionally.
It is hard; our impulses have been weakened; I find that there are days of restraint followed by a few hours of unbridled consumption. But we need to keep at it. And if it is hard for me, it will be much more so for today’s teenagers, and for people in their twenties, who need to be online because that’s where all their friends are, that’s where all the action is, that’s where they are going to meet their partners.
We all do have to spend time on screens, we all do have to engage with online content in its various forms but the question is - who has control? Do we hold the reins, or have we handed it over to the alluring digital charmer? Can we decide when to switch on and off, or is there a deep seated, very physical resistance each time we try to step aside?
Like every important pursuit, fighting back against the supersensorium is not easy. But I am finding that it gets easier the more one stays with it. We need to build back our weakened muscles. It is hard, but I think we can restore some balance, and regain some control, if we stay with the pursuit. We must.