The Death of Daydreaming: What we lose when phones take away boredom

Summary

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. T...