When it comes to children, we’re more than ready to acknowledge that screens have had a negative impact on their well-being. Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” is proof. As of April, that book had spent 52 weeks on the New York Times’ best-seller list.
But when it comes to screens and adults, we’re less willing to acknowledge our problems.
Haidt recognizes this in his introduction to Christine Rosen’s May 2025 essay, “On the Death of Daydreaming.” Haidt writes:
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?
Rosen raises similar questions in her recently published book, “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.”
“What kind of person is being formed in an increasingly digitalized, mediated, hyperconnected, surveilled, and algorithmically governed world?” she asks. “What do we gain and what do we lose when we no longer talk about the Human Condition, but rather the User Experience?”
These are not voices crying in the wilderness. Plenty of other writers and researchers, going back decades to critiques of television from the likes of Ray Bradbury and Neil Postman, have targeted the dangers screens pose to our humanity. And with so many companies racing to advance artificial intelligence today, even the new pope, Leo XIV, has warned that these AI advancements “pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”
Despite these red flags, screen time eats up hours daily for billions in the U.S. and around the globe. “Average Screen Time Statistics” offers a startling abundance of data revealing just how hooked we are on what some might consider digital drugs. “Generation Z, born between 1996 and 2010, typically spends around nins hours a day on screens, which is notably higher than the seven hours and four minutes spent by the average American in 2024,” the article notes.
Less physical activity, impaired cognitive development, and fewer face-to-face interactions are just some of the negative effects of spending long hours tied to phones and computers.
But there’s one important detail often shunted aside in this data and in the cautionary advice of such critics as Haidt and Rosen. I’ll use myself as Exhibit A.
Though I do have a DVD player, I haven’t owned a television in over a decade. Lack of time and interest caused me to abandon social media – Facebook – nine years ago. I still receive notifications from LinkedIn, but I don’t engage there either.
And yet, for two reasons, I spend the greater part of each day looking at a screen. For one, I write for a living, spending an average of eight hours daily sawing and hammering away on articles like this one. No screen, no work, no money, which, like most people in my circumstances, would soon mean no roof over my head.
The other reason for my screentime is where addiction sets in. I’m one of those political and cultural hounds who click onto certain websites five or six times daily for an update on the news. One of my Lenten resolutions this year involved taking more control of those online visits, and I had some success in steering myself clear of that trash basket of time. Now, however, I’m back to my old habits, searching and clicking for the latest headlines and developments.
From this example, we can draw two conclusions. First, like it or not, our lives and our work are woven today into a digital framework from which there is no real escape. Second, if the time we spend hunched over our devices engaged in the extraneous is to be monitored and controlled, then that effort must come from us as individuals.
By now, surely most Americans are aware that the hours fiddled away on social media, games, and other such entertainments are bad for our physical health and our mental and emotional well-being. As is the case with addicts of drugs and alcohol, the effort to restrain ourselves ultimately must come from within. It’s up to us as individuals, as it should be, to control this habit.
In my own case, I’d say it’s time to rekindle that Lenten promise.
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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image Credit: Japanexperterna.se, CC BY-SA 4.0
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