Rising Above the Phone-based Culture

                  If Jonathan Haidt was a traveling evangelist, I’d count myself a convert.

                  Last week I joined 2,000 people to hear him speak at the sold-out Arlington Theater here in Santa Barbara.  His message: the advent of the smartphone has radically changed the experience of childhood, and if we care about kids we need to do something about it. 

Much of what he shared is from his book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.  He cites countless studies showing the advent of smartphones has caused great damage to adolescents, creating widespread depression, anxiety, loneliness and isolation.  This is particularly true for girls, who by nature are sensitively attuned to how others view them.    

 Haidt doesn’t just analyze the problem but is a leader in the movement to have schools, communities and families put limits on how much children are immersed in their devices.

                  One such initiative is “Wait Until 8^th” in which parents create networks of families that pledge to not let their kids have smartphones until 8^th grade.  (Simpler devices limited to calling and texting are OK.)  I am grateful our school district has endorsed this initiative and our grandchildren’s family is one of the many that has signed on.

                  Another initiative is having schools collect smartphones at the beginning of each school day and returning them at the end of the day.  Our local schools are now doing this and LA Unified began last month.  Early results are strongly positive.

                  This movement involves more than just limiting digital devices. It’s also about giving kids more independence, real-life challenges, and responsibility. 

                  Haidt’s message isn’t limited to children.  We adults can also reclaim the kind of awareness and practices that make life worth living.

                  Daydreaming, for instance.  He cites studies that show when we are in between moments of focused activity — waiting for an elevator, at a stoplight, or in a line at the store — we may feel bored and instinctively check our phone to fill the time.  (One of his students admitted she is so attached to her phone she takes it into the shower.)  But such times can instead be opportunities when we might daydream, which in turn can lead to creative insights. 

                  The last part of his talk focused on spirituality.  He said he does not hold any personal religious beliefs but has discovered much of what spiritual traditions have taught and practiced over the centuries are antidotes to the problems created by modern digital life.

                  Key points are made in the chapter “Spiritual Elevation and Degradation.” “The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.” (pg.199) Spirituality can “elevate” us out of a relentless occupation with our own impulses and habits.

He identifies seven specific beneficial activities:

1. “Shared sacredness” – participating in experiences of “collective effervescence” and “energized communion” such as Sabbath keeping, communal worship, participatory music events, etc.  (203) 
2. Embodiment: practices that are not just mental but engage the body: kneeling, singing, sharing meals and “breaking bread” with family and others. (I would add device-free walking, hiking, swimming, etc.)
3. Stillness, Silence and Focus:  Taming our compulsion for impulsive scrolling through regular meditation practices.
4. Transcending the Self:  We have a “default mode network” (DMN) in which our attention is focused entirely on our own needs, wants and fears.  That has always been a common concern of spiritual traditions; Taoism calls it “bedevilment.”  “Social media is a fountain of bedevilments. It trains people to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world’s wisdom traditions: “Think about yourself first; be materialistic, judgmental, boastful, and petty: seek glory as quantified by likes and followers.” (209)
5. Be Slow to Anger, Quick to Forgive.  Spiritual traditions encourage us to find ways to be calm and nonreactive. Social media often leads us to do the opposite: be quick to condemn other while taking no time to reflect on our own shortcomings. Quoting Martin Luther King: “We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us.  When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.” (211)
6. Find Awe in Nature.  Haidt confessed he is an “awe junkie” who loves to experience the natural wonder of the world as often as he can.  He describes research on awe by Dacher Keltner.  Keltner and his students collected thousands of accounts of “awe experiences” of people around the world and “…sorted them into the eight most common categories, which he calls the “eight wonders of life.” They are moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spiritual and religious awe, life and death, and epiphanies (moments in which a new and grand understanding dawns).” (212)   Haidt taught a “Flourishing” class at NYU in which students were asked to take slow outdoor walks without their phones, carefully noticing their surrounding; many of them did this in nearby Central Park. “The written reflections they turned in for that week’s homework were among the most beautiful I’ve seen in my 30 years as a professor.”  Those opportunities for awe had been there every day, but students had missed them because they were absorbed in their phones. (213)
7. The God-Shaped-Hole Religious or not, Haidt believes we yearn for something more than just our own selves: “…meaning, connection, and spiritual elevation.  A phone-based life often fills that void with trivial and degrading content. The ancients advised us to be more deliberate in choosing what we expose ourselves to.”  (218)

I’ve been concerned about the growing influence of digital culture for 25 years.  Jonathan Haidt’s work is exciting because it offers a thorough analysis of the problem and shows how we can do something about it – for the sake of our children, our grandchildren, and ourselves.

Haidt’s website: https://jonathanhaidt.com