What Have We Done with Those Screens?

Reflection (on the Fall of a Society)

Photography by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

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In the summer of 2013, I embarked with my wife and three kids (then 14, 11, and 5) on a dream vacation: 24 states in 22 days. We packed our minivan named Homer the Odyssey (we name our vehicles) and, from central Maryland, with a great lasso-loop we embraced much of the Contiguous United States. We jaunted up and over mountainous West Virginia, we cruised through the rolling hills and fields of Pennsylvania and all through the Midwest, up into Iowa, past the Badlands and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, made brief friends with Devil’s Tower in Wyoming (plus the Bob’s Big Boy statue outside Wapati), and on through Yellowstone and Grand Teton, past the Salt Lake and over the Rockies, through the Sierra Nevada to California, and then, navigating the Pacific Southwest’s key national parks, on through New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, and back home again—visiting family and friends, and sightseeing, jaws dropped, all the way. What a gift! What we saw and whom we met have peppered our memories ever since.

When I asked my then-five-year-old son what his favorite part of the trip was, he said: “The iPad.”

What, dear God, have we done to our kids with those damnable screens?

According to a recent study by the Financial Times: plenty bad. And yet, we knew this, am I right?

We don’t need a deep dive into data from USC’s Understanding America Study to know how much we have sinned, at the expense of our youth. This summary article outlines the FT’s analysis:

According to the study, the capabilities of responsibility, follow-through, and self-control — all of which fall under the umbrella trait of “conscientiousness” — have decreased for all three age groups studied — ages 60 and older, ages 40 to 59, and ages 16 to 39 — but especially for the youngest group. The youngest adults group also stands out for greater increases in neuroticism and decreases in agreeableness compared with the other two groups. Each group experienced about a 10-point percentile drop in extroversion, but the youngest group’s drop was still the most dramatic decrease.

An OpEd by Colby Hall at Mediaite says it all with the title, “Alarming New Study Finds Smartphones Ruining Our Brains at Unprecedented Speed.” I encourage a quick look at this OpEd, if nothing else to see the summary data graphs from the paywall-blocked FT article. You don’t have to be a statistician to appreciate how grim this looks. And, unsurprisingly,

In less than a decade, conscientiousness — the trait most closely linked to responsibility, follow-through, and self-control — has collapsed among young adults. For those aged 16 to 39, it’s not a gradual erosion; it’s a plunge from respectability into the low 30th percentile.

And, as you might have expected,

Older adults (who aren’t addicted to smartphones), meanwhile, remain essentially unchanged.

Oops, our bad.

Sometimes you just need a published study to prove that what you’re seeing right in front of your face is, in fact, reality. This all validates the assumptions about what great damage we have inflicted on American minds with all these smart screens and algorithms driving mindlessness into our heads. So many shiny sparkly objects, and so little time.

BTW: hand raised, here. Guilty as charged.

And the worst effect has been, of course, on the youth, who, with all these distractions from normal cognition and socialization, are concomitantly trying to cognate and socialize. The young are developing their brain wiring up until the mid-twenties, in the important neurologic areas of critical thought, self-awareness, and restraint. Anyone with eyes wide open can see deficits in these crucial areas on display daily, and in addition to the nightly shock-and-awe local newscast.

That’s about all I’ve got. I’ve no idea what the answer is, because we sure aren’t going to put away every single smart device. The genie is out. That toothpaste won’t go back in. The lid of Pandora’s box lays broken and splintered on the hard dry ground of social responsibility.

Might I humbly suggest invocation of the Holy Spirit: that He guide us in ways that are level and smooth, back toward a culture centered in sanity and in God. There’s a start. What we can also hope for, is that the Millennials and Gen-Zs and Gen-Alphas who have survived this all with their noodles somewhat in-tact can learn from this, the most horrendous anti-social experiment of the New Millennium, and reshape parenting for Gen-Beta and beyond.

Thankfully, there is growing evidence of a return to traditionalism (and, dare I say, rationalism?), and I don’t just mean in the Church. Indeed, my son, now nearly 18, is a shining example of a youth who learned, by will and self-determination, to shake his smart-tablet habit. I am profoundly proud of him, and his classical-education high school friends, whose lives do not appear to exist solely for the purpose of losing themselves among electrons and radio waves, all at the expense of our future as a civil society.