December 5, 2024
By Joe Pitts
Since the iPhone’s release in 2007, screens have colonized every facet of our lives. News consumption, social interaction, dating, political engagement, and communication are mediated by the powerful supercomputers in our pockets and at our desks. It’s increasingly difficult to fill up your gas tank or pay for groceries without encountering a screen. A family engaged in dinnertime conversation with smartphones set aside is now the exception, not the rule.
Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist currently teaching at New York University’s Stern School of Business, compiled and analyzed the data on modern technology addiction in his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. “Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pocket that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternate universe,” Haidt writes. Real-world social interaction has plummeted—mediated digital interaction has triumphed.
Despite the sunny rhetoric of the early computer age, digital interaction has not been an unalloyed boon for human wellbeing. It has wreaked havoc on teen mental health, with social media in particular contributing to a massive spike in mental health issues, especially among women and girls. These new forms of technology are replacing human experience, making us lonely, anxious, and lethargic.
In the face of rampant technology abuse, Americans should muster the courage to found a new temperance movement, focusing on reigning in abuse while furthering healthy engagement. Above all, we must chart a positive vision for human flourishing in the digital age—one that addresses the pathologies unique to tech addiction.
Individualism and simulative technology
We inhabit an age of individualism. This sort of phrase is cliché, but clichés often take root because they contain certain truths. We understand ourselves first and foremost as individuals isolated from social context, leading us to do fewer things together, spend more and more of our lives by ourselves, and ultimately recognize our highest ends as relative isolation, complete control, and maximal comfort. Individualism’s triumph is reflected and advanced by the arc of technological development since at least the early 1970s. As Silicon Valley scion Peter Thiel wisely observed, innovation transitioned away from the “meatspace” and into the world of bits. In other words, it turned inwards. The legacy of the Apollo Program was the computer, not our transition to intergalactic exploration and settlement.
Smartphones, social media, and virtual reality are the capstone of this trend, making real the hyper-individualistic dream of a totally self-directed life with minimal discomfort. Our egocentric misunderstanding of human happiness has manifested itself in the evolution of technological development, and our new technology, in turn, reinforces this deformed vision of human flourishing.
“Reality has competition, from both augmented and alternative forms,” writes Christine Rosen in her new book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. She wisely differentiates the human experience from the user experience, the latter of which is how users of inward-facing technology are understood:
The human condition is embodied, recognizes its fragility, frequently toggles between the mediated and unmediated, requires private spaces, and is finite. By contrast, the User Experience is disembodied and digital, it is trackable and database and usually always mediated. It lacks privacy and promises no limits—even after death, when, as several new technologies promise, our digital remnants can be gathered and engineered into posthumous chatbots to comfort our grieving family members.
Past forms of technological development have augmented the human experience, enabling us to do more with less, mostly oriented toward outward-facing growth. A new era of inward-facing technological development—characterized by what I call “simulative technology”—replaces human experience, allowing us to create artificial “experiences.”
A new temperance movement should be primarily focused on reigning in this sort of technology, which has a particular tendency to turn us inwards—away from one another and away from the natural world. Shifting focus away from false experience and toward true experience is hardly anti-technology or anti-growth. In fact, steering the course of development outward enables us to build more and grow further, broadening our horizons beyond our living rooms and out into the great beyond.
By turning away from simulative technology, we can use more of our time to consciously refine skills and learn crafts that have atrophied with individualism’s long march. Less time on social media can translate to more time spent learning a language or building a garden. Better yet, it can be used to form families, explore the great unknown, and enjoy the pleasures—grand and simple—of a less mediated life. We can use our hands and minds to build in the kosmos, looking out to the world and up to the stars, instead of down at our screens.
Technology is fundamentally good
The etymological root of “technology” is “technê,” an ancient Greek word roughly translated as “know-how.” Technê was used in the age of Socrates and Xenophon to describe fields spanning mathematics, medicine, rhetoric, shoemaking, and so on. Over two millennia following the golden age of Hellenic philosophy, Thiel defined technology even more simply: doing more with less. Wheels allow us to move large objects with less force and in a shorter amount of time. The written word enables the spread of information at a scale unimaginable in preliterate civilizations.
Technology a la technology is not bad. It’s not even morally ambiguous—it’s fundamentally good. An outward sign of our inner spirit, technology is derivative of our uniquely human desire to not simply be one with nature, but to do something with nature. The myth of Prometheus is instructive. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the god of fire speaks:
I stopped mortals from foreseeing their doom. …I gave them blind hopes to live by. …I also gave them fire. …And from fire they will learn many crafts (technai).
Later in the ancient tragedy, Prometheus recounts the various crafts he bestowed upon man. When people used to fall ill, they would die without any chance of being healed. Now, medicine and “soothing remedies” enable them to “ward off all their disorders.” He goes on, recalling the “crafts” of divination and fortune telling as well as the extraction and use of “bronze, iron, silver, and gold.” Prometheus stole technê and delivered it unto mortals.
A fire rages in our souls; perhaps we stole it from the pagan gods. Perhaps the God of Abraham, in His infinite wisdom, implanted it within us. No matter. What matters is that it cannot be denied—to do so would be to deny reality, which sooner or later catches up with all of us. A total rejection of technology is not preferable nor ultimately possible.
Temperance does not entail—cannot entail—a rejection of technology. Technology is good and uniquely human. In fact, simulative technology can, in certain instances, be a real force for good. It already has made language learning accessible to billions of people across the world, and it is making some forms of technical training far more affordable. Our Promethean instinct can be taken to unhealthy extremes and channeled in dangerous ways (hubris, another Greek word, should be guarded against). Yet, it is far from wholly shameful. Temperance does, however, entail a frank acknowledgment that technology can be abused—and a recognition of current abuses. It also requires us to think critically about technology’s functions, and how different kinds of technological development are possible. Not all innovations are created equal.
Reclaiming human agency and experience
Despite its modern connotation with abstinence and teetotalism, temperance is something different. Aristotle understood it as the mean between excess and deficiency. Where exactly the golden mean lies is a prudential judgment. Nonetheless, social science and personal experience indicate many of us are on the “excessive” end of the spectrum. Technological temperance is about moderating our use of screens. We should aim to use screens when they are a means of turning us outwards.
Beyond moderation, we must conjure courage. Digital life is a lazy river, one enjoyed alone, or perhaps alongside an all-too-agreeable virtual companion. To combat this trend, we must forge a new ethic that engenders a willingness to take risks. A meticulously planned, self-directed, and selfish life is deprived of serendipity—it lacks an encounter with the other, whether a potential romantic partner, a newfound friend, or something divine. Oftentimes, our most meaningful experiences are those that are unplanned. They pull us out of ourselves, forcing us to reckon with the fact that we are not alone, that there are things beyond our skulls worth living for.
A hunger for real experience is already evident. David Goggins and an emerging web of influencers are exhorting millions of their listeners to push themselves beyond their comfort zones. These cultural avatars are not promising easy lives. Their message can be summed up as, “There is no more time to waste. Hours and days evaporate like creeks in the desert.” They teach that life is struggle, and that to live well is to face such obstacles head on, preferably with a smile on your face.
So, how do we put this movement into action?
First, parents and other role models ought to reduce their children’s access to simulative technology. Haidt is doing a lot of good work on this front, and schools and state governments across the nation are already taking steps to ban smartphones in classrooms. Students and children can take action individually to reduce usage, but it’s incredibly difficult to do when you risk social isolation by doing so, especially when all of your peers use these devices.
Second, families, communities, schools, and civil society organizations can work to instill a sense of wonder and adventure in the rising generation. It is in the bosom of these institutions that young people learn either to embrace the adventure that is life, or to opt for passivity. Kids should be taught that they were born with the ability to be agents of their own uplift, and that no matter changing external circumstances, they are truly the masters of their own souls. Life is not meant to be lived on autopilot. The greatest wonders that we can experience before shuffling off this mortal coil involve our openness to people, places, and experiences that we can never dream up: falling in love with the woman you met yesterday, meeting your best friend on the first day of class, navigating winding country roads without a GPS.
Third, inculcating this sense of wonder and adventure should be coupled with an exhortation to take risks. Leaving the confines of your self-directed digital world—the lazy river of simulative technology—requires courage. To encounter the other is to open yourself up to rejection and disappointment. But it is also the only way to encounter love and enjoy triumph.
Lastly, we should think through how we can make our culture and communities more amenable to less-mediated lives. Concert venues that only accept digital tickets and places of business that no longer accept cash are impediments to temperance. People should be able to stash their phones away for the day and still participate in civilized society.
These four recommendations are far from exhaustive. People across our nation should be encouraged to think about how the general principles of technological temperance can be implemented in their unique context, leveraging their perspectives to the benefit of the culture.
We are granted one life. Let us exhaust ourselves in the pursuit of worthy ends—not digital detritus.
Joe Pitts is a young professional currently working in Washington, D.C. He is a native Arizonan.