I don't ordinarily comment on Substack posts, but as a millennial, I just want to say: Freya, there are so many people older than you who understand and resonate with what you say here. Some may "cringe at Gen Z for not coping," but many others fully understand why you feel the way you do. It's unfair that Gen Zers couldn't enjoy screen-free childhoods. Your willingness to speak on this subject is a gift to Gen Alpha, who can still be spared much of that technocratic infection. And it's a gift to our society more broadly.
The good news is that embodied presence is always available to those who make the conscious choice to fight for it. And one of the glorious parts of adulthood is learning to recognise and prioritise the things you need to flourish—including freedom from screens. I hope that Gen Z increasingly finds that to be true in the coming years.
"Embodied presence" is a good phrase (although how "fight for" exactly?). The philosopher John Gray expressed this loss of embodied presence in these haunting words: “Instead of the daily encounters that enable communities to sustain a common life, random collections of solitary people are protected from each other.... Rather than connecting in troublesome relationships, they are turning to cyber-companions for frictionless friendship and virtual sex. The contingencies of living in a material world are being swapped for an algorithmic dreamtime. The end-point is self-enclosure in the Matrix – a loss of the definitively human experience of living as a fleshly, mortal creature..... the defiant smile in the face of cruel absurdity, the glance that began a love that changed us forever, a tune it seemed would always be with us, tears in the rain.” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
yes. I can’t stand those older folks (of which I now belong at 50yrs old) who constantly disparage Gen Z and Millenials as entitled and fragile. this might be the case but it’s not their fault! if anyone is to blame, it’s the former generations who are responsible! we are the ones who gave them these technologies and kept them inside for over two decades. what should we expect..?
Well, they don't exactly like it either. Embodied or disembodied, capitalism still fucked up jobs, and rent, and healthcare, and college, killed smaller towns, propped up corporate overlords, paid politicians for favorable laws, boosted inequality (not of the "everybody doesn't make the same salary, that's unacceptable comrade" kind, they "a handful of ultra-rich guys have amassed most of the wealth in the country and yield political power too, fuck that")
I can’t make any sense of your comment. And are you *proud* that you had unprotected sex with 100 people? Why are you announcing this shameful behavior online in a comment thread to a bunch of strangers?
I got Instagram at 13 and just got off it just a couple months ago at 24. Having a baby daughter of my own made me see the sickness of pixelating your identity. I imagined going online as a teenager and being able to watch her life story unfold from day one through my social accounts—and I didn't want that for her. I want her to tell her own stories and hold onto her own memories and to own her own life. I want her to be able to be a joyous nobody. Undocumented and free. Because I didn't have that. I hope my gift to her at 18 will be zero search results on the internet for her name.
One of my cousins tried to protect her son for years, asking people not to post photos of him to facebook, etc, but once he began playing baseball all bets were off. She still tries to make sure he doesn't get absorbed by it, though.
I ended reading this piece in tears, looking back at my childhood and grieving those days when I went to Sam goody over the weekend to buy the new spice girls single on cassette, going to school on Monday and looking forward to coming home and listening to it. Or knocking on my neighbors doors to ask if they could come out to play and running around until the sun set and our parents made us come in for dinner. Or walking to school, slipping notes in lockers… just so much simpler and raw connections. Iphones and social media are heartbreaking to me, and as a millennial with a 3 year old, I can’t help but get sad at the thought that things will never be the same for him. My husband and I are doing our best to work toward a more technology free life, but it is HARD.
Thank you for writing this. It made me feel a lot.
We are struggling to insulate our children (8 and 4) from digital life, because the school of all places pushes it so hard. They hardly use paper textbooks, everything is done on Chromebooks. Grades and schedules and updates are all done though apps. The kids are allowed to play video games on school Chromebooks during breaks. Half my son's 2nd grade class already have smartphones. Midwit school administrators got by slick software salesmen, and fully captured millennial phone-people parents are the problem.
We really had it so good in those days -- I have many of the exact same memories -- and now my wheels are spinning on how to bring more of this magic into my kids' lives.
I'm so glad Freya wrote this. Maybe many people know about this "phenomenon" - anemoia among today's young people - but my feeling is most people don't. I didn't have a word for it but I started to pick up on this as a trend as a high school English teacher. Especially when I asked my students to write about their phone lives.
I'm not a teacher anymore but last month I spent a day in a high school classroom talking to students about why their school plans to ban phones next year. Last week I wrote about this visit. I shared quotes (about phones) from my former students and invited these students to discuss them and later write about them within their class. In one quote I shared a kid bemoaned the fact that, when they wake up every morning, all they do is search for their phone in their bed so they can check TikTok and SnapChat. This kid was hard on himself for not "thanking God for a new day."
I've read MANY, MANY quotes like this, from 16-18 year-olds, and I see this as an expression of anemoia. It's as though this kid imagines that, prior to smartphones, all human beings used to just wake up and actively thank their creator for another day. Talk about an idealized imagining of the past! This makes me so sad and so worried for my own kids and all kids.
I've seen a comment or two asking whether anything can actually be done about this. I will argue all day every day that the place to start is removing phones from schools and being honest about why - ALL the reasons - this must be done. It would not be inaccurate, for example, to tell kids: Phones are not allowed in our school because we want our children to experience fewer feelings of anemoia.
Self-pub makes me feel ill as do internet comments as a general proposition...but I think this is a very important time so I do hope you'll take a moment to check out what's happening here in Des Moines, as a Phone School attempts to become the kind of school Gen Zers are so sweetly nostalgic for.
I always collected all my students' phones at the beginning of class. Walked around with a big box, they put them in. Some of them had two phones, so it was always a task trying to catch them with their second.
Whether as a parent or a teacher, phone use is a constant battle.
Thanks Freya for delving into the grief of what has been lost to remind us that we can go beyond the present lament and have agency to change what lies ahead. We, especially us parents, are not powerless to return to: “Delayed gratification. Deeper connection. Play and fun. Risk and thrill. Life with less obsessive self-scrutiny.” Thanks for your important work in turning the tide Freya!
Freya, we millennial parents don't mock you. I do feel sorry that your generation was part of the experiment. Technology moved too fast over the last 20 years and we don't have a good handle on it, as it continues to race even faster in a direction we can't even comprehend yet. So the desire to want to take a pause and be nostalgic is totally understandable. I am very conscious about media for my kids (7 & 10) and I'm taking all of this seriously. We all need to pause and reassess the situation before another generation is wasted.
Beautiful piece, Freya. The 90s were a magical time to grow up with no phones, wokeness, and algorithms. Older generations have succumbed to screen addiction too and zoomers’ parents should never have handed them this addiction so young, just like cigarettes. If everyone puts down their phones and talks to each other across generations, race, gender, politics, etc we might be able to make 90s style magic again and break the fever of our current tech enabled madness. I always enjoy talking to zoomers and hope you all continue your awakening.
Thanks for bringing "wokeness" into this discussion. You just reminded me that the 90s sucked for many disabled people. It was not until 1996 that I could use a telephone for the first time, for example. "Wokeness" refers to the belief there are systemic injustices in society and the need to address them. Barriers to access were more explicit in the 90s than they are today. The struggle to overcome these systematic injustices was still very much present in the 90s, but did not have the frictionless distribution mechanism of social media to spill over into the "normative" aka the ableist conservatives in society who want the oppressions to stay the same.
Hey, I don't mean to "punch down" here but the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed in 1990 by a (gasp) Republican prez! (don't worry I didn't vote for him)
This idea that "ableist conservatives in society who want the oppressions to stay the same" is a mental disability, as it allows you to magically write off half the country as some species of bigot.
—"'Wokeness' refers to the belief there are systemic injustices in society and the need to address them"...this is a very charitable definition. "Wokeness" believes that "systemic injustices" are such an emergency that they supersede our civil liberties and that all social arrangements need to be upended (including free speech, thought and liberal education) so that a specific group of administrators, bureaucrats etc can be empowered to restructure society according to their ideological specifications.
I think the ADA proves that any and all problems can be solved by good ol' fashioned liberalism, which also has the benefit of not being so socially destructive and turning every aspect of our lives into Friend/Enemy denunciation fests.
In New Zealand, the current government is the National Party, which has an "anti-woke" campaign to defund all the woke "shit" that touched their metaphorical genitals on the doll. My disabled community in New Zealand is feeling the pain. The playing field has tilted again and many are living in their cars, eating once a day, etc. This is the ideal situation for conservatives who were born into their wealth just as many disabled were disenfranchised by birth into an inequal society.
I am nearly 50 years old and I have yet to receive a single phone call in my life. The country I live in does not provide a relay service for making telephone calls. If the Internet or text messaging did not exist, I would have to rely on able people to access what many consider a public utility that my taxes pay for but I cannot benefit from it.
This attitude that wokeness benefits administrators instead of the community that needs the protections and equality is possibly a very American perspective that has infected the rest of the world.
I'm a bit confused by your discussion of liberalism as being the solution, since "woke" is a liberal ideology. When was the last time you saw a person using a wheelchair without an assistant? A blind person comfortably navigating the footpaths of your city? Do you see them on a daily basis or are they shut up in their suburbs where they need a car to get out? A "woke" ideology would invest in public utilities to allow these people to get out of the house without needing assistance.
How would you feel if suddenly you weren't allowed to access the Internet, just because of a physical characteristic you were born with? Forced to watch everyone else use the Internet. Suddenly not allowed to drive your car into the next neighborhood because of air quality indicators banning car travel? Suddenly not allowed to travel internationally because you have the wrong passport? These are systematic barriers that only exist because people like you say "bureaucrats are empowered to restructure society according to their ideology!"
Of course, we don't want people to not be able to access public utilities that their taxes pay for. It isn't even a full century since segregation ended, but the country continues to segregate minorities (e.g., illegal immigrants, disabled & so on) with the full support of people who don't want the status quo to change.
I am in NZ; and the point of the article is children losing their childhood. Adults have means of communication and the present govt is quite woke by conservative standards. The people in cars was Jacinda's Labour legacy.
Truly appreciate your perceptive writing, Freya, and grieve with you. I am almost ashamed to say I had the phone free childhood -- much of it outdoors. I am old.
I can’t help but wonder after reading a piece like this: “what is the solution? How can this be resolved?” The simplest solution would be to eschew social media and get rid of your smart phone. But unless you are part of a larger community also doing the same thing (which I think is the most likely avenue for success), the impact wouldn’t be quite the same. Obviously we can never return to pre-smartphone days, but still, I wonder: can this be solved?
That's what's so hard for me to understand, too. I know it's a Collective Action Problem which requires Collective Action Solutions -- and I believe our family is playing our part, but then what? Because so many people are far too comfortable with and cannot imagine life without their phones. While it's wonderful for me to connect with likeminded people in places here, when I talk to my friends inside my own community, it's mind-numbing, sometimes, the excuses.
"I want her to be able to take pictures." BUY HER A CAMERA.
Underlying the drive to get kids' phones, too, is fear. Parents are fearful of not having constant contact with their kids. It's not just parents – I get sideeyed by my son's principal for letting him walk four blocks home from school alone at age 10. As parents, we're expected to pick up and drop off our kids everywhere, immediately, so they're never ever unmonitored. They're never just left to roam.
I put an AirTag in my child's backpack and let him roam. It's good enough. My point is that we adults – parents, school administrators, whatever – need to get comfortable with our kids not having phones, too.
Yes! Absolutely! Our pediatrician balked when I said none of the kids have phones yet, nor will they for awhile -- and when our oldest does get one, it would most likely be a flip phone.
We've been homeschooling since 2020 and the kids' tutorial has not allowed devices... but I'm curious to see how entry for one (possibly two) of ours into private school in the fall will (or hopefully won't?) add to the tension mounting on our resistance.
Oh, it’ll be relentless. There’s no escape! I hate hate hate fighting the screen battle. Feels like the number one responsibility as a parent and it never relents.
I homeschooled my son through 6th and my daughter through 9th. Then they entered private school and the onslaught began. I can’t tell you how much I hate it. The countless battles, the nights lying awake questioning my parenting choices, and an always simmering resentment at culture, big tech, the schools that unquestioningly bring tech into the classroom, and the parents who give their kids phones in middle school for pushing us into this civilizational decline.
I felt like the onslaught began when my daughter started youth group last summer, ironically just at the end of a Digital Detox our church walked through the month of May. Her first event all the girls had their phones out starting a group chat that (though she has an iCloud account on an iPad she sometimes uses) she didn't engage with. This is a girl who puts letters weekly into the mail for friends who have "no time" to write her back but spend hours scrolling. There's such a disconnect between what people say they want and what they're willing to enact -- and I know it because it's in me as well.
We've been moving the needle in the right direction for our family, slowly but surely over the years, but I think part of that has been easier by being at home. The school we're entering into has a "no phones" policy for students while at school, but I need to press in a little -- or perhaps once I'm a part of the community -- on what that actually looks like and how we're challenging our children (or rather, parents) to resist the decline around them.
Oh, yes, sadly it’s in the youth groups too. In our last church, media consumption was barely different from the world’s, not only in terms of quantity but also in content. I was shocked at what parents allowed their kids to watch and play. I felt so alone in my convictions. Let us fight the good fight.
On the flip side, it’s way too tempting for parents to not respect the privacy of the child. That phone said child has also has his/her private thoughts in it. It’s way worse than reading a diary. Those AirTags get put on people unknowingly too. Nobody trusts anyone or respect boundaries when they know the tech is there to get them access
My sister was telling me about a girlfriend that she grew up with is answering her child’s text messages as if she were the child. It’s her way of gathering intel and ultimately being a full on stalker. Really sick
I do wonder if it will end up being *physical* communities that are likeminded about the problems of smartphone addiction. That sounds extreme, but the alternative (depressed, anxious, unconnected people) seems much worse?
I agree! I feel like I put feelers out in the varied physical communities I find myself in (neighborhood, tutorial, sports, community group, etc.) and am met with resistance. What I should probably start doing is connecting with the people I see waiting comfortably in lines or waiting rooms or coffeeshops without their phones out and go from there.
At the individual level, if getting rid of your smartphone is too much, you can reduce its impact by limiting the kinds of things you do on it. Many of its functions are quite useful and mostly sane: GPS, one to one messaging, the occasional video or audio call, note taking, the weather, even the news. Before phones people in the subway used to hide their face behind the newspaper, no big loss if it's now a digital screen. It's the social media dynamics, and "the feed" in all its forms, that has turned this little screen into digital crack. You can keep using all that useful stuff, and selective refuse social media, personalized feeds and "gamification" (likes, streaks, etc.) of all kinds.
Yeah I’m not talking about an individual level. Our little family of 8 is doing a great job on that front; it’s the loss of community via friends that I’m referring to.
Sorry, I was responding mostly to the "get rid of your phone" part, which is an individual action.
For the rest, I guess it's mostly a matter of seeking like-minded people who are into offline things. As other people have said in this forum, there's a vast physical world out there, it's not like it's all dead. Outdoors sports are literally exploding for example.
Getting rid of your phone as an individual works, but only to a certain extent; if you’re trying to replicate past experiences with no one “on their phone,” that is difficult to do unless you’ve cultivated a *community*that eschews smartphones.
Freya, thank you for this piece, and your important Substack writings. You're encouraging us to think broadly and deeply about this moment in time and what steps we can each take towards a better path for ourselves, our families, and our society. Personally, this took the form of relocating cross-country to a place that prioritizes community. Seeing kids riding bikes to school, occasionally with siblings or friends on the handlebars, not a phone in sight, is refreshing. Having a group of like-minded parents and school leaders certainly helps. Time will tell if it's the right choice, but we felt it was a move we had to make for our children. It's not easy to "wait until 8th", or longer. High school teachers we speak to say there's a tangible drop-off in academic and social skills among teens with phones and/or video games vs. those without. The science is slowly catching up to that reality. As more of us wake up and take action, your voice will be even more important. Keep up the good work.
A powerful statement Freya. I'm a septuagenarian and often think about how different the world you are growing up in is from the world I grew up in. Thank you for the word anemoia. I think that it is understandable, and very sad.
I don't ordinarily comment on Substack posts, but as a millennial, I just want to say: Freya, there are so many people older than you who understand and resonate with what you say here. Some may "cringe at Gen Z for not coping," but many others fully understand why you feel the way you do. It's unfair that Gen Zers couldn't enjoy screen-free childhoods. Your willingness to speak on this subject is a gift to Gen Alpha, who can still be spared much of that technocratic infection. And it's a gift to our society more broadly.
The good news is that embodied presence is always available to those who make the conscious choice to fight for it. And one of the glorious parts of adulthood is learning to recognise and prioritise the things you need to flourish—including freedom from screens. I hope that Gen Z increasingly finds that to be true in the coming years.
Thank you for sharing your perspective.
"Embodied presence" is a good phrase (although how "fight for" exactly?). The philosopher John Gray expressed this loss of embodied presence in these haunting words: “Instead of the daily encounters that enable communities to sustain a common life, random collections of solitary people are protected from each other.... Rather than connecting in troublesome relationships, they are turning to cyber-companions for frictionless friendship and virtual sex. The contingencies of living in a material world are being swapped for an algorithmic dreamtime. The end-point is self-enclosure in the Matrix – a loss of the definitively human experience of living as a fleshly, mortal creature..... the defiant smile in the face of cruel absurdity, the glance that began a love that changed us forever, a tune it seemed would always be with us, tears in the rain.” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
yes. I can’t stand those older folks (of which I now belong at 50yrs old) who constantly disparage Gen Z and Millenials as entitled and fragile. this might be the case but it’s not their fault! if anyone is to blame, it’s the former generations who are responsible! we are the ones who gave them these technologies and kept them inside for over two decades. what should we expect..?
We’re on gen beta now😭😭😭
> These kids don’t hate capitalism
Well, they don't exactly like it either. Embodied or disembodied, capitalism still fucked up jobs, and rent, and healthcare, and college, killed smaller towns, propped up corporate overlords, paid politicians for favorable laws, boosted inequality (not of the "everybody doesn't make the same salary, that's unacceptable comrade" kind, they "a handful of ultra-rich guys have amassed most of the wealth in the country and yield political power too, fuck that")
I can’t make any sense of your comment. And are you *proud* that you had unprotected sex with 100 people? Why are you announcing this shameful behavior online in a comment thread to a bunch of strangers?
I got Instagram at 13 and just got off it just a couple months ago at 24. Having a baby daughter of my own made me see the sickness of pixelating your identity. I imagined going online as a teenager and being able to watch her life story unfold from day one through my social accounts—and I didn't want that for her. I want her to tell her own stories and hold onto her own memories and to own her own life. I want her to be able to be a joyous nobody. Undocumented and free. Because I didn't have that. I hope my gift to her at 18 will be zero search results on the internet for her name.
"a joyous nobody," I like that.
One of my cousins tried to protect her son for years, asking people not to post photos of him to facebook, etc, but once he began playing baseball all bets were off. She still tries to make sure he doesn't get absorbed by it, though.
I ended reading this piece in tears, looking back at my childhood and grieving those days when I went to Sam goody over the weekend to buy the new spice girls single on cassette, going to school on Monday and looking forward to coming home and listening to it. Or knocking on my neighbors doors to ask if they could come out to play and running around until the sun set and our parents made us come in for dinner. Or walking to school, slipping notes in lockers… just so much simpler and raw connections. Iphones and social media are heartbreaking to me, and as a millennial with a 3 year old, I can’t help but get sad at the thought that things will never be the same for him. My husband and I are doing our best to work toward a more technology free life, but it is HARD.
Thank you for writing this. It made me feel a lot.
We are struggling to insulate our children (8 and 4) from digital life, because the school of all places pushes it so hard. They hardly use paper textbooks, everything is done on Chromebooks. Grades and schedules and updates are all done though apps. The kids are allowed to play video games on school Chromebooks during breaks. Half my son's 2nd grade class already have smartphones. Midwit school administrators got by slick software salesmen, and fully captured millennial phone-people parents are the problem.
We really had it so good in those days -- I have many of the exact same memories -- and now my wheels are spinning on how to bring more of this magic into my kids' lives.
I'm so glad Freya wrote this. Maybe many people know about this "phenomenon" - anemoia among today's young people - but my feeling is most people don't. I didn't have a word for it but I started to pick up on this as a trend as a high school English teacher. Especially when I asked my students to write about their phone lives.
I'm not a teacher anymore but last month I spent a day in a high school classroom talking to students about why their school plans to ban phones next year. Last week I wrote about this visit. I shared quotes (about phones) from my former students and invited these students to discuss them and later write about them within their class. In one quote I shared a kid bemoaned the fact that, when they wake up every morning, all they do is search for their phone in their bed so they can check TikTok and SnapChat. This kid was hard on himself for not "thanking God for a new day."
I've read MANY, MANY quotes like this, from 16-18 year-olds, and I see this as an expression of anemoia. It's as though this kid imagines that, prior to smartphones, all human beings used to just wake up and actively thank their creator for another day. Talk about an idealized imagining of the past! This makes me so sad and so worried for my own kids and all kids.
I've seen a comment or two asking whether anything can actually be done about this. I will argue all day every day that the place to start is removing phones from schools and being honest about why - ALL the reasons - this must be done. It would not be inaccurate, for example, to tell kids: Phones are not allowed in our school because we want our children to experience fewer feelings of anemoia.
Self-pub makes me feel ill as do internet comments as a general proposition...but I think this is a very important time so I do hope you'll take a moment to check out what's happening here in Des Moines, as a Phone School attempts to become the kind of school Gen Zers are so sweetly nostalgic for.
Phone School: https://sistermimons.substack.com/
Join the Phone Free Schools Movement: https://phonefreeschoolsmovement.org/
I always collected all my students' phones at the beginning of class. Walked around with a big box, they put them in. Some of them had two phones, so it was always a task trying to catch them with their second.
Whether as a parent or a teacher, phone use is a constant battle.
Thanks Freya for delving into the grief of what has been lost to remind us that we can go beyond the present lament and have agency to change what lies ahead. We, especially us parents, are not powerless to return to: “Delayed gratification. Deeper connection. Play and fun. Risk and thrill. Life with less obsessive self-scrutiny.” Thanks for your important work in turning the tide Freya!
Freya, we millennial parents don't mock you. I do feel sorry that your generation was part of the experiment. Technology moved too fast over the last 20 years and we don't have a good handle on it, as it continues to race even faster in a direction we can't even comprehend yet. So the desire to want to take a pause and be nostalgic is totally understandable. I am very conscious about media for my kids (7 & 10) and I'm taking all of this seriously. We all need to pause and reassess the situation before another generation is wasted.
In other words, social media is not for making friends, but for keeping in touch with friends you already made as your lives drift apart.
Beautiful piece, Freya. The 90s were a magical time to grow up with no phones, wokeness, and algorithms. Older generations have succumbed to screen addiction too and zoomers’ parents should never have handed them this addiction so young, just like cigarettes. If everyone puts down their phones and talks to each other across generations, race, gender, politics, etc we might be able to make 90s style magic again and break the fever of our current tech enabled madness. I always enjoy talking to zoomers and hope you all continue your awakening.
Authentic human intelligence is far superior to machine artificial intelligence: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/artifcial-intelligence-ai-authentic-intelligence
Thanks for bringing "wokeness" into this discussion. You just reminded me that the 90s sucked for many disabled people. It was not until 1996 that I could use a telephone for the first time, for example. "Wokeness" refers to the belief there are systemic injustices in society and the need to address them. Barriers to access were more explicit in the 90s than they are today. The struggle to overcome these systematic injustices was still very much present in the 90s, but did not have the frictionless distribution mechanism of social media to spill over into the "normative" aka the ableist conservatives in society who want the oppressions to stay the same.
Hey, I don't mean to "punch down" here but the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed in 1990 by a (gasp) Republican prez! (don't worry I didn't vote for him)
This idea that "ableist conservatives in society who want the oppressions to stay the same" is a mental disability, as it allows you to magically write off half the country as some species of bigot.
—"'Wokeness' refers to the belief there are systemic injustices in society and the need to address them"...this is a very charitable definition. "Wokeness" believes that "systemic injustices" are such an emergency that they supersede our civil liberties and that all social arrangements need to be upended (including free speech, thought and liberal education) so that a specific group of administrators, bureaucrats etc can be empowered to restructure society according to their ideological specifications.
I think the ADA proves that any and all problems can be solved by good ol' fashioned liberalism, which also has the benefit of not being so socially destructive and turning every aspect of our lives into Friend/Enemy denunciation fests.
I'm not an American.
In New Zealand, the current government is the National Party, which has an "anti-woke" campaign to defund all the woke "shit" that touched their metaphorical genitals on the doll. My disabled community in New Zealand is feeling the pain. The playing field has tilted again and many are living in their cars, eating once a day, etc. This is the ideal situation for conservatives who were born into their wealth just as many disabled were disenfranchised by birth into an inequal society.
I am nearly 50 years old and I have yet to receive a single phone call in my life. The country I live in does not provide a relay service for making telephone calls. If the Internet or text messaging did not exist, I would have to rely on able people to access what many consider a public utility that my taxes pay for but I cannot benefit from it.
This attitude that wokeness benefits administrators instead of the community that needs the protections and equality is possibly a very American perspective that has infected the rest of the world.
I'm a bit confused by your discussion of liberalism as being the solution, since "woke" is a liberal ideology. When was the last time you saw a person using a wheelchair without an assistant? A blind person comfortably navigating the footpaths of your city? Do you see them on a daily basis or are they shut up in their suburbs where they need a car to get out? A "woke" ideology would invest in public utilities to allow these people to get out of the house without needing assistance.
How would you feel if suddenly you weren't allowed to access the Internet, just because of a physical characteristic you were born with? Forced to watch everyone else use the Internet. Suddenly not allowed to drive your car into the next neighborhood because of air quality indicators banning car travel? Suddenly not allowed to travel internationally because you have the wrong passport? These are systematic barriers that only exist because people like you say "bureaucrats are empowered to restructure society according to their ideology!"
Of course, we don't want people to not be able to access public utilities that their taxes pay for. It isn't even a full century since segregation ended, but the country continues to segregate minorities (e.g., illegal immigrants, disabled & so on) with the full support of people who don't want the status quo to change.
Sorry, I don't know nuthin bout NZ!
But I do love Janet Frame and Jane Campion!
Apologies for the confusion...Cheers!
I am in NZ; and the point of the article is children losing their childhood. Adults have means of communication and the present govt is quite woke by conservative standards. The people in cars was Jacinda's Labour legacy.
Like your comparison to cigarettes, as well as the rest you wrote. Thank you.
Truly appreciate your perceptive writing, Freya, and grieve with you. I am almost ashamed to say I had the phone free childhood -- much of it outdoors. I am old.
I can’t help but wonder after reading a piece like this: “what is the solution? How can this be resolved?” The simplest solution would be to eschew social media and get rid of your smart phone. But unless you are part of a larger community also doing the same thing (which I think is the most likely avenue for success), the impact wouldn’t be quite the same. Obviously we can never return to pre-smartphone days, but still, I wonder: can this be solved?
That's what's so hard for me to understand, too. I know it's a Collective Action Problem which requires Collective Action Solutions -- and I believe our family is playing our part, but then what? Because so many people are far too comfortable with and cannot imagine life without their phones. While it's wonderful for me to connect with likeminded people in places here, when I talk to my friends inside my own community, it's mind-numbing, sometimes, the excuses.
"I want her to be able to take pictures." BUY HER A CAMERA.
Underlying the drive to get kids' phones, too, is fear. Parents are fearful of not having constant contact with their kids. It's not just parents – I get sideeyed by my son's principal for letting him walk four blocks home from school alone at age 10. As parents, we're expected to pick up and drop off our kids everywhere, immediately, so they're never ever unmonitored. They're never just left to roam.
I put an AirTag in my child's backpack and let him roam. It's good enough. My point is that we adults – parents, school administrators, whatever – need to get comfortable with our kids not having phones, too.
Yes! Absolutely! Our pediatrician balked when I said none of the kids have phones yet, nor will they for awhile -- and when our oldest does get one, it would most likely be a flip phone.
We've been homeschooling since 2020 and the kids' tutorial has not allowed devices... but I'm curious to see how entry for one (possibly two) of ours into private school in the fall will (or hopefully won't?) add to the tension mounting on our resistance.
Oh, it’ll be relentless. There’s no escape! I hate hate hate fighting the screen battle. Feels like the number one responsibility as a parent and it never relents.
I homeschooled my son through 6th and my daughter through 9th. Then they entered private school and the onslaught began. I can’t tell you how much I hate it. The countless battles, the nights lying awake questioning my parenting choices, and an always simmering resentment at culture, big tech, the schools that unquestioningly bring tech into the classroom, and the parents who give their kids phones in middle school for pushing us into this civilizational decline.
I felt like the onslaught began when my daughter started youth group last summer, ironically just at the end of a Digital Detox our church walked through the month of May. Her first event all the girls had their phones out starting a group chat that (though she has an iCloud account on an iPad she sometimes uses) she didn't engage with. This is a girl who puts letters weekly into the mail for friends who have "no time" to write her back but spend hours scrolling. There's such a disconnect between what people say they want and what they're willing to enact -- and I know it because it's in me as well.
We've been moving the needle in the right direction for our family, slowly but surely over the years, but I think part of that has been easier by being at home. The school we're entering into has a "no phones" policy for students while at school, but I need to press in a little -- or perhaps once I'm a part of the community -- on what that actually looks like and how we're challenging our children (or rather, parents) to resist the decline around them.
Oh, yes, sadly it’s in the youth groups too. In our last church, media consumption was barely different from the world’s, not only in terms of quantity but also in content. I was shocked at what parents allowed their kids to watch and play. I felt so alone in my convictions. Let us fight the good fight.
I just noticed your comment about church youth group and wanted to share this. It's something you can share with your church leaders. https://dearchristianparent.substack.com/p/dear-youth-leader
On the flip side, it’s way too tempting for parents to not respect the privacy of the child. That phone said child has also has his/her private thoughts in it. It’s way worse than reading a diary. Those AirTags get put on people unknowingly too. Nobody trusts anyone or respect boundaries when they know the tech is there to get them access
My sister was telling me about a girlfriend that she grew up with is answering her child’s text messages as if she were the child. It’s her way of gathering intel and ultimately being a full on stalker. Really sick
I do wonder if it will end up being *physical* communities that are likeminded about the problems of smartphone addiction. That sounds extreme, but the alternative (depressed, anxious, unconnected people) seems much worse?
I agree! I feel like I put feelers out in the varied physical communities I find myself in (neighborhood, tutorial, sports, community group, etc.) and am met with resistance. What I should probably start doing is connecting with the people I see waiting comfortably in lines or waiting rooms or coffeeshops without their phones out and go from there.
At the individual level, if getting rid of your smartphone is too much, you can reduce its impact by limiting the kinds of things you do on it. Many of its functions are quite useful and mostly sane: GPS, one to one messaging, the occasional video or audio call, note taking, the weather, even the news. Before phones people in the subway used to hide their face behind the newspaper, no big loss if it's now a digital screen. It's the social media dynamics, and "the feed" in all its forms, that has turned this little screen into digital crack. You can keep using all that useful stuff, and selective refuse social media, personalized feeds and "gamification" (likes, streaks, etc.) of all kinds.
Yeah I’m not talking about an individual level. Our little family of 8 is doing a great job on that front; it’s the loss of community via friends that I’m referring to.
Sorry, I was responding mostly to the "get rid of your phone" part, which is an individual action.
For the rest, I guess it's mostly a matter of seeking like-minded people who are into offline things. As other people have said in this forum, there's a vast physical world out there, it's not like it's all dead. Outdoors sports are literally exploding for example.
Getting rid of your phone as an individual works, but only to a certain extent; if you’re trying to replicate past experiences with no one “on their phone,” that is difficult to do unless you’ve cultivated a *community*that eschews smartphones.
Check out School of the Unconformed’s posts on solutions! Crowd-sourced suggestions on what has worked & is working.
When I was reading the comments under the video of the 1999 high school class, I was surprised to find tears welling up in my eyes.
Freya, thank you for this piece, and your important Substack writings. You're encouraging us to think broadly and deeply about this moment in time and what steps we can each take towards a better path for ourselves, our families, and our society. Personally, this took the form of relocating cross-country to a place that prioritizes community. Seeing kids riding bikes to school, occasionally with siblings or friends on the handlebars, not a phone in sight, is refreshing. Having a group of like-minded parents and school leaders certainly helps. Time will tell if it's the right choice, but we felt it was a move we had to make for our children. It's not easy to "wait until 8th", or longer. High school teachers we speak to say there's a tangible drop-off in academic and social skills among teens with phones and/or video games vs. those without. The science is slowly catching up to that reality. As more of us wake up and take action, your voice will be even more important. Keep up the good work.
Wow. Heartbreaking.
BRILLIANT!!!
Beautiful, Freya. With people like you, Jonathan and Zach in the world, there is definitely hope.
A powerful statement Freya. I'm a septuagenarian and often think about how different the world you are growing up in is from the world I grew up in. Thank you for the word anemoia. I think that it is understandable, and very sad.