This is an extremely important piece. Found Bowling Alone fascinating, and the parallels are striking. I'm running an experiment right now, going phone free on my commute (two hours each day) to see if it improves my mood. One of the strangest effects has been loneliness. I am surrounded by people - 99 per cent of whom are on their phones - who are in another world. It has been an insight to how I must make my children feel when I'm on the phone at home.
I'm pleased to say that though it has been hard, after five weeks of rewiring the brain, now feeling genuine and overwhelming benefits.
To start with, I went hardcore: no books, no music, nothing. Although I might in future take a book, I do think imagining it as training rather than relaxation did help with expectations. The withdrawal is severe.
Because I'd failed with willpower alone before, I now wear a high-vis vest on my commute that announces I'm not allowed to touch my phone. It's a full-on social commitment that keeps me honest! (Though I'm beginning to realise a Phone Free sticker for the laptop or bag might be the more subtle version for the rebel toolkit!).
I initially committed to 60 days, but the Week 5 benefits are so profound I am carrying on for life. It’s been quite surprising - I started it because I wanted to stop looking at my phone when I’m with my kids, and that has happened. But it’s had the unexpected benefit of also stopping work worry encroaching into family life. A commute spent without scrolling turns out to be an effective mental airlock.
I'm posting the full Day 30 rewiring report tomorrow morning on my Substack if you're interested.
Once a year during the month of November I unplug from everything. I take my phone with me just in case of emergency but next year I'm even thinking of stopping that. The feeling is outta this world.
I am a 1956 high school graduate and was interested in the story the part that starts society in 1956 and realized it was pretty much how things evolved. I am not, and doubt I will EVER be married to my phone. I take it only for convenience being a woman. Sitting on a train or bus or in the car, I like to look out the window and at my surroundings taking in and thinking about what I see. Sometimes I talk to people if they are interesting. I am not and will not be hooked to a phone, you can bet on that. I am not a robot. I am a social being in a society that has degraded sadly.
I'd love to try that. It must be such a liberating experience. Unfortunately for now, with a full time job and full time kids, the commute is the only time I have to dedicate. But one day...
We home schooled our kids 1998-2017 but still we were sucked into the electronics. We once piled all of our electronic gadgets on our bed one time and took picture of them. It was an eye opener. We are a completely different culture from the 1960s. Reminds me of the song "2525 if man is still alive."
This piece is right to push the origins of today’s anxiety crisis back before smartphones. TV, suburbs, and convenience technologies didn’t just change habits — they changed the texture of everyday life.
What’s often missed is that these changes didn’t just affect adults. They reshaped the environments in which developing minds were being formed.
The shift actually begins earlier, with industrialisation and mass education, when human time ceased to be organised around the sun and came to be organised around machines and performance targets. Philosophers like Heidegger noticed that humans don’t begin as detached thinkers who later enter the world — we become ourselves through the world we’re placed into. Developmental neuroscience now shows that’s a biological fact, not a metaphor.
Today, we’ve pulled abstraction and evaluation even earlier, into the experience-expectant phase of childhood, when the brain is still wiring regulation and social safety. From that point on, outcomes narrow.
When abstraction arrives before regulation, variance turns into impairment
Excellent piece! The historic trajectory of disconnection often goes unexplored in the context of. the current loneliness crisis. Learning to forge commitments in the real world, rather than just focusing on unplugging, will be the first step toward restoring trust and community. My husband Peco and I explored this in our piece "High Fidelity: Bringing Back Commitment Culture"https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/high-fidelity-bringing-back-commitment. We'll soon be leading our fourth annual Communal Digital Fast coinciding with Lent, focusing not just on fasting from the virtual, but feasting on the real. Thanks for your work!
I have gotten off all social media (Facebook, Instagram, Nextdoor, etc.). I have disabled all notifications on my phone, except for text. No sound notifications however, only the banner. I restrict myself to checking news to once a day. Ditto checking email. Ditto checking the weather. My life has gotten so much more peaceful. I don’t have constant interruptions to distract and feed my ADD. More time to read and do other things. I invite various friends for coffee or lunch or a walk once a week, we meet in person. I stopped watching church online and go in person. All of these small changes have added up to a different, improved kind of a day. Before, I found myself constantly reaching for my phone, checking, checking, checking..…. Now, to my surprise, I find that I do not miss what I have eliminated.
I enjoy this article, but I have a few critiques with it. The authors seem to suggest that the 1970s are closer to the present, as compared to decades earlier in the 20th century. I feel that there in many ways, the 1970's and surrounding decades were almost opposite to the present, in relation to the youth. For example, when Baby Boomers and Generation Xers were young, they "socially fast walked", they had less parental supervision and screens as compared to the present. kids then had to develop social "street smarts" very quickly. Now teens are "socially slow walking". They are reaching traditional milestones (driving, dating, drinking, working) significantly later than young people from decades past, like the 1970's. At the same time, back in the 1970's, Baby Boomers and Generation Xers were "professionally slow walking" It was much easier at the time to work at a "dead-end" job like pizza place just for gas money. The youth could spent many hours a day doing nothing with their friends because the "opportunity cost" of that time was low. Now Gen Z are "professionally fast walking". College is a hyper-competitive arms race, and teens today are under immense pressure to build a "resume" before they can even drive. This reduces independence.
Another point closely related, is the impact that the automobile had on young people back in the 20th century. Because of the automobile, baby boomers and Generation Xers could get further away from home and have an easier time doing this. I would argue that decades ago the automobile had the exact opposite impact as screens, in relation to young people independence. Perhaps new, emerging technology, like E-bikes, will help the youth get out of the house, like in past decades.
Now, going back to the points on Robert Putnam and "Bowling Alone". Besides reducing screens, another thing that will really help is reducing political polarization. I feel that the political chasm between groups and people is just as destructive to the disappearance of trust, and the resulting emergence of children being kept in the inside world, as screens. Political polarization is turning parent against parent and making it harder to create a fertile environment to return kids to the outside world. If parents were more alike to each other, it would be easier to create an environment, in which kids can go out and play and socialize with each other, without the supervision of adults.
I do think that things are starting to change. That the way children are being raised is, in minor ways, starting to become closer to the past and that overtime this "change" is going to turn into an avalanche that won't be stopped. That things are going to flip back to young people being "socially fast walking" and "professionally slow walking" like in decades past. And that these will cause many good things and then some not good things, but for whatever is negative, this will be up to a future Jonathan Haidt to fix.
This reminds me of my 2nd family. I had my first family in the 70's 80's and then when that faltered, by my spouse leaving the fold, I remarried a younger lady that had two young children and then we had two of our own. So thats a Brady Bunch of 6 kids with 2 of them step-kids. My oldest step son (born in 95) was an intellectual giant like his M.D. mother. When he was 3 and a half and attending the Montessori daycare/school the question of "What is love" was presented to him. His answer was astounding: "It's difficult to say." Time passes and this boy escaped to the west coast corralling a degree in English Literature in Seattle, Washington. Upon arrival back to the East coast he requested counsel with his monstrous step dad. "I learned that, 'sparing the rod spoils the child' doesn't not mean spanking." as he stared at me waiting for an answer. _ _ _ ?
This is enlightened. What to do about it? Look to town planning, make the space outside the home shared public space and make sure that there is a primary school within walking distance. Take the cars of the streets, let people walk the last 100 meters and meet each other on a daily basis. It's really not that hard.
However I am coming to suspect that what the After Babel team have been calling "Act I" was not in fact the first act after all (or at least started further back).
Having read "Feminism Against Progress" by Mary Harrington, and "Against the Machine" by Paul Kingsnorth I would argue there is a "Zeroth Act" that started the destruction of culture...that then laid the groundwork for Act I.
Of course this means the problem is a little larger than first anticipated.
That being said, using digital technology less is a good place to start!
In 1957, Isaac Asimov wrote a science fiction novel entitled "The Naked Sun" In it, he describes the Solarians, a human civilization that found person-to-person contact repugnant and went to great lengths to avoid it. They communicated remotely and were trying to genetically engineer themselves to become hermaphrodites, thereby removing any biological need for sexual reproduction.
I love that pieces like this are flooding my feed. It feels like an awakening to reality. I think the majority realize it but the minority realize the need to respond to it.
Yes, smartphones save time with certain tasks, but then you end up sinking 10x that into the addictive always-available entertainment device permanently attached to you. That's why people have less time today, despite ubiquitous time-saving technology.
“In a small, three-day survey, Talker Research found that 63% of Gen Z now intentionally unplug — the highest rate of any generation — and that half of Americans are spending less time on screens for their well-being, and their top alternative activity is time with friends and family. And they found that two-thirds of Americans are embracing “slow living,” with 84% adopting analog lifestyle choices like wristwatches and paper notebooks that help them unplug. Meanwhile in Eventbrite’s “Reset to Real” survey, 74% of young adults say in-person experiences matter more than digital ones. New devices like the Light Phone, Brick, Meadow, and Daylight Computer signal a growing demand for utility without distraction.”
I want to believe these statistics but I’m skeptical. Everywhere I go people are completely glued to their phones, except for church.
Interesting article! IMO, the data could use some refinement wrt geographic/cultural enclaves. Already when I was a tween (1950s) a visit to NYC from my home in rural PA, was a BIG culture shock in the way people avoided interaction on the sidewalks. In 2006 my wife of nearly 60 years and I moved to a rural setting in western NC for retirement. I have really noticed the warmth and openness of country folks around here vs those we knew in the Midwest. I have no data on how much TV they watch, but I suspect it may be less "sophisticated" than urban viewers might choose. And while some still believe in "demons" they are able to carry on a conversation even while disagreeing.
What an unimportant piece. We could have easily avoided the current tragedy by banning internet pornography and imposing other obviously needed checks on technology to mitigate this problem. It was libertarians like Jonathan Haidt who demanded we not do that, because something something freedom.
They won the court battles, and the culture war. And now they blame air conditioning. Ridiculous.
Excellent overview and updating of Putnam’s important work 25 years ago. 25 years that included the digital revolution and social media. Sure hope your hope for improvement bears fruit. Thanks.
Great essay. This historical mapping is clarifying, especially the long arc from front porches to parallel digital lives. But I wonder if framing the problem as "choice" understates what's happened.
The attention economy doesn't just consume time. It trains the nervous system into chronic defensive narrowing, the same architecture as trauma, at scale. Which means "choosing" connection isn't simply a matter of will. The capacity for sustained presence has to be rebuilt in the body. The trade-off wasn't just convenience for connection. It was convenience for the physiological capacity to stay.
I explored this in a recent piece: The Attention Wound: What the Attention Economy Extracts and What the Body Cannot Surrender
Re: choice -- the overwhelming majority of American children and youth now are _required_ to join and use at least one big tech platform, social network and/or smarphone app to complete school work, participate in clubs or activities, receive important announcements, play sports, apply to college or for summer jobs, etc.
So true Anthony. The platforms have become infrastructure. For many young people ppting out means opting out of basic social life.
So the question shifts: how do we build agency within structures designed to foreclose it? The algorithm wants contraction. Expansion has to be practiced against the grain, not by opting out, but by cultivating presence within the capture. It is so hard to do.
The chart showing how many couple meeting online now is absolutely wild to me. I don't know anyone who met their spouse online. 6 couples who met in my high school (my wife and I included) are married with kids. Now, the data is the data and it may not reflect my little slice of the nation but that is a very staggering statistic of where our attention is these days. I hope these concepts are far reaching and inspires people to get involved and be needed, be accountable, and be present.
What this piece does so well is refuse the easy villain. Instead of blaming smartphones alone, you trace the long moral arc of convenience itself—how perfectly reasonable desires for comfort, privacy, and control slowly dissolved the shared frictions that once made trust possible. The bowling-league kidney story still stuns because it reveals how ordinary intimacy used to be: not curated, not optimized, just repeated presence. What struck me most is the way you frame loneliness not as a technological failure but as a cultural one—a habit formed over decades where independence quietly replaced interdependence, until community became something optional rather than assumed.
I also appreciate how the “path forward” avoids both nostalgia and tech rejection. The Progressive Era parallel is clarifying: connection has always required new forms when conditions change, but it never arrives without inconvenience. The call to stay for coffee, host anyway, endure awkwardness—these are small, almost embarrassingly unglamorous acts, yet they’re exactly where trust is rebuilt. In a world optimized for staying in, choosing one another really is a kind of resistance. I’ve been reflecting on similar themes around memory, presence, and the slow erosion of shared life, especially how easily we confuse access with relationship, and efficiency with meaning.
I think the authors missed the mark with their "either/or" framing of Tech Rejection vs Personal Responsibility. By comparison, when we learned that dangerously addictive opiods had been foisted on an unsuspecting public by greedy Pharma Execs and unscrupulous doctors & pharmacies, our governments and medical boards enacted new laws, prescription protocols, oversight, and public education. Lawsuits secured $50B to pay for damage and prevention. We did all this, but did not "ban" or "reject" opiods.
This is an extremely important piece. Found Bowling Alone fascinating, and the parallels are striking. I'm running an experiment right now, going phone free on my commute (two hours each day) to see if it improves my mood. One of the strangest effects has been loneliness. I am surrounded by people - 99 per cent of whom are on their phones - who are in another world. It has been an insight to how I must make my children feel when I'm on the phone at home.
I'm pleased to say that though it has been hard, after five weeks of rewiring the brain, now feeling genuine and overwhelming benefits.
Love this experiment, Will! I'd be curious to know how you are you spending the time on your commute, if not on your phone.
To start with, I went hardcore: no books, no music, nothing. Although I might in future take a book, I do think imagining it as training rather than relaxation did help with expectations. The withdrawal is severe.
Because I'd failed with willpower alone before, I now wear a high-vis vest on my commute that announces I'm not allowed to touch my phone. It's a full-on social commitment that keeps me honest! (Though I'm beginning to realise a Phone Free sticker for the laptop or bag might be the more subtle version for the rebel toolkit!).
I initially committed to 60 days, but the Week 5 benefits are so profound I am carrying on for life. It’s been quite surprising - I started it because I wanted to stop looking at my phone when I’m with my kids, and that has happened. But it’s had the unexpected benefit of also stopping work worry encroaching into family life. A commute spent without scrolling turns out to be an effective mental airlock.
I'm posting the full Day 30 rewiring report tomorrow morning on my Substack if you're interested.
Once a year during the month of November I unplug from everything. I take my phone with me just in case of emergency but next year I'm even thinking of stopping that. The feeling is outta this world.
I am a 1956 high school graduate and was interested in the story the part that starts society in 1956 and realized it was pretty much how things evolved. I am not, and doubt I will EVER be married to my phone. I take it only for convenience being a woman. Sitting on a train or bus or in the car, I like to look out the window and at my surroundings taking in and thinking about what I see. Sometimes I talk to people if they are interesting. I am not and will not be hooked to a phone, you can bet on that. I am not a robot. I am a social being in a society that has degraded sadly.
I'd love to try that. It must be such a liberating experience. Unfortunately for now, with a full time job and full time kids, the commute is the only time I have to dedicate. But one day...
We home schooled our kids 1998-2017 but still we were sucked into the electronics. We once piled all of our electronic gadgets on our bed one time and took picture of them. It was an eye opener. We are a completely different culture from the 1960s. Reminds me of the song "2525 if man is still alive."
This piece is right to push the origins of today’s anxiety crisis back before smartphones. TV, suburbs, and convenience technologies didn’t just change habits — they changed the texture of everyday life.
What’s often missed is that these changes didn’t just affect adults. They reshaped the environments in which developing minds were being formed.
The shift actually begins earlier, with industrialisation and mass education, when human time ceased to be organised around the sun and came to be organised around machines and performance targets. Philosophers like Heidegger noticed that humans don’t begin as detached thinkers who later enter the world — we become ourselves through the world we’re placed into. Developmental neuroscience now shows that’s a biological fact, not a metaphor.
Today, we’ve pulled abstraction and evaluation even earlier, into the experience-expectant phase of childhood, when the brain is still wiring regulation and social safety. From that point on, outcomes narrow.
When abstraction arrives before regulation, variance turns into impairment
Excellent piece! The historic trajectory of disconnection often goes unexplored in the context of. the current loneliness crisis. Learning to forge commitments in the real world, rather than just focusing on unplugging, will be the first step toward restoring trust and community. My husband Peco and I explored this in our piece "High Fidelity: Bringing Back Commitment Culture"https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/high-fidelity-bringing-back-commitment. We'll soon be leading our fourth annual Communal Digital Fast coinciding with Lent, focusing not just on fasting from the virtual, but feasting on the real. Thanks for your work!
I have gotten off all social media (Facebook, Instagram, Nextdoor, etc.). I have disabled all notifications on my phone, except for text. No sound notifications however, only the banner. I restrict myself to checking news to once a day. Ditto checking email. Ditto checking the weather. My life has gotten so much more peaceful. I don’t have constant interruptions to distract and feed my ADD. More time to read and do other things. I invite various friends for coffee or lunch or a walk once a week, we meet in person. I stopped watching church online and go in person. All of these small changes have added up to a different, improved kind of a day. Before, I found myself constantly reaching for my phone, checking, checking, checking..…. Now, to my surprise, I find that I do not miss what I have eliminated.
I enjoy this article, but I have a few critiques with it. The authors seem to suggest that the 1970s are closer to the present, as compared to decades earlier in the 20th century. I feel that there in many ways, the 1970's and surrounding decades were almost opposite to the present, in relation to the youth. For example, when Baby Boomers and Generation Xers were young, they "socially fast walked", they had less parental supervision and screens as compared to the present. kids then had to develop social "street smarts" very quickly. Now teens are "socially slow walking". They are reaching traditional milestones (driving, dating, drinking, working) significantly later than young people from decades past, like the 1970's. At the same time, back in the 1970's, Baby Boomers and Generation Xers were "professionally slow walking" It was much easier at the time to work at a "dead-end" job like pizza place just for gas money. The youth could spent many hours a day doing nothing with their friends because the "opportunity cost" of that time was low. Now Gen Z are "professionally fast walking". College is a hyper-competitive arms race, and teens today are under immense pressure to build a "resume" before they can even drive. This reduces independence.
Another point closely related, is the impact that the automobile had on young people back in the 20th century. Because of the automobile, baby boomers and Generation Xers could get further away from home and have an easier time doing this. I would argue that decades ago the automobile had the exact opposite impact as screens, in relation to young people independence. Perhaps new, emerging technology, like E-bikes, will help the youth get out of the house, like in past decades.
Now, going back to the points on Robert Putnam and "Bowling Alone". Besides reducing screens, another thing that will really help is reducing political polarization. I feel that the political chasm between groups and people is just as destructive to the disappearance of trust, and the resulting emergence of children being kept in the inside world, as screens. Political polarization is turning parent against parent and making it harder to create a fertile environment to return kids to the outside world. If parents were more alike to each other, it would be easier to create an environment, in which kids can go out and play and socialize with each other, without the supervision of adults.
I do think that things are starting to change. That the way children are being raised is, in minor ways, starting to become closer to the past and that overtime this "change" is going to turn into an avalanche that won't be stopped. That things are going to flip back to young people being "socially fast walking" and "professionally slow walking" like in decades past. And that these will cause many good things and then some not good things, but for whatever is negative, this will be up to a future Jonathan Haidt to fix.
This reminds me of my 2nd family. I had my first family in the 70's 80's and then when that faltered, by my spouse leaving the fold, I remarried a younger lady that had two young children and then we had two of our own. So thats a Brady Bunch of 6 kids with 2 of them step-kids. My oldest step son (born in 95) was an intellectual giant like his M.D. mother. When he was 3 and a half and attending the Montessori daycare/school the question of "What is love" was presented to him. His answer was astounding: "It's difficult to say." Time passes and this boy escaped to the west coast corralling a degree in English Literature in Seattle, Washington. Upon arrival back to the East coast he requested counsel with his monstrous step dad. "I learned that, 'sparing the rod spoils the child' doesn't not mean spanking." as he stared at me waiting for an answer. _ _ _ ?
This is enlightened. What to do about it? Look to town planning, make the space outside the home shared public space and make sure that there is a primary school within walking distance. Take the cars of the streets, let people walk the last 100 meters and meet each other on a daily basis. It's really not that hard.
Very good stuff.
However I am coming to suspect that what the After Babel team have been calling "Act I" was not in fact the first act after all (or at least started further back).
Having read "Feminism Against Progress" by Mary Harrington, and "Against the Machine" by Paul Kingsnorth I would argue there is a "Zeroth Act" that started the destruction of culture...that then laid the groundwork for Act I.
Of course this means the problem is a little larger than first anticipated.
That being said, using digital technology less is a good place to start!
See Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation for more on "Act 0"
In 1957, Isaac Asimov wrote a science fiction novel entitled "The Naked Sun" In it, he describes the Solarians, a human civilization that found person-to-person contact repugnant and went to great lengths to avoid it. They communicated remotely and were trying to genetically engineer themselves to become hermaphrodites, thereby removing any biological need for sexual reproduction.
Are we there yet?
I love that pieces like this are flooding my feed. It feels like an awakening to reality. I think the majority realize it but the minority realize the need to respond to it.
Yes, smartphones save time with certain tasks, but then you end up sinking 10x that into the addictive always-available entertainment device permanently attached to you. That's why people have less time today, despite ubiquitous time-saving technology.
“In a small, three-day survey, Talker Research found that 63% of Gen Z now intentionally unplug — the highest rate of any generation — and that half of Americans are spending less time on screens for their well-being, and their top alternative activity is time with friends and family. And they found that two-thirds of Americans are embracing “slow living,” with 84% adopting analog lifestyle choices like wristwatches and paper notebooks that help them unplug. Meanwhile in Eventbrite’s “Reset to Real” survey, 74% of young adults say in-person experiences matter more than digital ones. New devices like the Light Phone, Brick, Meadow, and Daylight Computer signal a growing demand for utility without distraction.”
I want to believe these statistics but I’m skeptical. Everywhere I go people are completely glued to their phones, except for church.
Interesting article! IMO, the data could use some refinement wrt geographic/cultural enclaves. Already when I was a tween (1950s) a visit to NYC from my home in rural PA, was a BIG culture shock in the way people avoided interaction on the sidewalks. In 2006 my wife of nearly 60 years and I moved to a rural setting in western NC for retirement. I have really noticed the warmth and openness of country folks around here vs those we knew in the Midwest. I have no data on how much TV they watch, but I suspect it may be less "sophisticated" than urban viewers might choose. And while some still believe in "demons" they are able to carry on a conversation even while disagreeing.
This is why you rarely see anyone retire in the South and move North.
What an unimportant piece. We could have easily avoided the current tragedy by banning internet pornography and imposing other obviously needed checks on technology to mitigate this problem. It was libertarians like Jonathan Haidt who demanded we not do that, because something something freedom.
They won the court battles, and the culture war. And now they blame air conditioning. Ridiculous.
Excellent overview and updating of Putnam’s important work 25 years ago. 25 years that included the digital revolution and social media. Sure hope your hope for improvement bears fruit. Thanks.
Great essay. This historical mapping is clarifying, especially the long arc from front porches to parallel digital lives. But I wonder if framing the problem as "choice" understates what's happened.
The attention economy doesn't just consume time. It trains the nervous system into chronic defensive narrowing, the same architecture as trauma, at scale. Which means "choosing" connection isn't simply a matter of will. The capacity for sustained presence has to be rebuilt in the body. The trade-off wasn't just convenience for connection. It was convenience for the physiological capacity to stay.
I explored this in a recent piece: The Attention Wound: What the Attention Economy Extracts and What the Body Cannot Surrender
https://open.substack.com/pub/yauguru/p/the-attention-wound?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Re: choice -- the overwhelming majority of American children and youth now are _required_ to join and use at least one big tech platform, social network and/or smarphone app to complete school work, participate in clubs or activities, receive important announcements, play sports, apply to college or for summer jobs, etc.
So true Anthony. The platforms have become infrastructure. For many young people ppting out means opting out of basic social life.
So the question shifts: how do we build agency within structures designed to foreclose it? The algorithm wants contraction. Expansion has to be practiced against the grain, not by opting out, but by cultivating presence within the capture. It is so hard to do.
The chart showing how many couple meeting online now is absolutely wild to me. I don't know anyone who met their spouse online. 6 couples who met in my high school (my wife and I included) are married with kids. Now, the data is the data and it may not reflect my little slice of the nation but that is a very staggering statistic of where our attention is these days. I hope these concepts are far reaching and inspires people to get involved and be needed, be accountable, and be present.
What this piece does so well is refuse the easy villain. Instead of blaming smartphones alone, you trace the long moral arc of convenience itself—how perfectly reasonable desires for comfort, privacy, and control slowly dissolved the shared frictions that once made trust possible. The bowling-league kidney story still stuns because it reveals how ordinary intimacy used to be: not curated, not optimized, just repeated presence. What struck me most is the way you frame loneliness not as a technological failure but as a cultural one—a habit formed over decades where independence quietly replaced interdependence, until community became something optional rather than assumed.
I also appreciate how the “path forward” avoids both nostalgia and tech rejection. The Progressive Era parallel is clarifying: connection has always required new forms when conditions change, but it never arrives without inconvenience. The call to stay for coffee, host anyway, endure awkwardness—these are small, almost embarrassingly unglamorous acts, yet they’re exactly where trust is rebuilt. In a world optimized for staying in, choosing one another really is a kind of resistance. I’ve been reflecting on similar themes around memory, presence, and the slow erosion of shared life, especially how easily we confuse access with relationship, and efficiency with meaning.
https://theeternalnowmm.substack.com/p/seeing-clearly-lenses-history-and?r=71z4jh
I think the authors missed the mark with their "either/or" framing of Tech Rejection vs Personal Responsibility. By comparison, when we learned that dangerously addictive opiods had been foisted on an unsuspecting public by greedy Pharma Execs and unscrupulous doctors & pharmacies, our governments and medical boards enacted new laws, prescription protocols, oversight, and public education. Lawsuits secured $50B to pay for damage and prevention. We did all this, but did not "ban" or "reject" opiods.