Economic despair, political unrest, and climate fears are all reasons why more people feel concerned and could be the reason for the rise of the loneliness epidemic. Honestly, all that feels pointlessly abstract. It puts the problem entirely out of our hands when, in fact, I believe it may quite literally be in them.
The problem is obviously our phones.
In February, The Atlantic published a feature about the decline of hanging out. Within it was a particularly damning graph sharing the percentage of teens who report hanging out with friends two or more times per week since 1976. Rates were steady at around 80 percent up until the mid-90s, when a subtle decrease began to occur. Then, in 2008 — one year after the release of the first iPhone — the decrease became much more dramatic. It has continued falling sharply since, hovering at just under 60 percent of teens spending ample time with friends each week.
Some of us really don’t like our screen time habits criticized. Others may think they appear smarter by highlighting other issues that they can see above the fray and observing the macro trends that are really shaping our lives, not that stupid anti-phone rhetoric we hear from the Boomers. And some of these other trends do indeed apply. Correlation does not equal causation. Lots of things happened in 2008. Namely, a financial crisis, the effects of which many argue we are still experiencing. There are indeed few places for teenagers to hang out outside of the home. Skate parks are being turned into pickleball courts with “no loitering” signs, malls are shuttering, and you can no longer spend $1 on a McChicken to justify hanging out in the McDonald’s dining area for hours.
But as the Atlantic piece explains, the dwindling of places to be and experience community is a problem we’ve been lamenting since the 90s. And it’s not just teens — everyone is spending less time together than they used to. “In short, there is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own,” the article states.
The fact remains that even with the financial crisis, even with the lack of third spaces, we could all still be experiencing the company of our friends and family at home for free, and we are choosing not to. The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Time Use survey shows that we’re even spending less time with our spouses and children in favor of being alone. It’s because we’re on our phones instead.
Americans average around four and a half hours per day on their phones, with some of us averaging much higher. There are plenty of people looking at their phones upwards of ten hours per day. I personally average in at six and a half hours daily, and I hate it. Half of that time is spent on social media, and I am ALSO addicted to scrolling and receiving notifications. I recently implemented a time limit on certain apps, which is partially helping.
Maybe we want to say social media or the Internet are the real culprits here, but when we talk about phone usage, this is exactly what we’re talking about. Smartphones have allowed us to have constant access to social media and the rest of what the Internet offers — including porn — and are now the dominant form through which we do so. There’s an asinine XKCD comic strip people love to cite detailing how every new form of media consumption throughout history has been blamed for the end of socialization. Books, newspapers, television, and walkmans have all been cited as reasons why people don’t talk to each other anymore. And yes, maybe the phenomenon of people talking to strangers in public has been dying for hundreds of years now, but there remains something entirely contemporary about what phones are doing to us now.
People were not collectively spending up to ten hours every single day reading. They were not habitually choosing books over real people en masse. Even when people did begin spending hours every day on television and video games, the broader trends in time spent with others did not drastically shift. In 1950, the typical American household already watched four and a half hours of TV per day. People have been consuming copious quantities of media for decades now, but it wasn’t until the smartphone, a device we carry with us at nearly every moment, that we began to be so alone. Neither books nor television simulate socialization in the way our phones do.
Of course, the iPhone is not the only thing marking the difference between the 1950s and today, or even the early 2000s and today. You’re right to think life is economically harder, that there are fewer ways to form a community, and that there are countless global issues to feel depressed about. I’m not going to act like deaths of despair, like opioid overdoses, have risen because we’re on our phones too much. But the reality is that some of these changes, and more importantly, how we perceive them, are phone-informed. You’re aware of how bad life is because your phone is constantly telling you about it.
People are exhausted; they have jobs, they have families. You shouldn’t have to fight for places to be, for things to do offline. At the present moment, we’re stuck. We don’t know how to make friends, date, follow the news, or even buy clothing without the help of our phones, and none of it is really our fault. Even as I complain about it, it’s not as though I’m going to give mine up entirely. What I really want for myself and everyone else is to just use my phone less. That is something we are in control of. I want people to prioritize the real world.
De-centering phones is another real thing we can do to better our social lives. The economy is out of our control, but our own personal tech consumption isn’t. We will get nowhere by defending the phones. At the very least, we’re not going to bring back book clubs and bowling leagues by watching YouTube videos and swiping on Tinder. There aren’t going to be spaces to exist and meet if people would rather stay home and scroll. A better world is not going to be built by increasing our screen time.
Now go and put your phone down that you’ve read this article – and disconnect.
XX, Coach Ms.K
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