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Anyone who read the fifth chapter of last week’s World Happiness Report might have winced a bit watching Apple’s latest new product rally. Our phones keep getting more interesting at a time we need to get better at putting them down.
“At Apple, our services are actively working to help our customers get the most out of their products and to enrich their lives,” said CEO Tim Cook at the start of the morning’s event. “The iPhone you carry with you, with its powerful hardware and powerful software, allows you to capture the very best moments of your life.”
But that chapter in the report - “The Sad State of Happiness in the United States and the Role of Digital Media” - paints a troubling picture of an upcoming “iGen” generation missing out on some of the best moments of their lives while looking at their phones.
“Over the last decade, the amount of time adolescents spend on screen activities (especially digital media such as gaming, social media, texting, and time online) has steadily increased, accelerating after 2012 after the majority of Americans owned smartphones,” wrote San Diego State University psychology professor Dr. Jean Twenge. “By 2018, 95% of United States adolescents had access to a smartphone, and 45% said they were online ‘almost constantly.’”
Why does it matter? Because, as Twenge delineates, “the rise of digital media” coincided with “the fall of everything else.” Her warning is hyperbolic, but nonetheless important. College-bound high school seniors in 2016 “spent an hour less a day on face-to-face interaction than GenX adolescents did in the late 1980s,” wrote the professor. “The way adolescents socialize has fundamentally shifted, moving toward online activities and away from face-to-face social interaction.”
Adolescents are spending less time doing non-digital activities such as attending religious services, reading books and magazines, and sleeping, she reports, despite the fact that most real world experiences correlate with greater happiness and most online experiences sap it. Most concerning, “numerous indicators of low psychological well-being such as depression, suicidal ideation, and self-harm increased sharply among adolescents since 2010, particularly among girls and young women.”
It could be that unhappiness draws people more powerfully to digital media, rather than time with electronics causing unhappiness, the professor conceded. “However, several longitudinal studies following the same individuals over time have found that digital media use predicts lower well-being later,” she wrote.
For many of us, it’s now hard to imagine life without our electronics. From tracking a 5K run with the dog to managing travel on the fly, they make life easier, more interesting, and - yes - happier. (By way of confession, I’ve armed myself with nearly the full Apple artillery - iMac, MacBook, iPad, iPhone and even the Apple pencil.) The stuff is cool. But sometimes, perhaps, it’s too cool. Digital technology keeps getting better at drawing our attention; our fixed human nature is not well equipped to resist its features.
The evidence increasingly shows we humans, even with detailed weekly screen time reports that show we should put down the things, often lack the self-awareness and self-discipline to keep “powerful hardware and powerful software” within bounds. Too often we can’t resist looking at them when we’re in an important business meeting. Too often we’re using them to watch a rerun of Friends when we should be out with friends. Far too often we let them interrupt us when we’re driving.
“There has never been a moment quite like this one,” Oprah Winfrey said at the Apple gathering. “We have this unique opportunity to rise to our best selves in how we use and chose to use both our technology and our humanity.”
What she did not say, but what the new happiness report indicates, is that we will need to become more strategic with our technology if we are going to rediscover more of our humanity.
