6 thoughts on “The Terrible Effect Of Cellphones”

  1. “They” said the same about Boomers/GenX and Rock’n’Roll music and TV. (We know about why it was called Rock’n’Roll and it had to do with vans).

    “They” said it about video games, shoot-em ups and p0rn on PCs for Millennials.

    So why not cellphones for Gen Z?

  2. David,

    This is not the same. “They” w.r.t. Rock ‘n’ Roll, etc., were *not* Jonathan Haidt armed with solid, well founded research data. Read Haidt’s books. Read his substack. You will find a dedicated, thoughtful, thorough, and most importantly self-effacing and entirely-open-to-criticism-and-correction researcher who has been sounding a serious alarm in the wilderness for a very long time (kinda like Churchill did before WWII).

    –James

    1. I remember back in the day when there was serious concern we’d lose a generation to physical, real, and irreparable brain damage induced by use of LSD. Those fears seemed well grounded to me at the time. A powerful hallucinogenic with long lasting effects not well understood at the time, nor now. Something that behavioral therapy might not be able to treat effectively. Cell phone abuse I think, may alter brain chemistry but in way reachable by therapy I would hope.

      1. A better analog would be my generation’s addition to television. I spent an inordinate amount of my pre-teen time watching the TV of the time, and it had all the effects the article ascribes to the smart phone on today’s youth. But when I was 10 and 11, I spent a month each of those summers at the most awesome summer camp in the world: Camp Olympic, deep in the woods surrounding Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks. It was owned and operated by a couple of high-school football coaches in St. Louis. We played every sport there was, swam, water skied, rode horses (and cared for them), camped out on a horseback overnight trip, shot actual guns – you couldn’t possibly have a camp like that today. There was no television, and it broke my addiction to it. I lived so much in those two months, and have never regretted it. That’s the kind of therapy kids today could use.

        They used to have a Facebook historical page. Not sure if it’s still there.

      2. LSD under the supervision of a psychiatrist might be a cure for social media addiction. It would be cheaper and more scalable than a trip* to a Zen Buddhist monastery or the Swiss Alps.

        *pun not intended.

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