Confessions of a grown-up tech addict Adults are as dazed as children

A few years ago, I lost my smartphone. After hours of searching, I noticed the washing-up bowl in the kitchen, still ominously full of soapy water from an earlier task. With mounting dread, I put my hand in and pulled out a cold oblong body, dripping and now permanently lifeless. There were no other suspects, yet I could not remember doing the deed myself. I concluded that some better version of me must have taken control for a second and tried to set us both free.

Of course, this better self didn’t prevail for long. There’s always another warm screen out there, waiting to be caressed in the dark. Every day I lose hours to the habit, and over the years I’ve made many futile attempts to cut back. When forced away from the pixelated realm, I get anxious. While I’m in it, I neglect responsibilities and ignore my loved ones. I have scrolled or texted my way down steep staircases or across busy roads, the compulsion putting me at physical risk. My memory is now fading, and my capacity to delay gratification seriously reduced. My name is Kathleen and I am — according to all standard diagnostic criteria — an addict. Based on the law of averages, you are probably one too.

Given it is so difficult for adults to escape from their inhuman bondage, it seems imperative that someone thinks of the children. This week, various luminaries have been doing just that. Taking a dim view of Big Tech’s direction of travel, Pope Leo XIV has written approvingly of state restrictions on the use of internet platforms for minors, arguing that “it is difficult for parents by themselves to resist the influence of business models that monetize attention and time”. He might have added: particularly when the parents are similarly bewitched. In response to a government consultation, meanwhile, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges has published its own encyclical of sorts, declaring that children’s “unfettered exposure to tech and devices… ranks alongside smoking and wearing seatbelts in cars as a unifying force for the medical profession.”

Sensing a popular issue — both with parents worried about their children, and progressive voters who just want to stick it to Elon Musk — politicians are increasingly talking about tech limits too. Correctly, there was strong condemnation of Grok’s nudification app from the Prime Minister earlier this year. The aforementioned consultation has just closed, with unspecified draconian measures expected by the end of the summer. Following a meeting this week with bereaved parents who blame social media for their children’s deaths, Starmer has renewed earlier manifesto promises about improving online child safety. And Wes Streeting has said that he agrees with the doctors: “social media should be treated like tobacco.”

Interestingly, given the former health secretary’s vociferous support for the new Tobacco and Vapes Act, it appears to follow that the Government should raise the legal age for social media every year until it is phased out for future generations entirely. Though clearly such a measure would be ludicrously authoritarian — as indeed it is with respect to smokers — it does seem there are few harms to children caused by screens that don’t translate to the species as a whole. At the very least, the failure to consider this point means that whatever limits are eventually imposed for minors, they are likely to be useless. What self-respecting 13-year-old is going to accept reduced access to the internet, when the adults around her are completely entranced by it, allegedly without any issues? It is as if — fag exuberantly in hand — we were saying that smoking was terrible, but only for those not yet old enough to vote.

Prior to the Tobacco and Vapes Act, the general assumption was that smoking was bad for old and young alike, but also that autonomous adults had the right to choose their own poisons. Leaving the truth of that conclusion aside, it is striking that adult tech users get both autonomous choice and the trivialization of harms. Concerns as they pertain to over-18s seem to be mainly focused on AI, yet the troubling consequences of the smartphone craze long predated the rise of bots. It is striking that the bulk of chatter in this area is about the impact on child and teen development — an area conveniently irrelevant to aged brains.

The most popular concern is social media content, which exposes young people to dangerous influences well before they are able to process their true import. It is indeed a problem that, deprived of counterbalancing experiences, impressionable minds will heedlessly take on new habits of thought and action, given rapid exposure to hundreds of apparently confirming online examples. Vices like self-obsession and bullying can get fostered in personalities that are still forming, sometimes with tragic consequences. You can argue about whether some particular online element (porn, the manosphere, pro-anorexia sites, or whatever) is genuinely dangerous or not. But the medium’s generally corrupting power seems indisputable. In theory, self-improving habits might spread just as fast as self-destructive ones through a plugged-in population, but in practice the latter take less effort and can be carried out more easily from teenage bedrooms.

Quite apart from anxieties about content, there are also real worries about technological form: the way it keeps youthful attention spans short when they should be growing, causes dizzying dopamine spirals followed by crashes, and stops proper development of impulse control. Indirectly, the lure of screens also reduces participation in several fundamental prerequisites for well-being, both during childhood and afterwards: talking and listening to others, going outside in the fresh air, making real-life friends. When academic tech defenders protest that it is “loneliness… rather than screen time by itself” that causes “mental health struggles” in the young, the point is hardly reassuring. Perhaps the youngsters in question wouldn’t feel so lonely if their friends were actually in the room with them.

Whatever the experts say, from the perspective of a parent it is hard to deny that the ubiquitous presence of screens affects young minds for the worse. Only this week, my 18-year-old informed me that he had written clickbait titles at the top of his A-level answers, “to get the examiner’s attention”. Equally, though, nearly all of the problems I just listed have an adult correlate. You may protest that it’s just a little scrolling, you can quit whenever you want, and it doesn’t interfere with your work or family; but I’m afraid that is just the addiction talking.

Character development may slow down after adolescence, but it doesn’t stop entirely. It can still be derailed by powerful online temptations: porn consumption, getting approval from strangers, losing yourself in a fantasy version of your own life. Adults can be mindlessly influenced by social media too, as evidenced by the number of middle-aged women now obsessed with “fascia softening”, which five minutes ago wasn’t even a thing. And irrespective of what people are clicking on, the formal properties of the medium are wiping memories and ruining powers of concentration, while the whole business displaces other meaningful pursuits. As Ian McEwan told a festival audience this week: “It was much easier to be a writer in the Seventies… One didn’t take out one’s phone.”

By now, more libertarian-minded readers are probably spluttering about prising tech from their cold dead hands. These days, the merest hint of public disapproval seems to get people imagining the specter of state-backed sanctions, as if there was no middle ground between the two. But in this particular case, no one need worry. Unless experts can establish that smartphones cause cancer or dementia, or some other kind of dramatic health outcome for adults, the doomscrolling, rage-clicking, and ignoring of family members can continue unabated. It’s not just that the only officially acceptable ways of judging human flourishing must now refer to physical and mental health. It’s also that too many of us are moving in a downwards direction at once, hiding the true costs.

With modern alcoholism or gambling addiction, the problems for the individual and community can be perceived quite clearly, relative to the functional norm. But with screen addictions, most societies have no meaningful contrast to make with any better way of life. Thanks to tech’s awesome obliterating power, most of us can’t even remember what life was like before the screens arrived. In this respect, we are like the Vikings, for whom alcoholic and psychoactive intoxication was the everyday norm, and the word for sober was “un-drunk”. Let’s just say that Alcoholics Anonymous would have been unlikely to catch on there.

Among us moderns, there now walk a few highly self-disciplined people who can read whole books in one go, remember facts rather than looking them up, talk undistractedly to their children, and pass long train journeys by simply staring out the window. They are the un-addicted. We are the rest. Assuming the aim is to save future generations — or even just ourselves — washing-up bowls may be the only way to go.

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