Your Smartphone is Not the Problem, You Are

On Anxiety, Existentialism, and Recovery

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“I’m not raising children, I'm raising the grown-ups that they're going to be. So I have to raise them with the tools to get through a terrible life. That’s the way I look at it.”                                                                                                                                      
                                                                           — Louis C.K., Conan on TBS (2013)

THE KIDS ARE NOT ALRIGHT—at least according to the graph made by the American College Health Association I am looking at right now. Apparently, over the past decade and a half mental illness has skyrocketed among our college age population: anxiety has increased 134%, depression 106%, ADHD 72%, bipolar 57%, anorexia 100%, substance abuse and addiction 32%, schizophrenia 67%. Nor are these just some vague self-reported opinions, but professionally diagnosed assessments.

I came across these figures while skimming through the much discussed new book The Anxious Generation by Boomer Uncle social scientist Jonathan Haidt. The work purports to expose a direct connection between the adoption of smartphones and social media by teens and this surge in mental health issues. I have not read this book. Life is too short to read 400 pages telling me what I already know: unmediated exposure to media by impressionable youths is bad. However, because I myself am always online, I must have an opinion on this book. So I have read a good deal about it. And the consensus seems to be twofold: No duh, or GTFOH—which, like every issue today, is divided more or less along the fault lines of our culture war.

As sage Homer once observed, “People can come up with statistics to prove anything. Forty percent of all people know that.” Thus, like Haidt’s previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind, one’s response to his latest offering is generally a function of one’s priors. Do you want it to be true—i.e. does it confirm or refute whatever worldview you are already committed to? I’m generally a pessimist (although a more accurate description might be “doomer optimist”), so when I first heard about Haidt’s thesis, I of course applauded it—even if I ultimately felt it was obvious commonsense. It can be useful, though, for someone to be willing to state the obvious in order that private feelings become public knowledge. So say what you want about the specific contents of the book, at least the problem is out in the open now. 

One of the reasons I was so apt to agree with Haidt’s thesis, I believe, is because of the clip from which the epigraph to this essay derives. I remember seeing it on YouTube not long after coming out and being deeply moved. The segment begins with Conan complaining about how hard it is to not give in to his kids’ demand to have a smartphone. Louis C.K. immediately responds with his typical curmudgeon candor, “I just don’t let them have it. It’s easy. You just say, ‘No, you can't have it. It’s bad for you. I don't care what you want.’” He then concludes, “I’m not there to make them happy.” This is an outrageous thing to say—which is what makes it so funny. But it is also revealing: both of Louis’ inner psychology and our collective inner issues.

What really struck me about the segment, though, is what comes next. Louis claims that the real problem with smartphones is that they prevent us from being alone with ourselves—which is equaled only by their obverse problem: they also cause us to be alone when we are together. The constant need to check-in on what is happening in some distant realm, he explains, prevents us from being able to “build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something,” thus from “being a person.” Not only are phones causing us to be anti-social, but also anti-personal—which certainly seems a depressing way to live to me.

IT HAS BEEN SAID that all advice-givers and critics are ultimately talking to themselves. The problem with giving advice and critiquing, though, is that just because you know something does not mean you shall do that thing. As we would soon find out, Louis is no better at being a person than the rest of us. Despite all the incisive insights he routinely dispenses, he does not seem to know how to relate to others any better for it.

The relation between knowing and doing is to me one of the most interesting questions that confronts us as human beings. It is a question with an impressive pedigree as well, with roots stretching back to the very beginnings of Western self-consciousness. The conflict between speech and deed, theoria and praxis pervades the best of Ancient Greek poetry, history, and philosophy. Louis certainly knew what he was doing was wrong. But as he later admitted when his indiscretions became public knowledge, he was able to rationalize it to himself because he never did anything “without asking first.” Though he knew intellectually that what he was doing was wrong, something inside C.K. drove him to do it anyway. 

The question of how to harmonize our knowledge and our actions (the things we know we ought to do with the things we want to do) has been the guiding light of Johnathan Haidt’s career as well. From his first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, through The Righteous Mind, The Coddling of the American Mind, and now The Anxious Generation, he has been committed to the belief that if we only possessed the right information—the right data and studies, or even the right collection of wise insights from sages of yore—we would finally act right. He likewise finds himself in good company: a sage no less than Socrates is reported to have said that “virtue is knowledge”—that bad actions are ultimately the result of ignorance. Yet, there is a glaring difference between the two as well, which begins to reveal itself when you watch the rest of the Conan clip.

“Underneath everything in your life,” Louis continues in the self-consciously uncomfortable way that he has made his career upon, “there’s that thing, that . . . forever empty.” This is the real reason we are addicted to our phones, even why we endanger ourselves and others by texting and driving, he claims. It distracts from the truth we dare not admit to ourselves: “It's all for nothing and you're alone.” 

This is what Haidt misses. He sees the statistics that appear to show a parallel rise in smartphone/social media use and mental health issues and his priors tell him that there must be a direct connection there. And undoubtedly there is. But as is well known, correlation is not causation; and even when it is, it does not mean that it is the cause, perhaps just a cause. In fact, many of the problems Haidt claims smartphones are responsible for (alienation, loneliness, not playing outside, unrealistic beauty standards, cliquishness, bullying) are all critiques of American life that have been around long before even the internet itself.

As I observed in a piece on The Coddling of the American Mind when it first came out, Haidt seems unable—or at least, unwilling—to truly plumb the existential depths of the phenomena he attempts to diagnose. Other than some vague references in Coddling to the malign influences of Herbert Marcuse in the Sixties, Haidt seeks to pin the fragility and solipsism of contemporary youth solely on changes in parenting in the Nineties. But as I argued back then, if you were to read the obvious namesake of his book, 1987’s The CLOSING of the American Mind, the issues that Haidt describes have been around far longer—and really are just magnified manifestations of certain elements of the American character itself. Likewise smartphones and social media merely amplify the individualism at the heart of our social structure.

C.K., though, believes it is much deeper even than this. Recent changes in American society are not to blame, but the fact that “Life [itself] is tremendously sad just by, you know, being in it.” While the constant connectedness of our online world certainly adds to our woes, all it does is numb us to the truth of things. Rather than experiencing the great range and depth of the human condition, you instead “never feel completely sad or completely happy. You just feel kinda satisfied with your product and then you die.” Yet for some reason he seems to think there is utility in recognizing this truth, and that life has become less than it could be or ought to be if we were not so distracted. But where does such hope come from?

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN an artist and their art is another one of those questions that I find endlessly fascinating. Many of the most effective and affective human creations were, by today’s standards, made by absolute monsters. The divine madness that underlies the creative act may even require it. In order to bring something truly new into the world, one must strike out into the wild beyond the strictures of society to touch the depths of human existence. But re-entry does not always go so well. To conflate two famous, and incisive, observations about the human condition—the creator of new values must be either a beast or a god.

It is hard to determine, however, whether this is an eternal or simply a modern issue when it comes to art. We simply do not know a lot about the internal lives of the great artists prior to modernity. Before, say, Mozart, or perhaps Beethoven, art was simply not that big a deal. This statement is of course profoundly untrue at some level—art has held a pride of place in almost every society. But what I mean is that prior to the Romantic movement of the early 19th century, art was seen more as a jewel than the crown of society. Someone like Bach did not see himself, nor was seen by his contemporaries, as some ethereal genius (even though he clearly was). He was a functional and well-integrated member of society whose main role was to play the organ at church every Sunday, and periodically compose something to mark special liturgical occasions. Before Romanticism, “greatness“ belonged to Heaven. God was the Creator, not Bach or Mendelssohn.

My point is, we simply do not have very detailed accounts of the lives of artists previous to this turning, so it is hard to say what sort of person they were. From antiquity, we get mainly the lives of statesmen and conquerors. Even the epitaph of the “Father of Tragedy” speaks only of his martial service: “The grove of Marathon with its glories can speak of his valor in battle. The long-haired Persian remembers and can speak of it too.” 

A remark from Seneca gives a good sense of the traditional view of artists: “One venerates the divine images, one may pray and sacrifice to them, yet one despises the sculptors who made them.” Artists were seen mainly as artisans or craftsmen, so no one found their lives particularly worthy of documentation. The situation nowadays couldn’t be more different: being an artist—being creative—is seen as the highest human aspiration. Unsurprisingly, there has never been an age in human history where it has been easier to become one.  

When YouTube launched in 2005, its logo included the slogan “Broadcast Yourself.” Through this alternative media realm, everyone now had the opportunity to share their creativity with the world. No longer were we simply consumers, but direct interlocutors and participants. Mass media was replaced by an unmediated “social” media.

There was an immense power in the immediacy of it all. And for a while, it seemed fun, even important—another step forward in the progress of democracy. The internet had disarmed the Senecas of the world, the gatekeepers who made judgements about how we choose to live our lives. But with this lack of moderators came a lack of moderation. Once we could be seen, it began to feel like we must be seen. And the more honest the better. The more of your deep, dark secrets you shared, the more popular you became. So we shared and shared and shared, until the divine madness of modern art became madness simply—or at least anxiety and depression.

It has been a long strange trip from the Romantic worship of genius to TikTok and Instagram, but I would argue a straight line. Traditionally, it was held that the divine madness of the prophet or poet (the creator of new values) was a sort of “enthusiasm”—from the Greek entheos: a god within. Romanticism reversed this polarity: we are not God’s creatures, we are His creator. God is dead, and the individual is the vortex out of which the world springs forth—out of the “forever empty.” But as the Ancients also taught, ex nihlo nihil fit: from nothing, nothing comes. What else were we to conclude from such a worldview than what Louis offers: “it's all for nothing and you're alone”?  Fuck it, then, might as well become an e-celebrity! 

THERE IS BUT ONE TRULY serious philosophical problem,” Albert Camus challenges in the opening line of his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus—“and that is suicide.” While I have no doubt that immersion in the internet has indeed increased our miseries in many ways, as this eighty year old quote from Camus illustrates, to hold it up as the root cause is facile and ahistorical. Haidt’s critics would counter that it has even saved many from self-harm who would never otherwise have found a place in a “normal” community.

As Camus’ Existential philosophy and Louis C.K.’s Existential comedy confronts us with, how—and moreover, if—one ought to live is a perennial question. Despite the enthusiasm of tech utopianists, what technology has actually done is give us a nonsolution solution to this question. Perhaps IRL life is not worth living, but a virtual one—not bound by the natural and social structures we are thrown into, but one we create for ourselves—can be. However, if we take a step back and look more broadly at our situation, it becomes clear that the mental health crisis we need to address is not one created by recent developments in technology, but by modernity itself—although these are very closely linked.

The Romantic movement of the nineteenth century was the first attempt to address this crisis. To counter the mechanization of the Industrial Revolution and of rising bourgeois conformity, it celebrated the majesty of nature and each human being’s unique individuality. But Romanticism does not truly address our problems, but is only the other side of the same coin that Louis warns about. If the distracted over-activity of bourgeois life prevents us from ever being alone with ourselves, Romanticism is the source of our inability to be alone together. Its over-emphasis on the individual traps us in an unbridgeable subjectivity that only furthers our isolation and alienation. Ultimately what we must realize is the limitation of the categories by which we now interpret life.

As Nietzsche exposes in jeremiad after jeremiad against Romanticism, this movement did nothing to overcome the root cause of our despair: the fact that God is now dead. “God,” of course, is not actually God for Nietzsche, but the highest value of a society that orients, grounds, and pulls forth those living under it into life and action. It is that which covers over, or at least distracts from, C.K.’s “forever empty;” or to put it into Nietzschean terms, that which “seduces” us to life and holds the terrible wisdom of Silenus at bay. 

“[I]f it is true, as Nietzsche claims,” Camus continues, “that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of [their reply to the question of suicide].” The problem with both the Romantic solution and the rationality offered by someone like Haidt is that neither can give us a good reason to not kill ourselves—or at least to not reject this world for the digital. While both agree that values are invaluable to living a good life, they also both agree that values do not actually exist—that “existence precedes essence.” But neither does the Existentialism that grew out of Nietzsche’s critique. Try as I might, I cannot imagine Louis C.K. happy.

“A relationship, in the proper sense of the word, is a link established from something inside to something external,” the Catholic German philosopher Josef Pieper writes in his 1948 lecture series Leisure: The Basis of Culture. “[R]elations can only exist,” he concludes, “where there is an ‘inside,’ where there is a dynamic center from which all activity proceeds and to which everything in the nature of experience . . . is referred.” Only creatures that are capable of talking to themselves, as it were, can communicate with others.

Written in the wake of perhaps the greatest cultural catastrophe to ever beset humanity, Leisure is a reflection on how to rebuild a society whose problems make ours seem like child's play. Yet surprisingly, what most concerns Pieper is something quite familiar to us: the need to protect humans from a “world of total work”—one in which we do not work in order to live, but live for the sake of our work. With the death of Romanticism in WWI, and then the Fascist alternative being smashed to smithereens in WWII, Pieper feared that there was no longer the energy or will left to resist what he calls the “proletarianization” of society: the consecration of all activity to the fulfillment of mere bodily needs and desires. Yet, his proposed antidote—leisure—sounds quite surprising to our ears.

For us, “leisure” is synonymous with “entertainment,” with relaxation, vegging out, doom scrolling—with everything that Louis condemns as mere distractions. But before the onset of the world of total work in which we now live, this word held very different connotations. “Leisure” is a translation of the Greek term scholē, from which we derive our word “school.” To properly understand this connection, though, we must first be de-schooled. 

It is not enough simply to “be at leisure,” Pieper explains, but as the Greeks expressed it—scholen agein—what is necessary is “to do leisure.” In its original conception, leisure was seen as a sort of non-active activity opposed to both restlessness and idleness. Remnants of this older view still linger in what we mean when we speak of the “humanities” and especially the “liberal arts,” which are meant to immerse us in things above and beyond the “servile arts” and the art of survival—beyond labor and trade, money and commerce, status and position, politics and war. They are an activity not grounded in some further utility or by the expectation of material gain, but rather done “for its own sake.” As their coiner Cicero conceived it, the studia humanitatis and artes liberales were a lifelong educational program that cultivated inner freedom through self-knowledge.

You would think, then, that the mass shuttering of liberal arts colleges and the gutting of Humanities programs at universities would be at the top of Haidt and C.K.’s list of concerns. Haidt, at least, does seem dimly aware of this—or at least once upon a time was. The subtitle of his first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, certainly points in this direction: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.

The work was an attempt to understand what leads to human flourishing by taking bits of perennial wisdom from across civilizations and testing them in light of the knowledge acquired by modern science. But with each of his books, this view of the whole has become more and more contracted, to where he ends up in The Anxious Generation with an overly simplistic, monocasual explanation for all of our youths’ existential angst: It is the smartphone, not the very fact of being human, that is the problem.

He is, of course, correct that smartphones are not helping, and almost certainly hindering us; but as I have attempted to demonstrate throughout this essay, all he is ultimately doing is trimming the branches while leaving the roots untouched. Indeed, the trajectory of his career is almost a parody of what Pieper worried about, as each successive book has become proletarianized by moving further away from deep questions to concerns of immediate utility.

Yet, I have never really been comfortable with the formulation that the liberal arts are only “for their own sake.” I get (and generally agree with) what is trying to be expressed, but to me it does not get to the heart of the matter. Examining the deepest questions that concern us as human beings is not done for its sake (which sounds almost masturbatory), it is done for the sake of our souls. “To philosophize,” Pieper elucidates, “means to withdraw not from the things of everyday life, but from the currently accepted meanings attached to them, or to question the value placed upon them.” Breaking out beyond the opinions of others and the ever-shifting appearance of things is indeed a pleasure that can be self-justifying. But what we gain from this activity has its own sort of utility: happiness. 

CAMUS ENDS HIS REFLECTION on the despair of the modern world with the command, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” This he believes to be the only viable option left to us after the “death of God.” — As an aside, I would like to note that whenever you accept someone else’s form of an argument, you have lost before you even begin. — Yet if we were to examine the premises that undergird Existentialism, we see that it stands at the endpoint of a long line of thought that takes itself to be somehow “progressive”—not in the political sense, but simply meaning unidirectional and cumulative. The disenchantment wrought by Enlightenment rationalism, the Existentialist believes, is an irreversible curse, which was only further entrenched by the Romantic revolt and then solidified by the horrors of the two world wars. Imagining Sisyphus’ task as a happy one, though, is really just another act of Romantic make-believe. 

Insanity, it is said, is doing the same thing over and over, yet expecting different results. Is it any wonder, then, we have such a profound mental health crisis when we refuse to look outside the confines of the world we have constructed for ourselves over the last five hundred years in the West? For Pieper, Sisyphus is the embodiment of despair and resignation: “the mythical symbol of the ‘worker’ chained to his function, never pausing in his work, and never gathering any fruit from his labors.” Telling ourselves that it is somehow heroic to resign ourselves to this is inherently self-defeating. This is not necessarily to suggest that Pieper’s Catholicism is the answer to all our problems, but, as the father of the smartphone urged, that we must learn to “think different” if we are to begin addressing them.

Ironically, though, our ability to think different is exactly what Louis claims our smartphones have made impossible. But being a thoroughly modern man, he is unable to express his discontent in a way beyond Existential despair. For him, being “alone with oneself” means confronting the “forever empty” that makes up the core of our being. Is it really any wonder that the majority of us will do anything it takes to avoid having to do this? This perspective, however, is a mere presupposition—a prejudice—disguised as deep insight. It might even be called the presupposition that lies at the heart of our entire age. The thing that separates C.K. from the many is that he has the courage to stare into this abyss and call it by its name. But that does not make it true. 

It seems to me that if we are to confront the magnitude of the present threats to our humanity posed by technology (especially the prospects raised by so-called “artificial intelligence”), we must recover what it means to be a human being and not just a human doing—which, as Pieper emphasizes, requires a resuscitation of true leisure, i.e. the reclamation of true philosophy. As Socrates proposes in the Phaedrus, philosophy too is a sort of “divine madness.”—a portal to dimensions beyond that which make up the “world of total work.” This form of “madness,” though, does not lead to an abyss, but connects us to the ultimately mysterious roots of the cosmos. It is by setting aside leisure time to be alone with ourselves or engaging with others in open and honest conversation that the wonder of being is disclosed to us.

And perhaps despite himself, Louis can be instructive here as well. At least one place to begin uncovering what it means to be a human being is to contemplate why it is acceptable for a monkey at the zoo to masturbate in front of us without our consent, yet caused such a scandal when he did it in front of his colleagues? What about us accounts for these differing standards? I find it impossible to justify this judgment on the grounds of the nothingness proposed by Louis' Existentialism. Whatever it is Pieper means by “dynamic center,” however, at least hints at a possibility. 

A second place would be to follow Haidt’s advice in The Anxious Generation: to put down our phones, go outside and, as the kids say, “touch grass.” The screen has indeed become an impenetrable wall that alienates us from the world and entraps us inside ourselves. Yet for all our present interiority, we are no longer “in touch” with ourselves either. The incessant “sharing” with no one in partiuclar of our deep, dark secrets is in fact a defense mechanism that militates against any sort of deep reflection. But as the very word “philosophy” suggests—from philo, meaning “loving friendship,” and sophia, “wisdom”—to know one’s self necessitates the ability to be in relationship: both with the world and others. Until we learn how to re-cultivate this skill, the madness of the abyss shall be our only companion.