In recent years, research into the ways technologies such as smartphones and social media impact children’s mental health and well-being has generated a long-overdue public debate about how to manage the potential harms of our sophisticated new tools. Thanks to the work of social scientists such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, parents and educators are now better informed about potential risks of a phone-based childhood.
Yet other challenges remain: How our own use of these technologies has transformed our expectations and behavior, and led to the creation of a world that often seems devoid of basic decency and thoughtfulness; where we navigate public space comfortably enclosed in our own digital bubbles, feeling little sense of obligation to others; and where we become ever more comfortable outsourcing human skills to machines.
These transformations of everyday experience are seemingly less alarming but no less impactful. On average, we spend seven hours a day staring at screens; for younger people, those numbers are much higher. For many of us, our phones are the last thing we touch before falling asleep and the first thing we reach for in the morning. These small decisions, repeated day after day, create habits of mind and new ways of understanding and being in the world. They encourage us to expect convenience, efficiency, seamless interactions and everything on demand. We crave novelty, immediacy, endless options and near-total control of our environment.
Several decades ago, naturalist Robert Michael Pyle lamented the “extinction of experience.” Pyle and others worried that younger generations suffered from “nature deficit disorder” — being raised without the hands-on experience of mucking around outdoors, they argued, these children would grow up disaffected from nature and unlikely to embrace the role of environmental stewards as adults.
Several decades after Pyle coined the phrase, this challenge — to live in the real world, with all its messy physical realities — is one we all face. Our experiences of pleasure, hands-on skills, self reliance, relationships and connection to nature are all threatened by mediating technology. Daily intimacy with the physical world recedes, little by little, while our attachment to digital worlds grows. More and more, we relate to our world through information about it rather than direct experience with it.
The platforms and screens on which we spend our days effectively have become our new character-forming institutions. They have invaded the private world of existing institutions such as the family and become indispensable in the public world of work and leisure. They promise us, as an Apple slogan once put it, a world that is “automatic, effortless, and seamless.” In many ways, our technologies have made good on that promise, but in the process, we are changed.
The Disappearing Human Touch
There are several areas where crucial human experiences have deteriorated or are disappearing.
Consider face-to-face interaction. Data from the American Time Use Survey show significant declines in the amount of time Americans spend face-to-face with friends; in the past 20 years, time spent with others has declined more than 20 percent, and more than 35 percent for people younger than 25. We spend an increasing amount of time in self-isolation, and some experts warn that the 21st century might be one marked by a “loneliness epidemic.”
But it is not quite right to call this a loneliness epidemic. In fact, we are experiencing an epidemic of self-isolation, as more people choose to spend time alone, immersed in digital worlds but bereft of in-person human interaction. When we leave our homes, we encounter self-service checkout kiosks, computerized concierges, and other replacements of quotidian human interaction by machines. Many of these make our lives more efficient, of course, but they also change the tenor of our daily interactions, leaving us habituated to machine interactions and perhaps less patient with human ones. We are even replacing humans with screens in places like hospitals, where “telepresence robots” wheel around with a disembodied doctor’s head on a screen.
DESPITE WHAT SILICON VALLEY MARKETING MESSAGES INSIST, HISTORY IS NOT ALWAYS A STEADY MARCH TOWARD PROGRESS, AND NOT EVERY NEW THING IS AN IMPROVEMENT ON THE OLD.
Human beings are wired to read each other’s facial expressions and physical gestures — what anthropologist Edward T. Hall once called “the silent language.” As we spend more time on mediated interactions, we lose opportunities to hone those important human skills. When our face-to-face experiences become more hurried, less frequent and less satisfying, we delve deeper into mediated experiences to compensate, in a cycle that endlessly repeats itself. Our technological skills improve; our primal skills of embodied interaction deteriorate.
This new reality has proven fertile ground for technologies that offer to ease our loneliness and offer a simulacrum of friendship: artificial intelligence-enabled chatbots and other popular artificial forms of friendship such as Replika and Character.ai. A 2024 survey by Institute for Family Studies and YouGov found that 1 in 4 young adults “believe that AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships.”
We are also losing hands-on knowledge of the world gained by doing things in unmediated ways. Today it is easier, physically, to send a message to the other side of the world on your smartphone than it is to tie your own shoe. Yet earlier tools that used to serve as extensions of our bodies have given way to digital devices that require far less physical effort from us.
Consider writing by hand, and cursive writing: Mastering both builds fine motor skills while also stimulating and creating synergies between different hemispheres of the brain involved in thinking, language and working memory. Many experiments on the benefits of writing by hand versus on a computer, for example, have found that students who take notes by hand during a lecture retain more than those who take notes on a computer.
As those who study embodied cognition remind us, keyboards and touch screens do not hone the same skills as writing by hand. As well, by neglecting these old ways of teaching writing by hand, we are raising generations of Americans who also cannot read cursive, which means they cannot read our nation’s founding documents, or the letters of their ancestors who wrote only in script.
The art of waiting has also diminished. As steady increases in the rates of road rage and air rage incidents suggest, we are less patient and less tolerant of delay. Today we expect a great deal more distraction and control over the experience of waiting, and we can turn to our smartphones to check email, text a friend or play a game any time we experience a wait. Nearly every moment of interstitial time can be filled with entertainment or communication.
And yet, our willingness or unwillingness to wait reveals our feelings about patience (and impatience), our acceptance of things such as idleness and boredom, and our need for a sense of control. How we wait reveals our attitudes about silence and reticence, reflection and daydreaming. The individual experience of waiting might be unique, ours to cope with as we choose, but our attitude about waiting has a public effect — on our families, friends, neighbors, communities and even on our broader political culture. Our mediated lives have led us to believe that waiting is a problem to be solved, rather than a normal human experience. As a result, when we are forced to wait, we become annoyed and angry, as we lack practice.
The Collapse of Place
The extent to which technologies of mediation — cellphones, tablet and laptop computers, and the software and apps we use with them — saturate our lives and interpose in our daily decision-making marks a new moment in human experience. We don’t use these technologies merely to find the nearest coffee shop, museum or potential romantic partner; we use them to make judgments about what is and isn’t worth experiencing at all.
The greatest transformation of our daily lives, compared to past eras, is our willingness to allow so much of it to become data. This has radically altered our connection to place. Our near constant use of mediating technologies, especially phones, means we now follow the rules of virtual space, with its demands for immediacy and its rewards for behaviors that keep us focused on the virtual world. Our dedication to the virtual world has come at the expense of the physical world. In his 1985 book “No Sense of Place,” communications scholar Joshua Meyrowitz noted, “Electronic media destroy the specialness of place and time. … When we are everywhere, we are also no place.”
A VISION OF THE FUTURE WHERE LARGE PORTIONS OF THE POPULATION ARE RELEGATED TO VIRTUAL EXISTENCES IS DYSTOPIAN BECAUSE IT IS ONE IN WHICH HUMAN CHOICE IS SEVERELY CURTAILED.
Civil society has long been rooted in particular places — places that foster sociability among strangers. They create opportunities for us to run into people we know and to meet new people in a familiar context. Often, they serve as proving grounds for protest and political action. It is not a coincidence that large-scale civic engagement often begins in the physical town square, or in public meeting places where people of different backgrounds come together. In physical places, we are forced to confront, compromise and get along with those around us in ways that we can avoid when we are online.
When we are not grounded in concrete places, face-to-face with others, we form different habits of mind; we react at times with less empathy; we risk cultivating fewer emotional attachments. Instead, we have embraced the values of our technologies to measure our own and others’ worth through quantification — likes, reposts, follower counts. In doing so, we have made our relationships more transactional and turned others into abstractions, not out of malice, but out of habit.
Narcissus fell in love with a reflected image of himself. Today, a two-hour conversation with an AI model is all it takes to make an accurate replica of someone’s personality, researchers have found. Instagram has already begun experimenting with a feature that shows users AI-generated images featuring themselves. “Imagine yourself reflecting on life in an endless maze of mirrors where you’re the main focus,” the caption of one image stated. In this culture, what happens to the sympathetic imagination that encourages us to understand other people, when all we see is a reflection of ourselves?
Reclaiming What Grounds Us
The quality of our experiences matters, and by limiting the time we spend face-to-face with others, technology alters our understanding of the things we have in common, including things as mundane as having to wait in line together, or having to engage in the social pleasantries that make public space a healthy rather than hostile place.
Life is finite — even if acknowledging our human limits is not a popular pastime in a culture eager to understand technology as a story of endless gains for mankind. Accounting for what we have lost is also the beginning of the process of reclaiming it. Despite what Silicon Valley marketing messages insist, history is not always a steady march toward progress, and not every new thing is an improvement on the old.
What can we do to reverse some of these harmful changes?
We must, above all, defend the human. This is not hyperbole. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s vision of the future is indicative of how Silicon Valley understands humanity. When he was asked about the possibility of a future where people’s inability to distinguish between reality and unreality might harm humanity, he called this concern “Reality Privilege.” “A small percent of people live in a real world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date,” he said. “Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege — their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote unquote real world.”
He noted the likelihood of naysayers: “The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian,” but “reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap.” Instead, he argued, the reality-deprived should be happy to spend their time in “online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.”
WE USE OUR TECHNOLOGIES TO MEASURE OUR OWN AND OTHERS’ WORTH THROUGH QUANTIFICATION. IN DOING SO, WE HAVE MADE OUR RELATIONSHIPS MORE TRANSACTIONAL AND TURNED OTHERS INTO ABSTRACTIONS, NOT OUT OF MALICE, BUT OUT OF HABIT.
Defending reality is not a privilege; it’s crucial to ensuring a flourishing human future. A vision of the future where large portions of the population are relegated to virtual existences is dystopian because it is one in which human choice is severely curtailed.
This requires us to ask some tough questions about our own technology use, particularly as new promises are made about the sophistication and power of AI.
First: What human skills should we refuse to outsource to technology? What are the virtues and habits of mind we must practice by doing certain tasks ourselves, such as those that cultivate patience, empathy, healthy communication and respect?
Second: How do we value the human person in an age of virtual reality, AI and disembodied experience? What can we do regularly to live lives that are less disembodied and dematerialized? How do we cultivate richer in-person human relationships rather than always choosing the convenient and technologically mediated path? We can begin by choosing not to fill every moment of interstitial time in our daily lives with “look down” screen experiences; rather, cultivate more “look up” unmediated experiences.
Third: What can we do at the community level to reinvigorate public spaces that have been colonized by technology? W.H. Auden wrote, in “The Dyer’s Hand,” that “A real community, as distinct from social life, is only possible between persons whose idea of themselves and others is real, not fantastic.” Today we lack a sense of shared reality, and the real world cannot always compete with the fantastical things we see every day online.
Forming a healthier and more meaningful world for ourselves and our children means reclaiming the things we know are grounding: a healthy sense of time and place; the modeling of patience and delayed gratification; hands-on, real-world experiences; the encouragement of virtues and practices that lead to the development of a healthy sense of self.
Today we carry around in our pockets a tool that functions as a vast externalized memory, but it has made us forgetful about some deep truths — namely, the values we must continue to cultivate because they are important for human formation and human flourishing. They are the ballast against a fragmented culture that elevates the present moment at the expense of the past and encourages habits of mind that too often leave us feeling alienated rather than connected.
Seeking knowledge, not merely information, and practicing, every day, those quotidian habits of mind and cultivation of virtues that connect us to our past while helping us imagine a future, is not as seamless or efficient as downloading a new app or liking an image on Instagram. But it is in those daily moments of embodied interaction, grounded in time and place, often inefficient and frustrating but also rich and meaningful because of their quirks and inefficiencies, that we are truly formed as human beings.
Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; this essay is drawn from her book, “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World” (W.W. Norton, 2024.)
This story appears in the June 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.