Our smartphone addictions have led us to a rather odd cultural moment.
For teenagers, the endless need to gain approval and popularity, once largely isolated to the school day, has lost its boundaries. With never-ending social feeds, teens now never escape the pressures of peer approval. But the challenges persist for all demographics. Content fatigue is setting in for many, especially exhaustion from political tensions. Loneliness seems as unabated as ever, as friendships among middle-aged men have dropped to epic lows, generating a whole demographic of men who find themselves socially dislocated and isolated.
One journalist recently opened an article with this thought experiment: “Try to pinpoint the last time you took a purposeless walk through the late spring breeze, when there was no itch in your hand to reach for a mobile device, and you felt like the wind and sky around you had nothing to disclose to you other than the vast and mysterious sympathy of existence itself. Was it 2007? Or as far back as 1997? Does just asking the question make you feel ill?”