When teenagers decide that smartphones are ruining their lives
I literally did not understand a thing in the film, only to spill out of the theater nauseous while my 14-year-old looked aloft saying, “See mom, someone understands.”
In its ever-persistent endeavor to further my mid-life crisis, The New York Times published an article last week that killed me entitled “Should More Teenagers Ditch Their Smartphones” by Jeremy Engle. To make matters worse, the article was published alongside a podcast that made its way to my “suggested playlist” via some recommendation algorithm I fail to comprehend (even though my teenagers probably created it — the same teenagers that require me to chauffeur them around endlessly, which is why I have a podcast playlist to begin with.)
You can just see it can’t you? Me driving in my minivan from the White Plains Mall to Greenwich Crew to Wilton Basketball to Greenwich Academy and back again while my kids sit riveted in a full-blown addiction to their smartphones, while I (having no one to talk to), listen to a podcast about how smartphones are ruining their lives.
And yet we’ve heard it all before: This generation is being destroyed by social media and digital addiction, which was only reinforced by the pandemic. Mental health crisis among American teens, horrifying stories of lives destroyed by digital influence, phones, social media; I know, I know, I KNOW. Even the Supreme Court is on the case, having recently heard arguments Gonzalez v. Google where a family claims YouTube’s recommendation algorithm caused their son’s death by linking him up with ISIS — the very same recommendation algorithm used to access this information to begin with.
But we know this already — we live “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” just like the Academy Award-touted movie that caused me to have some kind of anxiety breakdown in the theater while my kids nodded on in reverent appreciation. The film, if you haven’t seen it, portrays an extremely problematic mother-daughter relationship not seen since Clytemnestra-Electra, involving an everything bagel that becomes a black hole, hot dog fingers, dildo battles and much more. Somehow, the film ends with the mother and daughter having transformed into rocks overlooking a precipice, which did not feel reassuring for this mother of a teenage daughter. And even then, as the mother rock attempts to inch closer, the daughter rock tries to run away … and they don’t even have legs … because they are rocks.
I literally did not understand a thing in the film, only to spill out of the theater nauseous while my 14-year-old looked aloft saying, “See mom, someone understands.”
But this NYT podcast/article was different from all of that: basically the Times was telling a story of a group of teenagers who had decided that their phones/devices/social media were ruining their lives so they ditched all of it. On their own.
To make matters worse, they created a club around the whole thing called “The Luddite Club”— a term that I immediately assumed they coined due to their more refined vocabulary skills given their nonphone abbreviated LOL-lacking existence. Yes, there these luddites sit, I could just see it: enjoying books like “Collages” by Anais Nin, smiling down on their jejune contemporaries from atop Mount Prospect Park because of course they all live in Brooklyn.
“Do you know what luddite means?” I asked my 14-yearold, who simply responded, “Mom, stop.”
The podcast featured Luddite Club members talking about their experiences with clarity and nuance that made me literally ill, as I eyed my primordial monosyllabic offspring SnapChat-ing pictures of themselves for no apparent reason — snaps which will probably end up in an IP-meta-multiverse-everything-bagel-blackhole database owned by Elon Musk thus permanently jeopardizing all their future happiness.
But here’s the part that got me in the gut. The interviewer, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, asks Luddite member Logan Lane if her club feels like something bigger than just a club, to which Logan Lane (aka the high school senior from Brooklyn who will now get into any college she applies to) responded:
“So I think this is definitely something I’ve been thinking about. I think the unplugging and the getting offline is 100 percent something bigger and something that hopefully this generation will take on, particularly as we become parents. I know I have some regrets about how early I got my phone and how early this addiction was instilled in me. And I can hope that my generation as parents will be able to better manage our kids and give them technolog y at appropriate ages, unlike the super young ages that I and my peers have gotten them.”
Did someone say “better manage?”
There are many moments in parenthood where you feel unheard, unseen — that is basically what being a parent to a teenager is all about, I get it. But there was something about these words that created a reaction in me not seen since my viewing of the multiverse movie (which, by the way, has permanently destroyed my fondness of everything bagels.)
“And I can hope that my generation as parents will be able to better manage our kids and give them technology at appropriate ages, unlike the super young ages that I and my peers have gotten them.”
After a slight pause (while I engaged in primal scream freefall), Lulu responded:
“As I’m hearing you talk, I’m feeling a lot of shame — I won’t lie — as a mother, because we as parents do give our kids these devices. But they’ve become such a ubiquitous part of our lives that it’s hard to separate ourselves from how we interact with our phones.”
Sing it, Lulu. Because I can’t even.
But maybe if I was a rock …