The scarcest commodity in America might be simple, unmediated reality. It’s an odd kind of scarcity because the thing we’re lacking would seem to be the most plentiful. And yet, many of us only rarely encounter the world directly, without the distraction of the glowing screen in our pocket or on our desk. Absent a conscious act of will, it is hard to keep our brains focused on the real world.
Distraction is endemic but unevenly distributed. A recent study from Common Sense Media found that adolescents whose families make less than $35,000 a year spend two more hours per day looking at screens than do their peers from families making more than $100,000 a year. There are surely many rasons for this disparity, but for starters, dire financial stress can be devastating, making the world around you look dark and heavy. It can be tempting, in such circumstances, to forget your anxiety in the bright glow of the digital spectacle. And considering that low-income families are more likely to feature single mothers or parents who spend all day at work, it should come as no surprise that poor children are being raised by YouTube and TikTok.
Until recently, we were told that the problem was unequal access to digital devices and information. But in a commercial triumph of heroic proportions, the screen makers have fashioned products with prices and appeal that make them necessities — most people will find a way to get their faces in front of a TV, computer, or smartphone no matter what they have to do to make it happen. So while poor teens do indeed own fewer devices than rich teens, they spend 8.5 hours a day looking at them, whereas rich teens spend only 6.5. The most momentous digital divide, then, is between privileged young people, whose projects, habits, and families lead them to put down their phones and engage with the world, and the have-nots, who are left staring at their screens. This divide produces other forms of inequality: Although the science is still relatively young, excessive screen use in children is associated with lower test scores, poorer sleep, higher rates of obesity, and issues with attention and behavior. We’ve all heard anecdotes about Silicon Valley tech lords whose own children are prohibited from using technology. Engagement with reality, not digital access, is becoming a luxury good.
The psychological dynamics at play here are deep and old. It’s always been hard to sit by oneself and simply be. Writing in the 17th century, Blaise Pascal famously said that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” It requires us to slog through thickets of boredom and self-confrontation. We’re all going to suffer, the glittering promises of medicine and technology notwithstanding. The hardest thing to learn is how to suffer well: patiently, bravely, letting it pass without thrashing against the inevitable. But learn it we must. Before we can see life as the improbably beautiful thing it is, we have to slowly, painstakingly recalibrate our eyes toward reality and away from the spectacle of fantasy. The potential payoff is huge, but it’s never been easy to achieve — and our modern technology has only made it harder.
In a 2009 address at West Point, the writer William Deresiewicz argued that there is a deep connection between solitude and leadership. Solitude, as he understands it, is a state of aloneness with the world and with one’s thoughts that allows a person to plumb the depths of his or her experiences, intuitions, and interpretations. Deresiewicz says that another way to articulate this is to call it concentration, which means “gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input.” In the end, the point is to learn what you think, to separate your own thoughts from those of others. This is necessary, he says, if one is truly to lead, to break from herd wisdom and become someone worth following.
It is not only leadership that requires concentration. Art, friendship, courage, intimacy, candor, confidence — these all require you to spend some time honestly, quietly looking at the world, including at yourself. When we talk about the epidemic of distraction, we don’t mean inconsequential stuff. We’re talking about a fundamental part of how we inhabit the world. Our ability to step away, to think, to achieve clarity, is momentous — it’s core to the nature of human experience.
The American dream has long been premised on equality, the idea that children of various backgrounds, colors, and means have an equal shot at whatever it is they want. This has never been perfectly true, but it looks right now as if our poorest children are falling into a massive psychological ditch, one that will make the dream of equality even more fantastical. It is possible, of course, to live huge swaths of life in a state of noisy evasion, but it’s not possible to flourish in that state, to become the individual one is capable of being. Achieving the solitude and mental clarity necessary for genuine independence is never an easy task, even for the well-to-do. But for many of our most vulnerable children, freedom from distraction may be steadily becoming the most illusory freedom of all.
Ian Marcus Corbin is a writer, academic, and entrepreneur in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
