"Personally, the phone is undeniably useful but still feels like a foreign object in my hand - a feeling that was brought into stark relief the second my kids were old enough to pick up a screen. To them, a tablet or phone offers an enticing, comforting, and even productive space. Not healthy, exactly, but familiar. For me, it's alien - and ground zero for a cultural battle against brain rot, attention loss, and reality itself. Phones stress me out."
"For Knausgaard, who is 56 years old, the internet barely existed in his twenties. He admits that he has been ignoring the fundamental influences of such technological advances since. 'Not once in those forty years have I turned my attention to technology and tried to understand it,' Knausgaard writes, 'how it works in itself, how it works in me. It's as if I had moved to a foreign country and not bothered to learn its language,"
Many adults find smartphones useful yet alien and stressful, especially those who reached adulthood before smartphones existed. Children who grow up with screens experience them as familiar, comforting, and sometimes productive, though not necessarily healthy. Formative technological environments shape long-term attitudes toward devices. Lack of effort to understand how technology affects individuals leads to a sense of neglect and contributes to cultural concerns about attention erosion, brain rot, and detachment from reality. Recognizing the role of early adulthood environments can clarify why some people struggle to integrate phones and seek control over screen time.
Read at Fatherly
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]