It's The Damn Phone

From Boredom to Brain Rot: Growing Up in the Age of Infinite Distraction

For years, it was easy to dismiss older generations' refrain "It's the damn phone", as reductive or out of touch, but their intuition may have been more accurate than we gave them credit for.

I recently finished Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, and to call it foundational would be an understatement. Haidt, a social psychologist, argues that the explosion of smartphones and social media since the early 2010s coincided with a steep rise in anxiety and depression among young people.

The book doesn’t simply present statistics (though the figures are stark). It weaves together psychology, developmental theory, and cultural critique, making the conclusion hard to ignore: the “phone-based childhood” has been one of the great social experiments of our time, and the outcomes are deeply concerning.

Reading the book felt like having a mirror held up to my own adolescence. I had unrestricted access to social media from the age of seven. It felt like limitless freedom at the time, but when I look back, I see the cost. My concentration was shaped by constant interruptions. And my capacity for boredom, once a fertile ground for imagination, shrunk to almost nothing.

Since finishing Haidt’s book, I’ve tried to place guardrails around my online life. My most addictive apps, TikTok and Instagram, now live behind locks. Still, I hesitate when it comes to deleting them fully.

It isn’t only boredom that scares me. It’s the fear of cultural exile: not understanding jokes, missing album releases, or blinking blankly at a reference everyone else gets. Social media doesn’t just connect us; it defines the background noise of conversation. You can step away individually, but you can’t escape the larger culture that continues to be shaped by the feeds. Haidt notes that this is part of the trap. Even if one individual chooses to step out, the digital culture remains. The collective nature of social media means you are never fully released from its pull, because it continues to shape the environment around you.

Haidt uses the economic idea of opportunity cost to explain the damage. Screens don’t only harm in themselves; they rob time from better things. For children and teenagers especially, that displacement is enormous. Screen time comes at the cost of unstructured play, outdoor exploration, and face-to-face negotiation—the very raw material of resilience and social growth.

The irony is painful. We are more connected than any previous generation, yet lonelier and less grounded. Thousands of digital “friends” can’t replace the handful of flesh-and-blood friendships that allow genuine intimacy and growth.

Of all the platforms, TikTok feels the most concerning. The real danger isn’t national security but cognition. The app doesn’t just entertain; it rewires expectations of attention. We are trained to anticipate new stimulus every few seconds, making deeper forms of thought, reading, or conversation feel oddly unbearable.

What unsettles me most is how lightly this erosion is taken. “Brain rot” has become a meme, a half-joking way of speaking about scrolling for hours. But the joke isn’t a joke. This is precisely what is happening. After an evening on TikTok, sitting through even a short book chapter feels like a battle. That’s not just distraction; it’s a reshaping of the mind.

Haidt is clear that this is not only an individual problem but a cultural one. Parents, educators, and communities need to rethink what it means for children, and adults, to grow up and live well in a digital world. Yet change also begins at a personal level.

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Here are some things I am implementing to try and limit my time online.

• Time locks on apps (using Opal for TikTok and Instagram)

• One phone-free day per week

• Developing offline hobbies I genuinely enjoy

• Turning off notifications for all non essential apps

• Making mealtimes phone-free and screen-free zones

I hope you give these a try, and we can journey together in attempting to get off our phones! I recommend you checking out the book, or Haidt’s substack After Babel if this topic is one of interest to you!