The New Pollution
Last week, wrapping up a conversation with my students on the many ways to live a healthy life as a teen—drug-free—a student said, off-hand: "We're not going to do drugs if we get bored. We have smartphones for everything we need." I didn't comment on that, in the moment, because sure, spending hours on the Internet is, on the whole, better for one's lungs and livers than going to parties and getting drunk or stoned. (I have to stay "on message" for these discussions, particularly for middle schoolers.) But it got me questioning whether we are missing an opportunity to have a frank discussion about the mental health impacts of smartphones on today's young people (and adults, too). Indeed, taking their cues from the adults around them, today's generation has an answer for the question of boredom: stare at a smartphone. To help foster 'face-to-face conversations,' my school has banned smartphone use during school hours, and yet there is still more work to do. Recently, during a school-wide assembly, new teachers were asked what was one thing we would change about the world. I said we should never have invented the Internet. To which I received loud boos from the students, who have never known a world in which boredom was natural, merely requiring creativity and ingenuity to overcome, or the insight to welcome it when it arrived.
