Derek R. Haswell

New newsletter: THERE'S SOMETHING VERY WEIRD ABOUT PHONES AND AMERICA The most interesting thing about the Smartphone Theory of Everything is that it's really a Smartphone Theory of Everything in America and the English-Speaking World. While phones are everywhere, the problems that they cause are often rising fastest and first in the richest countries, especially in the U.S. Youth sadness? Surging in the Anglosphere, but almost nowhere else. Attention disorders? Skyrocketing in the U.S., but not Europe. Populism, distrust, polarization? Much larger effects in the U.S. than other countries. The version of the SToE that is most defensible given the best data we have is something like this: Compulsive phone use along with under-regulated social media produce widespread youth anxiety, attention issues, polarization, populism, and institutional distrust in: 1. highly individualistic societies, with 2. a culture of diagnostic inflation [i.e., expanded diagnostic guidelines for anxiety and ADHD], plus 3. negative-affect prevalence [i.e., people online constantly talking about their anxiety and ADHD], and finally 4. high levels of negativity in their news ecosystem ... and post-2010 America was simply the first and most dramatic example of all these ingredients coming together.

Babies cry because it’s the primal protest against exile from paradise. Being born is the Genesis story incarnated: one moment in an amniotic garden of bliss, the next cast out for gaining consciousness of your own existence. Everyone’s first trauma is being evicted from the womb

Our kids are going to grow up thinking this is completely normal.