Phone-Based Childulthood

Middle-aged youths and childish geezers

A couple of weeks ago, Jonathan Haidt published a piece, “End the Phone-Based Childhood Now,” for The Atlantic. Even now, it’s up there as one of its most-read articles. Haidt, along with Jean Twenge, is among the foremost mainstream critics of phone/online-based upbringings. The timeline is well-known: in 2009, Facebook unveiled Likes, and in 2010, the iPhone 4 was the first iPhone with a front-facing camera. Around 2012, smartphones overtook sales of traditional cell phones as the dominant mobile communication device. And then, depression and loneliness and insecurity spiked among young people, especially girls.

Haidt writes a lot about how smartphones have destroyed childhood and adolescence. I don’t disagree with him, but the question I’m interested in is what have these stages of life become? In times past, societal concerns about broken youths have fretted about kids growing up too quickly into live-fast-die-young mode. Marijuana as gateway drugs to harder narcotics. Porn encouraging risky adult-like sexual behavior. Grand Theft Auto turning cherubs into grizzled murderers.

Yet the kind of behavior that Haidt laments as having become too prevalent among young people—diminished libidos, social withdrawal, and risk aversion (according to a startling anecdote from Silicon Valley, there are basically no under-30 tech stars for the first time in American history)—is not that of some wild premature adulthood. These are not Pinocchios and his no-good friends, smoking and drinking it up on Pleasure Island. Rather, their behavior is more characteristic of those in the washed-up middle-age phase of their lives, right on the cusp of a midlife crisis that will result in the purchase of a Camaro or writing of a divorce memoir.

On the flipside, my friends and I’ve long joked about Buzzteens. We’ve never come up with a dictionary definition, but if I had to formulate one, it’d be something like this: a 30-something (or, god forbid, a 40-something) overly online person who’s still stuck in that mid-2010s digital-media-boom mindset. They’re overly fixated on pop culture, still clearly hung-up on never having been popular in high school or college, with an obsession over an aesthetic type of diversity due to an acute obsession with Rent in their schooldays. Their screechy/preachy political ideology purports to care about grand issues like domestic policies and geopolitical events, but is really motivated by desirability politics (though, to be fair, all politics is fuckability politics).

That being said, there is still clearly a youth culture. But what’s notable is how there’s been a great flattening of what once used to be walled-off segments of the various developmental stages of our lives. Young people are being pulled towards middle age while old people are gravitating towards adolescence until everyone is mixed up in the same murky swamp. We’ve all seen how immature old people can get on social media. Some of us may even be unfortunate enough to be related to them.

Take dating as a prime example.

Magdalene J. Taylor

recently wrote a piece for the NYT about how we’re all getting tired of dating apps, which made me think of how such apps have homogenized the dating experience for everyone, no matter what age: a 16-year old gets dates the same way as a 60-year old would. When I was a teenager (and, for better or for worse, attending an all-boys school), the only hope I had of meeting a girl was maybe at one of the seasonal school dances we had. Or maybe at the annual school fair. I dreamed of one day becoming old and sophisticated enough to go to college, bars, parties, concerts, and wherever else men went to meet women (a luxurious casino?). But if everyone’s just meeting everyone else on a phone, what’s the true distinction between any of the various age groups, at least when it comes to dating? And in what other aspects of our lives have these distinctions collapsed?

In a previous piece, I wrote about how the online sphere allows us to make our social debuts as early as we get internet access, and how the bedroom—once the suffocating solitary prison of every child who wanted to escape the Alcatraz of mom and dad—has now become one of the most public spheres of all. And not just to make Youtube video essays or funny TikTok confessionals that can rack up millions of views. With the rise of OnlyFans and its equivalents, the barrier to entering the sexual marketplace has become essentially flush with the floor.

The online hunger for female sexuality is rapacious. With the flattened online culture placing less and less value on getting older, coupled with young girls being able to make their forays into the general sexual marketplace whenever they want, it’s no wonder that depression, anxiety and suicide rates have hit girls and women way more than their male counterparts. If the great genderized generational struggle of the smartphone kids is this disproportionate wallop to female self-esteem, then it’s to be expected that the upcoming wave of feminism will be dedicated to the restoration of that lost element.

But an ideology based on something as capricious and arbitrary as feelings of happiness and well-being will be a hotly contentious one, especially when it involves the always explosive arena of dating, sex, and relationships. After Sydney Sweeney appeared on Saturday Night Live earlier this month, a seemingly silly debate about the state of wokeness was had. If one defines wokeness as a platform of political issues regarding things like abortion access, criminal justice reform, and affirmative action, then yes, the discussion was odd. But if one interprets wokeness as a vague vibes-based battle over which gender gets to feel better about themselves, then it was a completely legitimate debate: who’s made happier by seeing big boobs, men or women?

As Haidt writes, the destruction of childhood eliminates a safe experimental playground where young people are allowed to make mistakes. In this sense, kids do grow up too fast, either sterilizing their personalities like an assembly-line politician to not risk upsetting anyone, or becoming colorful yet conformist so they can be loud and interesting, just like everyone else around them. Gone is that already all-too-brief period in our lives when we could be as embarrassing, unpopular, and abrasive as we wanted because, in the best sense possible, nobody cared.

Watching the devolution of elders into adolescents is just as demoralizing. Poptimism has even conquered the minds of middle-aged men who now feel they have to be into today’s teen popstars in order to remain relevant. It’s like a monkey paw situation where you wished that your painfully out-of-touch parents could become hipper, like the ones you see on scripted TV. Then you get what you want and realize how good you once had it. I don’t know what’s worse about Obama’s annual playlists: that he’s pandering about how his favourite artists are Ethel Cain and Tyla, or that he’s actually being genuine.

When I was younger, I remember reading lots of articles about how childhood was a manufactured period, a useful tool of the capitalists to sell toys and other useless junk to a once-useful class. Kids used to push plows and harvest wheat, dammit. The argument was that children were smarter than we gave them credit for and should be treated more like adults (i.e. their opinions on culture and politics mattered). But that was under the assumption that kids would become more like adults (as we knew adults at the time). Most people were not clamouring for a new culture where the best aspects of both the youngs and the olds would be blanched, while the worst parts would be distilled to create a new listless and petty world full of jaded kids and childish adults.