20 January

Apple have been asked to look at ways to make their devices less addictive. But I think we’re looking at this backwards, it’s not the technology (technology isn’t a thing). Why are people so glued to screens? My guess is in the images below. These are the things that have been found to make people live longer. You’ll notice by far the most powerful thing is social connection, more than even stopping smoking. We’re intrinsically social beings, and our devices have made it easier to be 24/7 social. But there’s a paradox here too. People see screens as less connected than hanging out with friends and family, without screens, but in fact screen time is orders of magnitude more connected than ordinary face to face time. You’re connected in real time to potentially the entire globe. That’s what makes it so addictive to our (social) selves. The person staring at their phone while you’re hanging out with them isn’t being anti-social, they’re being hyper-social. They’re hanging out with hundreds of people at once. Loneliness is our greatest killer. Ditching the screens won’t fix that, because people are also using the screens to try to fix it. We need LESS social time, half the planet is sitting in our lounge rooms with us every day. And the essence of social life is comparison, which is another toxic driver of unhappiness. We need less loneliness, but screens are one of the only lifelines a lot of lonely people have. Before they had phones or iPads, they had TVs which ran all day and night, to feel connected. And just having more face to face time won’t fix things, as the other graphic shows, because there are lots of types of loneliness that have nothing to do with whether you’re in the same space or not, people can feel even more alone when socialising. ‘Integration’ and ‘close’ relationships is key, as you can see in the graphic, we need to understand those. But it isn’t screens taking that away, I suspect it’s much more the destruction of the old institutional frameworks of society, like the church and meaningful well-paid work, that is doing the damage.