At a fancy New York restaurant last night, a man stood before me in a black tuxedo and warned me to stop looking at my phone. We'd been sitting in the same row all night, each with a phone in front of us. It's tempting to look at the screen, he said. You can read your WhatsApp messages and respond to your friends, but those messages will still be there when you go to bed.
Frankly, it's as easy to look at your phone while you are in a restaurant as it is at home. You sit down, and then everyone pulls out their phones. People don't sit and read the menu, as in olden times. They scroll through Instagram, play games, Facebook their friends, read the news, or try to Snapchat a fight between strangers (don't do this).
That habit hasn't been helping me become happier lately, so the man seemed to be on to something. But he also seemed to be admitting defeat. I looked at the places he pointed: our faces, the faces of our companions, and the faces of the people around us. His eyes were impassive, and they seemed almost as dark as the phones in the room.
Here's the reality: we will never not be on our phones. A new report from Nielsen has revealed that the amount of time Americans spend in front of screens grew by more than half-a-billion hours, to over 270 hours per-person, per-year. Millennials are getting even more screen time in comparison with their parents, of course.
Why does this matter? Well, once you lose the attention span, it's hard to ever get it back. So, we have to actively seek out media that challenges us. We also have to consume content that makes us happy, because all we get from the media these days is negativity.
Studies show that excessive screen time causes people to crave stimulation and escapism in an unhealthy way. It's not good for the brain to become unhinged in front of a television set or smartphone.
Screen time is also harming our kids. Children should have a phone, but the other big screens in their lives should be their parents. If you care for your kids, you should limit their phone usage.
Just look around. There aren't any children playing games on the streets. Kids fiddle with the phones on their laps and have their heads down, often texting or checking Twitter, or Instagramming a photo of their plate. They aren't paying attention to other people. Trust me: if you had a smartphone when you were a child, you've been missing out on your childhood.
It's also true that phones are a disaster for parents. A recent study found that parents who used screens for more than an hour a day had kids with behavioral issues, attention deficits, and sleep problems. The longer people use phones, the more likely they are to become addicted, to the point where the brain loses the ability to distinguish between real and fake. Yes, people lose their sense of what's real and what's not. They become completely lost in their own digital universe.
I'm not the first person to raise the alarm, but I may be the first to suggest that, in order to become better parents, we have to start seeing the problem as a matter of justice.
We need to start asking ourselves: why are we doing this? We believe we're making our kids happy by giving them access to this miraculous thing called the Internet. But if we choose to do that, we're giving them very little time to develop other interests and take in other culture aspects. Those screens aren't nurturing our kids, they are tuning them out.
You can see the problem clearly when you take the time to look at the latest phone commercials. It's all about being in the moment and living life to the max. And yet, my child prefers to play mobile games, rather than getting onto the field. That's something to think about.