Smartphones are an easy scapegoat for a more profound unhappiness

Children are led to believe ‘that their worth is tied to proving that they are exceptional’

Norma Foley, whose term as minister for education saw €9 million allocated for mobile phone pouches in schools, with former taoiseach Simon Harris and Kerry mayor Breandán Fitzgerald. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
Norma Foley, whose term as minister for education saw €9 million allocated for mobile phone pouches in schools, with former taoiseach Simon Harris and Kerry mayor Breandán Fitzgerald. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill

What makes a human life valuable? Greg Epstein, a humanist chaplain at Harvard, recalls discussing this question with a group of students at the Ivy League university, many of them “deeply anxious about their individual and collective futures” and seeking advice before graduating.

“When I suggested they view themselves as having inherent worth and value, simply for existing, as a baby would, one of the students responded – with laudable honesty and forthrightness – that she found that idea laughable,” he writes.

Epstein has spent the last few years researching the impact of technology on our lives and the roots of modern anxiety. While it has become commonplace to blame the smartphone for all our woes, he believes our relationship with tech needs to be seen in the context of a deeper malaise, a malaise that’s encapsulated in that story.

Many young people are led to believe “that their entire worth as a human being is directly and inexorably tied to proving that they are exceptional”, says Epstein, speaking from Boston by Zoom.

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The psychotherapist Alice Miller called this The Drama of the Gifted Child. Parents praise their children for being “smart” or industrious, which may help to raise their standards. But it can leave a lifelong impression that your value as a human being depends on always being more than what you are.

“Tech has taken this idea that we are gifted children playing out a tragic drama and it has multiplied that exponentially across the globe,” says Epstein. “Almost every minute of every day we are interacting with devices, applications, programmes, manipulations of data, with that notion in mind of trying to separate out the exceptional from the unexceptional.”

Epstein first became chaplain in 2005, a year before Twitter was founded, giving him a front-row seat for the so-called anxiety epidemic of modern times. Societal change in the past 20 years has had positive and negative aspects but the overall effect is “destabilising”, he says. There is much more diversity; there are more extreme rewards and penalties for winner and losers in the economy; and existential threats to humanity seem more immediate.

For students worried about the future, “tech is presented to them as the answer”. Epstein develops this argument in his book Tech Agnostic, which likens technology to religion.

The parallels are manyfold. Utopian thinking, zealotry and intolerance of dissent are all well represented in Big Tech. There is also a love of maxims, such as “move fast and break things” – a recipe for profit in Silicon Valley and now also “a popular theological answer to the question of how to live”, Epstein points out.

It is partly for this reason he shies away from “one size fits all solutions” to technological harm. Asked for any tips on responsible smartphone use, he says: “I’m not trying to create the killer app for tech criticism, because I think the fervent belief that we are always one maxim away from salvation is a deeply religious conviction, and it’s one of the reasons why tech is so religious.

Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain at Harvard University and author of Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation. Photograph: Cody O'Laughlin
Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain at Harvard University and author of Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation. Photograph: Cody O'Laughlin

“I want people who are anxiously feeling guilty that they aren’t obeying the correct maxim or following the prescribed plan for techno-zen that that’s okay; that they’re okay.”

He believes it’s best to think of the treatment for tech addiction – a fair description of what most of us have – as similar to one of the ways you might manage an eating disorder. “A doctor wouldn’t try to get you to stop eating as a way of managing your eating disorder. They would say: ‘Let’s take a step back and think about how you got this way, and let’s think one step at a time and build a healthy relationship with food.’”

With the smartphone, “it’s not going to kill me to check more notifications one day. It’s more important to over the long term try to use the technology in the service of my own humanity and other people’s humanity rather than devote my own humanity to the technology itself”.

Humanising technology is a big ask in the current political and economic environment. But we still have some control over how we use tech. It’s also within our power to challenge toxic philosophies that are being disseminated or amplified by technologies.

That means, among other things, going beyond token measures such as locking up students’ mobile phones in pouches for the school day (something Norma Foley said she “firmly believe[s] ... will improve wellbeing, mental health and socialisation” when she allocated €9 million for the scheme as minister for education) and instead reorienting our education system away from the competitive blood sport known as the Leaving Cert.

It means pushing against the idea that you need to be exceptional or “gifted” to be a worthwhile member of society. It means reassessing how we reward “talent” in our economy. At a fundamental level, it means bringing love to the fore of everyday conversations – a love of others, just as they are.

“It’s so destabilising when you have all these young people jockeying for position to show how great they are,” says Epstein.

“It places them in direct competition with their neighbour, their friend, their family member, their fellow human being and, in almost every case, relationships become transactional; studies [teaching and learning] become transactional; technology becomes transactional. If you don’t solve for that you don’t solve for much of anything.”