But How DO You Quit the iPhone?
I did it. It’s possible.
Everyone wants to quit the iPhone but nobody can. Or, at least that’s the sentiment I get when, every few months, I read about yet another new book that diagnoses us and our children with what could best be abbreviated as SDS — Smartphone Dependency Syndrome. This month’s anti-SDS tome (atop the headlines at The New York Times and The New Yorker) is Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. It echoes many of the points I made several years ago in my own contribution to the smartphone refusnik literature Goodbye Phone, Hello World.
Do we need another book telling us what’s wrong with this insidious device and the damage it’s doing to our teens? I mean, sure, why not? Pile it on until somebody does something.
But right here and now we need to take measures into our own hands and begin a campaign of active resistance. If we parents can’t refuse the siren song of the iPhone then how can we expect our teens to do so?
I have been basically iPhone-less for half a decade now. It hasn’t always been easy. I am no hermit. I am a person of the media. My writing and speaking business depends on communication. But more often than not, I find I can break through the cloud of distraction by direct, human appeal to my readers. Beneath the clamor of the digital noise people are desperate for…
