Does anyone truly have a healthy relationship with their smartphone?
Looking around modern society, evidence of such a balanced coexistence is remarkably scarce. Personally, while the pocket-sized computer remains undeniably useful, it still feels entirely like a foreign object when held in the palm of a hand—a jarring sensation that was brought into stark, immediate relief the exact moment my children became old enough to pick up a screen. To them, a tablet or a smartphone offers an enticing, comforting, and even productive space to inhabit. It may not be entirely healthy in the traditional sense, but it is entirely familiar.
For someone of my generation, however, it remains fundamentally alien—ground zero in an ongoing cultural battle against brain rot, attention loss, and reality itself. To put it simply, smartphones cause a deep, persistent stress.
This enduring dilemma recently found a much-needed perspective in a long, thoughtful essay published in Harper’s Magazine by Karl Ove Knausgaard, the brilliant Norwegian writer renowned for an uncanny ability to observe the world as it is with meticulous, unflinching detail. My personal struggle with technology, as his writing helped me to realize, stems directly from those most deeply influential years of my life—the formative era that came just before the rise of the smartphone.
“To understand a man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty, Napoleon is supposed to have said,” writes Knausgaard. “The quotation is probably apocryphal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
My own "Napocleonic prime" took place during the 2000s, arriving shortly after the initial advent of Facebook, but right before the iPhone revolutionized daily life by placing a
powerful computer in everyone’s hands. For Knausgaard, who is 56 years old, the internet barely existed when he was twenty years old. He candidly admits that he has spent decades effectively ignoring the fundamental, sweeping influences of such rapid technological advances.
“Not once in those forty years have I turned my attention to technology and tried to understand it,” Knausgaard writes, detailing how it operates both externally and internally. “It’s as if I had moved to a foreign country and not bothered to learn its language, as if I am content with not understanding what is happening around me and just settling for my own little world. This lately feels like serious neglect.”
This sentiment resonates deeply. While I spend a considerable amount of time and mental energy trying to understand and meticulously control the impacts of screen time on my children’s developing brains, I hardly ever pay close attention to my own digital consumption habits. What am I actually doing when I check for emails, Slack messages, and work texts with the conditioned, lab rat-like repetition that has become so common? What drives me to scroll through Reddit News and The New York Times at literally every available moment of downtime, or get completely lost in the bottomless rabbit holes of Instagram and YouTube? More importantly, what on earth should I actually do about it?
Knausgaard sought his own technological insight by traveling to Athens, Greece, to converse with James Bridle, an author and artist who specializes in nonhuman ways of thinking, including fascinating inquiries into what animals like orangutans can teach human society about politics. In a sense, Bridle views modern technology as an artificial barrier that continually gets in the way of genuine human experience. Sounding very much like a proselytizer for the free-range parenting movement, Bridle argues that the fundamental nature of existence requires direct, physical engagement.
“The only thing you can do is experience it and do it yourself,” Bridle notes. “You have to do it, you have to experience it, it has to happen to you. Bodily, physically—because you’re part of the world.”
Bridle takes this philosophical line of thought even deeper, offering the historical example of the ancient Eleusinian mystery cult. During those ancient rituals, initiates were led into a dark, enclosed room and confronted with a sudden, overwhelming “whirlwind of impressions, without anyone telling them what they were seeing or what it meant,” leaving them entirely on their own to interpret the sensory overload. The following year, those same initiates were shown the exact same ritual from the outside looking in. As Bridle suggests, it was only then—once the internal gaze was fully complemented by the external perspective—that the initiation could truly be considered complete.
This historical metaphor for the modern digital world made everything click into place. We are all too often trapped inside the digital experience, staring directly at the chaotic whirlwind of the internet with very little actual control or objective understanding of what is happening to us. Yet, there are a growing number of people today who are desperately trying to step outside of this manufactured world—to see the algorithmic puppet masters actively at work in order to find a way to walk away from it all.
We are certainly never going back to 2006, that remarkably innocent year that existed just before the introduction of the iPhone. Nor do I believe that returning to that specific technological era should be the ultimate goal of modern society. The technology that has been rapidly introduced since my own childhood is incredible, profoundly powerful, and represents a massive component of human progress. But despite all of its computational wonders, it remains no replacement whatsoever for the authentic, unfiltered real-world lessons I receive every single time I simply put down the phone and experience life directly.