Recently I asked a friend if she would talk to me about her decision to get her two girls a cell phone. Part of what prompted my request was a conversation we had, along with us both seeing Screenagers; a documentary which follows one family’s journey to getting their 12 year old a smartphone. Here is what she wrote:

I went back and read my journals, and the drafts of the contracts Mike and I drew up together, and remembered the dozens of conversations I had had with friends and family, and I thought, actually we did a lot of due diligence and deliberation around this. And still, it wasn’t enough. Maybe, though, it was never meant to be a one shot deal? Maybe there was no way to perfectly foresee what transformations we would undergo?

I have been really wrestling with this; what I can control and what is beyond me. So, when we got together with my brother and his kids over Easter, he and I agreed on a phone moratorium during the family holiday. We were both expecting a certain amount of unholy blowback, but were strengthened by our mutual resolve. And then, the blowback didn’t happen! The kids were completely fine about it, and didn’t do any of the addictive dry-drunk manipulation I was cynically expecting. We did puzzles, hung out, talked politics, and hiked. We had a lovely time.

The anticlimactic result of all my worry made me realize that a huge part of the problem is us. I think parents, myself included, make technology into this incredibly powerful force in our lives and shudder to think about what would happen if we tried to take it away. Even my brother expressed this sort of supernatural awe when we were talking about kids and phones and he said: “I don’t think it is enough to limit access to the I-phone. I feel like we need to drive a stake through its heart!” I too have this fantasy of incinerating them all in a big cleansing fire, freeing ourselves in some all-or-nothing, magical way from this infestation of Silicon Valley succubi. 

This black or white thinking has characterized my approach to technology up until now– either roll over and take it, or rage against the machine and ground everyone because I am convinced that it is destroying us. But you know what? Nothing is black or white. I can’t turn back time and undo everything. Some things are here to stay (at least for now): AIDS, CO2, overpopulation, mental illness, technology, addiction, capitalism. I am realizing that the cognitive distortion of “It’s evil incarnate and I am helpless before it’s insidious, invidious power!” is just not a helpful position for me to take. 

And so I meditated on all of this for a while. And I talked to Mike. And I looked at the phone contract we had made together 3 years ago. Then I called a family meeting and said we needed to revisit this because things have morphed considerably since our original agreement. I told the girls; “There is no blame or punishment here, because that is what living things do.They morph.They push the limits.They test the waters. And these objects are designed to make themselves indispensable and send little pellets of dopamine to our hungry brains every time they vibrate or ding.” 

I forbore going into all the research around the effects of technology on developing brains, although I was tempted. Instead, I kept it simple. I said, “we miss you.” I told them how I had noticed that when each of them had lost phone privileges recently how happy I had felt. Not because they were suffering, but because I didn’t feel like a second class citizen in my own house. Because I didn’t feel like some invisible string was always pulling them away from me and toward this infinite, horizonless, virtual feast; no pavlovian yank on their chain every time a text came through. No involuntary swivel of the eyeball.

I told them that what we needed was some space between us and our compulsions, because in the end awareness is the best protection we have. Therefore, the phones would to be staying downstairs from here on out. All the time. Except maybe for an hour or so before bed time if they wanted to talk to someone privately in their room. I went on to say that they were not be used anymore until chores, home work, exercise, dinner, etc were completed. Further, the phones were not to be used during homework, because, contrary to everything our culture tells us, multitasking does not make us smarter, more efficient, or better. And, you know what, it seemed as if the girls were expecting this, even wanting me to say all this. When our talk was over, it was as if a spell had been broken.

Now, the devil is in the details. I am all too aware of how slippery a slope this is. The work is never really done. But that makes it like just about everything else in life. As long as we don’t delude ourselves that this is the final word on the subject, we will figure it out as we go. I think the realization here for me was that my vulnerability has real power, and that connection is recoverable. Saying what we want, what we long for, what we want to rebuild is speaking from strength. I don’t think I quite believed that before.

I once heard someone say that whatever is behind any choice that we make is, in fact, what we have signed ourselves up to receive more of. Regardless of what we wanted, or thought we were going to get. In other words, if you make a decision based on fear, you have just signed up for more fear in your world. If you make a choice based on scarcity, you have just signed up to learn the lesson of lack. If you choose and act based on trying to appear better or different than you actually are in order to fit in, you have just signed up to learn about deceit and alienation.

Look at your life. Closely. How many times a day do you make choices that are not coming from what you really want, but are instead based on you trying to protect the downside? Or you trying to keep something from happening. How many times a day do you make choices that come out of reactivity, overwhelm, stress and busyness only to be met with more of the same? How often do you choose based out of denial, avoidance and disconnection? Have you ever linked up your motivations and mind states to the results that you are getting?

In the yogic tradition that I hail from, it is never about what you do. Instead, it is always about why you do what you do. This is the exact opposite of what we, and our children, are creating through social media where the “what” something looks like reigns supreme and above all else. Under the auspices of “connection,” what I would define as a mutual and reciprocal coming together for the benefit of both parties, more times than not, our use has more to do with spinning, glamorizing and inflating the self. Instead of a give and take in our interactions with others, there is a kind of side by side marketing of ourselves to each other and how it is that we want to be known.

What if we could really see that that every time we try and get people to see us through untruthful ways, we have just signed up for a falseness between us. And that every time we try to get a greater sense of belonging by garnering more likes and followers through misrepresentation, exaggeration and obsessive preoccupation with the wrong things, we have just signed up for an experience of isolation, fragmentation and dissatisfaction.

The technologies push and magnify our social buttons; our deep-seated and innate needs as human beings to be seen and to belong. For there to be any chance of the technologies benefiting us in this domain, we must become aware of the “whys” of the “whats” that we are engaging in. Further, we must recognize that our children are not yet capable of this distinction.

When my children were around two and four, we had had a long stretch of rainy, cold weather on Cape Cod where we were living at the time. After several days of this, we were all so sick and tired of being together in the house that we were all feeling the strain with one another. And so, even though I had no plan, I piled everyone into the car and went for a drive. Somehow we made our way to the beach even though it was most decidedly not a beach day. But like they say, necessity (and a mother’s desperation) is the mother of all invention.

We got out and made our way onto the sand. Because I had not planned on coming to the beach, I had no food, no towels, no toys and no friends. This was something I had never done before, nor even considered, typically arriving at the beach with enough supplies for an army.

Hours later I had to drag them off the beach. From out of their own minds and bodies, and in collaboration with their surroundings, came exploration, companionship, curiosity, creativity and more. Everything they needed was inside of them; aided and brought forth by what was outside of them. It was a pivotal realization for me as a mother to witness just how little they needed, and just how big they could create out of virtually “nothing.”

We are harboring an undermining belief when it comes to our children. We believe that they require entertainment 24/7. We believe that they need lots and lots of externals to be satisfied. We think they need screens and gadgets to do it for them, believing they must be continually wowed, stimulated and done for in their play and interactions. All of this derails their own creativity, natural movement, and imagination, the forerunners of intellectual, social and emotional capacities.

This mentality is robbing our children of the joys that naturally arise in a childhood that is free from too many externals, done fors and distractions. And along the way, we are forgetting that the less they need to be OK, the better, happier and more imaginative they will ultimately be.

You know, it is one thing to know all the reasons why something is happening, and it is quite another thing to actually experience it. That is why, in this day and age, when we have more information and more “reasons” than we can possibly make use of, there is nothing like a direct experience. There is nothing like watching yourself go through something. There is nothing like an embodied experience where all of you is present and included in what is happening serving as the platform that sees through the rationalizations, denials, intellectualizations, and justifications of the conditioned and habituated mind.

I flew down to visit my mother this past week and had three experiences with the screen technologies that still leaves me stunned and uneasy. On the flight down, I sat in front of the standard issue little screen embedded in the back of the chair in front of me. Looking around and seeing that every single screen was going makes it seem like they can only be in the “on” position. No choice. So, when I traveled last and discovered that despite there being no “off” position, if I dimmed the brightness all the way down, it felt like nothing short of a miracle when the screen finally went blank. Such relief washed over me.  I figured, well that’s that. Only, as it turned out, that was not that for this time because beside me and in front of me as far as I could see, the screens were on all around me. And for some reason I could not stop tuning into them. Even though my thoughts were trying to be on my own thoughts, or on my own breath, or what I was reading, my eyes kept finding their way back. It was as though I could not, not look.

When I got to my mother’s house, even though I do not watch TV and have not had TV for many years and actually never, ever think about it, suddenly with one in the bedroom with me, I thought about it quite a lot. I kept wondering what might be on. One night I even ended the day a little earlier so that I could have time to watch something. And even though on the first night of my arriving I was totally exhausted, and really just wanted to sleep, I turned it on. After passing through about 500 hundred channels and still finding nothing on, I settled for a movie I had seen before. A movie, by the way, that now was being interrupted with an obscene amount of commercials and that had scenes that had been deleted out. And even though I could feel the exhaustion, and was so annoyed with the experience I was having, I kept going.

Later in the week, while at the movies with my mother, a particularly disturbing trailer came on. I turned my eyes so as to not take in what I most definitely did not want to ingest, and I will tell you, it took all of my will power not to look back. I felt like the mythological character who goes into the underworld and who upon being released is told do not look back. Under any circumstances. And then does, because she just can’t stop herself. Even though she knows it will be really, really bad for her. And it is. She is turned to stone.

I know the research that talks about how when there is a screen around everyone’s attention goes right there. I know about the links made between dopamine, the feel good chemical, and our need to respond to anything and at any time that comes out of a screen. But I will tell you, when you are watching yourself committed and wanting something else, and still finding it virtually impossible to do anything else, that is a most disturbing and potent piece of information. And while it could be easy or tempting to reduce these experiences down to some personal failing on my part, I think I won’t. I think I will be with what I know to be true; this is beyond me.