Your Smartphone Is Not Your Brain

IF YOU DON’T use your legs, you won’t be able to walk. If you don’t use your brain, you won’t be able to do anything. This whole technology obsession is giving rise to a generation of zombies. But it’s not just that—people aren’t connecting with one another. People go out on a date: they sit across from each other, and instead of talking, they’re texting.

Technology is wonderful for medicine, for engineering, for all those kinds of things. But on a human level, it’s disastrous. People use smartphones and computers as a crutch. Technology has ruined a whole generation of young people. It has robbed kids of their childhood. They have become button pressers. They think if they press a button, they’re very curious. That’s not curiosity or imagination—that’s just access to a world created for them.

So many basic human capabilities have gone out the window. The three Rs—reading, writing, and ’rithmetic—aren’t enforced in school, either, so young people can’t read, write, or add two and two. No one’s developing memory, because their phones remember and do everything for them. I’m fairly good at remembering telephone numbers, which I always thought was a pretty common skill, but today it seems to stun people almost every time I make call.

My mother died in 1998, four weeks after her hundredth birthday. From about the time Carl and I were married to not so long before she died—about fifty years—he would give her an adding machine every year, and she would always send it back.

He would say, “Why do you do that? I’m trying to help you.”

And she’d say, “No, it’s no help. If I use an adding machine, I’ll lose it. I won’t be able to add anymore.”

She could do really big, big sums in her head well into her later years.

At first, everyone said I was an old fogy when I proffered my thoughts on the subject. But now there are “phone-free” get-togethers at which people have to give up their phone for the course of a meal and “tech-free” times when families go cold turkey on tech for an evening or, God forbid, a whole day.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Iris Apfel

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