I am home for the summer now. I’ll only be on campus here and there through June and July. I’ll spend most of the next two months with my kids, especially my nine year old Opal. We’ll go to the pool most days and ride our e-bike every day and I’ll be maintaining my garden and patio area which I increasingly think may be my number one passion. (We had a magical garden party this past Saturday with so many of our former students and a few current ones in attendance.)
I wanted to get a few thoughts down today because I don’t anticipate being at my computer much in general and I don’t plan on having too many work or movement related conversations over the next couple months. These are things I’d rather not wait to say.
First of all: Last week I had an incredible, long conversation with one of the Gen Z leaders of the movement at the national and international levels. (What is the name of the movement? The Anxious Generation is not the name of a movement. Hmm.) It was thrilling to talk to someone for so long and to feel that we agreed on most everything. This is happening more and more and it’s awesome. What was especially thrilling for me personally though was . . . I would say that as a result of this conversation I see more clearly than ever that the answers and the energy to pursue those answers reside almost entirely in the hearts and heads of the members of Gen Z. They can do this and we should help them do it, in some cases by doing whatever we can to stay out of the way.
What so encouraged me about that specific conversation was the amount of genuine philosophical thought I felt coming from someone just over half my age. I didn’t get to mention it in the moment so I sent a follow-up email the next day, thanking her for her time and complimenting her capacity for philosophical thinking. This is the kind of thinking I most admire and it’s the kind of thinking I at least try to employ.
For the purposes of this conversation I’ll define philosophical thought as a type of thinking that can step outside of reaction, of influence, of ideology, of self-interest, etc. in order to save time and energy and get to the heart of something, so that logical solutions can be proposed and implemented.
Or maybe all I’m trying to say is that for me philosophical thinking concerns itself with the greater good and - simply - uses the idea of the greater good as the ultimate guide. This is the best kind of thinking. It’s the kind of thinking about which you’d say: If everyone thought that way, we’d be okay.
Here’s a question we should use philosophy to answer:
Does social media do more to help us or hurt us?
Faced with this question fewer and fewer people are now willing to argue social media does more good than harm because the greater good argument may truly be impossible to make, especially at the societal level. But acknowledging this as likely true is just the beginning.
A philosophical thinker takes that relatively obvious answer and should be able to then say things like: If social media does more harm than good, no one should be on social media and at minimum anyone who is on social media deserves to understand that having any of those apps is a choice, it’s optional and not a requirement for human life in 2025. A philosophical thinker might then move on to the thought that we could fix all of this. If we told the truth about social media (and video games and porn and dating apps and Spotify and everything else) and let that truth guide our policies and philosophies at every level of society, we could heal our culture.
I think it takes a philosophical mindset to even see the possibility of all this and I think we all have access to this kind of thinking. I hope to spend the next several years discussing this and explaining it as needed and most importantly putting these ideas into practice to try to help people. I think we can heal and I think I’m a decent philosopher. I’m thrilled that I’ve begun to meet Gen Z philosophers. It gives me so much hope.
. . .
So the other thing I wanted to say now is that the damage brought on our society by social media and similar forces over the last 15 years has countless gifts embedded in it. Embedded in the damage, that is. This is how adversity works. When something bad - like social media rapidly addicting, confusing, and depressing an entire population - happens, understanding why that thing happened is the best way by far to learn about ourselves so that we can improve.
Social media has laid us bare, man.
It has shown us not who we are, as humans, but more so how scary things can become when we forget who we are.
This is a gift, damnit.
Because it feels like we’ve lost so much so quickly, we should be able to ask: Why did we lose the things we didn’t want to lose (childhood, peace of mind, cultural solidarity, etc.) and how can we go about getting them back?
I really do believe if we took an honest assessment of all the damage social media has done and then actively worked to undo that damage, the lessons derived from that process could logically provide us with a clearer than ever picture of what we humans actually need. This is the gift.
A good philosopher sees opportunity in adversity. This doesn’t mean he seeks adversity. It’s just his job to see the potential opportunities in everything including seemingly unsolvable problems. When adversity occurs he’s likely not glad for it. But what happened happened, so how can we make the most of it and find a way to improve and to move on?
The phone-based life has convinced most of us that we dislike ourselves and others far more than has ever seemed fair to me. We seem to carry these notions into the real world and all of this is so damaging, so distorting.
Might extracting ourselves from this mess help us see that we never actually hated ourselves or each other? And could coming to this realization in fact leave all of us with a deeper appreciation for human life, period? Having experienced and experimented with the opposite of real life for so long, wouldn’t it be logical to think many of us might be more thrilled with reality than ever before upon rediscovering it (or for some young people, experiencing it for the first time)? I have had this experience through the negotiating of personal and professional adversities many times in my 42 years and this - the realization that the experiencing of an extreme can deepen the appreciation of its opposite - is what launched me into philosophical thinking in the first place, sometime around 2003. I was two years removed from the murder of my best friend at the point. I’d experienced the absolute depths of despair but throughout that time I’d begun to realize that my appreciation for life itself and especially for the good times had expanded. I’ve tried to take this wisdom with me and apply it where I can.
Now for some Notes
Note One: I’ve said I think we can heal. For me the most critical process you have to undergo in order to heal from anything psychologically serious tends to be forgiveness. One of the great obstacles I see preventing us from confronting the damage we’ve done (so that we can learn from it and do better) is all the guilt felt by millions of parents who now see that they probably made a huge mistake by allowing their children to become addicted to phones. I feel this in nearly every room I enter when phone addiction is the topic at hand. It manifests itself as tension. It’s so hard because I really feel for these parents. They’re everywhere. It’s truly almost anyone who has raised a kid over the past 20 years. We’ve all fucked up and to varying degrees. We’re guilty and we feel it but we can’t talk about it.
The philosopher in me wants to find a way to make the most of this guilt. For one, I don’t think all you parents deserve to feel guilty to the degree you might. The engineering behind social media and video games is unbelievable. It ended up working way better than the engineers themselves could’ve imagined. On top of that you raised your kids within a culture that trusted technology. You even sent them to schools that may have let them sit on their phones all day. That wasn’t your decision. Life is so hard. Parenting is so brutally hard. All you were trying to do was survive the parenting experience while giving your kid something you thought they’d like, something they wanted. You don’t deserve to feel so guilty.
But me telling you that doesn’t matter much, I’d think. It has to be way bigger.
The philosopher in me wants to try to trigger an avalanche of forgiveness. I think it might be much easier for millions of parents to forgive themselves if our institutions set a tone for this. I’m hereby proposing that all the superintendents of all the schools that allowed phones in their classrooms between 2010 and 2025 publicly apologize for having done so. They should apologize for the huge mistake they made and by doing so publicly they could empower millions of parents first of all to forgive themselves and then perhaps to seek the forgiveness of their children where the need for that is felt.
Yes this might seem similar to all the public apologies we saw in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. It would need to be different, though, in that these apologies could not be at all performative. They would need to be absolutely genuine and realistic just like all the 2020 apologies should have been. Any school that allowed phones in its classrooms over the last 15 years allowed its students - people’s children - to deepen their addictions while undermining their academic and social progress. That’s just a fact. We have to call it what it is and was so that we can actually move on. This is possible.
It’s possible because it would be so difficult and probably ridiculous to try to prove that any school district did any of this damage on purpose. It was a mistake just like the mistake made by any parent who gave their kid a phone out of love then watched the phone take over the kid’s life . . . they didn’t mean to put their child in that position. But if no one ever admits the mistake, especially no one in leadership positions, then it will be all the harder for “little people” to admit the mistake themselves and we will just continue to rationalize and to dig ourselves deeper. We won’t change.
Forgiveness is the most powerful thing. Forgiveness is LOVE. I want to help us unlock all the latent love we’ve pushed inside ourselves and forgotten about over the last 15 years. I hope to continue to build something at Simpson College and to ultimately leverage that momentum to convince one superintendent to make this logical leap, to apologize and to ask for forgiveness. I think if one of them did it hundreds would follow. Where is the downside here?
It’s also just logical. We can set love aside if you like. As school and district phone bans began to sweep the nation my first question was: Will any of the administrators announcing these decisions have the intelligence to acknowledge the terrible mistake they made by allowing phones in schools in the first place? It’s so strange to me that any leader would announce a huge change without properly acknowledging why the change needs to occur, especially if they personally (professionally) may have contributed to the problem. Avoiding this shifts all the blame to the parents and as we’ve discussed, they don’t deserve this.
If a school district could apologize properly and without sanctimony, it seems to me that students and parents alike would be far more willing to fully buy in to conscientious phone bans. This would improve the district and district officials should always be looking to improve their districts. Apologizing therefore feels like a pretty strong, logical strategy for any leader looking to improve his or her district and avoiding this could conversely be a timebomb. We can talk way more about this later.
Note 2: The fall will be big for me and for the task force I’m leading. I want to have things in place for the fall so that I can discuss our work very publicly here, for the benefit of all. I believe we’ve taken the proper steps to make that happen. Very exciting.
For now I will tell you that during the spring semester we conducted four separate surveys. Three student surveys confirmed all that we already knew - kids spend too much time on screens and too little time outdoors and socializing in person, and most of them wish this were not the case. We already knew this but it was important to get some data directly from our students. As usual the most telling parts of the surveys were the open-ended questions. On two of the surveys we asked students whether they feel they have a healthy relationship with their phone. On another, our student body president asked students what they would change about their relationship with their phone, if they could change anything.
The big trend I and others have noticed in these written responses is: Those students who seem to feel their relationship with their phone is problematic are extremely able to tell you exactly what the problems are - they are specific and often detailed. On the other hand, those students who feel they have a healthy relationship with their phone are rarely if ever able to actually explain what is healthy about their phone use. They mostly just claim that the use is healthy without evidence or often they compare their own relatively moderate phone use to students or others with extreme phone dependence and use this to conclude that their relationship is healthy. It makes sense they’d do this, but this is faulty logic. There is no healthy societal standard for them to use as a frame of reference. None of this means that some of those kids don’t have reasonably healthy phone relationships. I do think the difficulty in describing a healthy relationship is itself telling though and it may reflect the fact that most people have never even questioned the true role their phone plays in their lives. This is something we intend to dig further into in the fall. We can use this.
Overall all the survey data we collected indicates that phones represent what I’m calling a net-negative force in our students’ lives. A net-negative force is obviously not contributing to the greater good so we have work to do.
Otherwise I spent the last few weeks of the school year analyzing our data and writing up internal reports and generating recommendations. Based on all that went down at Simpson last year, these are the things I’m recommending we focus on going into the fall:
We have to let our chapter of The Reconnect Movement grow on its own. Reconnect is student-led and it’s very simple. Early in this entry I said the answers are in the kids and I do believe that. An organic student group could impact the campus culture in ways we don’t need to predict. We just need to support these kids largely by staying out of the way. (The wisdom in this was confirmed even by our survey process. In my opinion the best data we got came from the anonymous survey our student body president sent out on the disastrous social app Yik Yak. The students were more willing to respond to a survey that originated with a peer than they were to take mine, however smart and cool and funny I might think I am.)
I hope to help facilitate the creation of a Simpson College classroom phone philosophy. The college surveyed faculty and staff in the fall and through a couple of yes/no questions and a written response a significant percentage of the faculty indicated their interest in or at least openness to working to reduce the impact of phones on classroom dynamics. Many professors already have their own policies and they shared these with us. Many said they won’t fight phones on their own, without institutional support. Boy do I understand that stance. I feel that eventually an institutional policy will make sense and such a thing will be commonplace across higher ed. For now though, because we’re either the first or the first do so conscientiously, a philosophy seems to make more sense than a full on policy. This is where I think considerations of the greater good will be critical. Can a large percentage of our faculty and a large percentage of our students agree, through dialogue, that phones undermine the educational experience in ways none of us should be content with? I know this must sound like a lot. It sounds impossible. I think it can be done and I also think the attempting of all of this, even if it should fail, could be insanely valuable. Think of what we might learn in the process.
We will continue to advocate for phone free spaces. I’ve discussed this elsewhere. I think designated phone free spaces would be cool for obvious reasons and I also think they could be important symbolically. How might we show our commitment to helping each other to feel consistently better? Committing to a space and committing to respecting that space could be a great way to show this.
We will continue to work with athletics programs. Last week I met with our athletic director and he remains extremely committed to this cause. What I want to do in the fall is to work with willing programs to see what might happen when a competitive group agrees to treat phone/electronics use as a variable that could affect athletic performance. They in fact wouldn’t need me at all for this process but I’d love to talk to them about it along the way. The results of their experiments could tell us valuable things that could be extrapolated to other teams and other human groups everywhere. I think this could be way cool.
Those are the main areas of emphasis as of now. I have a bunch of other ideas that are more guerilla style and I hope we can get into those as well. It’s likely that I won’t be writing any more for the next several weeks but I’m around. Especially if you’re at a college that is already working on what to do about phones or if you’re wanting your college to get on this, I’d love to hear from you. Email me at Jack.Simons@simpson.edu
You’re all beautiful. We’ll talk soon.
JS