I feel like fixating on the device only gets part of the point. I try to remember being a teen, and in spite of not owning a mobile phone until I was 27, and not having a beeper before then, I was still exposed to all of what this article and a lot of the comments are pointing out as harmful things. I saw plenty of porn, gore, witnessed a lot of in-person violence. Looking back, I can see a lot of my friend group had some very inappropriate relationships with predatory adults. We drove while intoxicated, had underage unprotected sex. My sister got pregant as a teenager. Her best friend from high school was murdered by her mom's boyfriend. One of our best family friends who I babysat for was one of the few surviving victims of Richard Ramirez, the nightstalker. My middle school was shot at in three separate drive-bys. It's not like we didn't face danger. By any reasonable measure, at least in the US, the 90s were more dangerous than the world is today. Remember the movie My Girl? That actually happened to me. One of my best friends from when I was a kid, my dad's co-worker's daughter who hung out with us before I could form memories and ended up going to the same middle school as me, died from touching a cat because of allergies when we were 12. Stupid, preventable nonsense.

The problem that kids face today isn't danger. It's scale. Telecommunications has created a world where everyone is hyperconnected 24/7 and it's overwhelming. One issue with phones is the media content. There's too much of it, it never stops, and it creates an environment of constant comparison you can never escape from. Back in the day, getting really into TNG or X-Files was in itself an escape. They only came on once a week. They didn't try to fool you into thinking what was happening was real and your life didn't measure up because you weren't living that. The streaming ecosystem creates an entirely different dynamic where the consumers feel like they aren't living their best lives if they're not also producing their own content because of the illusion that the most popular celebrities are just regular people showing you their regular lives. But even without a phone, it's still there. The streaming services are all reachable from any other computing device or even a television.

Then you get into social networks. People you actually know, but barely. If someone bullies or annoys you, you can never get away. Instead of playing pick up basketball or lifting together with regular friends, you're doomscrolling Instagram watching a bunch of underwear models who can slam dunk thinking that's normal. Maybe you avoid some of that if you can't doomscroll, but if you have friends, they're going to show you the same feed. You can't make them unaware of the environment of FOMO and personal inadequacy this creates.

It's different being exposed to this kind of thing as an adult. Now that I'm spending time on Hacker News, it often makes me feel unaccomplished. There are technical wizards here, people whose books I read when learning the industry, people who retired as multimillionaires before they turned 30. But you know what? I barely knew such people existed when I was a kid. I'm just a normal guy now, but I felt like a god as a kid. I got 2nd in the So Cal regional spelling bee. Won the district-wide art show two years in a row. I lettered in four sports. Won two cross-country state championships, not individual, just team, but still. Perfect SAT score. I was 3rd tallest in my graduating class.

It turns out I was just a somewhat big fish in a nothing pond, but what would it have been like if I'd known that as a kid? If I was aware of how big the world is and how many ridiculous outliers and exceptional people are out there and how far I really was from being great at anything at all, what effect would that have had on my self-esteem and mental health? I can deal with it as an adult. I'm content at this point to live out a mediocre but happy and comfortable life. I don't know that kids can do that. Kids are ambitious. They're self-centered. They naturally form steep and brutal hierarchies.

I'm just not sure that taking away the phone, restricting usage, having GPS and parental controls, actually protects them from any of that.