Can We Please Stop Romanticizing Pre-Smartphone Life?
A lot of anti-tech—or anti-Gen Z—screeds only work by romanticizing the past while pathologizing the present and projecting damage on strangers.
Of course there are some downsides to smartphones. I'm not denying that. But all too often, critics of phones—or of any new technology—have a tendency to romanticize the past in an attempt to make our tech-enabled present look worse.
Case in point: this recent piece by Paul Greenberg in TIME magazine, which commemorates the release of Apple's iPhone 17 by asking, "Do We Really Need Another iPhone?" Greenberg opens with an extended anecdote: He is 19 years old, stuck in Luxembourg unexpectedly, and starts chatting with another teenager at a youth hostel. They decide to go off in search of a discotheque, and wind up wandering all around the city. They never find a dance club, but they chat with a lot of strangers, get to know each other, and wind up having a nice dinner together. "We don't become fast friends for life," writes Greenberg. "But what we've accidentally found is meaningful."
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Greenberg imagines that, today, the new friend and him would simply have looked up "disco in Luxembourg. We would have evaluated the merits of this disco or that one relative to our location in the city. Perhaps we would have disagreed on which disco we found preferable and parted ways in favor of our respective choices. Whatever the case, the silly dinner afterwards would never have taken place, and my Canadian friend would have remained a stranger."
He concludes that "the smartphone has destroyed our impetus to wander, get lost, and find ourselves." In this age, "no longer does one simply roll the dice and go. Instead one chooses a destination and walks toward it. Along the way the route is commodified. Restaurants suggested instead of found. Parks digitally delineated instead of outlined by the contours of our promenades." Books searched for instead of ambled upon.
OK, but here's the thing: You can still wander, even with an iPhone. No one is stopping you. Traveling in a faraway place, or simply visiting a new area of your hometown, you can still keep your phone in your purse or pocket and stroll the streets, peeking in bakery windows, perusing bookshops you randomly discover, and stopping at a restaurant not because you've checked its Yelp reviews but just because you like its vibes.
I wander like this a lot when I travel. It's lovely in the right circumstances.
But sometimes you're in a bit of a time crunch. Sometimes you're traveling with hangry toddlers and need to find a kid-friendly restaurant, stat. Sometimes you're in a rural or suburban area where leisurely strolling for lunch options isn't an option. Sometimes you or a companion have dietary restrictions and would like to make sure a restaurant has food you can eat before you go there. In these situations, pulling out a map app to view your options and looking up menus on restaurant websites is a blessing.
Sometimes stepping into little boutique stores on a whim is exactly what you want on vacation. Sometimes it's 9 p.m. and your kid has a fever and you just need to quickly find the closest drugstore that's still open.
The fact that we can quickly find and evaluate places from our phones has made our lives immeasurably easier and better. I am as grateful that we have this technology as I am not beholden to it. Just because I have the option to use my phone to skip the wandering doesn't mean I always need to or will.
Of course, Greenberg seems concerned not so much with preserving his own wanderlust but with the idea that other people are relying on their phones too much. And surely some are. Some would be happier wandering more but have gotten in the habit of simply consulting Google Maps. But surely some simply have different values and preferences than Greenberg or I do.
Not everyone has the disposition or inclination to strike up conversations with strangers. Not everyone enjoys a leisurely and loose romp around a new location. Some people feel unmoored and anxious when they don't have a concrete plan.
And this was the case before iPhones existed, too. For every couple strolling hand-in-hand through Paris with no particular destination, there was another who booked a structured tour of the city. For every solo traveler who made a new friend, there was one who stuck her nose in a book. For every 19-year-old tromping through Luxembourg in search of a discotheque, there was a middle-age man asking the hotel concierge for recommendations.
That brings us to another funny thing about Greenberg's rant. Might part of what he's nostalgic for just be novelty and youth?
The journalist Jane Coaston has a theory that a lot of people's nostalgia for earlier eras is actually just yearning for a time when they were younger and less burdened. It's not really that they miss the 1990s, per se, it's just that they miss the lazy freedom of childhood or the ignorance of current affairs and tragedy that comes with it. It's not really that the 1970s were some sort of golden era but that they have fond memories of high school antics, or miss the sense of endless possibility they felt at age 22.
Greenberg's Luxembourg anecdote—the main plot point against which he disfavorably positions today's phone-fueled ways—seems to me more like a prime example of the differences between traveling at age 19 versus at an older age. The youth hostel. The lack of a spouse or kids. The lack of work responsibilities. These were all as necessary for his adventure as his inability to consult a smartphone.
Surely, there are still 19-year-olds chatting it up in youth hostels and embarking on outings together. And if they do pull out a phone to find that discotheque instead of searching all afternoon in vain, who's to say that their experience will be any less "meaningful"?
Greenberg imagines that, in the presence of smartphones, he and the acquaintance would have disagreed on discos and set off for different locations. But the fact that they were sympatico certainly doesn't turn on the phone's absence. Another new acquaintance may have just as easily gotten frustrated with the wandering after a while and called it a night. New acquaintances today may just as easily look up a place and decide to go there together. The club could be a dud, despite good reviews, and propel them to go get pizza together across the street.
Or they might have a blast at the dance club, meet more new people there, and embark with them to a magical afterparty. A few decades later, when they look back fondly on that night, perhaps they'll see their phone and the information it provided as an essential component in helping them create such a meaningful memory.
Exoticizing Gen Z
Romanticizing is only one component of the toxic nostalgia playbook. Exoticizing, pathologizing, and projecting also tend to be afoot.
Take, for instance, this piece in The Atlantic on Gen Z courtship habits. It's part of a larger trend of pieces designed to portray everything about the rising generation as new, exotic, and probably alarming.
"Gen Z has abandoned the old dating script," it says. But the "old script" being offered here involves…a Meatloaf song and the concept of getting to sexual "bases"? That's not exactly a paradigm of traditional courtship or something to mourn the loss of.
Meanwhile, the "new" Gen Z dating paradigm that writer Molly Langmuir conjures up sounds a lot like the paradigm prevalent for at least the last three decades, just dressed up in new slang terms:
In my reporting, including in conversations with about a dozen Zoomers across the country, I learned about the terms sneaky links (people you hook up with in secret), zombies (people who come back after ghosting you), and simps (guys, usually, who try too hard to get a partner). Zoomers spoke of the dangers of "catching feelings" and the imperative to keep liaisons chill at all costs, or "nonchalant," as they put it. They discussed the numerous expressions that have arisen to describe the work that goes into maintaining simultaneous relationships, such as breadcrumbing (offering little bits of attention to keep someone interested) and cushioning (flirtations you keep on the side). I learned about so many different types of casual entanglements—not just the "talking stage" and situationships, but also flirtationships, explorationships, and the scenario that I struggled most to understand: a situationship that is exclusive but between two people who would not, under any circumstance, describe themselves as dating.
None of these things are new, even if the teens and twenty-somethings of my millennial youth would have used different terms.
Langmuir goes on:
My exchanges with Zoomers—as well as with sex educators, psychologists, researchers, and parents—made clear that anything so simple as the base system had essentially become moot. Few of those I spoke with described a typical order to the way physical intimacy or relationships evolve.
"From what I know about previous generations, in past times, you could just ask a girl to be your girlfriend, and she'd say yes or no, and that was it," Miles Greene, an 18-year-old student at a liberal-arts college in Massachusetts whose mom I've known for years, told me in a tone of voice that I might use to discuss the baffling customs of the Pilgrims. "It's so much more complicated than that now."
To use the slang of my youth, lol—what? Speaking as an elder millennial, I can tell kids today that, no, it was not that simple in the 1990s or 2000s. I suspect at least several generations before me would say the same.
This is a perfect example of people's tendency to romanticize the past in an effort to pathologize the present. But Gen Z's relationships are only exotic and unhealthy when you pit them against an idealized and unrealistic version of relationships past.
Langmuir's piece winds up coming to the seemingly obvious conclusion that Gen Z is made up of all sorts of different people who want and seek different things from relationships:
From some of the Zoomers I spoke with, I heard that they and their peers tend to eschew even the most flexible relationship labels…. But a number of other young people told me that they and others they know were in clearly defined relationships. And some intentionally seek out conventional labels.
Almost as if…they're just like any other generational cohort before them. Crazy!
Do You Feel Like Slop?
At least Langmuir seems to have talked to members of Gen Z before trying to explain their dating habits. In a new piece on Jonathan Haidt's Substack—provactively titled "We Are the Slop"—writer Freya India simply projects a sick psychology onto everyone around her.
"We have become the meaningless content, swiped past and scrolled through," writes India. "Experiences, relationships, even our own children, are cheapened, packaged, churned out for others to consume. For some of us growing older has become a series of episodes to release: first the proposal, then the wedding, followed by house tours, pregnancy reveals, every milestone and update, on and on, forever. We exist to entertain each other."
That's certainly one way to look at it.
People who share pictures of their families, life milestones, and other activities on social media may also be driven by something much healthier: joy, and a desire for people to share in it. A wish for those they know and love to be a part of their lives, even when they are far away. A healthy impulse to document both major and minor life moments that seem special so you can look back on them fondly.
Were our grandparents' experiences cheapened by showing slides from their vacations to their neighbors? Were our parents' relationships with us cheapened by keeping books of babies photos displayed on the coffee table for anyone visiting to look through?
Sure, social media photos may be shared more widely, depending on how large your social networks are. But the underlying activity and impulse doesn't seem all that different. And it feels downright disturbed to me to look at people happily sharing their engagements, pregnancies, new homes, etc., and think "ugh, look at them churning out content for me to consume."
(I must also point out that people have been sharing intimate details and moments from their lives on the internet for more than two decades now and, arguably, are more thoughtful about what they put online now than they were when, say, Facebook first got big.)
India goes on to criticize "influencers" who really do use their lives as fodder for entertainment and commerce. The way you view that concept is probably dependent on a lot of other values, and I'm not here to argue for it being good or bad. But I do take issue with India's assertion that "the worst part is that these influencers think their views go up because people care, because they finally matter, forgetting they have declared themselves entertainment."
Again, pure projection. And an infantilizing assumption that influencers—who skew heavily toward women—are too dumb or naive to know what they're doing, when the truth is that actually becoming big by branding your own life requires a lot of skill, savvy, and intentionality.
"How long would these couples last without the cameras? How would these families feel if the internet shut down, if they had to compliment and compromise and sacrifice without the validation of strangers? Would they know how? Without comments and clapping emojis? Can they live without it anymore — adulthood without applause?" asks India.
Where's a good eyeroll emoji when you need it?
Like Greenberg, India cloaks her anti-tech rant in concern for those she imagines are harmed. But her basis for concern here is just that: her imagination. She has melodramatically conjured a scenario in which folks who share their lives online are all secretly dysfunctional and empty in order to support her thesis that we're all "slop."
I don't know about you, but I don't feel like "slop" when I proudly post photos of my kids because, like most sappy parents, I just think they're so cute that I want my family and friends to see them. I don't feel like I'm viewing slop when I see pictures of my cousin's daughter at her dance competition, my best friend's son starting high school, a long lost work friend's wedding, or an old theater classmate's latest work. I'm happy to have glimpses into the lives and little moments of people I care about deeply, and to see milestones from those I've lost touch with but about whom I still feel fondly.
If you look at the same things and only see "slop" that you imagine others are deceptively "churning" out for your entertainment while they lead lives of quiet desperation…I think that problem just may be on you.
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It's not that the table or quilt is expensive or hard to source, as these things often are when a celebrity posts a house tour. It's that there aren't any answers at all. These things don't exist.
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