A s we approach the Festival of Freedom two recent articles in the New York Times give cause for taking stock of where we stand vis-a-vis technology’s chokehold on our lives. In one Adam Alter an NYU professor who researches psychology and marketing was interviewed about a new book he’s written in which he argues that “many of us — youngsters teenagers adults — are addicted to modern digital products. Not figuratively but literally addicted.”

I’ve written before about the many technology industry executives who strictly limit their children’s screen time because as one of them put it “we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself and I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.” Similarly Alter tells his interviewer that the impetus for writing the book was his discovery that “there’s a private school in the Bay Area and it doesn’t allow any tech… and 75 percent of the parents are tech executives…. What was it about these products that made them in the eyes of experts so potentially dangerous?”

Defining addiction as “something you enjoy doing in the short term that undermines your well-being in the long term — but that you do compulsively anyway ” he observes that the “technology is designed to hook us that way. E-mail is bottomless. Social-media platforms are endless. Twitter? The feed never really ends. You could sit there 24 hours a day and you’ll never get to the end. And so you come back for more and more.”

Alter says the proof that these devices are literally addictive is in the putting… of these devices next to one’s bed: “In one survey 60 percent of the adults said they keep their cell phones next to them when they sleep. In another survey half the respondents claimed they check their e-mails during the night.”

In the other Times piece the writer notes that for the past decade American teenagers have become less and less likely to initially try and regularly use drugs and alcohol. An annual government report measuring drug use by teenagers found that use of illicit drugs other than marijuana was at a 40-year low among most high school students.

So much for the good news. The question however that researchers are starting to consider is whether kids are “using drugs less in part because they are constantly stimulated and entertained by their computers and phones. The possibility is worth exploring ” they say “because use of smartphones and tablets has exploded over the same period that drug use has declined.” Psychiatry professor David Greenfield says that “people are carrying around a portable dopamine pump and kids have basically been carrying it around for the last ten years.”

But here’s what I don’t fully understand. Professor Alter lays out a compelling case for the literal addictiveness of technological devices. He admits that he too is addicted to e-mail and various games on his phone. He says we’re

biologically prone to getting hooked on these sorts of experiences. If you put someone in front of a slot machine their brain will look qualitatively the same as when they take heroin…. We are engineered in such a way that as long as an experience hits the right buttons our brains will release the neurotransmitter dopamine. We’ll get a flood of dopamine that makes us feel wonderful in the short term though in the long term you build a tolerance and want more. 

So wouldn’t one expect that his prescriptions for addressing this addiction would be at least somewhat commensurate with the gravity with which he views it? Yet when asked at interview’s end about recommendations for quitting behavioral addictions I was disappointed by how tepid and from a psychological standpoint unrealistic his response was: 

I’d suggest that they be more mindful about how they are allowing tech to invade their life. Next they should cordon it off. I like the idea for instance of not answering e-mail after six at night. 

That’s it? A little more mindfulness will do it — even if the problem is that we’ve very nearly lost our minds to these gadgets?

(As an aside however I must say that Professor Alter deserves credit for concluding the interview by recommending that people “find more time to be in natural environments to sit face-to-face with someone in a long conversation without any technology in the room.” He‘s describing first seder in Lakewood isn’t he? And he continues there “should be times of the day where it looks like the 1950s or where you are sitting in a room and you can’t tell what era you are in.” Isn’t that Beis Hatalmud?)

If indeed “many of us — youngsters teenagers adults — are… not figuratively but literally addicted ” it would seem to make good sense to look for example to the approaches that have been successful with other addictions such as 12-step programs. One of the things people in such programs do at the outset is to forthrightly acknowledge and bring themselves to face up to that they actually have a real problem.

So at the risk of being hauled into the precinct for unlicensed practice of psychology how about holding an initial “12-step meeting of one” — with yourself — and as a first step ask these questions:

Do I sleep with my phone near my bed? Do I ever go for a walk without it? Do I keep it on the table during meals? How about during meetings? When I’m speaking with someone face-to-face and I receive a text message who comes first? What is my reaction to being separated from my phone: Anxiety? Heart palpitations? Loss of identity? Do I feel bereft disoriented?

And once you’ve answered those questions and perhaps some of the answers are more than a bit disquieting it’s worthwhile contemplating something that was once said by another person named Alter — the Chiddushei Harim ztvk”l. He explained that when Hashem said V’hotzeisi eschem mitachas sivlos Mitzrayim (Shemos 6:6) the word sivlos conventionally translated as “burdens ” in the physical sense can also mean “toleration ” in the mental and spiritual sense.

Hashem was telling His people that their redemption would come at the moment He saw that they were so repulsed by the tumah of Mitzrayim so fed up with the spiritual degradation that they were simply unwilling to tolerate it any longer. Perhaps by taking stock of what has become of us and what the world out there is trying to do to us and our families to our precious Jewishness to our very humanity to our eternity we too will reach a point of intolerance for the status quo that will result in our own individual redemptions.

And then the final national one too. (Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 654)

To contact Eytan Kobre directly please e-mail kobre@mishpacha.com.