Technology promises connection. It delivers efficiency, customization, endless choice. And yet, for many of us, it also delivers a strange and persistent loneliness.
A few weeks ago, I had the incredible opportunity to speak about this tension to a group of Catholic Bishops for the National Catholic Bioethics Center’s Biennial Bishops Workshop. I’m in a room full of men who have dedicated their lives to the service of others and shepherding the Church. And there I was, talking to them about smartphones and the impact of social media on teenage development.
I told them that I wasn’t there to demonize technology. I use it constantly. My work depends on it. But I have become increasingly aware that while technology expands our individual agency, it often erodes our collective life.
That tension—between individual choice and shared experience—is at the heart of the moment we’re living in.
The Rise of the Sovereign Self
In her book Generations, psychologist Jean Twenge traces how different generations have been shaped by the technologies of their formative years. Twenge points out that with technological advances comes increased individualism and a shift away from former collectivist notions, and this preference to choose for myself and go my own way gains strength with each new generation.
Technology (not just digital tools, think washing machines) gives us unprecedented control over our lives. We choose what we do with our time, who we talk to, and how we live. As digital technology has swept across the landscape, algorithms began to tailor the world to our preferred view. We curate playlists instead of listening to the radio. We stream on-demand instead of watching a common program at a scheduled time. We text instead of gathering. We scroll instead of strolling.
Twenge’s research shows that as smartphones and social media became dominant—particularly among Gen Z and Generation Polar (she uses Polar, I use the term Alpha)—rates of loneliness, depression, and anxiety rise sharply. While correlation is not causation, a matching trajectory in data is difficult to ignore. The more life has moved onto screens, the less time teens spend in face-to-face interactions, sleep, driving, dating, even working.
What struck me most in her work is this paradox: the expansion of personal freedom coincides with the contraction of shared life.
The current generation has more individual choices than any generation before them, but far fewer common experiences to bind them together.
The Anxious Generation
This theme was present in Jonathan Haidt’s earlier book, The Anxious Generation. Haidt argued that we have overprotected children in the physical world while underprotecting them in the digital one. We have restricted their independence outdoors but given them unfiltered access to the internet. Essentially like dropping your kid off in TImes Square unsupervised…
The result, he suggested, is a generation that is physically safe but psychologically fragile.
Social media platforms amplify comparison, reward performance over presence, and transform friendship into a public metric. Adolescence—already a crucible of identity formation—now unfolds under the gaze of peers, strangers, and algorithms.
Haidt described what happens when play-based childhood gives way to phone-based childhood. Free play teaches negotiation, risk assessment, resilience. A phone-based childhood teaches curation, reaction, and constant self-monitoring – also known as anxiety.
Again, technology expands individual expression while weakening embodied community.
What I Told the Bishops
When I spoke to the Bishops, I informed them of the current mental health crisis among our youth, declining competencies, shortening attention spans, and social skills deficits. I tried not to paint a gloomy picture, but the data out there has shown that having a smartphone in your pocket distracts you from your studies in the classroom. I suggested that the Church might have something uniquely valuable to offer in this moment— as a guardian of shared time and shared space.
- I encouraged the Bishops to consider placing technology back in its place in the classroom, as a tool to augment education not as the source.
- I invited them to consider offering screen-free youth events and retreats, to offer opportunities for young people to connect with their phones at the door.
- I suggested they educate their administrators and the parents in their parishes about potential harmful effects of unfettered internet access
They were receptive, asked great questions, and it felt really good to be able to share my shared passions for media and psychology in an impactful way, and I feel incredibly honored to have been invited.
Sacramental Reality
Embodiment and presence are incredibly important aspects of the Catholic faith that are being challenged in this digital age of distraction and detachment. I believe that the Mass is a powerful antedote.
There is something to be said about the fact that Catholic Mass cannot be streamed into full sacramental reality. It requires presence. You stand, kneel, respond together. You sing the same songs. You observe the same calendar. You inhabit a story larger than yourself.
It is full of traditions and shared activities – some of which, even though I’ve been practicing for over 39 years, I still have only scratched the surface or do not understand.
In a culture increasingly organized around personalization, the Church insists on participation.
The irony is that many of us hunger for precisely what technology has thinned out: thick community, uncurated encounter, embodied ritual. We want to be known without performing. We want to belong without branding.
Technology Is Not the Villain
It would be too simple to frame this as a morality play. Technology has created extraordinary opportunities:
- People remain connected across continents.
- Information and education are more accessible than ever.
- Creative tools are democratized.
Twenge herself acknowledges that technology aligns with broader cultural shifts toward individualism. Haidt does not argue for smashing smartphones but for redesigning norms—delaying social media, restoring play, building guardrails.
The issue is not connectivity. It is disembodiment. Not choice itself—but the loss of shared context.
Recovering Shared Experience
We may need to become more intentional about cultivating common life:
- Shared meals without phones.
- Community rituals that are not optimized.
- Collective viewing, reading, worshipping.
- Spaces where no one is performing for an invisible audience.
Perhaps the deepest challenge technology poses is not distraction but fragmentation. Each of us can now live in a slightly different world—news feeds, timelines, playlists, microcultures—until the sense of a common “we” begins to dissolve.
Community is not accidental; it is structured. It requires limits. It requires showing up at the same time and place as others. It requires friction.
Technology gives us frictionless living.
But human beings are not designed for frictionless lives.
If Twenge is right, we are freer than ever.
If Haidt is right, we are more anxious than ever.
The question is not whether we will use technology. We will. The question is whether we will allow it to replace the shared rhythms that make us human.
Connection is easy.
Communion is harder.
And it may be that in this age of infinite choice, what we most need are the experiences we cannot customize.