This is an opinion column

“And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made,” wrote a prescient Paul Simon in 1964. Simon & Garfunkel’s beautifully written “Sound of Silence ‘’ exposes a culture that has lost its ability to meaningfully communicate. More than half a century has passed. The neon god now reigns supreme.

A glance at DataReportal’s Digital 2024: Global Overview Report gives credence to the quasi-divinity of technology. More than two-thirds of the world’s global population now uses a mobile device. Our digital tethers mean “the typical internet user now spends 6 hours and 40 minutes online each day.” For younger users, it’s even more.

Whether we know it or not, most of us are hunting dopamine hits like drug addicts. As much as I might sound like a grandpa telling you that screens rot your brain, tomes of available research suggest that our elders were actually correct.

Technology at the levels we’re utilizing is safe…in the same way mainlining cocaine is safe. Researchers have demonstrated that screen time can cause physical changes to the brain that are similar to those caused by cocaine.

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study concluded that children consuming more than 7 hours of screen time per day had a thinner cortex, affecting their ability to think and concentrate. Children younger than 11 who spent more than two hours a day on screens scored lower on thinking and language tests. High levels of screen time and internet addiction actually reduce brain volume in areas responsible for impulse control and behavioral regulation.

From a scientific and medical perspective, we aren’t even remotely confused about the impact of excessive screen time. The dark comedy is that almost all of us excuse our particular use as “normal.” That’s the language of an addict.

Imagine your kid coming to you and asking for a little bump of cocaine because everyone at school is doing it. Screen addiction is uncomfortably similar. If you’re irrationally upset by the comparison, you’re making my point.

I tried an experiment with my teenage son since my family is extremely strict on screen use. I let him have Instagram, and my only requirement was that he self-regulate to no more than thirty minutes a day. As it turns out, putting a developing brain against the most sophisticated computing algorithms ever created isn’t much of a contest. His usage crept up to several hours a day.

We have since imposed hard timers on his phone to help him. He’s not thrilled, but even he understood how quickly it got out of control. “Dad, sometimes I’m scrolling, and I don’t even know why,” he said. How many of us have had that experience?

We’re experiencing a cultural wrecking ball of mental health and brain development, and we will pay generational consequences. Parents struggling with their own digital addictions must protect their children. The situation certainly isn’t ideal.

Waking up from our techno trance demands us to first admit the gravity of our problem. Then we actually need to change. Put some time limitations on your own devices. Almost every popular piece of technology now has some capacity to do so. Ask someone else to do it if you can and let them keep the screen time password. Requesting more screen time as an adult is a sobering deterrent.

In my home, we’re more permissive of social communication tools like chat and text than we are with tech with the capacity for doom scrolling. We want to foster meaningful human interaction while cutting down on the fake alternatives.

The neon god isn’t real. He never was. We made him, and it’s past time for us to let the batteries die and take the power back.

Smith is a recovering political attorney with four boys, two dogs, a bearded dragon, and an extremely patient wife. He’s a partner in a media company, a business strategy wonk, and a regular on talk radio. Please direct outrage or agreement to [email protected] or @DCameronSmith on X or @davidcameronsmith on Threads.