BOWLING ALONE READS LIKE A NOSTALGIC LOOK AT THE GOOD OL’ DAYS:

What [Robert] Putnam couldn’t possibly have seen at the dawn of the technological revolution is how much worse the “bowling alone” phenomenon would get with the addition of the smartphone and the internet. I was waiting tables during the portable computer revolution. In the course of just a few years people went from dining together to dining together, alone. Entire families eating together, all looking at their phones.

My Gen Z nephews look at the TV like a telephone landline. Why would they be chained to one room, at the mercy of other people’s preferences, when they can roam freely from place to place, consuming whatever content their heart desires?

There is a line in Bowling Alone that made me laugh out loud. Putnam wrote, “Some see hope in the rise of news on the Internet or the all-news cable channels. It is still too early to predict the long-run effects of these new channels,” Putnam wrote. He adds, “That said, the early returns are not encouraging.”

Adorable. Cable news is dead. Cable broadcasts get fewer viewers than many YouTube streamers. Trump will probably be our next president, again. Now we are fat and lazy and also outraged and misinformed and distracted. Our attention spans are shredded by the multiple devices and social media constantly capturing our attention.

And as a result: The closing of the teenage mind is almost complete.

In the 1950s, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg developed a model for moral reasoning that follows a trajectory similar to Piaget’s model for cognitive development: Children progress from more concrete to more abstract thinking, from more rigidity to more flexibility. Levine says that what alarms her about the rigid, concrete take on right or wrong she sees in my generation is that without the “capacity to hear opposing points of view, you don’t develop empathy. And you’ll need empathy to end up with a good partner, to be a good parent and to be a good citizen.”

Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former Stanford dean, agrees: “We’re in desperate need of humans who can grapple openly with ideas, and disagree, as reasonable people will, without villainizing each other.”

I see teenagers unintentionally becoming more unforgiving and judgmental rather than open-minded and compassionate. When we can’t or don’t talk freely, we lose the chance to find real common ground, acknowledge complexity or grasp that even our own opinions can be malleable. If we listen only to those who already agree with us, we won’t make wider connections. We won’t grow.

Some people told me not to write this piece — that I could get canceled online, cut off by peers and perhaps even rejected by colleges. That’s a risk I’m willing to take.

I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I believe that daring to get past what’s acceptable and engage in open dialogue — as we did walking away from English class that day — is the key way to finding them and becoming the empathetic critical thinkers we need to be as we grow into adulthood.

Let’s start talking.

But that would require reasoning and — heaven forfend — even thoughtful debate! It’s so much easier (for kids of all ages) just to let those knees jerk and tear down the posters when confronted with a liberal ideology that causes them plenty of cognitive dissonance.