{"id":560,"date":"2026-07-02T10:38:39","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T10:38:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=560"},"modified":"2026-07-02T10:38:39","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T10:38:39","slug":"what-we-lost-when-everything-became-a-screen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=560","title":{"rendered":"What we lost when everything became a screen"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I was the kind of kid who dug holes, the deeper the better. I vividly recall the ecstasy of once splaying out my fingers in a bucket full of backyard dirt, a bliss punctuated only by a sudden burning sensation in my right hand that turned out to be my first-ever encounter with a fire ant.<\/p>\n

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The textures of my childhood loom larger in my memory than sights or sounds. My first paper cut, on a piece of sheet music, and the rush of cold water my older sister used to wash away the blood. The warmth of my mother\u2019s hug and the tender squeeze of my grandmother\u2019s hand in mine. The whoosh of air I\u2019d get from barreling a scooter down a hill, and the pristine crunch of stepping out into a winter\u2019s first snow.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This was the world where many of us grew up, one in which we felt our way toward understanding, sometimes playfully, sometimes a little painfully, sometimes both. To make a phone call, you once had to rotate a dial. Entering an apartment building meant turning a key inside a wobbly knob. Calculators and cameras used to be clunky, and writing was something you did with a pencil you sharpened yourself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But now, almost everything gets done through the touch of a screen, and the sharper that resolution becomes the fuzzier sense of what\u2019s real and what\u2019s not becomes. We\u2019re starved for clarity, and as we fall out of touch with the world \u2014 both literally and figuratively \u2014we\u2019re only getting more ravenous.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe\u2019re aching for friction; we need and we crave friction,\u201d said Mark Paterson, an expert on the sociology of touch at the University of Pittsburgh, because \u201cit affirms ourselves and the boundaries between the self and the world.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To be an adult today is to literally lose touch, to recede into the contours of your workaday life, and to reserve your exertions to do or to produce, but less frequently to explore. And to never willingly expose yourself to the fire ants lurking in the dirt.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Growing up isn\u2019t the only reason why the textures that stitched together my early memories \u2014 those lines between real and imaginary play \u2014 now fall as flat as a crushed juice box or a deflated birthday balloon. Like most Americans, I spend far too much of my time with my nose pressed to a glossy screen, electroconductive feedback loops replacing the many discrete activities my younger hands mastered.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If kids once grew up surrounded by a smorgasbord of textures, many of today\u2019s iPad babies struggle to hold crayons or zip up their jackets by the time they enter kindergarten. Socializing is something we now do overwhelmingly online with teens hanging out with their friends face-to-face nearly half as often as they did 20 years ago. We\u2019re told to touch grass, but we keep touching screens: Americans spend 90 minutes less outside of the house now than they used to, and two-thirds of parents say they spent far more time outdoors as kids than their children do now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIf the screen could imagine what its users look like,\u201d Paterson told me, \u201cthen we\u2019d be one big set of eyes and just one finger.\u201d That one finger \u2014 or at most, two to four \u2014 is the dominant medium through which most young adults engage their sense of touch for over seven hours each day, tapping and texting and swiping for the equivalent of 106 days per year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What so many people experience as screen fatigue might actually be better described as touch hunger, the unyielding sense that we don\u2019t touch grass, touch one another, or touch textures \u2014 neither buttons, pens, nor dials \u2014 as often as we used to. In the quest to make our daily lives as frictionless as possible, we might be losing out on some of what makes life feel like life<\/em> itself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe world is a wonderful interface to engage with,\u201d said Rachel Plotnick, an expert in human-technology relationships at Indiana University. \u201cGiving that up comes with a real loss.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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How the world became flatscreen<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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As the 19th century yawned into the 20th, an Italian physician named Maria Montessori opened up an experimental preschool for children cooped up in an impoverished tenement in Rome.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The first Casa dei Bambini, as Montessori called it, embraced a pedagogy of touch, eschewing lectures in front of a blackboard in favor of sensory activities such as fastening buttons, sorting blocks, and sweeping corridors. In their tactile environment, the students who arrived to the schoolroom \u201cwild and uncivilized,\u201d Montessori once said, soon \u201cshowed extraordinary understanding, activity, vivacity, and confidence. They were happy and joyous.\u201d At a time when only half of Italian adults were literate, many of these children quickly became the first in their families to learn to read and write.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIn order to form and maintain our intelligence, we must use our hands,\u201d Montessori said decades later in 1946, by which time hundreds of schools around the world had adopted her methods and her name.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The anxieties that first made Montessori\u2019s educational innovations take off around the world will feel familiar to anyone nursing a smartphone addiction today. In the wake of the industrial revolution, nobody seemed to use their hands like they used to anymore. By 1920, more Americans lived inside cities than outside of them. As that shift continued, entire generations of workers began to earn their living primarily using their minds, not their hands, for the first time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But the dawn of mass production also led to \u201creal concern about bodily disengagement from the world,\u201d said David Parisi, a professor of touch and digital technologies at New York University. Americans began buying their bread instead of baking it. They did away with churning butter, spinning yarn, chopping wood, and pickling produce in favor of buying packaged margarine sticks, factory-woven fabrics, coal furnaces, and canned vegetables.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There were ultimately tremendous benefits to these industrial era innovations, like more abundant food, the birth of modern medicine, and dramatically longer lifespans. But as transformative as those innovations were, they also represented an early manifestation of the \u201closs of what I like to think of as a certain type of epistemology, a certain mode of knowing or being in the world,\u201d Parisi said. \u201cThat sense of knowing through touch.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the century since sliced bread began appearing on market shelves, our daily lives have only become more and more tactilely convenient, which is another way of saying still more physically disengaged. And while earlier technologies still involved some \u201cdifferentiation of the interface,\u201d said Parisi \u2014 think of a button versus a knob \u2014 now ubiquitous touch screens, despite their name, have flattened even those differentiations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Plotnick, who wrote a definitive history of the button\u2019s electrified early days, notes that there was plenty of fear at the turn of last century that all forms of touch would one day be replaced by the pushing of a switch. \u201cElectric buttons have become the masters of the world, overcoming distance, doing away with the necessity for forethought,\u201d a French nobleman that she quotes complained in 1903. \u201cAnd, for that matter, for thought at all. Everything is changed.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But today, most of what we do is achieved not through a push, which at least requires a modicum of pressure, but through a fleeting tap or swipe. What Plotnick refers to as \u201ctouchscreen mania\u201d has flattened even those once ubiquitous buttons, levers, and knobs into a glossy lifeless display.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Even branding has gone flat in deference to the smartphone, which favors the legibility of 2D design at the expense of the richness that even a veneer of texture brings. If you\u2019ve wondered why the logos for brands like BMW, PayPal, and Olive Garden look so sterile and interchangeable now, blame the fact that most advertising now happens through your phone, which can make anything remotely textured \u2014 like Spotify\u2019s much-maligned disco ball icon \u2014 look distorted. Like most of modern life, it seems, branding has contorted itself to fit into the deflated topography of a largely digital world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe are tactile creatures,\u201d Plotnick said. \u201cHow boring is it that all of the digital experiences that we have in the world are just touching the same slick flat glass over and over again.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Our screens, ourselves<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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And boy, do we spend a lot of time touching that slick flat glass, often at the expense of touching more important things, like nature \u2014 and one another.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Americans check their phones nearly 200 times per day. It is the first thing they see in the morning and the last thing they see when they go to sleep. Nearly one-third of adults under 30 spend over nine hours per day looking at screens, which means that if nothing changes, they will spend over 20 years of their lives under the cool blue glow. Their dexterity, and even grip strength, appears to be atrophying away the handwriting or even typing mastery of older generations, and collapsing toward the great plains of the smartphone screen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Worry not for the grown-ups, whose motor skills are more or less fully baked, but for the iPad babies, whose fingertips have been expeditiously wired like those of a prodigious violinist to deftly navigate the contourless landscape of their devices, as anyone who\u2019s seen a toddler navigate an iPhone can attest.<\/p>\n

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Montessori\u2019s hands-on learning methods remain popular, particularly among well-to-do parents. But many toddlers are glued to their screens, spending about 2.5 hours per day with them on average, instead of stacking blocks or painting with their fingers. And, while affluent families might be able to afford the Montessori preschools, $80 audio toys, and screen-free summer camps, many families can\u2019t afford the increasingly premium experience of an unplugged childhood. According to a 2019 study, tweens from low-income families use their phones two hours more per day than high-income kids. Kindergarteners from low-income families spent a startling six hours per day on screens at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s no wonder that over three-quarters of preschool teachers say their students can\u2019t hold scissors, crayons, or pencils as well as they used to anymore, according to a 2024 survey by Education Week. Nearly 70 percent of teachers said kids have a harder time tying their own shoes. \u201cThe only place I\u2019ve seen crayons given to kids is on airplanes,\u201d said Field, the developmental psychologist, who believes that children\u2019s motor skills have increasingly molded around their use of screens, rather than around the hexagonal barrel of a pencil or the steel frame of the monkey bars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But this haptic atrophy is about more than pure playground nostalgia. As Montessori spent a lifetime pointing out, children \u2014 and teens and adults for that matter \u2014 learn better when they learn with their hands. Kids who count on their fingers are better at math, and writing by hand lights up your brain in all the right places for encoding new memories and information. For every additional hour per day that children spend on screens, they score 10 percent lower on standardized tests, a correlation that probably helps explain why American kids have been testing precipitously worse on math and reading ever since the smartphone took over about a decade ago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cHow do kids learn about the world? Well, they need to feel if something is lumpy or soft or hard or hot or rough,\u201d said Plotnick, who becomes concerned at times when she sees her own kids learning math on the computer. \u201cIf they\u2019re not moving around pieces and they\u2019re not erasing with an eraser,\u201d she said, they might not be able to \u201cprocess that content in as rich a way as if they were using their hands.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While adults may be less vulnerable to the worst effects of screen time, they\u2019re not immune to its dangers. Smartphone-addicts are more prone to vertigo and balance problems, meaning that the majority of Americans may be clumsier than they used to be. And if you spend all of your free time spiking your dopamine levels on your phone, then you have less time for using your hands to knit, cook, and garden, which all measurably improve your mood and can ward off depression.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cEven just writing, holding a crayon or pen, is stimulating the pressure receptors under your skin\u201d leads to \u201ca more relaxed neurological state\u201d in which \u201cyour nervous system slows down, your heart rate slows down, your blood pressure slows down,\u201d Field said. \u201cYou can trace a whole path towards ill health\u201d from failing to adequately engage your sense of touch.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Like most technologies, the touchscreen is not inherently evil. It is not predestined to be cast as the cartoonish bad guy siphoning kids away from their cowboy dolls like LilyPad the tablet does in the latest Toy Story<\/em> sequel. During the pandemic, for example, touchscreens were arguably an overwhelming force for good, allowing people to preserve some slimmer of connection with one another when being physically together became unsafe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Arko Ghosh, a professor at Leiden University, has studied patients going through brain surgery. After they come out of anesthesia, \u201cone of the most difficult moments of their life,\u201d almost all of them \u201cgrab their phone, because it\u2019s so easy and it immediately connects you to your loved ones,\u201d he marveled. \u201cThere\u2019s a magic going on through your fingertips that wasn\u2019t there before.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But there are also inescapable tradeoffs to outsourcing your social life to the screen instead of rubbing shoulders and shaking hands in the real world. Touch starvation or skin hunger \u2014 the yearning for human contact \u2014 reached a much-discussed fever pitch during the pandemic, but many people never shook off the itch, in part because its roots long precede the pandemic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Teens and young adults today spend hanging out in person than they did two decades ago, and a poll in the UK found that 40 percent of adults go days without speaking to another person face-to-face. Americans have far fewer friends and have way less sex than they did a few decades ago. Even when they hang out with one another, most admit that they can\u2019t stop checking their phones.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThere is more touch on the screen than there is on other people,\u201d Field said, \u201cand that is a sorry experience.\u201d Holding hands or hugging have been shown to reduce cortisol levels and flood your brain with happy hormones. Touching grass has a similar effect, and so does collaging or ceramics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s no wonder that people feel existentially lonelier, far less trusting, and I would argue, fundamentally less grounded in reality than they were when they, like me, spent their childhoods literally digging into the ground. When we no longer feel the grain of the world, how can we hold onto what\u2019s real or not?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Have we reached peak screentime? <\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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There are some indications that the world has reached its anti-tactile breaking point.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Dissatisfaction with our touch-deprived status quo has spilled out in the form of fidget spinners and the revival of the printed word, flip phones, clackity keyboards, wristwatches, and grannycore hobbies like ceramics or crochet. \u201cPeople want that tactility, that physicality,\u201d Parisi said, of textures as benign as \u201cthe play button on a cassette deck.\u201d They crave the subtle etched sound grooves of a vinyl record \u2014 sales of which surpassed $1 billion last year for the first time since last century \u2014 or the feel of a cool metal needle pressed against a fuzzy bunch of yarn.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI\u2019m of that generation where I used to love taking the record home from the store and lifting the needle\u201d of a new vinyl, Paterson said. \u201cThere was a tactile element that\u2019s missing in digital streaming.\u201d He believes their resurgence may belie \u201can appetite to introduce more friction into people\u2019s lives again,\u201d he said. \u201cI think the tide is turning.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Naturally, as with Montessori schooling, one\u2019s digital detox now comes with a premium price tag: An app blocker can run for $60, ceramics classes are prohibitively expensive for many hobbyists, and some dumb phones \u2014 devices with far more limited access to apps and other functions \u2014 cost far more than their \u201csmart\u201d counterparts. But there are other reasons to be hopeful too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Critically, schools (and in some cases, indie musicians) have begun locking up kids\u2019 phones altogether, mandating recess, and forcing students to go back to handwriting essays in blue books. Quite suddenly, the lunchroom is loud again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Even car companies, which so eagerly began adopting their big ugly touchscreens a decade ago, have begun bringing back the button. \u201cPeople seem to have a hunger for physical buttons, both because you don\u2019t always have to look at them \u2014 you can feel your way around for them \u2014 but also because they offer a greater range of tactility and feedback,\u201d said Plotnick, who\u2019s advised companies looking to make the switch. \u201cI do think we are seeing that pendulum swing back.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If you are not a neo-luddite, and the idea of a small computer wrapped around your index finger doesn\u2019t make you seethe, then there is also the promise of wearables \u2014 like Oura rings, Apple watches, and Meta glasses \u2014 which could portend a more ambient technological future, one where people spend less time staring at screens and more time living in life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe don\u2019t want to romanticize buttons and demonize touchscreens or vice versa,\u201d said Plotnick. \u201cWe don\u2019t have to live in a world where you have to only have one or the other.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Haunting all of this, an actual ghost in the machine, is the spectre of artificial intelligence. On the one hand, it could push us towards an entirely frictionless future, Plotnick said, one where people need not even tap or swipe anything <\/em>anymore to send out a message or get food delivered to your door. On the other hand, AI calls into question the very premise that led many people to value the cerebral over the corporeal in the first place. After all, the dawn of the helped crystallize the idea of an America that worked \u2014 and by extension, defined itself \u2014 within the contours of the mind. Disrupting that premise \u2014 combined with the dawn of reality-warping AI photos, videos, and misinformation \u2014 could force a reassessment of the value of a human touch.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Over half of Americans now say they have a hard time knowing what\u2019s true, and perhaps even more importantly, more than half feel isolated from one another, and three-quarters say they\u2019re more stressed about their country\u2019s future than they used to be. Over 65 percent of Americans in this country, and over three-quarters said the same of their neighborhoods. The nodes that once connected people to their surroundings, to one another, and to their own personal truth appear to be eroding.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You really can\u2019t believe everything that you see anymore. But with the almost quaint certainty that comes from a fresh blade of grass or a fire ant\u2019s sting, you can<\/em> in fact believe almost everything you can touch. If we choose to outsource our sense of reality, and even our precious early memories, to our frictionless digital lives then we are dooming ourselves to a life in a sea of slop, that thankless mire of the proverbial metaverse. At worst, we risk stripping away the textured frictions that help define where our selves end and where the rest of the world begins.<\/p>\n

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