3 Takeaways - Swipe, Tap, Ghost: The New Rules of Human Connection (#248)

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

What if your phone is quietly changing your brain—and your relationships? The brilliant Christine Rosen explores how digital life is reshaping everything from childhood to public discourse, often in ways we barely notice. With insight and urgency, she challenges the assumptions driving our always-online world.  This conversation will make you see your screen—and our society—differently.

Tech has made life much more comfortable and convenient. Everyone spends more time on their phones and their computers for work as well as for entertainment. But what is tech doing to us as individuals and more broadly to us as a society? Hi everyone, I'm Lynn Toman and this is 3 Takeaways. On 3 Takeaways I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers and scientists. Each episode ends with 3 key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better.

Today I'm excited to be with Christine Rosen. Christine analyzes how technology alters human behavior. She is co-founder of the journal The Atlantis and a frequent contributor to commentary, national review, and other news publications. She is also the author of the wonderful book The Extinction of Experience. I'm looking forward to learning how technology is changing us. Welcome, Christine, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today. Thanks, Lynn. I'm very glad to be here. I'm excited. Tech has made life so much more comfortable and convenient.

Are we spending less time in person with other people? We are. And this is a fairly new thing in that we have a choice about whether we can be with each other in physical presence, face to face, having those sorts of conversations, or doing the same thing but with a screen between us and another person.

Given the convenience, the ease, the efficiency, our ability to maybe mute or turn off a conversation that we're not enjoying, we're more and more often gravitating towards the mediated interaction with other people rather than the face-to-face. And I think over time, we develop habits and expectations of each other that are mediated through the technology. And that means when we are face-to-face and together in person again, we're not as good at what we used to do. We've lost some of our skills in just interacting as human beings. Can you elaborate? What are we losing? One of the things that we are designed evolutionarily to do is to read each other's facial expressions.

So we have all kinds of unspoken languages, as they say, with our gestures. So the way we use our hands, if our eyebrows go up, and from the very moment that you open your eyes, and in fact, an infant's field of vision is when you're being held, if you're an infant, it can see the person's face. So it's a very short distance,

but it's meant to just focus on the face. So from a very young age, we're reading faces even before we can speak or articulate our feelings. When we spend a lot of time being interacted with and talked to and gestured, we are absorbing a million different things about what it means to be a human and how to communicate. But if you think about children today, if you put an iPad or a screen in front of their face from a very young age, maybe even before they're quite verbal and they're just staring transfixed at the screen, we've all seen this, they're seeing a lot of things on the screen, but they're not interacting with a fellow human being and seeing all the nuances, these sort of unspoken bodily signals that we give. As

they get older, they are not as good at reading other people. And I spoke to some diplomats, for example, who said, it's a real challenge. The new kids coming in are bright. They're super sharp. They're ready to go. They lack basic social skills. They don't know how to look someone in the eye

and sustain a conversation. They're very physically awkward when they're all thrown into a room together. And obviously, for diplomats, that is a huge part of their job is reading signals across a negotiation table, meeting new people in perhaps somewhat hostile situations. So these are skills that are very qualitative, you know, it's difficult to quantify what they mean. But a lot of the people, particularly in the business world that I spoke to said they notice a shift with each

rising generation, the more time they've spent on screens, the more they have to do some basic people skill development of these teams when they come into the workplace. So interesting. Do our devices give us more power and control over our experiences? They do to some extent. I would argue, and in fact, too much power and too much control creates habits of mind that then perhaps make us less functional as people. And by that I mean, it's great that I can call my grandma from anywhere in the world on my phone and check in on her and I can text my kids and see what's going on.

All these things are good. I use them every day. I'm not a Luddite. But when you spend most of your time having the ability on a phone to mute someone, to end a conversation, to swipe right because that person doesn't look nice to you, the sense of control and power means when you're in a situation where you don't have that control,

say you're sitting dealing with a difficult bureaucrat at the DMV who can't figure out why all your paperwork isn't in order, you suddenly realize that you're a lot less patient. And that's because you haven't had to practice being patient. You haven't actually had to deal with difficult things because you can get rid of them, mute them, cut them out of your life. And the technology habituates us to expect certain things. So in the sense that it gives us power and control and we use it wisely, that's all for

the good. But I think what we're realizing now with the extent of our use of this, most of us spend more than seven hours a day staring at some form of screen, that that also creates new habits of mind and it does make us less patient, less tolerant of other people, less willing to deal with difficult situations and in some sense also less sophisticated about things like long-term planning because we're used to on-demand instant gratification. So interesting. And I suspect there are many people that

spend more than seven hours a day on their devices. They may work all day or much of the day on their devices. And then when they go home, they may turn on a device for entertainment, whether that's Netflix or Amazon Prime Video or gaming or social media or dating apps. You said people become more impatient and more intolerant. Does that mean that the physical world is going to feel less and less attractive to us?

Yes, it's interesting. When you try to measure qualitative cultural change, for example, it's difficult to make a case in a world where everyone expects everything to be quantitative, right? Well, what are the statistics on that? And so when I was thinking about patients, do we actually have more or less patients? I had to look for other signs of whether we're patient. So I studied how people stand in line and how lines have been redesigned.

I went to amusement parks to see how those have changed over time to suit the, as it turns out, increasing impatience of a public that doesn't like to wait for anything. I looked at road rage rates, which are, I think, to me, a sign that our unwillingness to accept delay. I looked at how engineers have managed to design websites and pages that load almost instantaneously and what was motivating them to do that?

Because a fraction of a second was too long for people to wait. There are studies of all of this. So when I looked at all of those different threads and brought them all together, I think I can make a pretty strong case that, yes, we are less patient. We are less tolerant of delay. And again, I think it's because if you spend most of your time

on a device that's constantly giving you everything you want when you want it, that's your expectation. So it's not just that we're spending all day at work staring at a screen. It's that then we come home, and our leisure time involves screens. And so that then takes out of the realm of human interaction all kinds of sociable interactions

that people used to share in third places, like a coffee shop or a saloon or a bowling alley. And there have been studies over the 20th and 20th, early 21st century, about how those third places, those public spaces that aren't home, that aren't work, where people from all kinds of different backgrounds can come together and do stuff and have to tolerate each other.

Now, those are actually really good for civic health, for people getting along, for encouraging toleration. And we're losing those. So now we can just be in our homes and we get whatever we can have our meals delivered. We can have our friends talk to us through the screen. We can play games with our friends while they sit in their house across town. All of this has led to an epidemic of self-isolation.

And that is not what we're wired to do. We are wired to be with other people and to learn from other people and to interact with other people. This is something different. And it's not that the experience doesn't feel real and give us an emotional burst of enthusiasm or any of those things.

It is real, but it's qualitatively different than how we used to interact. So interesting. You talked about research you've done on people becoming more impatient. What does the data show? Measuring people's ability and desire to wait for things. Shopping websites are actually an interesting source

of data for this, because they can tell when a customer abandons a shopping cart or abandons a page. And it's based on how long it takes for that page to load or how quickly it processes their transaction. And so there's all kinds how long it takes for that page to load, or how quickly it processes their transaction. And so there's all kinds of interesting consumer research about that, and that has been shrinking rapidly, like what people are willing to wait for from the early days of the internet shopping

boom to now, especially with mobile technology, how quickly they'll abandon something. And then again, like I said, with road rage, rates have skyrocketed. And that, to me, it's not just because traffic has increased, because it actually that's not the causal effect. It's that people expect to be able to go from point A to point B, whenever they want to, as they want to, with no delay. So our inability to deal with delay, whether that's waiting in line at a shopping mall or waiting in line of cars to be able to go home. We are just less patient and we're expressing that through very unhealthy means in the case of road rage where many people tragically have been killed in some of these altercations.

But it also then means when there's something that you must wait for, like the birth of a child or, you know, waiting in a doctor's office or waiting to hear good or bad news from a doctor. You can't rush these things. But just culturally, I think you can also see some evidence of our inability to wait when you think about instant solutions to very complicated political problems, right? Long-term thinking, long-term strategic planning, all of these things, and all of these have been studied in terms of the amounts of time and all the details. But I think the overarching picture says says we're just less patient.

We don't wait the same way we used to. We're not willing to wait. We used to do things 100 percent on our own, based on our own instincts and serendipity. But we don't anymore. I think you have some wonderful examples like restaurants or music. Can you talk about that? I think you have some wonderful examples, like restaurants or music. Can you talk about that? Yes, I'm fascinated by the idea of serendipity.

For years after I heard an interview with Eric Schmidt, who was still at Google at the time, who was at a panel discussion, he said, oh, well, we manufacture serendipity now. We can do that. And I thought, huh, I actually don't think you can do that. That's the whole point of something being serendipitous. It's not manufactured. It just happens. And humans have this great desire

for those sorts of chance experiences, for those unexpected things that could potentially encourage feelings like awe and amazement, the kind of stuff that I think we take for granted as being possible in the world because we're so focused on our screens. So when you think about how algorithmically driven and managed so many of the ways we spend our time looking for something, whether it's a spouse or partner or a particular kind of book, everything pulls us into that web because it's convenient, it's seamless, it's

efficient, all these words we hear from Silicon Valley. But I find it fascinating that the computers have taken over the thing that we used to love to do as humans. So think about browsing. I used to love to go to bookstores and just browse. Just go up and down, look at the shelves. And then you might pull something off the shelf, and it happens to be this amazing book of poetry

or a magazine you'd never seen before. And then that sets you down a path of a meandering path. That's harder to do online because everything is more managed. Your experience is managed. You're the user. That's why we talk about user experience. Serendipitous things, browsing, meandering, those are things, right? That's how our brains work. They wander. And it's very frustrating at times because when you're supposed to be focused at that staff meeting, your mind starts to wander. You lose track of what everyone's saying. But that's what we're designed to do

because those are the paths, those serendipitous paths that lead to creative insight, to thoughts. It's the cliche of suddenly you're in the shower and you have the aha moment. That's because you're distracted with your body doing something else, your mind is allowed some freedom. It's not being constantly stimulated

by something on the screen. Yes, if you walk by a restaurant and you like the outside of it, in the old days, you might walk in. But now my guess is almost 100 percent of people would check their device for reviews and ratings on the restaurant first. Failing to recall that, in fact, a lot of those ratings are fake. A lot of them don't really reflect the experience of people in the restaurant.

So we seek approval of our decisions now before we've even made them. We need this sort of constant algorithmically-fueled approval. And it might make the experiences more homogenized and safe feeling, but it also makes them a little bit, I think, boring. And in the realm of art and literature and music, it means that we are

missing the opportunity to be humble appreciators of someone else's work. If an artist, a truly genuinely creative person has made something, we owe them the respect of actually sitting and looking or listening to it and just being open to that experience. Not filming it, not spending a minute taking a picture of it, moving on to the next picture in the museum, but really kind of treating that with respect, that creative act with respect. Have our devices made us more risk-averse? I think they have, and it's funny, people always laugh when I say that, that we're all much more risk-averse because of our phones. Like, I just the other day, I was watching this guy jump out of an

airplane, doing this at the same time. I'm like, well, we've become more voyeuristic. Like, we're really excellent spectators of other people's risk. But are we more risk averse? So think about it this way. When's the last time you went to a new place and you just wandered around without using your phone?

Very few people will answer that they've done that recently. What's changed when people do come together in person? I think it's that we're never truly there in each other's physical presence anymore. We might be there physically sitting around a table at a restaurant. But throughout the several hours of a meal with our friends or family, everyone's

taking turns checking out mentally. They're checking their phone. They're looking down and sending a text to someone else. And we know the brain is not designed to multitask, and we don't multitask well. Multitasking is a myth. And every time you shift your attention from the people right in front of you

to the world on your phone, that is an act, I think, of deepened gratitude for the value of the human experience of people being together. So it's become normalized in a way that worries me because it really does lead to very fractured interactions, anxiety in the professional context, a lot of miscommunication. It's not just kids these days and their technology, it's all of us. We've all become habituated to ways of checking out from each other that I think can be quite harmful over time. So these devices, as we know, are addictive.

Whether it's the movies where as soon as a movie ends, the next one is loaded and starting within a few seconds, or whether it's our phones pinging us with text messages or where somebody just wants to know what's new in the news for the world. It's so easy, so convenient for people just to continuously check their phones. What do you recommend here?

Two things. The first is there are all kinds of things you can do to grayscale your phone, for example. You can eliminate all notifications. You can make the home screen be a very dull gray color. And I would recommend people do all of that, especially if they find themselves responding to everything.

Don't have those alerts. Have times of day where you check that phone or check your email and be deliberate about that. It's very difficult to do, especially if you're a parent with young kids who you're kind of coordinating things. I understand that. So my second bit of advice, if you can't go totally

grayscale, is to practice a little experiment. And I experimented on myself with this, and I still try to do this as often as possible. Instead of picking up your phone in those interstitial moments of time throughout your day, when you're waiting at a stoplight, when you're waiting in line at school pickup to get your kids, when you're waiting for a meeting to start in the office,

don't pick up your phone. Do something else. If you're in your car, take a deep breath, look around outside, listen to some music, something. Don't go for that phone. Or what I've started doing, and it's been a great pleasure, is carrying a book around with me again, which I always used to do. And the phone at some point replaced my book, but now I'm reading more. The overwhelming effect when you do that is you start to notice how often you reach for your phone out of habit. And when you don't do that, how much for me, it's just I remember things throughout the day better. I remember little details. I observe more. And it's heartening to think that these tiny little habits actually can lead to a better sense of well-being.

So I would say grayscale your phone and try for 24 hours not to pick up your phone in those interstitial moments of time and see how you feel at the end of that day. I love that advice, especially the advice on not picking up your phone in those little interstitial moments. Christine, what are the three takeaways

you'd like to leave the audience with today? The first takeaway is that the gold standard for human interaction is being face-to-face, being with each other in person, giving each other attention, looking each other in the eyes, reading our weird facial expressions, all of that. And although all of us have to mediate some of our interactions now because of the way our lives work, we should still actively seek out those moments where we can be with each other in each other's physical presence.

The second takeaway is that we should try to cultivate more look up experiences, not look down experiences. So when you're out in the world, try not to look down at your phone all the time. Look up, look around, you notice things. Try to cultivate a new way of attention, cultivating your own attention rather than allowing a technological device to constantly capture it.

And finally, every new thing is not necessarily an improvement. And I think we live in a culture that is extraordinarily powerful at giving us these tools that can make things more efficient and convenient and they're incredible tools. But not every new tool makes us better as human beings. So when we think about bringing a new tool into our homes, into our family life, in some cases like as sensors on our bodies, in our pockets all day, we should ask first, is this

going to encourage the values in the way I want to live my life? Is it going to be good for my family? And answer those questions first. Every new thing that comes your way isn't necessarily going to improve what you value in your life, and particularly in your family life. Christine, thank you so much.

This has been wonderful. I really enjoyed your book, The Extinction of Experience. Thanks so much, Lynn. I enjoyed the conversation. If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out.

If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at threetakeaways.com, where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynne Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. Thanks for listening.