The Tragedy of Not Missing What You Never Had

I'm on a couple of weekly email newsletters. I have chosen them carefully to be the ones I will definitely read. One of them is called Evidence Snacks from the great Peps McCrae. 

Teachers, if you don't know Peps, do yourself a favor and look him up. He writes very short books with a lot of punch. This week's snack was special. In this snack, he was talking about how the low friction of the modern world has prevented us from growing resilience and perseverance, leading to more depression and anxiety rather than less. Then, he included a line that broke my heart a little.

Here it is: "The cost of all this is easy to miss. Nobody notices the strength or skill they never built . . . or the confidence they never grew."

I'm not a person who believes everything new is bad and everything old is good. I'm writing this on a laptop, and I am grateful for it (thought I still love handwriting a thank you note). I appreciate that I don't get lost now the way I used to (but I also recognize that I can't read a map and figure out the area the way I could before). I don't think it is awful that kids play video games when their grandparents rode bikes (although kicking the kids outside for some unstructured time wouldn't be terrible). But I think part of the reason that I can use tech while recognizing what it has taken away is that I am a member of Generation X, the one generation that bridges the time of low tech to the time of high tech. Millennials have it a little bit because they had dumb phones and Blockbuster still existed. But Generation Alpha a beyond won't have lived in a world without instantaneous gratification, low friction, and no thinking required. 

I don't use the word tragic very often, but y'all, this is tragic. 

• Because we like quick delivery, we are teaching kids they never have to wait for anything; so the next generation won't know the joy of an anticipated gift or the Aha! moment that happens after trying to remember something for a long time.
• Because we worship convenience, we are surrendering our cognitive abilities to AI; so the next generation won't get the satisfaction of solving a problem for themselves. 
• Because we want everything to be easy and seamless, we make more tools that reduce friction. But God help the helpless child when that tool doens't work because they won't know how to "do it the hard way." They will fall apart.
• Because we want to "save time," we raise the expectations of what can be done in the time we have, so we teach kids that efficiency matters more than depth. They won't want to take the time to read something long, so they'll just have AI summarize it for them. They already have a hard time sitting through a movie, which has millions of dollars of mind engaging, dopamine inducing special effects. So, a class, where learning only happens when it is effortful will seem like torture because they are used to things being effortless.

What is the result of all of this? 

More anxiety - Less strength - Lower resilience - Less mental health - Less physical health

Even worse, people who are born into this won't know that this isn't the way it was meant to be. God designed us to work hard, socialize with loved ones, and enjoy the life we have. Yes, the fall damaged all of this, but none of it stopped being true.

In the same way a fish doens't know that it's wet, kids who grow up in this world won't recognize that it goes against their design.  Kids born this year won't know that they could have been stronger. They won't know that they could have built confidence. They won't know that they could have moved more slowly. They won't know they could have enjoyed the people around them more. 

I'm painting a grim picture, I know. 

But I have good news - We have agency. We have the ability to set boundaries for ourselves and for our children (and students). We can stop doing things the easiest possible way and intentionally live in a world of friction. Some ideas:

• I was talking to a man a few weeks ago that said he had a phones free dinner with friends once per month. They could talk about anything, disagree about anything, decide a fact that another person said was wrong. But there was one rule; they couldn't look it up on their phones. If you thought someone at the table was wrong, you just had to convince the table that you knew what the right answer was. You couldn't "prove it" with Google or Grok or ChatGTP.
• Choose to remain a generation or two behind the latest phone or operating system. And give your kids a phone that only makes calls but has no internet or social media functions.
• Go outside and take a walk or a drive without your phone. If you get lost, stop and ask for directions.
• When on the phone with customer service, just keep saying "speak to a human" over and over until you confuse the bot into transferring you.
• Go to a store and buy something rather than having it delivered. Take the risk of being annoyed by the checkout clerk.
• Choose not to voluntarily engage with generative AI. I promise it's possible; I've never once prompted an AI for anything and changed from Google to Duck Duck Go because DDG would allow me to disable AI results and Google wouldn't. I know people are afraid of being left behind, but it is only inevitable because we believe it is inevitable. It doesn't have to be if we make them lose enough money.

We don't have to have the same boundaries, but we should all have SOME kind of boundary rather than adopting everything that comes along just because it is the next thing. 

Teachers, require students to use their brains in whatever way you can. Restrict their usage of tools that reduce friction, including but not limited to AI. Force them into discomfort by doing things in your classroom without access to the tools that make it easier. This goes beyond the curriculum and influences their view of both the world and themselves. 

If you don't do it, they won't complain. You know why? 

"Nobody notices the strength or skill they never built . . . or the confidence they never grew."

But you can notice it. You can prevent it from going unnoticed. And now, more than ever, it is your responsibility to require more of them than they want to give - for their own good.

I hope you will be able to read this. I screenshotted it from facebook, but it was so long that I had to reduce it a lot to make it fit into the screenshot. It's important advice to adults - Don't come along and make it easier.