I’ve just finished Anton Chekhov’s excellent short story, “The Man in a Case” (1898).
It chronicles the life of a rigid and anxious man named Belikov, who teaches Greek in a provincial Russian town. As Chekhov describes him,
“the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate and protect him from external influences.”
For Chekhov, a “case” is a way to insulate ourselves from the world’s messiness, but also from its grandeur, pathos, and joy. Cases prevent discomfort, but they also wall us off from life and from transformative experience.
Through a series of unexpected twists, Belikov nearly gets married (driven partly by the townspeople who hope to rid themselves of him), but he pulls back at the last minute, refusing now to even leave his bed, until his final encasement: death.
Then comes Chekhov’s most memorable line:
“Now when he was lying in his coffin his expression was mild, agreeable, even cheerful, as though he were glad that he had at last been put into a case which he would never leave again. Yes, he had attained his ideal!”
In our day, we might say that Belikov lives with a form of OCD. And that likely makes him a more sympathetic character.
Chekhov’s genius, however, is to show how there is a bit of Belikov in all of us. After the narrator (whose thoughts are not necessarily Chekhov’s) has smeared Belikov for the entirety of the story, another character experiences a moment of apparent revelation, staring up at a moonlit and melancholy sky. After reflecting on his safe but stuffy life, filled with frivolous pursuits, ” he remarks: “isn’t that all a sort of case for us, too?”
And the question hangs unanswered.
CASE STUDIES
Chekhov’s encasement sounds a bit like what Jonathan Haidt calls “safety-ism”— the worship of safety above all else, which leads to an attempt to “nerf” the world to prevent all possibility for distress, anxiety, or risk.
But safety-ism has ironic consequences: It serves as an “experience blocker,” which fuels anxiety, instead of quelling it. It also often leads to an enforced adherence from others. “You know, he crushed us all,” a townsperson remarks of Belikov, “and we gave way.”
Case-dwellers become case-enforcers.
And case-enforcers rob not only themselves, but also their loved ones of life.
MY CASE
I’ve thought about my own tendencies to be a bit like Belikov.
Like anyone, I have reasons: A few years back we almost lost our eldest son to a freakish rip current while on a family vacation in Florida. It happened on my watch, and ever since I’ve turned into much less of a “fun dad” at the beach (but also elsewhere)—causing my children to complain as I hover nearby telling them to “stay close!”
Is my safety-ism bad?
Not always. Sometimes it’s needed. But it can go too far so that I find myself saying “Be careful” when what I really mean is “I love you, and I’m scared you’ll die.” The thing is, both ends of that sentence are inalterable. So the only question is, what now?
A theme in Chekhov’s masterpiece is the need to examine how we insulate ourselves not merely from danger or discomfort—but from life. This happens not just in anxious attempts to avoid suffering or death, but more frequently through the malaise of distraction, productivity, and the tyranny of tiny tasks which confuses “getting things done” with actually living.
In other words, as Chekhov might say, don’t crawl into a casket because it’s “safe.”
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“The cost of a thing is the amount of LIFE … required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
He penned those words in 1854, but Jonathan Haidt argues they are even more important now in an age of digital distraction, and the bottomless scroll of social media.
In part 1 of this series, I offered a short overview of Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. In part 2, I’ll move beyond summary to a short response from my admittedly limited perspective as a parent and professor.
In short, I find Haidt’s argument largely compelling: By swapping a play-based childhood for a phone-based one, “The Great Rewiring” has created a generation that is more anxious, scattered, and distracted than ever. And I also agree that one positive solution involves more free-play and independence—even if that’s hard for parents who, myself included, worry about our kids’ safety.
Despite this broad agreement, I’d like to focus on some additional factors that complicate Haidt’s book, even if they do not contradict it.
#ParentsToo
A first challenge for parents (like me) is the charge of hypocrisy that easily attaches if we move to limit unhealthy digital behaviors in our children while we too are compulsively engaging in them.
Kids see us. They know our habits. And it’s tough to go all “Molly Hatchet” on your daughter’s screentime if you’re a raging digital addict too. (Picture a 1920s prohibitionist trying to close the local speakeasy by selflessly drinking all the liquor before it harms the kids.) Given this worry, a prerequisite for adopting Haidt’s advice may be to detox ourselves from screens and devices before preaching such an unpopular gospel to our children. That doesn’t mean throwing my phone in the lake, but it does mean making some important changes.
Preteens are attuned to hypocrisy. Thus, it seems insincere to act on the issue in the way Haidt suggests till we “first, remove the plank [read: phone] from our own eye.”
Knowing isn’t Enough
While I hope Haidt’s book makes a difference, Alan Jacobs makes the point that “knowing” is NOT our problem when it comes to the dangers of smartphones, social media, and the zombie-fication of the American amygdala.
“Everyone knows that living on screens is making children miserable in a dozen different ways, contributing to ever-increasing rates of mental illness and inhibiting or disabling children’s mental faculties.
Everyone knows that engaging creatively with the material world is better for children — is better for all of us.
Everyone knows that Meta and TikTok are predatory and parasitical, and that they impoverish the lives of the people addicted to them.
Everyone knows that social media breed bad actors: each platform does this in its own way, but they all do it, and the more often people engage on such platforms the more messed-up and unhappy they become. […]
Everyone knows all this. Some people, for their own reasons, choose to deny it, but even they know it — indeed, probably no one knows all that I’ve been saying better than Mark Zuckerberg and Shou Zi Chew and Sam Altman do.”
If that’s true, another book or blog post may not move the needle. Our problem is not a lack of knowledge. Our problem is a lack of will, fueled by compulsion and disordered loves.
Already Dated
A third issue for Haidt’s research (and one he readily acknowledges) is that his book is already dated. This doesn’t change the overall thesis, but it does mean the situation is already substantially worse than his data suggests.
Because of how long it takes to publish peer reviewed studies, the The Anxious Generation barely touches on the new developments in the digital landscape: AI, VR, and TikTok. And for those of us in education, we can attest to how TikTok especially has abbreviated attention spans ever further.
To address that challenge, Haidt has a website that promises to add to the conversation as new data emerges (see here).
Beyond Anxiety
Publishers (not authors) determine titles. And it’s no wonder why Penguin chose this one: Anxiety is front and center, especially in Gen Z.
Still, I think we shortchange the conversation by making it primarily about “anxiety.” To view fretful nervousness as the main cost of The Great Rewiring is already to prioritize the individual, therapeutic self as most important: “‘x’ is bad because ‘x’ makes me anxious.” Yes. Indeed. But there are moral, spiritual, and intellectual problems that go far beyond that.
The Great Rewiring is also troubling because it makes us more shallow, stupid, sleepless, sexually stunted, spiritually vacuous, and incapable of normal human interactions. That matters too. But we’ll need a rubric larger than anxiety to appreciate it. (To Haidt’s credit, he works to balance this trend with sections on porn, video games, and a need for real-world play.)
I witness this cost weekly in university chapel services where it sometimes feels like almost every student around me is staring blankly into smartphones, “forever elsewhere.” The same distraction afflicts classrooms, dinner tables, date-nights, Bible studies, and literally every waking moment.
To be fair, we shouldn’t blame Gen Z entirely. For the first time in history, a generation was captured by powerful tech companies before puberty, and captivated by digital stimuli for which they had no preparation. It happened when they were too young to know it. But the costs go far beyond anxiety.
A God-shaped Hole
Since Haidt is an atheist, it was interesting to find him affirming Pascal’s famous line about a God-shaped hole in every human heart. In his words, “if [that hole] doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.” And with the rise of smartphones and social media, “that garbage pump got 100 times more powerful in the 2010s.”
Haidt thus joins a line of recent atheistic thinkers (most notably, Richard Dawkins) who want to extol the virtues of religion, but without the actual “God part.” (On this point, Dawkins created quite a stir recently by espousing what he calls cultural Christianity [see here].)
I appreciate Haidt’s respectful posture toward people of faith. Indeed, he seems like exactly the sort of measured, thoughtful, humble public intellectual we badly need. Still, I find Nietzsche’s critique of this brand of godless religion and post-Christian morality to be far more persuasive than the appeals of Haidt or Dawkins to “our elevated nature” and “cultural Christianity.” For all his terrifying faults, Nietzsche rightly saw that we have no basis for prioritizing (or even discerning) “our elevated nature” once God is dead and gone.
Collective Action
Let’s end with application.
Haidt admits that his four action steps are hard to follow alone. If your kid is the only member in a friend group without a smartphone, then that isolation may be almost as bad as the negative effects of being on the platforms. (I can relate to this personally after hearing a child lament that “My friends already think I’m weird for not having one!”)
For that reason, Haidt hopes parents can act collectively. I must say, I’m not optimistic.
But perhaps he’s right to hope for incremental, voluntary change. After all, lots of harmful adolescent activities—from teen smoking, to drunk driving, to kids without seatbelts—used to be completely normal. Now they’re not. We changed in response to evidence. So while these problems still occur, they are not nearly as common.
Maybe in fifty years we’ll look at big tech companies capturing childhood much as we now view Big Tobacco using cartoon characters and product placement during kids’ programming.
Still, how we urge collective action matters. I’m wary of parental shaming that makes others (moms especially) feel like they’re failing because they don’t parent like the latest guru says. Hence, I don’t want Haidt’s work to become the latest bludgeon in the ongoing Suburban pastime of “parenting as competitive sport.”
We need to be clear that phones are harming kids. But we need to communicate that reality with humility and grace.
One of the best parts of The Anxious Generation comes in the form of practical, positive steps to get kids out in the real world, doing things that kids used to do for generations—playing, learning skills, and building confidence apart from screens. After all, the real cost of digital distraction is not just anxiety—it’s all the stuff we miss out on while staring vacuously into a phone. Again,
“The cost of a thing is the amount of LIFE … required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
Grace and peace, JM
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