The pixelated pacifiers and the generation they have doomed

Whenever I go out to meals, I am often met with the distressing sight of toddlers in highchairs with their necks craned down towards a tablet of some kind.

Strolling back to my car after work, I encountered perhaps the most dystopian sight I have gazed upon this solar year. A hypochondriac mother, all masked up long after The Current Thing had shifted its attention towards the Donbas and Dnieper, pushing a stroller across the pavement bearing a young child, likely no more than three years old, glued to a hand-held pixelated tablet.

My heart sank out of pity for the child, then strained in anger against the negligent mother, clearly unaware of the damage she was inflicting on her little one. Who knows what the malleable child’s mind was absorbing through this metallic block of cheap wires, equipped with computer software more powerful than the Apollo spacecraft that flew humanity to the moon and back? The answer: nothing good.

Whether it was a slapstick family friendly game, or a CBeebies show laced with characters more brightly coloured than a Brazilian carnival float, or worse (it’s not as if children stumbling into age-inappropriate content is a mythical creature), what they were consuming was destroying them from the inside-out.

Frequent interaction with these pocket gadgets has already been shown to exert detrimental effects on the health and well-being of adults. Crippled attention spans, chronically low self-esteem, neuroticism, narcissism, and a decimated vocabulary have all been linked to these devices we use for hours on end. At the extreme, young people who spend more time on social media have a higher likelihood of committing suicide.

The arrival of holding the world at your fingertips has been the West’s most poisonous form of shiny object syndrome to date. Something that is so new, so revolutionary, so omnipotent, and so deliberately addictive, we have thrown our arms around our screens and the apps positioned in a soldier’s formation within them without a second thought for the consequences. Facebook et al. outsmarted the Devil himself in snatching the souls of all those foolish enough to fall for their charms.

But now time has been granted enough trips around the sun to shine a light on our grievous errors, and enough years have lapsed so that an entire generation has spent their most formative and vulnerable years trapped in this technologically oppressive land. The Devil has arrived to claim his due.

For those of you who remember a time when phones were the size of a tissue box, text messages cost a £1, and you would be pulled over your mother’s knee if you made an unnecessary and expensive phone call, you are the lucky ones. Your brain was permitted to develop in an environment that fostered social interaction and collaboration, allowing you to examine what life was really like outside of the bedroom, and grant you the emotional intelligence needed to thrive.

Now what many of you have taken for granted has been vaporised in the space of two decades. Your brain can still recall a time when you weren’t taped to a phone, which is your chance at redemption, as your mind’s neuroplasticity can be reconditioned and repaired.

Generation Screwed, on the other hand, take this as a state of nature. The touch of metals mined by modern slaves in the Global South is probably more familiar to them than their parent’s own voices. In fact, many families now put mobile phones in charge of their child’s upbringing.

Whenever I go out to meals, I am often met with the distressing sight of toddlers in highchairs with their necks craned down towards a tablet of some kind. I’m sure it’s far easier to distract the children with whatever overstimulation is present on the device than actively parent and, if necessary, discipline them, but wait until you see what useless humans they become.

Along with the already disastrous effects wrecking the adult population, our children have the added bonus of these ailments becoming irreversible (potentially). With such overstimulation, along with the child’s perception of this being a state of nature, they will enter their 20s with the most unbreakable of addictions. Withdrawal symptoms will churn their organs as if they were pounds of beef forced through a mince grinder, and, if they are to shape their brains into behaving normally, they will have to sit out the psychological thunderstorms that inevitably come when escaping vice.

We will never be able to see the future as if it was a film played through a crystal ball, but we can sense the foreshocks, and what we have done to our children will be enough to tear the Richter scale of its hinges.