For this month’s newsletter, I’m doing something a little different.
I’m sharing something that I’ve never told anyone publicly: I have obsessive compulsive disorder. Growing up with OCD was difficult, but in many ways, I think I was still better off than kids today. I couldn’t know it at the time, but growing up with a mental illness was preparing me for life with a smartphone.
This piece was inspired by Jon Haidt, who has most shaped my thinking about the world. He’s a leading expert on the health risks of smartphones and has inspired a movement to take back childhood with his bestselling book, The Anxious Generation.
I hope you enjoy…
How OCD Prepared Me for A World with Smartphones
When we were kids, my uncle took me and my sisters to see “As Good as it Gets.” In an opening scene, Jack Nicholson’s character stands at his front door, locking and unlocking the deadbolt, counting each repetition. “He’s got obsessive-compulsive disorder!” My 13-year-old-self blurted. I still remember the look on my uncle’s face when he turned to me, eyebrows raised. I knew the character had OCD because I had it—and after this exchange, my uncle knew it, too.
OCD is a psychiatric disorder affecting about 1-2% of the population. To meet the criteria for diagnosis, one must have “recurring thoughts and/or compulsions that are time consuming (e.g., take more than one hour per day).” I find it a little amusing that one would not be diagnosed because their compulsions only take up 45 minutes of their day—Sorry, you’re just not obsessive enough.
Some speculate that OCD is an attempt to impose order on a chaotic world. Maybe that’s true. It was around 13 when I realized how utterly unpredictable the world is—how little control we actually have—and soon after, I was diagnosed.
That same year, my cousin died from a brain cyst. He was at home one day and just collapsed. He was 15. It was my first experience of someone close to me dying. Part of me wondered if I was to blame somehow—maybe I’d forgotten to perform one of my rituals or didn’t do it correctly. That may sound profoundly egotistical to think that one could possess such power, but humans—especially teenage ones with OCD—are profoundly egotistical. Still, the rituals were supposed to stop bad things from happening.
“Think of OCD as a sort of mental hiccup,” the psychiatrist directed as I peeled the stickers off his Rubik’s Cube and replaced them so that I could “win.” Even at 13, I found this advice annoyingly unhelpful. Hiccups are, at worst, an inconvenience, gone in a matter of minutes. Also, everyone gets them. Not everyone worries that if their clothes aren’t folded correctly someone in their family will die.
The only reason I was even seeing a psychiatrist was that I couldn’t hide my OCD anymore. My English teacher had noticed some…changes to my handwriting. I had developed the habit of rewriting over certain letters. “T’s” were especially troublesome because I had to re-do the crossing section over and over. By the time I was finished, my homework looked more like modern art than an essay.
Unfortunately, some 20 years after my diagnosis, we still become aware of mental health issues only when people can no longer hide them. This is devastatingly true for young girls, whose self-harm rates have skyrocketed in recent years. (Young boys haven’t fared much better.) The primary culprit, as you may have guessed, is modern technology—smartphones and social media, to be specific.
While I am certainly not Gen Z, I think that my OCD provides a unique window into the lived experience of these “digital natives.” It turns out that living with OCD isn’t all that different from living with a smartphone:
Lack of freedom
With OCD, I’ll be going about my day when suddenly some external force dictates what I must do and for how long. Now, I may not compulsively turn the faucet on and off like I used to, but I check email, texts, and social with the same vigilance. I could be at school, at work, even mid-conversation—when a notification pops up, I drop everything to comply.
Time blindness
When you are in the throes of an OCD ritual, time doesn’t exist. It’s as if you’ve fallen into another dimension. Anyone who has mindlessly scrolled their device, doing everything but what they intended to do when they first picked it up, knows exactly what this is like.
After Apple added the “screen time” feature that tracked exactly how much time we’ve spent on our devices, everyone’s reaction was the same: shock, horror, and embarrassment—the same way I felt once I realized how long it took to complete one of my rituals.
3. Blaming the victim
I spent years berating myself for not being able to resist my compulsions. I framed them as some sort of personal or moral failure: If only I had more willpower or listened to a few more podcasts with Navy Seals, then I would heal myself.
And this is exactly what Big Tech would have us believe when it comes to our phones, repeatedly insisting that it’s on us to use our devices “responsibly.” With features like the “infinite scroll,” which was designed to be addictive, what “responsible” means, exactly, is anyone’s guess.
Part of me still believes there is a world in which I will “white knuckle” my way to victory over OCD, just like part of me believes I will resist checking my phone during dinner, while watching TV, or while talking to my wife.
This is the type of naivete on which Big Tech thrives. Americans have always believed we can muscle our way to our desired behavior, despite all evidence to the contrary. This is tech companies’ greatest advantage. What’s astonishing is that Big Tech and the rest of society assign this (naïve) belief to kids, too. But that’s starting to change…
In response to Big Tech’s ever-expanding influence over children, some have proposed returning to a “phone-free childhood.” This may feel antiquated—like opting for a horse and buggy after the invention of cars. But proponents aren’t saying we must revert to landlines or even eliminate phones; they’re saying can’t we at least have reasonable age minimums—like those that exist for cars?
Currently, “internet adulthood” begins at age 13 in America, which seems profoundly unreasonable. And it’s not like there’s no precedent for changing this—we did raise the drinking age from 18 to 21.
Millennials were lucky to be the last generation to experience a childhood free from phones. We played outside, in the woods, miles away from home (talk about antiquated). This isn’t just a “Back in my day” argument—those experiences are both pivotal and protective for developing brains. And it is because digital natives lack these experiences that they are so much more prone to mental health issues.
Looking back, it’s frightening how narrowly I escaped. When I was in middle school, I learned about a website that ranked the “hotness” of each student in your grade. After seeing that I was ranked 27th (don’t ask my class size), I started obsessively voting for myself until I was in the top 10. Even brief exposure to this precursor to social media was harmful to my mental health. Thankfully, all I had was a family computer in the living room, shared by 5 other people—and not a smartphone in my pocket. The only difference between Millennials and Gen Z is access.
It was torture growing up with OCD, but I look at kids now, and I’m grateful that’s all I had to deal with. At least OCD still allowed some periods of respite. Now, millions of kids spend nearly every waking moment attached to a screen, suffering online and IRL—and they can no longer hide it. They may not have OCD, but they are obsessing—about their appearance, status, and self-worth. And they are desperate for some guardrails.
I might not be able to remove OCD from my brain, but we can remove phones from our kids’ hands. Why don’t we?
*To find out how to get involved in the fight to restore childhood, check out After Babel.
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