John Burn-Murdoch

Maybe people end up, people talk about this a lot with the internet, right?

It can be better at getting you more sort of shallow friendships.

but it might not be brilliant at making or certainly maintaining those strong ones.

So those two you can see going in that way.

Again, neuroticism, anxiety, social anxiety.

People might be all ready to go for that night out, go to that house party, and at the last minute they think, I don't know, what if this happens, what if that happens?

But overthinking that worrying, again, can erode that social connectedness.

So to the extent that we are a social species, to the extent that people get meaning from

from their shared experiences with other people, and this is a very well-supported framework for thinking about things, more anxiety, people being less reliable, people being less likely to go out and make friendships in the first place, you're going to get more atomization, you're going to get more loneliness.

And again, these things are all very well established that loneliness, more social isolation leads to measurably worse outcomes.

I think there's two ways of looking at this.

So in terms of the data we have, again, the slightly frustrating thing here is that the data starts in 2014.

And that is already a couple of years into this period where we've had ubiquitous internet in our pockets.

But one thing would be that timing.

It's that when studies have been done over the decades and decades and decades, we haven't seen this data.

Now we have a period where we know that we've had this technological change, which has enormous impacts on social relationships, and we start to see these changes.

So the timings, while we don't have enough data to say they're absolutely perfect, the timings do seem to line up relatively well with that.

The other, again, I think is just thinking on a very basic level about what conscientiousness is and what distraction is.

And if conscientiousness is doing what we intended to do and distraction is being pulled away from that, then they are essentially opposites or they feed off each other.

And we know whether we're looking at data on the number of push notifications people get, the number of times people pick up their device, actual screen time itself.