Upon returning to campus this term, I had a moment to catch up with friends. My winter breaks are generally pretty quiet, so when asked how I passed the six weeks, I usually say, “I read and wrote.” Upon hearing this, two of my close friends earnestly confessed to me that they couldn’t remember the last time they had actually finished a book cover to cover. One of them smirked ruefully at me. “Am I like, totally fucked?” He asked, already seeming to know the answer to his own question.
Before you click away from this column, assuming that it’s a smug humanities major admonishing you for not reading enough, let me tell you about my journey to reading regularly. It absolutely sucked. I discovered the exceptional willpower it takes to put down a phone and pick up a book. Even the act of starting a book can be daunting. The first few times I had to overcome this hurdle, what motivated me was not reading the book in my hands. It was a desire to rebel against one, an insular class of tech billionaires who wish to benefit from capturing as much human time as possible; and two, a systemically reproduced class of lesser elites, created by institutions like Dartmouth.
It is genuinely startling to think that only about 20 years ago, no one in the world habitually spent hours staring at a phone screen. Today, the average college student spends six hours and 53 minutes on their phone daily. What the hell did people do with their extra seven hours before phones existed? This statistic exposes the shocking ability of power to materialize and normalize desire.
Advocates of unfettered technological development frequently argue that the net positives of technological development outweigh any possible negatives. Concerning red flags like our current teen mental health crisis fueled by social media and declining happiness among American adults are brushed aside as negligent, almost trivial rebuttals in the face of statistics like plummeting child mortality rates and longer life expectancies. However, as we have embraced technological development, cracks have continued to reveal themselves.
Both millennials and Gen Z report being more significantly more stressed than older people. This makes sense. In the never-ending crunch of a diminishing and hard-to-reach middle class, it seems increasingly hard to “make it.” This spectre is only worsened by Gen Z’s inability to do hard things that require sustained attention which has been zapped by compulsive phone use and short-form media consumption. Living the “good life” requires increasing amounts of work, and our brains are increasingly wired in a way that prevents anyone from doing any patient, long-term work at all. A desperate malaise prevails as repeated desire and attempts at self-improvement are suffocated by an inability to focus.
If all this is happening, who benefits? It’s not only the billionaires who own the companies, but also lesser elites like the executives and others that fill the corporate ranks. Many Dartmouth students are pushed into a pipeline that transforms them from students who are eager to learn into beneficiaries and stewards of the same exploitative system they were originally coerced into. What would you do if you were a student saddled with immense debt, told that the job market was increasingly precarious? Conversely, what would your goal be if you were a very wealthy student facing pressure to perform as well as your parents did, or follow in their footsteps? Either way, you’d desperately hunt for the jobs that pay the most money and are consistently talked about as the typical path to success.
The process of securing an investment banking or consulting job out of Dartmouth requires very little real learning or critical examination. While some math and problem solving knowledge may be required, these activities are easily gamified, and frequently rendered down to simple memorization. Beyond this, those who get these jobs are heavily influenced by simple networking. Using social media apps like LinkedIn to reach out alumni, having short, often surface-level conversations. This process is naturalized in our community and often undertaken before students are able to sit down and really think. Think about what they want to do, or what values they have.
So, what can we do? In the last month, I’ve sought to minimize my consumption of everything to only absolutely necessary minimums, and this has started with my phone. I’ve deleted all non-essential apps, and try to only use my phone for things like messages and phone calls. While this is incredibly hard — and I occasionally relapse by re-downloading a social media app — I have already noticed positive changes in my life. While it’s true that I’ve been bored more frequently, I also feel more present in my body and more introspective. These changes have also helped me develop more willpower and patience.
I’m not trying to go entirely off the grid, and I certainly will never be perfect in these habits. However, we don’t have to be perfect. Even small changes — picking up a book every once in a while, putting your phone away while doing schoolwork and avoiding algorithms when you can — are acts of mental rebellion and betterment.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
Eli Moyse ’27 is an opinion editor and columnist for The Dartmouth. He studies government and creative writing. He publishes various personal work under a pen name on Substack (https://substack.com/@wesmercer), and you can find his other work in various publications.
