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There’s a word for people who prefer phones to meeting friends: addicts

16 5
26.01.2025

Over the decades, research has chipped away at our most cherished ideas about human specialness: it turns out that we share such things as theory of mind, empathy, and time perception with many other creatures.

But there is one feature of humanity that we can claim to be uniquely our own. Animals – unless captured by humans or infected with zombie parasites – tend to act staunchly in their own interests. Why is it that this frog or that bat or this humming-bird behaves in the peculiar way it does? The answer is almost always the same: to further its survival and the propagation of its genes.

Humans aren’t like that. We self-sabotage. If David Attenborough were narrating a human life, he might watch us puffing away on cigarettes, stuffing ourselves with junk food and walking drunkenly into lamp-posts, and struggle to segue into a smooth evolutionary explanation. Drug takers, overeaters, gamblers and adrenaline junkies all act in ways that make their survival less likely. They keep going, even when they know full well they should stop.

These groups, compulsively inching themselves closer to death, make up a relatively small proportion of us: when harmful addictions spread to larger groups, it often becomes a national crisis. But what would happen if a self-sabotaging behaviour suddenly went global? What if everyone started acting against their interests all at once?

That is the puzzle of the moment. Evidence is mounting that a particularly dangerous habit is taking hold. As the Atlantic writer Derek Thompson wrote earlier this month, we are spending more and more time in solitude – a trend rising across........

© The Guardian


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