Medley

Andrew Rooke – Australia

The vast majority of Americans – 91% - now own a smartphone of some kind up from 38% in 2010 [PEW Research Centre]. This is probably much the same in Australia and most Western countries. According to reports in a Bank of America survey conducted in 2016, 96% of millennials aged 18 to 24 years said smartphones are very important to them with 93% of them suggesting that smartphones are more relevant than toothbrushes and deodorant! The research also revealed out that this generation checks his or her smartphone every 6.5 minutes!

Despite, or maybe because of their popularity, smart-phones seem to be having a huge and mostly disastrous effect on a whole generation of young people, particularly those born since 1997 and 2012 (Generation Z) and after 2010 (Generation Alpha) when smart phones became widely available as suggested in the following statistics giving percentage increases in mental disorders between 2010 and 2024:

Major Depression Amongst Teens: Girls 145% Increase in Major Depression since 2010. Boys 161% increase. Source: US National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Cited in Haidt: The Anxious Generation. (2024) page:24.

Increases in Mental Illness in College Students Since 2010: Anxiety 134%; Depression 106%; ADHD 72%; Bipolar 57%; Anorexia 100%; Substance Addiction and Abuse 33%; Schizophrenia 67%. Source: American College Health Association. (nd) Cited in Haidt: The Anxious Generation. (2024) page:26.

Increases Since 2010 in Suicide Rates for Younger Adolescents: Boys 91%; Girls 167%. Source: US Centres for Disease Control, National Centre for Injury Prevention and Control. (nd). Cited in Haidt: The Anxious Generation. (2024) page:31.

Emergency Department Visits for Self-Harm Increases Since 2010: Girls 188%; Boys 48%. Source: US Centres for Disease Control: National Centre for Injury Prevention and Control. Cited in Haidt: The Anxious Generation. (2024) page:30.

Mental Health Hospitalizations, Australia Increases Since 2010: Girls 81%; Boys 51%. Source: Australia’s Health 2022 Data Insights (2022). Cited in Haidt: The Anxious Generation. (2024) page:41.

The statistics show that the surge of anxiety, depression, and self-harm hit girls harder than boys and preteen girls hardest of all probably because girls are more addicted to and influenced by social media. The mental health crisis has also hit boys. Their rates of depression and anxiety have also increased a lot but not as much as girls as boys use of the new technology is mainly video games and pornography which have their own harmful effects.

Suicide rates in the USA began rising about 2008 for adolescent boys and girls but they rose much higher in the 2010s – Why? Probably because of the wider availability of smartphones and parent’s inability or unwillingness to control their use.

• Effects on Child Development: How exactly then does a phone-based childhood interfere with child development and produce or exacerbate mental illness? Let’s look at some of the disadvantages of smartphones, especially for children and teens.
• Distraction: with a smartphone you can be distracted easily and continuously, especially with social media posts. This can be incredibly dangerous for adults as we all know as we wait in traffic whilst drivers read their mobile phones at traffic lights, but imagine what it does to children’s developing brains if their attention is shattered continuously, they are deprived of sleep whilst looking at phones in bed, and they get cleverly designed ‘dopamine hits’ from approving messages on social media designed to keep them looking and reacting to social media messages.
• Addiction:  incredibly imaginative games like ‘Minecraft’ and ‘Fortnite’ and social media websites are available on smartphones and portable hand-held gaming devices (Switches) that can contribute to addiction, more so to the kids growing up with them before they reach the age of ten. Some schools have thus restricted their use or banned them altogether from classrooms. Social media bans for children under 16 years were introduced by the Australian federal government in December 2025 to try and protect children from the harmful effects discussed here. So far, these bans have proved largely ineffective as tech-savvy teens find many ways around these government regulations by using false identities, establishing Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) from the many such services available; older adults establishing social media accounts for them, etc.
• Risk of data loss:  Information is no longer confidential if your phone is stolen as thieves have ways of getting your PIN number or access pathways. This disadvantage is vital for the safety of banking and commercial access from smartphones. Imagine how it will be for scammers when we have widespread Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Quantum Computers thousands of times more powerful than today’s Binary computers!
• Cost and family arguments:  upgrading smartphones every three years or so is mighty costly as kids usually want the ‘latest and greatest’ in technology to stay in touch with their contemporaries. They certainly won’t cope with ‘dumb-phones’ that you can only ring in and out on and there are bound to be plenty of tantrums over access to parent’s fully-functional smartphones.
• Uncensored content:  there is a downside to quick access to data and the internet. Individuals, particularly children, could see uncensored material, including violence, pornographic content, etc., intentionally or not.  Also, the internet is a potent weapon for school bullies especially with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which can manipulate images of victims. This has been the cause of much depression, anxiety, and subsequent suicide amongst young people.

Effects on Spiritual Development: Our focus in this magazine is the Ancient Wisdom, so let’s see what the new communications media means in terms of spiritual development for the younger generations. 

Jonathan Haidt in his recent best-selling book: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Books, 2024., lists six extremely damaging effects of smartphones on spiritual development, especially for children:

“When people see morally beautiful actions, they feel as though they have been lifted up – elevated on a vertical dimension that can be labelled Divinity. When people see morally repulsive actions, they feel as though they have been pulled down, or degraded.

A phone-based life pulls people downward. It changes the way we think, feel, judge, and relate to others. It is incompatible with many of the behaviours that religious and spiritual communities practice, some of which have been shown to improve happiness, well-being, trust, and group cohesion, according to researchers…” – The Anxious Generation. Page 216. 

Let’s look briefly at six such spiritual practices mentioned by Haidt and how the phone-based life affects them: 

1. Shared Sacredness:  We know from our studies of the Ancient Wisdom that there are broadly two levels of human consciousness: the Profane level of everyday consciousness for survival in the material world; and the Sacred Consciousness which is the realm of unity or the collective. Groups of individuals become a cohesive community when they engage in rituals that move them in and out of the realm of the Sacred together. The ‘Virtual World’ of phone-based life gives no structure to time or space and it is entirely of this materialist ‘Profane’ world. This is one reason why Virtual communities on the internet are not usually as satisfying or meaning-giving as real-world communities.
2. Embodiment:  Religious rituals always involve bodily movement with symbolic significance, often carried out synchronously with other people. Eating together has a special power to bond people together. The virtual phone-based world is, by definition, disembodied with every member of the family sitting self-absorbed and most often alone playing video games or scrolling endlessly through social media messages. Try getting a video-game addicted six-year-old off his ‘Switch’ and stay eating dinner at the table with the family for more than five minutes without a tantrum. Or, the same problem with a pre-teen girl on Tic-Toc or Messenger sending and receiving continuous messages to school friends, day and night. This could be the definition of impossible as many parents simply give-up and give-in to the demands of their kids for sophisticated technology rather than ‘face the music’ of continual battles over technology.
3. Stillness, Silence and Meditation: many religions and spiritual practices use stillness, silence, and meditation to still the ‘monkey mind’ of ordinary day to day consciousness when the spiritual life demands an open heart to the needs of others, enlightened thinking and hopefully aspiration towards Divinity. The phone-based life in contrast is a never-ending series of notifications, alerts, and distractions which fragment and trivialize our consciousness as a Facebook ‘friend’ on holiday sends us shots of their every waking moment and even photos of what they had for breakfast! The phone-based life trains us to fill every moment of consciousness with something from our phones.
4. Self-Transcendence:  transcendence of the self-interested ‘Personality Self’ is the basis of all the great religions as they urge us to be ‘Other-Centred’ instead of ‘Selfish-Centred’. For example: Christianity: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." — Matthew 7:12; Hinduism: "This is the sum of duty: do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you." — Mahabharata 5:1517; Buddhism: "Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful." — Udana-Varga, 5:18; Judaism: "What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. That is the law: all the rest is commentary." — Talmud, Shabbat 31a. Social media on the other hand, keeps us focussed on the Personality Self, self-promotion over the needs of others, branding other people and social media promotes the struggle for status within groups. You could say that it is almost perfectly designed to prevent self-transcendence as understood in the major religions.
5. Be Slow to Anger and Quick to Forgive:  Most religions urge us to be less judgemental. For example: Christianity:  In the Book of Matthew, 7:1 Jesus says: “Judge not, lest you be judged…” This teaching is part of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, urging that the same standards we use to judge others will be applied to us. The passage goes on to say that we should be mindful of our own faults and failings before we are anxious to find fault in others. However, social media encourages us to offer evaluations of others at a rate never before seen in human history. At the extreme this leads to internet ‘trolling’ and ‘bullying’ which can be extremely damaging to young people, sometimes leading to anxiety, major depression, and even suicide. Religions advise us to be slow to anger and quicker to forgive others, but social media encourages and provides a potent media to do exactly the opposite.
6. Contemplating Nature: the grandeur of nature is among the most universal and accessible routes to experiencing ‘Awe’, an emotion that is closely linked to spiritual practices and progress. The first and greatest of all spiritual teachers is Nature herself. We are a part of Nature and through communing with the natural world we can overcome our sense of separateness and awaken an awareness of the Whole. For Shamanic cultures, all of Nature – the wind, the rain, animals, birds, fishes, grass, and stones – can teach us something about ourselves and the mystery of existence. The awesome beauty of Nature bypasses the rational mind and directly touches the heart. Nature’s rich sensuality overwhelms our cultural conditioning and puts us in touch with the primal Power of Life. Many traditions encourage us to spend time in the wilderness communing with Nature, away from the comforts and the stresses of city life. In Native American tradition, men and women head out into the wilderness in search of visions – the ‘Vision Quest’. Australian Aborigines go ‘walkabout’ in the outback and amongst other things, practice ‘Sky Gazing’ – a natural form of meditation that involves starring at the sky until consciousness is experienced as no longer limited to the body but as permeating the whole cosmos. However, if you are obsessed with screens, you become isolated from nature and in extreme cases totally involved in virtual worlds rather than the magnificence of the natural world. Awe in nature may be especially valuable for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, as it counteracts the anxiety and selfish-consciousness caused by a phone-based childhood.

Helena Roerich

Russian mystic Helena Roerich’s, Agni Yoga teachings, which she claimed were inspired by one of the same Masters of Wisdom (the Mahatma ‘M’) who inspired the founding of the Theosophical Society, warn of the downside to our current fascination with technology and artificial intelligence (AI) and how this approach, blindly taken before by earlier civilizations (especially in Atlantis), actually contributed to their demise:

“Technocracy should be regarded as a device of the Dark Ones. The Dark Ones have often led people on to mechanical solutions, thereby hoping to occupy the attention of humanity, only to divert it from spiritual growth. Yet the problems of life can only be solved by the expansion of consciousness. It can be seen how mechanical hypotheses can easily ensnare the hopes of humanity. Such also was the Maya (illusion) of the ancients.” – Agni Yoga, The Fiery World 1, 349.

Most people feel a yearning for meaning, connection, and spiritual elevation. A phone-based life fills that yearning most often with trivial and degrading content. The Ancient Wisdom certainly advised us to be more deliberate in choosing what we expose ourselves to in our relations with other people and now with the potent new communications technology. It’s up to us.

Do we want the next generations of phone-based and ‘re-wired’ kids to have happy and balanced lives cherishing our values based in the time-honoured standards of the Ancient Wisdom, or ... are we going to have a technological nightmare - a truly ‘Mad World’?

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This article also appeared in the March 2026 issue of the magazine The Ancient Wisdom Downunder.

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