Fulfillment.

Cole, The Course of Empire Destruction,  1836

James Marriot covering the ongoing end ...

For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence.

The classics have been preserved over the centuries because they contain, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, “the best that has been thought and said”.

The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading non-fiction — science, history, philosophy, travel writing — we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.

Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations.

The epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposeless afflicting young people in the twenty-first century is often linked to the isolation and negative social comparison fostered by smartphones.

It is also a direct product of the pointlessness, fragmentation and triviality of the culture of the screen which is wholly unequipped to speak to the deep human needs for curiosity, narrative, deep attention and artistic fulfillment.

Too late.  We've sacrificed the collective soul of children to the gods of narcissism and distraction.  The only hope I can see is through increased limits restricting access, if not prohibition.  

Until then, leave great books lying around (the best solution), let kids catch you reading, provide for alternatives to screens (magazines, graphic novels, audiobooks).  Instead of coffee shops and tattoo parlors, spend a day at the library or a bookstore (peaking of pointlessness and fragmented, have you seen the offerings at a school book fair recently? It's been years since I've seen a classic literature title.).