THE U.K. GOVERNMENT has announced plans to outlaw social media accounts for kids under the age of sixteen.

“Children will be given back their childhoods,” the government said last month in a press release.

Predictably, technology companies are not happy about this. But the statement one social media executive made to The Times of London reveals how clueless and confused many of these people are when it comes to the effect their platforms are having on children.

The executive I’m talking about is Hugh Shepherd, founder and CEO of Liaura, a social media app made specifically for young kids. Speaking with The Times, Shepherd said the announced ban could hurt his business by making it more difficult for his company to turn its young customers into compulsive users.

“Things like push notifications, for example . . . if we were restricted from using them altogether, I think that could be deadly [for us],” Shepherd is quoted as saying. “When you’re building a technology platform, particularly when you’re trying to get off the ground, habit formation is an essential part of it.”

Shepherd is admitting the thing all technology executives and engineers know, but most have the sense not to say out loud: addictive use is the goal—even for the youngest and most defenseless users.

In our modern attention economy, profit is all about “engagement.” And nothing drives engagement like habit. As the technology ethicist and former Google employee Tristan Harris put it in the 2020 documentary film The Social Dilemma, “We’ve moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to an addiction-and manipulation-based technology environment.”

Governments and consumer safety groups are finally waking up to this reality.

Just last month, the European Commission released a preliminary finding that Meta, the social media company that owns Instagram and Facebook, may be in violation of the EU’s Digital Services Act due to its use of “addictive design” features like push notifications, infinite scroll, autoplay, and highly personalized recommendations.

What’s so alarming about Shepherd’s statement to The Times is that he doesn’t seem to realize that his platform, by using some of these same features to hook kids, is part of the problem.

His company’s website positions its app as “training wheels for a kinder internet.” Based on its public-facing marketing materials, the company wants parents to believe that having their children spend a lot of time on a habit-forming social media app is just fine as long as the content is candy-colored and playful, and membership is tightly restricted to kids and their friends. To me, this is a little like giving children candy cigarettes made with real nicotine; the fact that what you’re offering them is less bad than the grown-up alternative doesn’t make it good.

Shepherd’s comments reminded me of the book Careless People—a memoir by the attorney and former Facebook employee Sara Wynn-Williams about her years working in international policy at the social media company.

Wynn-Williams makes it plain just how self-interested and morally deficient the company’s leadership was when confronted with evidence that their business was destabilizing democracies around the world and harming its users, including kids.

In one especially appalling chapter, titled “Emotional Targeting,” she describes how Facebook built features that allowed advertisers to target thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds at moments when they felt “worthless,” “insecure,” or “psychologically vulnerable.” (One example: young girls were shown ads for beauty products whenever they deleted a selfie.)

The fact that Facebook employees built and deployed these features is bad enough. But when a journalist in Australia brought these tactics to light, Wynn-Williams says that most of her colleagues at Facebook seemed “unbothered,” and employees on the advertising team were openly dismayed to hear that they might not be able to tout these services to Facebook’s clients. “This is the business,” one incredulous colleague told Wynn-Williams. “We’re proud of this . . . this is what puts money in all our pockets.”

When I read Careless People, and again when I read the Liaura CEO’s comments to The Times, I thought of the old Upton Sinclair observation that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The CEO’s apparent lack of concern, or even awareness, of the potential harms of hooking young users with push notifications and other habit-forming design features is more evidence—as if we needed any—that the people in charge of social media companies can’t be trusted to build products that have users’ or societies’ best interests at heart.

“Tech giants had their chance and failed,” said outgoing U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer last month when his government announced the bans for under-16s. “We’re stepping in to protect children.”

I’m not always in favor of government regulation. But when it comes to social media platforms and kids, it seems our elected leaders can’t step in soon enough.

I RECENTLY SPENT a week on the Greek island of Spetses.

I was there with my wife and kids, and the house where we stayed was on the outskirts of a confusing tangle of winding streets and alleyways.

Spetses is a car-free island—only scooters and commercial vehicles are allowed—and the nearest market was a 20-minute walk from our place. Since “vacation” for me means not having to look at screens, so when the time came for a grocery run, I decided to leave my phone behind and find my own way to the market. The friends we were staying with had pointed it out to me, so I knew, approximately, where I needed to go.

I set off with my kids . . . and quickly got turned around. We backtracked, found a familiar street, and, after several more wrong turns and accidental detours, finally ended up at the market. What should have been a 20-minute walk had taken us a good half hour, and the walk home was only a little more direct.

But the next day, when I had to go to the market again, I had little trouble finding my way. Thanks to the previous day’s meandering, I’d built up a mental map in my head filled with landmarks and orientation points. Each day we spent on the island, my mental map grew more detailed. By the end of the week, the tangle of streets and alleyways no longer felt confusing. I could venture out and explore without fear of getting lost.

I didn’t know this term at the time, but apparently I was “friction-maxxing”: opting for effortful cognitive labor over the ease of modern convenience.

The term was coined by Kathryn Jezer-Morton in a 2026 article for New York Magazine. While I only learned about Jezer-Morton’s catchy phrase recently, the big idea behind it—that our brains, like our bodies, may languish for lack of exercise—is something I’ve been thinking about, writing about, and acting on for years.

In my book The Habit Trap, I devote several chapters to the necessity of “cognitive challenge” and the many problems that arise when we spend too much time coasting along in behavioral autopilot. These problems include loss of focus, shallower mental engagement, and other executive-function failures that limit our capabilities, lever us out of the moment, and feed into conditions like anxiety and depression.

Routines encourage this kind of problematic coasting. Habitually offloading difficult cognitive tasks to our devices does something similar.

There’s no question that our digital tools improve life’s ease and efficiency. They’re a boon to many forms of productivity. But while we’re all getting more done with less effort, some critical mental muscles may languish for lack of exercise.

Even those of us who recognize these risks may be low-balling the stakes. Some recent research on GPS and Alzheimer’s disease reveals how offloading cognitive work and embracing tech-enabled convenience may threaten the physical health of our brains.

***

At the turn of the century, a groundbreaking study of London taxicab drivers revealed something unusual: they possessed especially large hippocampi.

The hippocampus is a part of the brain involved in navigation and spatial memory. Using structural MRI, the study team found that the taxi drivers—who must pass a notoriously brutal test of local navigational know-how without the aid of GPS—had beefier hippocampi (as measured by gray matter volume) compared to regular people. Furthermore, the taxi drivers who had been in the job the longest had the largest hippocampi.

“This finding indicates . . . that normal activities can induce changes in the relative volume of gray matter in the brain,” the study team wrote.

That may not sound like a big deal, but it is. The researchers had uncovered evidence that how a person uses their brain may change its physical makeup. In the same way training a muscle can increase its size and strength, the study findings seem to show that training the hippocampus with complex navigational tasks can pump up its physical properties.

In the quarter century since that pioneering study, researchers have found that habitual use of GPS leads to a decline in spatial memory, and that those adults who rely heavily on GPS tend to have reduced hippocampal volumes compared to adults who use GPS less.

More work has revealed that, apart from being heavily involved in navigation and spatial memory (and, for that matter, in many other forms of learning and memory), the hippocampus is also strongly linked to the appearance and progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

Loss of hippocampal volume (i.e., shrinkage) is one of the earliest indicators of Alzheimer’s—often showing up even before a person has noticed any symptoms. Research from University College London has also found that the speed of hippocampal shrinkage correlates with the speed of cognitive decline among people with Alzheimer’s. Those who have the lowest hippocampal volume to begin with also tend to lose volume and capability fastest, that research found.

All these links between the size of a person’s hippocampus and their risk for Alzheimer’s disease—coupled with the work on GPS and London taxi drivers—inspired a group of U.S. researchers to look at the rates of Alzheimer’s-related death among people who, thanks to their jobs, are heavily dependent on their brain’s navigation skills and spatial memories.

Using publicly available data collected from millions of Americans, the researchers discovered that, out of more than 400 different occupations, people who worked as taxi or ambulance drivers—jobs that require on-the-fly navigation and lots of spatial memory activation—enjoyed the lowest risk of death due to Alzheimer’s disease. And it wasn’t close: The taxi and ambulance drivers’ risk at any age was 56% lower than the general population’s. (Their risks for other common diseases—and even for other causes of dementia—were average, which suggests these were not especially healthy people.)

Christopher Worsham is an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the book Random Acts of Medicine. He helped lead the study on taxi and ambulance drivers and their Alzheimer’s risks.

When I spoke with him about his group’s research, he said, “We couldn’t address every source of potential confounding, but the correlation between these jobs and a reduction in Alzheimer’s death was so striking. When you take into account the existing research on the hippocampus and how it relates to dementia, it becomes even more compelling.”

While there’s plenty of evidence that our cognitive capabilities follow a use-it-or-lose-it principle—meaning the less we exercise our mental muscles, the weaker they become—Worsham’s findings suggest it’s not just our cognitive skills that suffer when we lean too heavily on our devices; the physical health of our brain might suffer when we offload effortful activities to our technologies.

“We know that some forms of cognitive struggle are really important to us when it comes to learning and skill development,” Worsham said. “If we’re all farming out that struggle to computers and AI agents, our findings may be an early indication of what this could mean for us, and it’s worrying.”

Like a good scientist, he’s careful to add that there’s a lot left to be sorted out. “We understand so much about how the body works, but the brain is still such a black box,” he said. “But right now we have a situation where the researchers who study these things are very cautious and hesitant to extrapolate, while AI companies and their lobbyists are the opposite—they’re free to over-promise and play down any risks to cognitive health.” The unfortunate consequence of this mismatch is the rapid adoption of these technologies without a balancing regard for what we all may be giving up in the bargain.

“You even see some of the computer scientists who have helped develop these technologies warning that there may be risks, but we don’t seem to be listening to them,” he added.

***

After reading Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s piece on “friction-maxxing” and the downsides of convenience, I read some online rebuttals to her arguments.

The most common—and, in my opinion, the laziest—was the assertion that the history of human innovation and progress has basically been one long march toward greater ease and convenience. Since we’re all still here and doing okay, freaking out about the state of AI-powered convenience is silly, that line of criticism goes.

I think these critics need to exercise their own mental muscles a bit harder, because their argument ignores the mountain of work on the risks of a sedentary lifestyle.

We know beyond all doubt that if we don’t move our bodies, we lose range of motion, strength, and capability. Ultimately, we end up sick—or worse. As the convenience of modern life has rendered movement increasingly optional, we’ve had to set aside more time for intentional, effortful movement—a.k.a., exercise—which is something few people devoted much time to prior to the 1970s. The “fitness boom” that has seized America in recent decades can be viewed as a byproduct of technological progress and the health problems it has created for us.

I think we’re going to need another boom—this time to protect our brains from technology-enabled inactivity. And doing the occasional Sudoku or playing with a “brain training” app is not going to cut it. “These things sound good,” Worsham told me, “but the evidence supporting them is terrible.”

It’s been a month since I walked around Spetses with my kids, but I still have that mental map in my head. I can still wander those pretty streets in my mind, recalling conversations I had with my boys, places my friends pointed out to me, and even thoughts that came to me as I explored the unfamiliar island. I feel like my memories are much richer than they would have been if I’d had to devote half my attention to Google Maps.

Navigating without the help of GPS is the kind of intrinsic, engaging cognitive work that has been a part of the human experience since our species’ inception. It’s one of many age-old cognitive tasks—tasks like critical thinking, deliberative problem solving, persistent focus, creative brainstorming, and attentive social interaction—that used to be inescapable (and rewarding!) aspects of daily life for every human. But now, thanks in large part to AI, these tasks are increasingly optional.

There’s a lot left to be sorted out. Good science and the evidence it produces take time. But based on what we already know, the health and capability of our minds may depend on us setting aside our devices—at least every now and then—and putting our brains back to work.

LAST WEEK I wrote an article for Time magazine about the differences between reading on paper and reading on screens.

In that article, I talk about a 2024 study that found students scored better on reading comprehension tests when they read short stories on paper, as opposed to on a 13-inch laptop.

The study was small, but its findings are in line with a lot of previous work. Research dating back to the 1980s has found that printed text usually beats out screen-based text when it comes to a reader’s comprehension and retention of the material. Some have termed this “the screen inferiority effect.”

Like many of those older experiments, the 2024 study I wrote about used eye-tracking technology, which revealed that readers were much more likely to skim a text when reading on screens. Screen readers also spent a lot more time looking back over the text when it came time to answer simple questions about what they’d read. (If you want to know more about why these differences emerge, check out my Time article.)

I spoke with one of the authors of that study, the University of Oslo professor Marte Blikstad-Balas. She said that, apart from the headline findings of her research—that screen reading tends to be faster and “shallower” than reading in print—one other thing really jumped out at her:

“When we asked the students, they said they believed they were equally good in both conditions,” she told me. “That took me by surprise because, observing them, we could see them struggling so much more in the screen condition. But they would say, no, it’s the same. Most of them didn’t seem to realize that they were reading very differently or that they were having a harder time finding answers or thinking about the content [in the screen condition].”

In other words, the students had a blind spot when it came to assessing their own reading performance. Unfortunately, these sorts of blind spots turn up a lot when researchers ask people to judge their own performance or capabilities.

Studies on multitasking, for example, have found that those who do it a lot tend to rate their multitasking ability as above average, even though they usually under-perform those who seldom multitask. “The people who are most likely to multitask harbor the illusion they are better than average at it, when in fact they are no better than average and often worse,” said University of Utah Professor David Strayer, one of the authors of that study, in a press release.

In the paper detailing his findings, Strayer and his colleagues attribute some of this to the famous Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the tendency of people with low ability to overestimate their level of skill or competence.

Evidence of the Dunning-Kruger effect has turned up in the realms of business leadership, politics, academics, medicine, and pretty much every other domain where someone has gone looking for it. Again and again, researchers have discovered that when people lack immediate and objective feedback, they tend to be poor judges of their own performance. Making matters worse, the least capable tend to be the most delusional about their ability.

There are a lot of theories about what causes the Dunning-Kruger effect. One of the most widely cited has to do with human “metacognition,” which is our awareness of our own thinking and thought processes. The metacognition theory holds that people who are bad at something may not have developed enough skill to recognize their own ineptitude.

When I spoke with Blikstad-Balas, she mentioned these sorts of metacognitive shortfalls as one reason why students don’t notice how reading on a screen lowered their comprehension of a text. But these were only part of the story.

“If people are always reading in this very shallow condition, they will become used to that,” she said. “Their brain will adapt and it will think this is what reading is—going fast, skipping words, doing it as quickly as possible—and they won’t see how this creates difficulties for them.”

Essentially, she’s saying that the screen readers had developed a bad habit, and the presence of this habit and its associated brain adaptations made it difficult for them to notice the problems it was creating for them.

In The Habit Trap, my forthcoming book, I explain how habits change the brain’s activity patterns by building up and reinforcing the sorts of adaptations Blikstad-Balas is talking about. These adaptations allow us to slip into our habits easily, with little thought or effort. This makes our habits very efficient. But these adaptations also produce the sorts of behavioral blind spots that kneecap our abilities and hinder our performance.

Wendy Wood, a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California, has shown that compared to people with relatively weak habits, those with strong habits are much more likely to say that their behaviors are aligned with their goals. But once again, these self-assessments were off. A person’s behaviors and their goals were actually more likely to line up among the people with weak habits, as opposed to those with strong habits, her research found.

One reason for this is that the stronger a habit becomes, the more likely we are to default to it—regardless of its suitability to the task at hand—and the less able we are to recognize its shortcomings. For better or worse, our habits feel right to us. They are our comfort zone.

Even when people are presented with evidence that their habits are a poor fit for their objectives, they’re often reluctant to accept the evidence—and in some cases will come up with stubborn or absurd justifications for their habitual behavior. (In the same way that problem drinkers often deny that alcohol has become an issue for them, researchers have found that doctors will defend their own problem prescribing habits even when it’s clear to everyone else that their practices are inappropriate or out of date.)

“People with strong habits process information in ways that reduce the likelihood that they will consider acting otherwise,” Wood told me when I spoke with her. The stronger a habit becomes, the more its associated brain adaptations make it difficult for us to notice its flaws or pursue better ways of going about things.

There are two important lessons we can all take from this work.

First of all, people are often bad judges of their own skill or performance.

You may assume that if something’s not working for you, you’ll take notice and make a change. But decades of research on human performance have revealed that unless you’re doing something that provides immediate and objective feedback—something like playing a ball sport, where you’ll know right away if your technique succeeds or fails—it can be very difficult for you to recognize how a flaw in your approach or execution is holding you back. That’s doubly true if the behavior in question—whether it’s multitasking while you work or doing all your reading on screens—has become an entrenched habit.

The second lesson is closely related to the first, but may be a bit harder to swallow: Those of us who are the most sure of our abilities and processes are often the most likely to be fooling ourselves.

As David Dunning himself once wrote about his namesake Dunning-Kruger effect, “Poor performers in many social and intellectual domains seem largely unaware of just how deficient their expertise is.”

“Top performers,” he added, “tend to underestimate their performances.”

As I explain in my book, this is partly because top performers don’t default to mindless habits. They tend to adjust their behavior to meet the demands of the moment. This may not feel as natural and easy as slipping into a habit—hence the mismatch between their actual and perceived performance—but it often produces better results.

One way to combat these sorts of self-assessment failures is to continually experiment with different techniques and approaches. This can help reveal problem blind spots and other hidden pitfalls in your methods. It’s also a good way to keep your habits weak and your behavior flexible, which allows you to adapt to changing circumstances.

Whenever possible, it’s also helpful to bring in outside feedback. Especially if something you’re doing is important to your personal goals or professional success, relying solely on your own judgment is asking for trouble.

All this should serve as a good reminder to stay humble, and to be open to coaching or constructive criticism. As many of us have learned the hard way, it’s often when we’re riding high and think we have everything figured out that the rug gets pulled out from under our feet.

I DO ALMOST all my work on a computer.

After a typical day of reading research papers, Zooming with sources, replying to emails, and writing articles like this one, I can feel the toll all this has taken on my brain. My thinking takes on a sluggish, gauzy quality, and even simple cognitive chores can feel effortful. I’ll zombie around the supermarket for thirty minutes, unable to decide what to buy for dinner. The cereal aisle overwhelms me.

This kind of mental fatigue is commonplace and arises for different reasons. Most of them have to do with an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex.

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) lies just behind the forehead. It’s one of the most recently evolved parts of the human brain, and it’s heavily involved in the so-called “executive functions,” which include higher-order processes like decision making, attention, emotion regulation, meta-cognition (thinking about what you’re thinking about), and the manipulation of abstract ideas. Both your notion of yourself and the complex models that form your unique version of consciousness are believed to be generated in the PFC.

In addition to all these jobs, the prefrontal cortex also plays a central role in working memory.

Working memory is the brain system where all newly acquired information is temporarily held and assessed before its either discarded or integrated into your mental models or banks of long-term memory.

According to Mark Rego, MD, a psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine and author of the book Frontal Fatigue, the PFC is acutely vulnerable to the stresses of modern life. The pummeling the PFC now routinely takes helps explain why the rates of so many mental illnesses are on the rise.

“We are now putting demands on our prefrontal cortex that are really new to humanity,” Rego told me.

He highlighted the latest digital technologies—technologies that often require us to navigate a shifting array of virtual, abstract, busy, and highly complex spaces—as a major driver of PFC fatigue. “The prefrontal cortex does not function well under stress, but it is now continually under stress,” he said.

In line with this view, research I highlight in my own forthcoming book, The Habit Trap, reveals how the cadence, the addictiveness, and the sheer volume of digital media we now consume may be overpowering the working memory and prefrontal cortex in ways that contribute to insomnia, to burnout, and to other forms of mental dysfunction.

But in Rego’s estimation, the PFC’s problems go beyond the latest tech.

“In America today, we’re forced to make decisions about a lot of things that used to be decided for us by tradition and culture,” he said.

How to think, how to act, what to believe, how to live according to your ideals—these and countless other parts of life now have to be worked out independently and from scratch, he said. We’re also forced to continually reassess and reconfigure our choices as we’re confronted by an ever-expanding and unstable landscape of information and ethics.

We’re all walking around nowadays with these sorts of burdens piled on top of us, and it’s the prefrontal cortex that bears most of that weight. The result, Rego says, is the historically high incidence of mental illness that we see today. “If you have any vulnerability to mental disorder, heaping stress on the prefrontal cortex is going to draw it out.”

I asked him how I could tell if my PFC was overtaxed—not in normal and temporary ways, but in ways that could indicate more serious mental strife. He gave me three potential red flags:

1. Your attention span is pathetic. “It becomes harder to control your focus or shift your focus appropriately when your PFC is fatigued,” he said.

2. You can’t seem to find the right words. “The ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomenon, where you’re thinking of a word but can’t find it, is a form of prefrontal cortex dysfunction,” he said. (Other types of forgetfulness — losing track of your keys, for example, or forgetting what you were about to do — are also related to PFC failures.)

3. Poorly controlled emotions. “You may notice you’re surprisingly irritable,” he said. “So you feel normal, but then you’re suddenly yelling at your kids.”

We all experience these signs of frontal fatigue now and then (and especially at the end of a tiring day). But if you notice these PFC failures more than you used to, or if they seem to be present all the time, it’s time to pump the brakes—because you may be heading toward a cliff. “You need to get out of your prefrontal cortex,” Rego said.

To do that, he advised seeking out activities or hobbies that are centered around “primary sensory experiences.” That means stuff you can touch, taste, smell, see, and hear right now, in the real world.

Almost any analog, hands-on activity is likely to do the trick. Playing an instrument, sewing, painting, gardening, baking, woodworking, puzzle-ing, and ball sports are all examples.

“It could also be going to art museums, or listening to music, or reading a book deeply and slowly,” he said. Spending time in nature, spending time with good friends, and mindfulness meditation are also science-approved ways to give your PFC a break.

“You know, life has become so fast and so complex,” he said. “Even if someone isn’t consumed by their smartphone, these pressures of technology and of inventing your life are still there putting the prefrontal cortex under stress.”

We are resilient, adaptable creatures. Our brains can take a lot of abuse. But everything has its limits, and modern life may be pushing the PFC beyond what it can reasonably bear.

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A LITTLE TIME away can be clarifying. When you’ve had a break from a place, you’re able to see it with fresh eyes. You notice things that routine and familiarity had rendered invisible.

During my last trip home to the U.S., one of the things that jumped out at me was the number of people with AirPods in their ears.

Where I live, in southwest Germany, AirPods are far less common. It was jarring to see so many little white globules dripping out of the ears of those around me in coffee shops, in grocery stores, and pretty much everywhere else I went during my trip to suburban Detroit. Whether young or old, chic or grungy, athleisured or denimed, everyone seemed to be sporting some type of earphone.

The popularity of AirPods is nothing new. But as the functionality of our tech-connected ear gear has improved — and as podcasts have exploded into one of the most consumed forms of media in America — earphones have assumed a bigger role in our daily lives.

By some market estimates, 44% of Americans use Bluetooth or wireless earphones, and an additional 24% use something wired. I couldn’t find good data on the percentage of people who regularly wear earphones as they go about their daily lives. But during my recent trips to Michigan and Florida, I felt like half the people around me in public had some kind of device-connected earwear on their head.

There is disappointingly little peer-reviewed research on the effects earphones have on our daily lives and interactions. But the evidence we do have suggests that while AirPods and similar technologies do some wonderful things for us, they also subtly influence our beliefs, reinforce our insecurities, and push us farther apart.

***

During the pre-smartphone era of iPods and other portable music devices, a small study of college students found that those who were heavy users of headphones experienced higher levels of social isolation and loneliness.

More than 15 years later, in 2021, a survey conducted by the audio technology company Jabra came to similar conclusions. Heavy headphone use makes people feel lonelier, the survey found. It also makes people less likely to have a meaningful conversation with someone new. Many of those interviewed for the survey said they wore headphones in part to avoid having to talk to other people.

This habit of using headphones to dodge uncomfortable interactions may be especially common among younger adults, for whom social unease and feelings of isolation are well-documented problems that have become more common in recent decades.

“I believe human interaction is fading, largely in part to the constant usage of AirPods or other forms of headphones,” wrote Eva Long, a student at Liberty University in Virginia, in a 2025 opinion piece for her school’s newspaper, The Liberty Champion.

“No one talks on the bus. No one greets the barista. Even in class, students are choosing to listen to music instead of their professors,” Long wrote. “When passing someone I know who has AirPods in their ears, it’s difficult to catch their attention unless we make direct eye contact. This lack of engagement is discouraging, and it makes spontaneous social connections less likely.”

Headphones “are a social crutch, granting us the ability to tune in or out of the world as we please,” wrote sophomore Katelyn Halverson in The Cornell Daily Sun. “Interpersonal interaction in public spaces has become more or less optional with the use of headphones — and it appears that the majority (myself included) have a sneaky tendency to opt out.”

Both of these college-paper think pieces were written in 2025, but I found a half-dozen others — some dating back to 2019. All of them bemoaned the fact that, thanks largely to headphones, the collegiate experience has become less social, less immersive, and less interactive. Basically, less collegial.

While earphone-assisted comfort bubbles are nothing new on campus — or for that matter, in coffee shops or on public transit — I see them bleeding into situations where, just a few years ago, they would never have occurred.

People now wear their AirPods all day at the office. They keep them in while ordering and paying for things in stores and supermarkets.

I played golf last summer at a public course in Michigan, and the guy I was paired with wore AirPods throughout our nine holes together. After shaking my hand and offering me a terse “play well,” the guy didn’t say five words to me for the rest of our round. I would have felt less isolated playing alone.

I know that a lot of people wear AirPods to facilitate communication, not to deter it. AirPods can function as hearing aids — blocking out background noise while helpfully amplifying the words of a conversation partner.

The problem is that unless you already know the AirPod wearer and you’re confident they won’t be bothered if you start chatting with them, earphones are the equivalent of a “Do Not Disturb” sign. We see them and assume the person wearing them is either listening to something or trying to block out distraction. To strike up a conversation with someone wearing earbuds feels intrusive — like you’re bulling your way into their personal space without permission.

I’m sure some people reading this will say, Well, so what? Small talk is a drag anyway, especially with strangers or loose acquaintances. As long as a person has close connections in their lives — people for whom they either take out their AirPods or use them to connect and communicate — then what’s the harm?

I used to feel this way myself, but I’ve learned some things that have changed my mind.

For a piece I wrote recently for Time magazine, I detailed the findings of a new study that found Americans are speaking to one another far less than they used to. According to that study, the number of spoken words uttered by the average person fell by 28% between 2005 and 2019. Each year during that time period, the number of words people spoke in an average day declined.

One of the authors of that study, the University of Arizona social psychologist Matthias Mehl, told me it’s highly likely that spoken communication has fallen further since 2019. He pointed to the loss of idle chitchat and other public-space interactions as significant contributors to the trend. “We can shop for groceries now without talking with a checkout person, and in restaurants we can sometimes order and pay without ever talking with a server,” he said. “All these ways in which we have rendered our daily lives more efficient may have also resulted in rendering our social lives more rudimentary.”

For that Time piece, I also spoke with Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Sussex and author of the new book Once Upon a Stranger.

Sandstrom told me that casual conversations with people we don’t know well can make us feel more connected to one another. These conversations also exercise and enhance our social skills. They may even bolster our faith in humanity. “When we have these interactions, they tend to go much better than we thought they would, and we come away from them with a sense that people are generally good,” she told me.

The more I’ve thought about what she told me, the more important her message feels.

For those of us who wear earbuds all the time, the people drifting by on the outside of our artificially quieted, personally curated sound silos can begin to resemble other vehicles on a traffic-choked interstate — that is, like little more than nuisances crowding our space and impeding our progress.

I think we need regular doses of real human contact — not just with close friends, but with acquaintances, and even with strangers — to counterbalance all the negativity we encounter in the news and online, and to remind us that, on the whole, people are kind and well-meaning.

***

Apart from throwing up roadblocks that prevent these sorts of casual interactions, earbuds may change our relationship to the content we consume.

For a study creepily (but aptly) titled “A Voice Inside My Head,” researchers at several University of California schools found that when people listened to podcast-style audio content through headphones, as opposed to via speakers, they tended to form a more positive impression of the person delivering the podcast. They perceived the podcaster to be warmer and friendlier, more persuasive, and more empathetic than if they listened to the same piece of content on speakers.

The explanation for this, according to the study’s authors, is that headphones may reduce the psychological distance between listener and speaker; headphones give listeners the sense that the speaker’s voice is coming from inside their head — almost as though the voice they’re hearing and their own internal thoughts are one and the same. “It is important to understand how the medium through which people listen can affect their perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors,” the study’s authors wrote. “We find consistent evidence that listening to a message via headphones (vs. speakers) leads listeners to feel closer to communicators, leading to different psychological and behavioral responses to messages.”

It’s possible that many of us are so taken with podcasts — and so amenable to the theories and opinions we encounter in them — in part because of these subtle perceptual and psychological effects. (As Marshall McLuhan famously put it, “the medium is the message.”)

While all these consequences are concerning, I think the greatest problem our earphones pose to us — and the one that led me, several years ago, to cut back my own use — is the way audio content can crowd out time we should properly spend with our own thoughts.

Back in 2019, I wrote a piece titled “Why Your Brain Needs Idle Time.” I detailed all the reasons we need to give our minds regular breaks from new information so that we have time to consider and make sense of our experiences.

“The deeper reflective states, where you make meaning of what’s going on and connect it to self and identity and integrate knowledge together into coherent narratives — these kinds of processes only happen when you’re not focused on some in-the-moment activity,” Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor at the University of Southern California, told me for that piece.

These vital periods of contemplation and meaning making require us to step away from our various content streams and allow our thoughts to wander freely. But thanks to earbuds, such opportunities to rest and reflect are increasingly optional — and effortful.

***

During my last trip home to Detroit, I was filling a container at a grocery store salad bar when an older man, unprompted, pointed at the jalapeno slaw I was spooning up and said, “You’re going to eat that?”

He looked at me sideways, shaking his head and smiling. “Oh man, that looks too spicy for me. You’re going to have to tell me how it is. I don’t know about that!”

Living abroad, one of the many things I miss about the U.S. is the warmth and friendliness of its people. (In my experience, a German would never interact with a stranger the way this older man had interacted with me.) I told the man I’d be sure to let him know about the slaw, and he wished me a good day. The interaction lasted 15 seconds, but it brightened my whole afternoon.

The greatest benefit we get from chatting with other people — and the one we may ultimately miss the most if we spend less time talking with one another — is also the hardest to quantify, Sandstrom told me for that Time article.

“All these little conversations add up to us feeling like people are generally good, I can talk to anybody, and I have a place in this world,” she said. “That’s very hard to measure, but that’s something we all need.”

The more time we all spend with AirPods in our ears, the more that need is likely to go unmet.

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