Relief for an Algorithmic Age

Digital grief, wooden lightsabers, and the grace of playing without an audience.

Photo by Hugh Han on Unsplash

A version of this article originally appeared on Mockingbird.

The only time I ever interact with the work of American author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is on my phone via some form of social media, which, in many ways, is the epitome of irony — perhaps only rivaled by watching Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer on an iPad mini. You might know Haidt from his critically acclaimed book, The Anxious Generation.¹ That book, which spent fifty-two weeks on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, contends for a direct negative correlation between the advent of smartphones and social media and the decline in mental health among young adults. The Anxious Generation is not only the product of Haidt’s years of researching moral politics, social sciences, and the effects of technology on the human psyche, but also the coronation of a movement, of sorts, by which he aims to both raise awareness and lobby for regulatory reform to cultivate a healthier digital environment for teens and young adults.

One need not look too hard or too far to discern Haidt’s relative disdain for the rampant absorption of social media in general and smartphones in particular, especially among adolescents. Ironically enough, this discourse is often promulgated via social media, but Haidt’s endeavor is nevertheless commendable. There is no shortage of evidence to suggest that life online is not just marginally worse but critically adverse to mental, social, relational, and emotional health, and we have still yet to learn how deep that rabbit hole goes. Exacerbating this issue is the apparent omnipresence of social media platforms that have flooded the digital marketplace. As YouTuber Drew Gooden recently hilariously observed, everything from The Ring app to Venmo to an app that controls smart lights is outfitted with a social connectivity “feature,” which may be more of a bug. The gargantuan amount of data that is uploaded to YouTube and TikTok every second suggests that the toothpaste is already out of the tube. There may be no going back to the way things were.

Even still, this hasn’t deterred Haidt and his team from researching and publicly acknowledging the deep ills that social media has wreaked and continues to wreak on a generation or two. The data with which he is working is, perhaps, only the beginning of what will come down the pike in years to come, as those who’ve grown up online grapple with what that means and what that’s done to them on an existential level. The measurable effects of the incessant and ubiquitous pressure to perform are still just trickling in, and yet the results are devastating, to say the least. As someone who can still remember a time before wireless internet, Spotify, and social media — heck, I still have the dial-up sound ingrained in my brain — I continue to wrestle with the positives and negatives of life lived incessantly online. Although some of my peers have been quick to reevaluate their upbringing and mine it for all the traumas that explain who they are now, I readily admit that mine own is a hinge generation; that is to say, I know and am well-versed in both worlds, the one without constant connectivity and the one that can’t seem to live without it.

Looking back on my childhood as a mid-thirties adult, I am grateful for the notes of imagination, creativity, and play that were indicative of the times. This is not to say that Gen Z-ers aren’t imaginative or creative by any stretch, but I would say that there is an overall dearth of real-world playfulness among those currently in their formative years, which, no doubt, is a side-effect of a social marketplace that, as the comedian Bo Burnham once put it, has made the pressure to “perform everything to each other all the time for no reason” so ubiquitous that it is difficult if not impossible to conceive of life any other way. This isn’t an assertion that deserves pointed fingers, assigning blame, or disparaging dialogue; rather, it should warrant grace, especially for those who have had to “contend with the permanence of their mistakes in new and frightening ways,” as David Zahl puts it.² It is daunting to account for all the pressures of online life. Just thinking about it ingratiates me to those who are struggling to find a sense of meaning, purpose, and identity that subsists even when their phones are turned off. It also makes me thankful for the way I grew up.

I recall quite fondly the hours my cousin(s) and I spent crafting our own lightsabers out of wooden dowels and bits of PVC to choreograph elaborate sword fights that paid gleeful homage to the Star Wars films of the early 2000s. On a recent visit to my hometown of Greenville, South Carolina, my cousin Joey gifted me one of those DIY laser swords after discovering a collection of them tucked away in his attic. As simple and ludicrous as it may be, holding such a trinket flooded me with memories that I can only categorize as playful indulgence. My cousins and I were frequently found in the backyard, filming some of those fight sequences or some such other stunt with a handheld camcorder, doing our best to pretend that we were serious filmmakers of some kind. We weren’t making TikToks, but home movies for our own enjoyment. I still have some of those clips on a hard drive somewhere. (Maybe if this post gets more than 100 likes, I’ll release one for you.)

This is now a family heirloom

What is apparent to me now that I didn’t recognize then was the elemental innocence and resourcefulness of those days, which is gleaned from the fact that a few early adolescent teens were content to hit each other with sticks in the backyard without caring about much else. I’m positive the neighbors thought we were a bunch of dorks, and we probably (definitely) were, but we didn’t care. We didn’t need to outsource our play, as Zahl writes, “to YouTubers like Mr. Beast,”³ or to whatever the algorithmic gods decide we should like. Perhaps we would have if that option had been afforded to us, but at the time, we played freely, unencumbered by the judgmental eyes of followers and performative connectivity. We did what we loved because we loved doing it, notwithstanding what everyone else might’ve thought. And without invoking too much of that “back in my day” nostalgia, I resonate with Andy Bernard from The Office, when he opines, “I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them.” There are some who never knew those days.

In a truly affecting essay called “A Time We Never Knew,” which was published on Jonathan Haidt’s Substack outlet, After Babel, Gen Z essayist Freya India refers to a sentiment known as anemoia, which she defines as “nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.” While this term might conjure the cliché hipster aesthetic of vinyl records and grainy film stock, it actually conveys something more wistful than that. As Freya notes, there’s a deeper and truer reason why videos of high schoolers from the 90s are going viral on TikTok right now. “There is something distinctly different and deserving of our attention,” she says, “about online forums filled with Zoomers wishing that they lived before social media. Wishing it didn’t exist. These are children grieving their youth while they are still children.” Freya continues:

I am grieving something I never knew. I am grieving that giddy excitement over waiting for and playing a new vinyl for the first time, when now we instantly stream songs on YouTube, use Spotify with no waiting, and skip impatiently through new albums. I am grieving the anticipation of going to the movies, when all I’ve ever known is Netflix on demand and spoilers, and struggling to sit through [an] entire film. I am grieving simple joys — reading a magazine; playing a board game; hitting a swing-ball for hours — where now even split-screen TikToks, where two videos play at the same time, don’t satisfy our insatiable, miserable need to be entertained. I even have a sense of loss for experiencing tragic news — a moment in world history — without being drenched in endless opinions online. I am homesick for a time when something horrific happened in the world, and instead of immediately opening Twitter, people held each other. A time of more shared feeling, and less frantic analyzing. A time of being both disconnected but supremely connected.

This, to be sure, isn’t meant to be an inter-generational referendum, further highlighting the disparity between kids and their grandparents. The way I grew up is, in many ways, just as foreign to my kids as my parents’ experience was to me. “Next time you cringe at Gen Z for not coping, for not feeling cut out for this world,” Freya continues, “remember how painful it is to think that the good times are over. Then imagine how much more painful it would be to realize you never knew them.” Comparing the “righteousness” of eras is about as helpful as comparative suffering, which is to say, not helpful at all. But it does offer a window into a more gracious understanding. Freya concludes her essay by entreating “some sympathy and a little more grace,” which frees us to resist the low-hanging fruit of casting aspersions on “them youngsters.” The pervasive hopelessness of these times may not be novel to the human condition, but the public awareness of it is. The public discourse seems to trade not necessarily in clout but in grief, anxiety, and despair that masquerades in a game of obsessive social performance, which belies the greatest tragedy of our day.

Perhaps the most thoroughgoing casualty in this algorithmic era is not necessarily our attention spans or even our mental health, but our incapacity for play, for those moments of joyful vulnerability and foolishness that don’t need to be posted to be enjoyed. A moment of playfulness is found when the threats of performance, judgment, or productivity are entirely removed. “Something can be understood and experienced as play,” David Zahl observes, “when it’s undertaken for its own sake, rather than to get something else.”⁴ So while Jonathan Haidt is right in giving us the statistics and surveys that confirm the obvious, maybe Dave is on to something when he suggests that the answer for our time, as it is in every time, is the Big Relief at the heart of the Christian message, which is little more than a euphemism for God’s grace. And what is grace if not the freedom to be delightfully unproductive, hilariously unserious, and joyfully human, even when no one is watching.

1. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin Press, 2024).

2. David Zahl, The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2025), 35.

3. Zahl, 129.

4. Zahl, 136.