Longing for a Time Before Smartphones

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I'm Hannah Rosen.

This is Radio Atlantic.

Do I remember a time before I had a smartphone?

Of course I do.

Long dinners with friends, nothing buzzing or pinging,

standing in line with nothing to do,

but think and stare.

Reading an entire book in two days.

And then back to when I was a teenager,

telling my friends that I liked,

or maybe didn't like their new perm in person.

I guess that's what people call nostalgia.

But nostalgia is working a little differently for Gen Z.

I actually lived through the things that I miss.

But a lot of them long for a time

when they weren't even alive,

an era of iPods and CD players

and calling your friends on a landline.

I find it strange that people in their 20s

are now fixated on shows that I watched

when I was in my 20s, like friends.

It seems like a longing that goes nowhere,

but maybe nostalgia for the past,

even an unfamiliar past can help shape the future.

Today we have something special.

The first episode from How to Touchgrass.

It's the latest season of the Atlantic's How-To series.

It's all about how we might renegotiate our relationships

with technology and untangle ourselves

from guilt and habit, mindless patterns.

Step one, go touchgrass, probably.

I'll let cohost Julie Beck and Natalie Brennan

take it from here.

If you have one word,

it can be a noun, it can be an adjective,

it can be any part of speech that you want

to describe your overall relationship to technology

at this moment in time.

Taganistan.

Complicated, fraught.

I think it is an addiction.

It's a more than hourly to like sugar or anything else

that I sort of compulsively overindulgent.

What do you mean indentured?

It's going to say reluctant, but maybe that's not right.

Very frequent user.

Okay, that's a lot of words, but we'll take it.

I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at the Atlantic.

And I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at the Atlantic.

This is How to Touchgrass.

Have you heard the young people say touchgrass?

Switch to a dumb phone. This is the Nokia 270.

It's like a term basically, which is like,

get off your phones.

Smartphones are evil, they're ruining society

and we need to just stop.

100% disagree.

Get off the internet and go outside and touchgrass.

I nominate everyone for the touchgrass challenge.

Go outside and touch some grass like I'm doing right now.

Go, go, go.

In this season, we'll be exploring the often fraught,

always changing relationship people have with technology.

And the ways that in this moment,

the terms of the relationship are being renegotiated.

Julie, the way that I would like to renegotiate my relationship

to technology is that I would like to throw my phone in the East River.

Natalie, you could throw your phone in the East River.

Why don't you?

It's not really just about my phone.

I want to throw your phone in there too, Julie.

But I can't take everyone's phone.

So I think what I mean to say is that I yearn for a pre-phone era.

I think we're not the only ones who have this fantasy.

It's all over TikTok.

What's the biggest trend of 2026 going to be?

Analog.

This past year, we've seen the rise of nostalgia,

which from iPhone cameras to digital cameras,

here's how to actually be more analog in 2026.

First, I want to say analog era is here.

And while audiences say they want to go offline,

Gen Z Millennials openly expressing their desires to break from an online world.

Find you.

I saw using an iPhone three weeks ago and the effects have genuinely been profound.

In the past few years, there's been no shortage of people advocating for reducing screen time.

But another force that has been inspiring people to rethink how they use their devices

lately is nostalgia.

We can often feel overwhelmed in the moment and in the challenges we face today,

it's hard to see past them.

nostalgia can't help us step outside at that moment.

Clay Rutledge and his colleagues have been studying what's behind this widespread

yearning for a time before smartphones and before social media.

Clay's a psychologist who specializes in nostalgia,

and he's also the author of Past Forward,

How Nostalgia Can Help You Live A More Meaningful Life.

Clay, hello, welcome.

How do you like it?

I see you've got an Atari poster behind you.

There's some kind of video game that is too small for me to see what it is.

What is it?

On the shelf, I've got an old Nintendo, the original ADS.

Then I've got the Robotron arcade game,

which is an arcade from the 80s in the Atari poster.

So yeah, lots of video game nostalgia from different brands and decades.

Oh, man, perfect.

Okay, it's an nostalgia museum at your house.

It is indeed.

Clay, just to get started, what is the point of being nostalgic about anything?

So nostalgia is in psychological terms up we call a self-regulatory resource.

It helps us navigate life in important ways.

We don't know the future, it's uncertain.

And so it can also be a great source of anxiety.

Nostalgia can't help us step outside of that moment and say, you know, there's a bigger picture right now.

Maybe I'm experiencing stress or loneliness or I just went through some difficult challenge.

But my life is full of other types of experiences.

And if I have these more fulfilling experiences in the past, then I should be able to have them in the future.

Yeah, I asked you about the past and you immediately started talking about the future.

Do people tend to misunderstand nostalgia by assuming as I did that it's about the past?

So nostalgia, the dictionary definition is something like a sentimental long-ean for the past.

When you present it like that, then it makes sense that people would assume when the nostalgia might even be people getting stuck in the past.

They're looking to the past too warmly and not dealing with their present reality's head on.

And it makes sense that when people engage in this kind of nostalgic reflection, in a lot of ways, they're talking about their issues today and they're thinking about tomorrow.

So nostalgia actually has this very forward-looking, unexpected, hopeful quality.

We often are looking for specific things that can help us with particular challenges and anxieties we're facing.

And I'm articulating this as if this is happening at some deliberate conscious level.

Because I'm talking about more of the scientific study of nostalgia and what we've learned from that kind of empirical work.

But in reality, of course, this is just happening almost unconsciously.

People are often using nostalgia without even realizing it.

That makes sense to me when it comes to my own life and my own past experiences, right?

But Clay, what about nostalgia for a time from before you were even alive?

There was a stat from a survey you worked on that really struck me, which was you found that 60% of Gen Z wished that they could return to a time before everyone was, quote, plugged in.

And the other generation said that too, but they actually lived through that time, whereas Gen Z has no actual memories of a time before the internet existed.

So was that surprising to you?

Because when we first found that, I was pretty surprised because most of the work, the research in nostalgia, including the research I've done,

and this focused on autobiographical memory, to your point, what we started to discover with that survey is people actually have a longing for the past that predates them.

Now, of course, if you study art in culture more abstractly, we've long known that people have favorite errors that they're interested in, whether it's the architecture, the music,

or the fashion. So we've known there's the systemic nostalgia, that's historical.

But what we were surprised to find is that young adults have so much to look forward to in the future.

And we typically think of youth as very future-oriented, but the majority of them were saying that they longed for a time, really before modern technology, but really before they were alive.

And then since that survey, I've just done more and more surveys finding that around two thirds of Gen Z adults say they're nostalgic for a time before they're alive.

Right. So this seems like a little bit more than just a like, we're bringing low-rise genes back, right? If they're saying they would like to live in the past.

I mean, how common is it for generations to yearn that way for a past they never actually knew, or is something about this unique?

There's not a lot of research, really, any research in previous generations when they were the same age as Gen Z.

But we do know from our own work, in general, people tend to become nostalgic when they're going through major life transitions or disruptions, or when the world feels particularly chaotic or uncertain.

Regardless of whether you're 20 or 60, sometimes there are sources of cultural inspiration that people want to draw from,

and a more shared bag of memories that aren't just your own, but the memories were shared as a culture.

And here's the key thing, I think, and this is the case with Gen Z too.

It really isn't the case that people want to live in the past.

Okay.

If you start asking people, would they give up all of the modern advances? They say no.

What they're saying is they have a sentiment for some aspect of the past that they think that we're missing today.

I think there is something about Gen Z as digital natives who grew up in this era where this major transition from the analog world to the digital world that seems to be sparking a particularly potent type of historical nostalgia.

And then the irony is technology really is helping facilitate this, because how are Gen Z adults learning of retro trends? They're on TikTok.

And so it's funny how the technology that on the one hand is the source of frustration and anxiety is also the vehicle through which they're being introduced to the analog world.

Okay.

So I was wondering because when you say you want to return to another era and earlier era, maybe they're not thinking about the things they would be dissatisfied with in the earlier era, right?

Like lack of social progress that we have since made, it seems like you're saying it tends to be about something particular that they are yearning for rather than like a holistic desire to go back to all the things.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, one of the things that I think people don't appreciate about the stagic is it's often portrayed as just repeating something.

And it really isn't. It's more of like a revising. There's a creative process.

Humans are really a progress oriented species we're never content, we're never satisfied. We're always tinkering. We always think things can be a little bit better.

And it's frustrating, right? Because it often means we're not ever just really happy.

But that's also the thing that drives us to positive change. And the style is just very much an ingredient of that.

So Natalie, I can remember really distinctly the last time that I was ever truly lost.

It was like two months before I would get my first smartphone. The year was 2013.

So you were, how old were you then? I was 23. Okay. I was in St. Petersburg, Russia.

And what I would do to get around in the days before I had Google Maps available on my phone all the time is I would look up directions on the computer before I left and I would write them down sometimes on my hand totally.

I had done this. I'd gotten my directions together. I had gone sightseeing and I was heading back to my hotel.

But I was so jet lagged that I fell asleep on the bus. And when I woke up, I had no idea if I'd already missed my stopper nut.

I don't know. Do you speak Russian? I definitely don't. But I went up to the bus driver anyways to try to ask him if we had already passed the stop.

A lot of people spoke English, you know, but he got really angry and was like, you can't talk to me while I'm driving.

So he wouldn't talk to me. And I'm freaking out. And this young woman behind me, she can see how upset I am and she speaks English.

So she comes up and tells me like, yes, we already passed the stop for my hotel.

Lovely woman. She gets off the bus with me at the next stop. And she drew me a map on a piece of paper that she had.

And she was like, there's this one really long road. You just have to walk on that road the whole way back and the hotel was on that road.

So you would like see it, you know, looming in the distance. And I remember she said, it's really far.

You're going to think that you're never going to get there. But I promise if you just keep walking on this one road, like you will get back to the hotel.

Oh my god, I'd be crying. Where are you crying? Oh, for sure. For sure.

So anyway, I set off down the road for a really long time. It felt like miles multiple miles.

I'm alone. I was traveling alone. When out of nowhere, this man comes running towards me.

Nope. Well, it turns out he's from a cruise ship that is docked nearby. And he is trying to find McDonald's.

No, I tell him what happened. And he says, oh, well, that's the same direction as my cruise ship that I need to get back to.

Like, I'll just walk with you until you get back. Eventually my hotel appears on the horizon. Finally.

And there's really no other word for it. He like scampers off into the night. And as he runs away, he shouts goodbye, Julie. I love you.

Oh, no. So anyway, I made it home safely. And that was the last time I was ever lost in my life.

Wow. I'm feeling both jealousy and awe in that I will... I've never had that experience. I mean, I've been on public transportation, of course, while my phone has died.

Yeah. But I have never been an adult without a smartphone.

I am kind of nostalgic for that memory because it was one of those moments that really restores your faith in humanity.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I was screwed. And people appeared. And they helped me when I really needed it. And that made me feel like swaddled tightly in the fabric of human community.

And none of that would have happened if I had a smartphone if I had Google Maps.

Yeah. I've only really ever had that experience. Men factured for me.

Really? Yes. I went on this program in college. It was called the New England Literature Program.

Okay. And it's basically living in cabins on a lake in New Hampshire for six weeks. And when you arrive, they take your phone for the remainder of the program. There's no personal technology. No phones, no computers.

You read Emerson Thoreau. Of course you do. Who else would you read? You visit Walden Pond.

And on the second day of the program is Get Lost Day. Okay.

In the morning, we learned how to use a compass. And then promptly, we were driven blindfolded, which now sounds like a cult, but it wasn't.

To different locations in groups and then shown on a map where we were and where camp was and told to get back by dinner.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Where it like described me the vibe of like where we were dropped off. Yeah.

Field. Field. End of sentence. Field. Okay. Okay.

In the beginning, you're quite confident that you're your on track. And I think a few hours in and became quite clear to us that we weren't making it back to camp.

And that we would just find a ride later in the day. We would ask somebody to take us back to camp and just kind of spent the day enjoying and exploring.

Oh, wow. So you just pivoted. You were like, this is never happening. We're not going to find a way back. Let's just be in this field.

We're going to we are going to touch grass and vibe. Okay. I'm sure we were walking for hours, but I think the bigger point instead was to like get to know each other.

You're like placed into vulnerability. You're going to share this experience. But I do think extremely fondly about the program.

Those whole six weeks really just sparkle with nostalgia for me. And I really struggle to differentiate between how much of that experience was the note heck of it all.

And how much of it was just the experience at large.

What do you think the thing is that people who are nostalgic for the 90s or the 2000s are wanting to bring forward and revise as you say.

If I could sum it up using two words. That'd be great.

I would say control and community. And the reason I'm picking those two words is because we've done in addition to the surveys. We've done a number of qualitative projects that you look at the types of nostalgic related posts that jeans adults make on different social media and websites that they frequent.

And what you often find is a sense that they love technology, but they want to be in control of it, not feel controlled by it. So it's not more sense of intentional use. And this is why I think you see these interesting trends like Gen Z by old iPods.

And you know, they want to have their new iPhone. Everybody wants to have the Uber app and all the different things that make our lives a little more convenient.

But sometimes there's a sense of like maybe there's a more low tech option that allows me just to listen to music. Yeah.

And the community, I think Gen Z is figuring out that there's something missing in computer mediated social relationships.

And on the one hand, the social media is really useful because it helps you organize events, meet people you would have never met.

But at the same time, I look at this time period right before smartphones really became dominant. And they said, oh, there's a sense of freedom. There's a sense of organic social life.

You're not looking at your phone the whole time.

And they want to build that in a lot of times in the style just framed in a very zero sum sort of framework where it's like, oh, you read it for the past or your fourth of the future.

And I think what Gen Z's showing us is they want both. And you know, there's something to say intergenerational about this, which is maybe young people are learning about 90s fashions on TikTok.

But then what we often find is that sparks a conversation with older generations, whether it's a parent or co-worker, you know, or somebody in their run club that they're like, oh, was life really like this? Did you really do this?

And it creates a dialogue between generations, which I think in this era where everyone has their own screens and their own tailored content.

There's something that people feel like they're really missing.

Yeah, I remember my dad always used to talk about that, that sort of like shared experience of music because you had to like put on a record.

And so everybody's listening to the Rolling Stones, like whether they like it or not.

And now obviously we just have our sort of like isolated pods. And you don't know that I'm listening to that same Taylor Swift song like 10 times in a row. And you'll never know.

No, I know. Okay, yeah, I did. Yeah, now everybody knows.

We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, why is this analog nostalgia bubbling up now? Does it have anything to do with AI coming on the scene?

Getting to a great idea is hard in college. Non-sensical essays, cringe-inducing presentations, and seemingly unsolvable problem sets.

But then the first thought becomes a final thesis. Jumped slides transform into a polished keynote. And that midterm assignment gets a lot less mid.

Because the road to great ideas is littered with bad ones. You just have to keep going until something clicks. Great ideas start on Mac. Find out more on apple.com slash college.

This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on marketplace. And there it was. The bike you've been searching for.

You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group.

The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer find more on Facebook.

Clay, why do you think the nostalgia for analog technology is so popular right now?

Does all the buzz about AI have anything to do with it?

I think AI is part of it because if machines can do all this cognitive work and maybe even creative work that we thought was the distinct domain of humanity.

Now you're seeing more of this holistic thinking of like what is the essence of being a person.

And this nostalgia, I think is really helping people get that sense of embodiment of like, you know, this isn't just cognition. There's something about emotion, spirituality, living in the world, having these tactile sensory experiences in person, real contact with other real human beings.

Just with like all the parts of life that are more than just being a brain in a jar, basically.

Yeah, that's a great way putting that. And if you look at a lot of the consumer trend nostalgic trends, many of them driven by Gen Z, they're very much that right though the rise of independent bookstores, the growth of music, festivals, book clubs, game nights, all tech, technology that's not online that you have to.

I was talking to somebody the other day about retro video games and they were saying, one thing that's really cool is you have to sit next to each other to play like two players.

Yeah, you're not playing online. And so I think there's this idea that even if it's technology, even if it's like video games, there's some or music, you mentioned vinyl records, which you know, one of the big drivers of on our record sales as Gen Z.

There's these low tech retro tech trends that really seem to be about being out in the world handling things, engaging with people that's a big driver of this.

Natalie, let's play a little game where I name a thing that people might be nostalgic for and then try to psychoanalyze what it means about what they actually want from their relationship to technology.

Okay, my first one, I see a lot of memes about people missing today's when people had computer rooms in their home.

Like picture a big wooden entertainment center with a big monitor, the shelves are all covered in CD-ROMs. And then the meme says something like we used to respect the computer.

What does this mean?

This is really giving that control element that Clay was talking about in that we still want to honor our computer.

We love computer time, right? But I think we missed that separation in which your technology wasn't on you at all times.

Sorry, my phone is kind of just a mini computer at this point. So I think we like having some separation of like, now it's time for me to go in the computer room. And when I'm done, it's done.

Does that resonate with you?

Yeah, it's a deliberate choice to go in the computer room and sit your butt in front of it and use it and then leave.

And then leave.

I think you're onto something. Okay, I am personally very nostalgic for Google reader, which for those who may not know, it was an aggregation service for websites, RSS feeds, which doesn't sound fun, but it was.

Basically in the late 2000s, I would use this to like follow all my favorite blogs and cooking websites and news sources and it was all in one place.

What do you think I'm actually longing for here?

Okay, well, I think for me, what comes up here is feeling like the internet isn't any more curated towards what I want to see.

So for example, like I'll open my Instagram app and I no longer see posts by my friends and family who I follow, but instead I see a lot of pushed posts.

The algorithm just sends me what it thinks I want to see.

And so maybe you're yearning for that time where the internet was curated to your niche hobbies and what you are actually interested in.

Just a bunch of slaps. Okay, I want to ask you. Okay, I am also one of the analog Gen Zers who love to shoot film and collect old cameras thoughts.

I don't know about you, but sometimes I pick up my phone to take a picture of probably my cats. And before I know it, I'm like sucked into a million other things on my phone.

So I think maybe there's also something about like when you want to take a picture, you just want to take a picture and like taking that function out of the everything device and letting it just be its own thing.

Maybe it's that crushed it.

Clay, I was fascinated to learn that like back in the 17th to 19th century nostalgia was considered a disease.

And like doctors tried to cure it with leeches. I read that there was this one American doctor who kind of thought the way to cure it was just bullying people like shaming them with public ridicule.

And obviously we no longer think nostalgia is literally a disease. But I think a thread of that negative attitude remains.

I feel like I sometimes hear other people talk about nostalgia as though you're trying to hide from reality and maybe you know you should be a little embarrassed.

Do you see that reaction from people when it comes to this current cultural yearning for a pre-digital era that okay, it's not a disease, but maybe it's still not good for you.

Yeah, definitely. People seem to have this view of nostalgia as anti-progress or holding people back from progress. And I spend a fair amount of time trying to disabuse them of that view and show them decades of empirical research.

It really isn't holding people back. We all have to adjust to change. And nostalgia helps people navigate that in the best way that they can.

Even people who don't think nostalgia is a barrier to progress, oftentimes you see it characterized as a waste of time.

It's a trivial thing and it's a distraction at best. Actually nostalgia increases goal motivation. Increases a sense of meaning in life. Increases optimism.

It makes people more creative. It increases empathy. Most nostalgic memories are social memories. So nostalgia actually pushes us towards each other.

When you're saying that some people are seeing nostalgia as an impediment to progress, do you think some of that has to do with the sort of make America great again, brand of nostalgia where like you're saying people are looking to the past to potentially bring things into the future.

But sometimes what they want to bring into the future is for instance like stricter and more stereotypical gender roles.

So declineism is the view that things are getting worse and the past was better.

Or as nostalgia really is just more or less warm feeling for the past. And I think the two are often conflated.

We also find over a while mainly that most of the time nostalgia in general mixes see the humanity and other people.

Or another way of saying is nostalgia might be helping people wrestle with declineism and hopefully in a more productive and constructive way.

A lot of Gen Z might feel like oh things are going in the wrong direction and their future is going to be worse than the future of previous generations.

And there's certainly a lot of data to support them.

And I was just helping them feel agentic and say well you know what we can change that. We can do something else.

It just feels surprising when you see an era that was not a great time for a lot of people recast as something to be nostalgic for.

Right. This is there are people that are have nostalgia for COVID which again not that long ago.

Not that fun famously.

Not that fun. But you know what what's interesting is that wasn't that surprising to me.

When I first started doing this research I was a professor at University of Southampton in England.

And Southampton the city that was heavily bombed during World War II as a port city.

And again, Changge the city was destroyed not a good time when we were doing this research.

This was a little over 20 years ago. We were collecting nostalgic narratives from older British adults.

Many of them were young children during that time. And they had this nostalgia.

Yeah. But what it was is they were saying well this was the time that was defining character defining.

It wasn't a pleasant time. Shaped our character, shaped our view of the world, shaped our ability to appreciate what's important in life.

So how does this sort of personal individual nostalgia rate then grow and end up becoming a cultural moment or an internet trend?

As a lot of times what people are really looking for with nostalgia is an opportunity to share memories.

Oftentimes nostalgia is portrayed as this very isolating personal experience after all this is in your head.

Your experiencing this emotion. But people love opportunities where they can talk about nostalgic experiences,

particularly ones where they might have their own idiosyncratic memory of it.

But it was shared with other people. I think this is why people have an nostalgia for television where you had to wait.

Everyone had to watch the show at the same time and then the next day we get all talk about it.

People are looking for ways to make contact over shared experiences where their personal nostalgia is woven into a broader cultural nostalgia that connects us.

And we've talked about control a good amount and obviously we can't actually travel back in time to an era when nobody had smartphones.

Sam Altman is going to keep making new iterations of chat GPT and I have no control to stop him.

But to the things that were nostalgic for hold any lessons for how we can exert the control that we do have over the role tech plays in our lives.

When the broader world outside of yourself, when you scale out, when it feels like you don't have any control over that and it can be anxiety provoking,

if you just focus your attention on your corner of the world, we actually do have a lot more control.

Agency often happens at a local and at a personal level. You can help your neighbors, you can help your family, you can help your friends, you can be involved with those things.

And even media engagements away to remind ourselves of that. It's like, yeah, I don't have control over the next internet iteration of a particular technology.

But I can go to that retro store down the street and buy some blue-ray discs and have a movie night at my house and have some people over.

Yeah.

So I think people are really seeking that kind of experience.

Are you seeing people actually acting on this pre-digital nostalgia?

There is an increased sales in physical media. The live music market is growing and mass attendance is up.

Like, young people going to church, number of independent bookstores and the number of chain bookstores like Barnes & Nobles is growing.

That does seem to be something changing in our culture that's a push back towards the in person in the analog.

Clay, I've noticed at many times in this conversation that you're very optimistic about Gen Z, which is not how I often hear people talking about that generation, especially when it comes to tech.

So I'm curious to hear a little bit more about how you're thinking about it and whether Gen Z is kind of leading this trend for other generations.

My thinking on Gen Z has really evolved. So I'm way more bullish on Gen Z than I used to be.

So I'm a psychologist and so when all of this research was coming out about these growing mental health problems that young people were facing and how Gen Z reported higher rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, pessimism for the future, like everyone else, I was like, this isn't good.

Young people are supposed to be the ones that are optimistic. They're supposed to be the ones that are looked to the future with possibility and that didn't seem to be the case.

But then I started really studying this historical nostalgia and started seeing like, yeah, Gen Z has their challenges and maybe mental health is one of them.

But they're not just saying they are doing nothing about it. They're using their creativity and the problem solving capacities that all humans have to do something about it.

And I feel like this historical nostalgia that they're engaging is just one example of that. It's not people my age that remember that time.

It's Gen Z that are saying, hey, like maybe we're spending too much time online. And so for instance, there's surveys showing that Gen Z or the generation most likely to report disconnecting from their digital devices.

So now I have a different view. It's not a certain view, of course. It's an optimistic view though that Gen Z might not only be doing better than we think they are,

and navigating their challenges and having the agency to do so. But they actually might lead us out of this mess. They might be the ones that remind the rest of us that there is an in person real world life.

So you know, I often say that it's common for people to feel sorry for Gen Z and worry that as digital natives, they were born too late to really appreciate the analog world.

But in reality, it might be that they're the generation that leads us back to it.

It sounds like you're not so sure Natalie. I said I wanted to throw my phone in the East River. And suddenly now I am tasked with healing everyone's relationship to technology.

I just you and your entire generation are responsible for the rest of us.

I don't know. I get so frustrated about this because I feel like I hear it all the time. It's the same thing with climate change.

Like, will be the ones that need to fix all of it. I'm just like, this list is getting a little bit long. We've got a lot to fix now.

Honestly, I think what talking to Clay made me realize is that so many of us are just looking for inspiration on how to move forward with technology in a way that doesn't feel bad.

Because we have to live in 2026. It's never going to be 1996 again.

I think as a joint mission, then I can get behind that. When like, Gen Z does it have to be the leader. Nobody's the leader. Nobody's the follower. We're just figuring it out together.

Yeah, or even bigger picture when I feel like this is just on each one of us individually versus something that we're all just trying to renegotiate together.

When it's an individual mission, I think that's maybe when I go escape this mode, when I go like fantasize about throwing the phone in the river.

I want to go back in time, back to those New England woods, to no phone, back to your fields, back to your compass. Yeah, back to my grass.

That's all for this episode of How to Touch Grass. This episode was hosted by me, Julie Beck, and co-hosted and produced by Natalie Brennan.

Our editors are Claudine Abade and Jocelyn Frank, fact check by Hisela Salim Pire.

Our engineers are Rob's Murciak and Miguel Cadascal. Rob also composed some of the music for this show.

The executive producer of audio is Claudine Abade and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez. Next week.

A pretty star partner, a therapist, a friend. Those people have natural limits. They get tired. They push back, but the chatbot doesn't.

These are these programs are trained to be endlessly validating and endlessly agreeable.

Turning to AI for help with anxiety could actually end up making you more anxious. That's next time on How to Touch Grass.

Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back.

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