In a recent essay for The Atlantic, writer Charlie Warzel explored why so many older adults are spending more time on their digital devices — and why their children and grandchildren are increasingly uneasy about it.
But is this shift actually worth worrying about? Or are younger people just projecting their own anxieties about screen time onto their parents and grandparents?
Katty Kay speaks with Charlie Warzel about his piece and the complicated questions it raises about family relationships, technology, and loneliness among older adults.
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The Phone-Based Retirement Is Here
Do your parents have a screen-time problem?A friend of mine had just traveled across the country to see his family when he texted me, deeply concerned. The chaos of holiday travel is always a drag, but usually, it was offset by getting a break and watching his kids spend quality time with their grandparents. But this year was different, he said: “They were just absorbed in their phones a lot of the time, and distant.” He wasn’t talking about the kids, but the grandparents.
I’ve heard similar anecdotes in recent years—adult children worried about their parents slipping into screen addiction as they age. Stories like this pervade the internet. (One representative thread from the Millennials Subreddit: “Are all of our parents addicted to their phones?”) These accounts are striking in part because they mirror the concerns parents have been expressing for years about their children—that young minds are being influenced and warped by devices designed to seize and capitalize on their attention. Screen-time panics typically position children as being without agency, completely at the mercy of evil tech companies that adults must intervene to defend against. But a version of the problem exists on the opposite side of the age spectrum, too: instead of a phone-based childhood, a phone-based retirement.
Over the past year, I asked people to share their stories with me. “I am constantly begging my mom to put her phone down, every time I see her she is just mindlessly scrolling. I swear her attention span is GONE,” one person wrote. Another described a parent as “playing Candy Crush for hours while the grandkids fight for a spot on her lap to play with her because that’s ‘spending time together.’”
Some described what sounded like an omnipresent sensory assault: “Visiting my folks is very often two TVs blaring in different parts of the house while everyone scrolls their ipads/phones,” one person wrote. Many of the messages were quite blunt: “I’ve had to tell my boomer parents not to be glued to their iPads around our 3yr old.”
Many people messaged me privately to express real concern. Most asked me not to use their full name, as they did not want to speak publicly about their family members. Josh, who lives in Ohio, said his father is consumed by vertical-video content on Instagram and TikTok. “I definitely think it’s more of a coping thing with him,” he said. “He has depression and bad anxiety. Trying to get him to turn to better hobbies.”
Others were concerned about scams. “Worry more about him online than I do my 11 yo,” a man named Conor said. “Every time I go back home I have to take my dad’s iPhone and unsubscribe him from the myriad of scam virus scanning subscription apps he’s been duped into downloading from an ad in some word game or something. Had to turn off his ability to download apps from the App Store as a preventative measure.” One person who wished to remain totally anonymous said their parent had been spending inordinate amounts of time on Instagram and accidentally reposting NSFW videos to their feed and soothing themselves with brain-rot AI-slop content.
These stories aren’t just anecdotal: Older people really are spending more time online, according to various research, and their usage has been moving in that direction for years. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that people 60 and older “now spend more than half of their daily leisure time, four hours and 16 minutes, in front of screens,” many watching online videos. A lot of this seems to be happening on YouTube: This year, Nielsen reported that adults 65 and up now watch YouTube on their TVs nearly twice as much as they did two years ago. A recent survey of Americans over 50 revealed that “the average respondent spends a collective 22 hours per week in front of some type of screen.” And one 2,000-person survey of adults aged 59 to 77 showed that 40 percent of respondents felt “anxious or uncomfortable without access” to their device.
But usage surveys do not capture the nuance of a person’s relationship with their device. It is easy to retreat to broad stereotypes about older adults—to suggest that they’re illiterate when it comes to social media or confused by new technology, or to see them as dupes for scams. Reality is far more complicated, Ipsit Vahia, the chief of geriatric psychiatry at Mass General Brigham’s McLean Hospital and the director of its Technology and Aging Laboratory, told me.
“There is just a fundamental error in the way we think about older adults, where we classify everyone 65 and over as this one kind of block,” he said. Not only are the elderly not a monolithic group, but as Vahia argues, the older a generation gets, the more diverse that generation is. As he sees it, two 5-year-olds are going to have more in common by default than two 87-year-olds are likely to: The older you get, the more opportunities you have for different experiences, and to develop different habits and perspectives. “Our rule of thumb is that if you’ve met one older adult, well, you’ve met one older adult.”
Many of today’s screen-time concerns are rooted in the coronavirus pandemic, which drove a noticeable uptick in tech adoption among seniors. “When the alternative is isolation, then the technology becomes a very powerful, positive force,” Vahia said. In many cases, he notes, Zoom was the on-ramp. In the early days of the pandemic, families started having Zoom reunions, and churches began Zoom services. The technology became useful for telehealth appointments. All of this helped some older people become more confident using these technologies.
The thing to remember is that not all screen use is equal, especially among older people. Some research suggests that spending time on devices may be linked to better cognitive function for people over 50. Word games, information sleuthing, instructional videos, and even just chatting with friends can provide positive stimuli. Vahia suggests that online habits that might be concerning for young or middle-aged people ought to be considered differently for older generations. “High technology use in teenagers and adolescents is often associated with worse mental health and is a predictor of sort of more isolation and loneliness, even depression,” he told me. “Whereas in older adults, engaging in technology seems to be protecting them from isolation and loneliness.”
And yet many of the technology-use examples Vahia offered seemed somewhat idealized. Epic Words With Friends sessions or productive Wikipedia binges clearly fall in the less-problematic camp. But many of the people I’d heard from described device spirals that seemed far more depressing. One person who identified herself as a nurse working in the United Kingdom, and who asked not to be identified because she was not authorized to speak about patients, told me in a direct message that in her inpatient ward, many of her older patients are trapped in a cycle of “excessive scrolling,” where “the amount of slop they consume on phones and iPads is unreal!”
“Some of it is fairly benign,” she said. “And sometimes it’s actually been pretty funny, like when folks end up in an autoplay cul-de-sac of Chinese language videos.” But the negative effects “are bleeding through more,” she said. She pointed to virulent anti-immigration content, “and the conspiracy thinking and medical distrust, too.” Spend enough time on Facebook or Instagram and you can probably spot this dynamic in action. It looks like confused comments on AI-slop images from people who don’t appear to recognize that what they’re seeing is fake. It looks like hyperpartisan pages feeding generated images depicting minorities committing crimes reshared by concerned users who appear to be getting more fearful, paranoid, or polarized. It looks like scams from fake accounts pretending to be a bank or loan provider or a lonely man with some 30 female AI chatbot companions.
Even here, Vahia urged against moral panic: When I brought up the idea of older people soft-brain scrolling AI slop on Facebook all day, he suggested a meaningful difference between active and passive consumption. Who’s to say that every old person is necessarily being fooled by slop? Maybe they’re making fun of it together or trying to figure out what’s real and what isn’t. “Slop as giving people a common thing to talk about that might not have too many common things to talk about—now that’s a little more nuanced, isn’t it?” he said.
Maybe so. There’s certainly a bit of projection happening. The anxieties I heard from people who reached out to me—the anxiety I myself have felt—seem rooted in our own tortured relationships with our devices. Many of us are constantly concerned about what we’re consuming, how much we’re scrolling, and the subtle ways we’re all being pushed, prodded, and manipulated online. And we map our individual worries onto others, fair or not.
But Shrimp Jesus and synthetic videos of ICE agents arresting people are meant to confuse or enrage users, along with all the other clickbait clogging social platforms. True, we shouldn’t assume that older people are dupes, but this is a system run by tech giants that reward engagement, not quality: For people with more free time than they know what to do with, who may already be struggling with isolation or other mental-health issues, the glowing screen may be an irresistible temptation.
When I asked Vahia about the holiday elder-scrolling phenomenon that I’d heard so much about, he encouraged me to look at it from a different perspective. “Yes, you observe it when you meet them during the holidays,” he said. “But the problem is you’re not there the rest of the time. Their phones are a big part of their lives, for better or worse, and your arrival is actually the disruption.”
It’s worth considering, he argues, what the phone is doing when nobody is around. Is it preventing a loved one from sinking into depression? Is it giving them a tether to the world around them? Are they happier with the world in their pocket or on their tablet than they might be without it? Algorithms complicate human agency, but some people may want to spend their golden years on their phone consuming an endless scroll of entertainment. Who’s to judge?
This is a muddled mess. The same tools that are keeping some people connected to reality are blurring the lines of what is real for others. But rather than rush to judgment, younger people should use their concern to open up a conversation—to put down the phones and talk.
Now that's quite the spin from the "think of the children" narrative.
My anecdotal evidence is that my mom is hooked on doomscrolling on Faceberg and she barely takes a break. As a result, she takes almost EVERYTHING at face value, not a second of critical thinking. Then again, they had the same attitude towards cable TV, 20 years ago... it's just a smaller screen now.
