Our modern addictions—especially to our phones—have quietly become the backbone of daily life, eroding memory, attention, and a sense of self. Against this backdrop, a wave of cultural withdrawal, from sobriety to expat living, reflects a deep desire to reset before AI either liberates us or consumes us.

AI generated summary of: The new Lost Generation.

Key Points

• Modern addiction has shifted from substances to screens, with phone dependency becoming unavoidable for work and survival.
• Cultural movements toward sobriety, wellness, and minimalism are all attempts to regain lost agency.
• Living offline is now a luxury, accessible mostly to elites who can afford to step away from digital life.
• Americans moving abroad are seeking a psychological circuit-breaker, using relocation as a way to “reset” their lives.
• AI presents a forked future: one where it becomes invisible infrastructure enabling abundance or a black hole that dissolves human selfhood.
• Digital immersion is likened to opiate use, providing relief yet ultimately eroding one’s existence.
• The lost generation will split, with some reclaiming life offline and others disappearing into virtual escape.

Summary

The essay frames phone addiction not as a playful quirk but as a creeping existential crisis. Unlike the old anxieties around alcohol or drugs, phone dependence is inescapable because it is woven into the infrastructure of daily survival—especially in the United States, where employment and even healthcare are tethered to constant connectivity. The piece argues that our current wellness trends, from sobriety challenges to biohacking regimens, are largely displacement behaviors: we pretend to fight addiction in other domains while the real culprit is glowing in our hands.

This cultural malaise has led to visible acts of flight. Americans moving abroad are often interpreted through a political lens, but the essay situates this migration as a psychological impulse—an attempt to create a literal and mental circuit-breaker. Expat life, like a Wim Hof breathing exercise, is portrayed as a physiological intervention for the mind: changing context as a way to reset the nervous system and reimagine the self. True luxury now lies not in wealth or objects but in the ability to live offline, away from the algorithmic pulse of endless scrolling.

Looking forward, the piece envisions two possible AI futures that mirror this split in human response to modern life. In the optimistic scenario, AI fades into the background, a silent enabler of abundance that leaves us to wrestle with timeless spiritual questions. In the darker vision, AI becomes the ultimate opiate, allowing people to abandon themselves completely in virtual escape. The essay closes with the haunting recognition that while you can run from your problems, you cannot run from yourself—unless AI gives you a way to do so, at the cost of ceasing to truly exist. This is the defining tension for the self-styled “lost generation”: some will find their way back to reality, and some will vanish into the feed.

• The new Lost Generation - A meditation on phone addiction, digital escapism, and the existential fork between AI-enabled liberation and dissolution.

Summarized by ChatGPT on Sep 23, 2025 at 9:26 AM.