It is interesting to see how rapidly social fabrics deteriorated when smartphones came around. I was in highschool from 2014-2018, and for most of the years, I could remember everyone socializing during lunch, break times, and even in the classroom. Which is odd because we had access to smartphones, airpods, and laptops. Perhaps it was because we spent the majority of our lives without them still? Seems to have gotten a lot worse since then.

That's an interesting data point. I think covid did a lot of damage too. Kids spending formative years stuck in their room texting just didn't get the chance to build basic social skills and habits.

But it's hard to separate out that effect from just earlier and earlier exposure to modern phones. The class of 2018 was ~10 when the iphone 4 came out. And even that wasn't nearly as addicting as modern phones - it was tiny, and didn't have vertical scrolling video (except for Vine, briefly).

pandemic factor is i think critical here

Smartphones have been around much longer than before 2014. My takeaway from this is that people just always think it's worse than what they went through.

No it was Covid. But one party’s dogma was to close schools and force all socialization to be online for almost two years and rather than admit it was wrong and harmful they blame phones instead.