Our current mental health philosophy, with its dedication to tranquilizing discomfort and stimulating away inattention, is in need of change. Yet the flawed treatment system can’t be the cause of our national dysphoria. A better sweeping generalization of the issue would be Durkheim’s anomie, a concept he formulated to help describe the new relationship between the individual and economic society during the 19th century Industrial Revolution. It now refers to the more general alienation individuals face as long-standing norms are discarded and cultural values and traditions are increasingly viewed as outdated obstructions on the road to the “New Way.” We saw the rise of this feeling in turn-of-the-century films Office Space (1999), American Psycho (2000), and Fight Club (1999), where Tyler Durden articulated the sense that:

Our Great War’s a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact.

As the pace of technological immersion has dramatically increased, many are convinced that we are entering the dawn of the “Digital Revolution,” which more or less began in 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone. As consumer eyes drifted away from television, newspapers, and print for mobile apps that miniaturized desired content, information and entertainment became not only free but condoned for use at all waking and sleeping moments.

Esteemed New York University faculty member Jonathan Haidt and civil liberties expert Greg Lukianoff have been at the forefront of this narrative. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, they show that the mental health trends listed by Pollan are magnified in universities, which they say are filled with anxious and paranoid students who are overparented and underprepared. The professors argue that something drastic has changed in how young people are prepared for adult life. The social life of the average teen changed substantially between 2007 and 2012 thanks to smartphones, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. They quote Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, who famously lamented: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

American productivity has remained strong in the face of phone addiction but a significant majority of workers report a lack of meaningful connection to their jobs. Gallup’s 2017 State of the American Workplace report shows that roughly 51 percent of Americans are “not engaged” at work, defined as “just kind of present,” while an additional 16 percent actively detest their jobs. That leaves 33 percent connected enough at work to qualify as “engaged.”

The disintegration of face-to-face community, combined with the rise of a digital propaganda war for our attention, has left many lost and bewildered.

Though it is hard to imagine a time in history that a majority of workers actively enjoyed their jobs, Americans could often count on family and civic obligations to keep them busy. A recent Pew Research report found that 40 percent of Americans said family was the most important source of meaning for them, followed by religion at 20 percent. But despite fears of job automation and robot workers, technological change appears to have already impacted the social realm, where the fabric of relationships has been ruptured by the blur of digital surrogates.

A New York Times opinion piece cited data that, in the 1980s, 20 percent of Americans said they were “often lonely,” but today, that figure has doubled to more than 40 percent. The nuclear family is no longer; as New York Times commentator David Brooks writes, “most children born to mothers under 30 are born outside of marriage. There’s been a steady 30-year decline in Americans’ satisfaction with the peer-to-peer relationships at work.” The disintegration of face-to-face community, combined with the rise of a digital propaganda war for our attention, has left many lost and bewildered as the technological tides have rolled on without them.