Kids Can't Read

And teachers are quitting.

I saw this yesterday and dashed off two notes - one to a teacher I dated, one to a friend whose wife is a teacher, both are veterans nearing retirement. Neither are personally affected, but both confirm this trend.

Pay particular attention to the teacher who appears at 3:43

“They live on their phones and they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute they wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night. Because they’re in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional, the smallest things set them off, and when you’re standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in if your communication isn’t packaged in short little clips.”

I took social media off mobile devices in 2013. I bricked my last post paid smart phone in 2014 and have never replaced it. I stopped even carrying a phone with me unless I was leaving town at the start of 2019. I maintained that practice until a knee injury four years later made me occasionally but unpredictably bound to a ride sharing service.

I’ve been treating social media as an addiction problem for more than a decade. For me this is akin to to an eating disorder - my career demands some degree of engagement, but LinkedIn for professional definition and Substack for outreach are fairly non-toxic. There are a pack of losers here, some of the same ones who infest Xitter, but if I spot even one, I’ll go through their contacts, and block anyone that looks even vaguely problematic. LinkedIn doesn’t overlap like that, but I’ve blocked a couple hundred Trump partisans who bother people I know, and that keeps things quiet there.

Nationally, this is obviously a catastrophic problem, and it’s about to be made so much worse by AI hollowing out white collar jobs.

The first step is admitting you have a problem. We obviously do …