We are raising people who have never had to tolerate boredom. Never had to sit in a car for three hours without a screen. Never had to navigate a conversation with no exit option. Never had to be fully present with another human being and not know exactly when it would end.
I don’t say this with contempt for kids or parents. I say it as someone who watched himself become an adult who couldn’t tolerate discomfort either — who reached for alcohol whenever the feeling of simply being with himself became too much. The mechanism is different. The cost is the same.
Angelica Ferrara at Stanford, whose work on male loneliness and social development I find particularly useful, points out that one in four American men now reports having zero close friendships. Not strained friendships. Not distant ones. Zero. The friendship crisis starts in adolescence and compounds from there. Boys specifically are losing the social skills — conflict navigation, vulnerability, sustained reciprocal attention — that get built in messy, unmediated, in-person time together.
Richard Reeves, in Of Boys and Men, makes the case that boys are developmentally behind girls on average by a year or more, and that design choices in social media platforms — which exploit the very social-emotional vulnerabilities boys are still developing — are hitting boys harder. The data on educational outcomes, mental health, and social connection all point the same direction for young men. Not because boys are broken, but because the environment has been engineered to exploit the specific ways they’re still forming.
The practical answer isn’t to ban everything. It’s to build counter-practices. To give kids — and honestly, ourselves — regular practice at being present, being bored, being in conversation without an escape route. To model what it looks like to put the phone down and actually be with someone.
Meditation, in whatever form fits a young person, is one piece of this. Not as a spiritual project — as a developmental one. The capacity to be with your own experience, to tolerate discomfort without immediately reaching for relief, to sustain attention on one thing — those are learnable. They require practice in the same way that any other capacity does. And they are among the most valuable things we can cultivate in a generation being raised to expect instant relief from every uncomfortable feeling.
We’re not raising disconnected people because we don’t love them. We’re doing it because we never built the counter-practices. That’s fixable.
