How to Become a Person After Smartphones Have Rotted Your Brain — The New Atlantis

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June 16, 2026

How to Become a Person After Smartphones Have Rotted Your Brain

Three prescriptions

Luke Burgis

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Fifteen-year-old August Lamm posted a picture of herself on the r/amiugly subreddit with the following caption:

15/f and curious what people think. I’ve never been a popular girl and I don’t get much attention from guys. My teeth are kind of wonky but I’m getting Invisalign tomorrow.

“I would make another post the following year, then again at eighteen, to see if I’d gotten any prettier,” she would write in 2024, reflecting on the experience. “I sought feedback in other ways too, on other platforms. I posted photos, drawings, collages, songs, videos. I wanted so badly for something to take off, go viral, launch me into notoriety.”

Lamm would soon find what she’d been seeking. In her early twenties, people took notice of her artistic talent. As fans responded to her intricate pen-and-ink drawings, her Instagram account exploded, gaining more than 175,000 followers.

Adapted from

The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion

Luke Burgis

Copyright © 2026 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group

But as her fame grew, so did her misery: She couldn’t stop checking her phone for updates and reactions to her posts. “A few more years and my mind wasn’t suited for much else,” she wrote. “I was anorexic and had no friends; I was absolutely killing it online. I had developed all these health issues and begun posting hospital selfies, crying selfies, depressive bathtub selfies. I was sick and sad.”

One day, a young girl recognized her on a train in Paris. “I’m fangirling,” the girl told her. For Lamm, it was a tipping point. Inside, she secretly felt that the social media platform she’d been building — the one that led this girl to admire her — had destroyed her life. She went home and poured out her true feelings into a camera for half an hour and uploaded the video to YouTube. She deactivated her Instagram account that same day.

Finally, one day, Lamm traded in her smartphone for a flip phone. To truly escape, she knew that she had to completely redesign her life — not to stop doing one thing, like posting on Instagram, but to transform her entire technological environment.

She compiled the notes about her lifestyle changes in a thirty-six-page pamphlet called “You Don’t Need a Smartphone: A Practical Guide to Downgrading & Reclaiming Your Life.” She partnered with an online platform to publish a short version of it. Soon, employees of this new partner sent her over four hundred emails in the span of two months. She was bombarded with text messages from the marketing team, including emojis that her “dumb” phone could not even render. They didn’t seem to accept that she had, in fact, given up her smartphone and was trying to stay offline as much as possible. “I was spending entire days toggling between Zoom meetings, documents, emails, and design files, in service of an anti-tech message,” she remembers.

The audacity of her project was such that those who had praised it in the abstract faltered when faced with its reality. So tethered was their work to the technology that they couldn’t help but push her boundaries. Despite her resolve to resist — to break away from the prevailing norm — Lamm found herself once again pulled back into the fold for a time.

The pathologies of digital life are many, and our smartphones are a Pandora’s box of them. Three pathologies that have not received much attention are particularly acute, but most people are not developing antidotes because they don’t know these pathologies exist. That is, in part, because they are not named. I’ll attempt to do that here. The question that naming them leads to is: How do you reclaim a solid self — a real person who is able to be in communion with others — in place of the pseudo-self, the shape-shifting simulacrum of a self that digital technology tends to create?

The Three Temptations of the Screen

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s research on social bonding shows that humans organize their relationships in concentric circles, with the innermost circle made up of about five people. Many know his famous “Dunbar’s number” — which refers to the roughly 150 meaningful social ties that humans can maintain — but fewer realize his work also shows that psychological security depends on far smaller groups.

Microcommunities of four to seven people, usually immediate family and closest friends, act as the strongest buffers against the fragmentation of modern digital life. While there are certainly situations where digital technology can bolster those tight-knit relationships (I have been on a text thread with several old friends for years, and it keeps us bonded and close despite living in different cities today),...