Everyone’s trying to fix what phones and social media have done to our minds.

But that’s like trying to make horse-drawn carriages safer, just as cars are rolling off the assembly line.

The real danger isn’t that we’re asking the wrong questions. It’s that we’re asking yesterday’s questions about a world that soon won’t exist.

We weren’t prepared for how the tech giants would reshape our lives:

• Notifications hijacking our focus.
• Algorithms overwhelming our thinking.
• Social feeds dividing us.

But this time, with AI, we can see the storm coming. And no amount of moral panic will slow it down.

As futurist Amy Webb warns:

“The future will show up, no matter how uncomfortable you are. You cannot outrun it. You must learn how to meet it.”

The good news? This time, we can prepare.

But before we talk about how to move forward, we need to understand what we’re really up against.

The Real Problem

Smartphones, streaming, and social media didn’t invent isolation.

They just supercharged a problem that had been brewing for decades.

Long before the iPhone, we had already begun retreating from each other:

• Neighborhood porches gave way to private backyards.
• Public spaces disappeared as convenience pulled us indoors.
• Malls — the public spaces of my childhood — died, replaced by online shopping.

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg puts it this way:

“Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether.”

It used to be that the places where genuine connection happened, where we learned how to be human, just happened, almost effortlessly.

But now, many of those spaces are gone.

Meanwhile, the philosophy behind most modern technology has been to reduce friction as much as possible. But reducing friction has unintended consequences:

• More information → less focus.
• More immediacy → less productivity.
• More comparison → less connection.

We are not just battling loneliness and distraction.

We are battling the erosion of meaning, belonging, and purpose itself.

The Storm We Can See Coming

Now, with AI accelerating everything, we can’t drift back to the way things used to be.

Because for the first time in history, we’ve built something that can create on its own.

As AI merges with biology and machines, it will reshape industries, governments, and life itself.

We have to rebuild what we lost. Relearn connection, creation, and community as urgent, deliberate acts.

This is the mental health challenge of our time.

Moving with Intention

You can feel it already.

Not just in the endless AI rollouts, but in the growing disgust we feel toward our devices:

• The dopamine detoxes.
• The dumb phone movement.
• The hunger for purpose beyond the feed.

The first step isn’t deleting apps or banning phones.

It’s reclaiming your mind, before technology gets its turn.

Here’s how I do it.

Before checking notifications, before opening my inbox, before reading the news, I write down the 3–5 things that matter most to me today.

Not someone else’s emergencies. Not my never-ending scroll of to-dos.

Just a short, conservative list of what I can realistically do, because I know my mind will be hijacked many times before the day is over.

Here’s what I wrote down this morning:

• Finish the AI post I’ve been ruminating about (what you’re reading now).
• Respond to that work email I’ve been avoiding because I don’t know what decision to make.
• Put my phone away during homework time and dinner with my kids, because yesterday I got sidetracked reading the news.
• Catch up on Severance with my wife, because talking about it afterward brings us closer together.
• Read the next chapter of Carl Sagan’s Contact, because it helps me unplug and fall asleep.

Whenever my mind gets hijacked during the day, I look back at this list and ask:

What’s one thing on here I can make contact with right now?

It’s not about productivity. It’s about ownership.

It’s me declaring:

My day is mine. My mind is mine.

We Have a Path Forward

Every major technological revolution, from the printing press to industrialization to the internet, rewarded those who invested first in their human skills.

This time will be no different.

As Kevin Roose writes in Futureproof, this is the edge we still have:

“AI is better than humans at operating in stable environments, with static, well-defined rules and consistent inputs. On the other hand, humans are much better than AI at handling surprises, filling in gaps, or operating in environments with poorly defined rules or incomplete information.”

The next few years are full of uncertainty, disruption, and opportunity.

Our job now is to sharpen the skills machines can’t replicate:

1. Focus in a world designed to distract you.
2. Resilience through relentless stress.
3. Flexibility in the face of accelerating change.
4. Foresight in the fog of uncertainty.
5. Connection in an increasingly disconnected world.

The future won’t belong to those who move the fastest or build the most powerful tools.

It will belong to those who stay the most human.

And that starts by remembering something we’ve always known, but too often forget:

Your brain knows better.

It was never built for constant inputs or nonstop comparison.

It was built for connection, for creativity, for deep focus in a noisy world.

We just have to start listening again.

This is just my starting point.

I don’t have all the answers.

But I’m sharing what I know, what I’m learning, and what’s helping me.

And I want to learn from you, too.