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We’ve worked ourselves to the point we are conditioned to turn every activity in our lives into content.

We are now passive consumers of everything, even human interaction.

Yet getting everything through a screen is isolating and unfulfilling.

That’s why it needs to be addictive, because it can’t compete with the human experience it is trying to replace.

We are, whether we like to admit it or not, social creatures who need to interact with other people.

If there is one spiritual illness for our times, it is the isolation and wasting of our lives online. I say this as a person that spent my entire life working on the latest computer technology. Is this new? No, we’ve been replacing the deepest desires for love of our hearts as long as man has been alive. Money, power, conquest, ownership have always been there. But now, it’s entertainment.

Look at the tracking in your iPhone to see the number of hours per week you spend on your phone/tablet/devices. We justify it as harmless fun, keeping up with the news, and even casual learning. But imagine what you could have done with 4, 8, or even 12 more hours you spent on your phones each week?

Want to find out? Uninstall your social media apps from your phone. Take ‘screenless’ Fridays in which you don’t watch tv, use your phone for browsing in idle moments, or consume media or books on a tablet.

I did this 3 years ago and noticed several remarkable trends:

1. My mental health improved dramatically. I originally got off apps during Covid when outrage replaced sex as the hallmark clickbait. I disconnected myself from the pipe – and learned how exploring my inner wellbeing and connection with God was far more fulfilling than anything I got out there.
2. I got bored. Without the time suck, I spent time puttering around my house and neighborhood. I started going more and more to daily mass. I picked up books I hadn’t looked at in years nor finished. I started, and re-started, projects I hadn’t worked on in years. I eventually won some competitions with the little ideas I worked on.
3. My general health improved. I got bored. I went for a walk. Soon it was every day. I met several wonderful people and several interesting cats that I now pet every time I go by.
4. I got involved. I started volunteering for causes I believed in at my Church. I made connections with real people and re-connected with my spiritual life. I spent more time talking with God.
5. I got social. I started going to morning daily mass. All of a sudden I was talking to people more and more every day and connecting with the lives of others.
6. I got happier.

Challenge yourself to go on a hike, start volunteering, or get involved in a real life hobby. Go GET BORED. You’ll be amazed the people you’ll start meeting when you are bored and start looking out there instead of in a box.

Dolly was the first cloned animal – and that was 30 years ago now. So where are all the clones? Here’s a good article that covers the quick state of things.

Firstly, there is huge failure rates. Dolly took 277 attempts for a single birth. The epigenetic reprogramming required for the clone cells is hard and fails often, but has led to new techniques such as using ethical sourced adult induced pluripotent stem cells for drugs and regenerative medicine research.

Breeders have cloned a horse and even had them compete in equestrian sports; but livestock industries are uninterested and still rely on traditional breeding due to costs and failure rates.

China and the United States offer commercial pet cloning for cats and dogs. Barbra Streisand cloned her dog Samantha into two new puppies. But, the personalities of the new clones were different than the original dog. Just because you share DNA doesn’t mean you’ll share personalities – which any parent of identical twins can tell you. Besides epigenetic, environmental, and socialization differences which can be big differentiators, there is the entire basic question science still cannot answer about what really makes a person alive or dead. For those that believe in a soul, cloning and the nature of the soul has also been reviewed (with no conflict to existing Catholic doctrine, but the ethical problems of such a practice are huge).

Researchers in China cloned a rhesus monkey in 2024 due to its physiological similarity to humans. The supposed goal was to speed up drug testing; but raised serious ethical questions due to the low success rate and lack of real-life applications.

Finally, there is bringing back extinct animals. This requires a fully intact genome, a suitable egg cell, and surrogate species. No ancient animals have yet been discovered with fully intact DNA. Even recently extinct animal DNA is usually unavailable. Though there are methods like CRISPR that might combine ancient DNA with gene-editing technologies; or create mammoth-like animals by editing existing elephants.

So, that’s why we don’t have massive cloning going on even though the technology has been around for 30 years.

Despite all the supposed enlightened teaching methods and policies, the Economist reports that the data speaks louder than rhetoric. Even before Covid (and Covid definitely had a negative impact on young people) it is clear whatever policies we have been enacting the last 10 years have been failing our kids. This goes beyond Oregon, that despite record spending, has become a special backwards place as some of the worst schools in the country.

This is a global trend. Test scores in many other first world countries shows gloomy trends. For two decades analysts at the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, have been asking 15-year-olds in dozens of places to sit comparable exams for what is known as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). In 2018 these tests found that a typical 15-year-old in the OECD countries was no more adept at math, reading, or science than had been the case in the early and mid-2000s. In science and reading, scores had generally risen until 2009 and 2012 respectively, after which they fell back down. In math they largely plateaued.

A lot of Europe is pointing their fingers directly at digital learning and is starting to ban digital learning devices:

Sweden: Dropped compulsory digital tools in preschools, banned tablets for children under two, and invested millions in physical textbooks to reverse declining reading scores.
The Netherlands: Removed phones, smartwatches, and tablets from classrooms, corridors, and cafeterias, with most schools reporting better concentration and behavior.
Denmark: Banned mobile phones and tablets during class hours, returning to physical textbooks after a decade of heavy digital learning.
Spain (Madrid): Planned restrictions to limit computer and tablet use in primary state schools to two hours a week.
Other Nations: Finland and Norway are reintroducing physical books in early education, while France and Italy enforce strict bans or limits on mobile devices.

I suspect it’s a combination of Covid era isolation and social disruption, social media, digital devices, and now provably failing ‘new’ teaching methods.

There’s an amazing preponderance of evidence that social media is causing untold amounts of mental health issues in young folks: anxiety, inability to concentrate or hold attention, and other psychological problems in young people. There’s solid data that now says that learning from digital devices is much worse than simply reading books. Educational methods from 50 years ago are again producing dramatically better results than everything that has come since.