How About a Little Less Screen Time for the Grown-Ups

Listen − 1.0 x + 0:00 55:05 Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Are your parents addicted to their phone? In this episode of Galaxy Brain , Charlie Warzel explores how technology is affecting an older generation of adults. Instead of a phone-based childhood, Warzel suggests, we may be witnessing the emergence of a phone-based retirement —one shaped by isolation, algorithmic feeds, and platforms never designed with aging users in mind. To untangle whether this is a genuine crisis or a misplaced moral panic, Warzel speaks with Ipsit Vahia, chief of geriatric psychiatry at Mass General Brigham’s McLean Hospital in Massachusetts and a leading researcher on technology and aging. Vahia emphasizes that older adults are anything but a single category, and that screen use can be both protective and harmful, depending on context. The key, Vahia argues, is resisting reflexive judgment. Ultimately, this is an issue not of screens versus humans, but of how families navigate connection in a world where attention is mediated by devices in every age group. The following is a transcript of the episode: Ipsit Vahia: Don’t go, You’re spending too much time on the phone. Instead, perhaps ask, What are you watching on your phone? What apps are you into? This is what I do with my phone. You could use their phone use as a conversation starter, as a way to meet them where they are, as a way to perhaps enter their world rather than expecting them to jump straight into your world. And, you know, it can just be the basis of strengthening connection rather than breaking it. Charlie Warzel: I am Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain . About a year ago, around the holidays, I began to hear a similar complaint. People were heading home, often with their kids in tow, to be with family. It was there that they noticed that their parents, or grandparents, or older relatives were behaving differently. Broadly, the complaint was that their older loved ones seemed consumed by their devices—constantly on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook, watching vertical-reel videos. Sometimes they said they found it hard to hold a conversation. In multiple instances, people reported that some of these adults seemed to not pay much attention to their grandchildren. Most of the people that I spoke to recognized it pretty quickly. It was the same thing they’d seen in their own kids: a screen-time problem. So, naturally I was curious. I wanted to get a sense of the scale of this. So I asked around on social media. I got dozens of responses over the year. From young people, from older people. Lots, lots of people. Some older folks, they wrote in to tell me that they felt bad about how much time they were beginning to spend on social media. Others told me they’d found joy in the process and that there was no problem and I was over-hyping it. But many confirmed the anecdotes. Some feared that their loved...

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