“The Cost of (Digital) Living” (2024-2025)

As a high-school student, I had always found the school administration’s draconian technology rules and heavy-handed enforcement tactics distasteful. I was, after all, mostly following the rules and didn’t appreciate the “show your papers” atmosphere that the enforcement team cultivated. Random checks, rumored “Instagram spies,” and constant suspensions of classmates reinforced this perception. So, when I started reading Stephen Marche’s polemic against Facebook, I was understandably skeptical. ‘Isn’t technological advancement a good thing?’ I wondered. Is Marche just another Luddite, looking to confiscate phones and enforce suspensions?

But as I kept reading, I felt my perspective shift. Essays like those by Marche and Jonathan Safran Foer pointed to real issues that technology evokes within society, such as increased feelings of loneliness, the inability to self-actualize emotionally, and constant comparison to others whose personas are curated for an online audience. I was floored, in fact, by how these articles, written in the early 2010s, predicted so accurately the online culture of the world a decade later. As someone who eschewed smartphones and social media for most of my teenage years, I wanted to explore how this experience informed my perspective and how I, as a latecomer, related to the experience of my online peers. Above all, I wanted to investigate how the early warnings of these writers may need to be updated in the face of a shifting digital landscape.

Although Talmud study and religious practice are an important part of my life, I did not want religious fervor to guide my essay. Instead, my early drafts were written from a cold and analytical perspective. My “Writing the Essay” professor challenged me to change that outlook, to elevate my writing by including relevant pieces of Talmudic wisdom culled from my years of yeshiva education. The resulting essay has much more heart and spirit, fusing the ideas of thinkers like Marche and Foer with ancient wisdom and personal identification.

Shawn Harris, a Queens native, studies public policy and philosophy in CAS. Before NYU, he interned for Congresswoman Grace Meng, who showed him how responsive public servants can make a positive difference in people’s lives and inspired him to pursue a career in designing effective policy. Shawn attended an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva high school, where everyone called him by his Hebrew-Yiddish name, “Shraga Feivel.” This unique education fueled his interest in philosophy and law, an interest he’s currently exploring by working as a research assistant to ethicist and NYU professor, Kwame Appiah. His yeshiva’s strict technology rules sparked his  thinking about the role our phones play in our lives, a topic he explores in this essay through the lenses of issues like loneliness and emotional detachment.