By Robert Dean
Guest Columnist
I keep thinking about Toy Story 5. Somehow, the crew at Pixar managed to balance two ideas that normally get flattened into a useless argument between panicked parents and tech evangelists: You can’t push back the unforgiving claws of time. Technology is here forever. But also, holy crap, we gotta do something about screen time.
The screens are a problem.
I have two kids, and I helped create the problem in my own house. I introduced my oldest to Lego Marvel’s Avengers at around five-years old as something we could play together. Later, I gave both kids tablets loaded with Paw Patrol and Hey Duggee at restaurants so the restaurant could enjoy a meal in peace. It worked beautifully. Everybody ate. Nobody stabbed one another with a crayon. For twenty blessed minutes, parenting became easy.
But convenience charges interest.
Now my spawn can spend an entire day playing video games and show little interest in doing much else, especially my oldest. The laptop and phone aren’t toys anymore. They contain an entire life built inside Steam, Roblox, Minecraft, and sometimes Fortnite. With thirteen knocking on the door, the main item on his birthday list is a desktop gaming computer—a more powerful machine for entering a world he already rarely leaves. And I’m the person who got them the PS5 and the Xbox.
I’m not going to spoil Toy Story 5, but Pixar isn’t exactly hiding the central conflict. The official pitch is “Toy meets Tech,” with Bonnie’s toys facing competition from a friendly-faced frog tablet that threatens to devastate traditional playtime altogether. Underneath that battle is a more uncomfortable question: How do children learn to play, make friends, and tolerate the messiness of other people when a device can offer endless stimulation without requiring them to leave the room?
Honestly, the same question applies to us.
We use Uber to summon rides from strangers and Hinge to locate people we might want to get overpriced dinner with. We work through laptops, order food without speaking to anyone, and maintain friendships through memes fired back and forth from the toilet. Technology has made human contact more efficient, but efficiency isn’t the same thing as intimacy. We have never had more ways to reach one another, yet we’ve built lives requiring a lot of manufactured walls between us.
That is why we need to recover the idea of the “third place.” Somewhere that isn’t home and isn’t work, where people can sit around without needing to accomplish much of anything. A park. A coffee shop. A library. A front stoop. A favorite bench where you recognize the same old guy every Saturday until eventually one of you says, “Come join me.”
Bars still manage to perform this function because loneliness has always been good for the vodka business. But many of our other gathering places have disappeared, become unaffordable, or turned into temporary waiting rooms where everybody sits silently staring into a world curated just for their interests.
And the screen hasn’t only replaced conversation. It’s replaced boredom, play, and sustained attention. We still know how to read, technically, but fewer of us build our lives around books or long stretches of concentration. Some thinkers describe this as the beginning of a “post-literate” society: not a world in which words disappear, but one in which reading stops being the primary way we understand complicated ideas. We skim captions, watch clips and absorb whatever an algorithm can explain before our thumbs get restless. This is not good.
I’m happy you’re reading this column. Genuinely. But the contradiction isn’t lost on me: I’m using a screen to tell you that all of us, myself included, need to spend more time away from screens.
The answer isn’t to smash the tablets or pretend our children can be raised in 1987. Technology isn’t going anywhere, and much of what kids do online is social and creative. The answer is to make the physical world competitive again—to give them somewhere to go, something to do, and people to encounter beyond the boundaries of a server.
That also means we have to put our own phones down first.
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