Article Excerpt: As a boy growing up in Britain, David (Danny) Blanchflower, PhD, and his mates would toss sticks at chestnut trees until hard brown chestnuts, nicknamed “conkers,” rained down. They’d drill holes through them, thread them onto string, and whack at each other in “conker battles.”
“It was utterly irrelevant,” recalls Blanchflower, who now studies happiness as the Bruce V. Rauner Professor of Economics at Dartmouth. “The conkers were just an excuse. It was about being together.”
When he describes those childhood memories now, decades later, there’s warmth in his voice, the wistful signature of dignified meaning. Today, however, few British parents let their children go conkering. The game—along with similar random ways kids of the pre-digital age invented to have fun—has all but died out. And simultaneously something intangible has slipped away: Young people are decidedly less happy than they once were…
“We’re seeing less in-person connectivity, more social isolation, especially since the pandemic,” says Michael Heinz, MD, an inpatient psychiatrist at Dartmouth Health’s Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center and assistant professor of psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. “I’ve seen more struggles that are directly related to smartphone use, to the point where it starts to take the place of social relationships and other meaningful activities.”
Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/u6kcn8km
Article Source: Vitals Magazine