Generation Zombie by Charlotte Armitage (Yellow Kite £18.99, 272pp)

There are currently 987,000 16 to 24-year-olds at a loose end, neither in education or employment, slumped at home, a quarter of them complaining of precarious mental health – ‘zoned out’ in Charlotte Armitage’s phrase, ‘zombified’, by gazing at the little screens on their phones, an addiction every bit as bad as drinking, drugs or gambling.

If we now have ‘the highest-ever recorded rates of mental illness, suicide and obesity’, this book convincingly states, it’s mainly because of our electronic devices, and how we have foolishly allowed them to invade every corner of existence.

Simply put, no one talks to each other face to face. They wake up and start scrolling, meaning that, within an average family, there’s a ‘disconnection from your loved ones’, starting at breakfast time. Few people, in any event, sit down to meals and make conversation – no one buys dinner tables or dinner services.

Out on walks or jogging, headphones and earpieces are clamped on. Cafes, trains and buses are ‘full of mindless bodies sucked into the blue light’, examining Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

At work, meetings involve staring at screens. There is scant ‘in-person connection or contact’. Busy people in offices don’t go shopping after-hours. Groceries are ordered online.

Anyway, people have lost the knack of communicating with cashiers, because they can’t make eye contact.

Not me. I natter for ages with checkout ladies – I loathe self-checkouts. I’m the one behind whom huge queues build up in the post office.

I also speak to you as one who has never sent nor received a text. I don’t know what tweeting entails. I have no social media presence, as I’d be ‘cancelled’ instantly.

My mobile is so ancient, it is steam powered.

I live in peace, and I am increasingly convinced I am the last sane person on the planet.

But everything is so much worse for the younger generation, who, it is transpiring, have no fundamental interpersonal skills, who are ‘restricted and isolated’, on antidepressants, and who show signs of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder.

This is all because their parents had their noses stuck in their devices. We have all seen mothers pushing prams while focused on their phones, only responding to their child to shout at it. Or the dads, face down in their phones, whilst the kiddies run amok.

Youngsters need interpersonal connections and genuine attachments – to feed and feel safe, to learn to trust others, and to talk. This they have been denied. Today’s teachers are finding that new pupils can’t communicate and don’t know what to do with themselves. Children learn by imitation, and if their parents treat them as an inconvenience, unwanted, they’ll never feel important – so can’t form friendships or regulate emotions.

My wife is a child psychologist. She once asked a patient what they’d most like to be.

‘I want to be a mobile phone, then my mother would look at me.’ Heartbreaking. Last year 1.9million children required additional support and therapy for speech and language development. Since 2022 there has been a 26 per cent increase in children displaying speech and language delay – i.e. there is an entire generation coming along who are incoherent, shambling and moronic, who never sleep properly or take exercise, who have no hobbies (such as music or dancing, and arts courses are fast being scrapped by colleges).

As Armitage brilliantly puts it, ‘social media is the opposite of social’, yet all too many people are wrapped up with pseudo-relationships online. Phones divert attention away from those around us. ‘To be able to listen actively, we have to be present’ – and everyone is disconnected, lost.

At the age of 11, 91 per cent of children possess a smart phone. (When I was 11, back in the last century, we just about had carrier pigeons and penny postcards.) Mad parents even give phones to babies, propping devices up in pushchairs or adjacent to car seats. ‘Babies learn a huge amount through the facial expressions given and mirrored to them by their parents’, so if all there is to look at is a screen, no wonder there are damaged attention spans – everyone scrolling through content quickly, like gobbling up junk food.

Youngsters can’t read books now, watch whole episodes of a telly programme, sit exams, let alone ‘focus on a project in the real world’. Hence the lack of achievement and sensations of worthlessness. Apps do everything people once did – conduct relationships, manage careers and finances (banks have shut), take over decision-making generally.

Devices have ‘displaced human interaction… We no longer use our brains to think and to organise our days.’ We are becoming literally mindless.

Scarily, AI is the next step in evolution, and we will go the way of the great auk or the dodo. Our final skill will be the ability to swipe past pop videos rapidly.

We have long known that phones could be detrimental, facilitating online bullying, harassment, pornography, extremist groups targeting the vulnerable. The ‘unrealistic expectations of life perpetuated by social media’ are often discussed – adolescent girls having eating disorders or believing themselves compelled to undergo cosmetic surgery.

What’s excellent about Generation Zombie is Armitage’s full account of the alarming and pervasive psychological repercussions, when devices make people only semi-present to each other at best. While, now, it is ‘socially acceptable’ to pull out a phone and focus on it, even in a restaurant with guests, in time this may become as unacceptable as smoking. In the meantime, we are advised, reduce dependence.

Create experiences that don’t require phones.

Turn off notifications. Ban devices from bedrooms or when out for meals. ‘Go to the bathroom without your phone.’

Plus, and this is where Generation Zombie excels, people need to realise that looking at phones instead of at their children is nothing less than child abuse.