Living through the screen: Black Rifle Coffee co-founder warns smartphones are destroying minds and memories

Over the past decade, smartphones have taken over the lives of people across the world. People no longer work, play, or even leave the house without them — and at this point, many essentially live through them.

And the consequences, Richard Ryan, co-founder of Black Rifle Coffee Company, says, may be disastrous in more ways than one.

Those who live through their phones, often as content creators, base their worth off of the feedback from others through some distant screen. But your worth is then contingent on whether or not the platform you use to post agrees with your content.

“You’re getting hundreds of millions of views, and then all of a sudden a social platform, because they disagree with you on the type of content you create, turns that off,” Ryan tells BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan on "Back to the People."

“Your distribution is completely shut off and then all of a sudden your self-worth feels like, ‘Oh, OK,’ and you take this kind of psychological hit,” he says, noting that the youth largely makes up the content-creating portion of the population.

“I think about how many younger people work on creating content for these platforms, and there’s something to be said for when you have a large audience and you lose it in any capacity. You’re trying to chase the dragon in that it’s kind of tragic and when that social capital goes away,” he explains.

“Yeah, you hear of these really sad stories of social media TikTokers that have serious mental health issues. Some commit suicide, and they’re very young. And if you think about how much of their lives they’ve spent creating content,” Shanahan agrees solemnly.

And it’s not just that their content is subject to censorship or criticism that can prove dangerous to their psyche, but “being present in the moment.”

“You look at how many people have their phones out at every aspect of their life to record this thing,” Ryan says, noting that there “are a few studies” that broke down the way the brain stores memories.

“The event of you recording something, your brain is logging it as the phone recording the thing, not the thing itself,” he says.

“So say you’re watching fireworks or whatever, which nobody ever rewatches their Fourth of July fireworks videos after they share them to social media, but your brain’s logging it as remembering recording the fireworks and not the fireworks themselves,” he explains.

An example he uses is driving to work via the same route every single day, which your brain will not separate into different experiences unless there is variability in your commute.

“It’s the same thing with your lived experience. If your phone is always the focus of this thing, you’re kind of losing the long-term effects of storing that memory,” he says, noting that the end result could spell disaster.

“The downstream effects I think we’ll find that a lot of this will have some type of implications for memory or cognitive decline, definitely emotional atrophy and different neurological processes for sure,” he says.

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