I spent a month without my smartphone. Here's what I learned about attention

Consider the numbers for a moment. Not the ones you see in the headlines, which are chosen for their drama, but the boring ones underneath: the slow, grinding trends that have been moving in one direction for 20 years while everyone argued about something else.

I spoke last week to a woman who has been dealing with this for most of her adult life. She was not angry, which surprised me. She was tired. "I stopped expecting anyone to fix it," she told me. "Now I just want them to stop pretending they are going to."

We have built a system that is very good at explaining why nothing can be done, and very bad at doing anything

None of this is inevitable. Other countries have faced the same choices and made different ones, not always successfully, but at least with the honesty to admit that a choice was being made. That honesty is what we are missing.

So here is a modest proposal. Instead of another review, another consultation, another carefully worded statement that commits to nothing, let us try something. Let it be small. Let it be imperfect. But let it be real, and let us be honest about what happens when we try.

The alternative

Because the alternative is what we have now: a slow drift, punctuated by outrage, followed by silence. And the silence, in the end, is the part that does the most damage.

I do not pretend to have all the answers. But I am increasingly certain that we are not even asking the right questions, and that until we do, the answers we get will keep disappointing us.