As I was driving north to a getaway at lovely Green Lake Wisconsin, I began to muse on my recent blog. In it, I waxed on the damage that cell phones, social media, and the loss of ‘play-based’ childhoods were having in the Gen X generation, those born after 1994. Essentially, childhoods lost on apps where kids and adolescents spend their young lives scrolling through endless posts, usually comparing themselves to others. This mindless activity has led to extensive amounts of anxiety, depression, and mental health issues. As a result, this next generation has little opportunities to interact with other kids outside of structured situations with adult supervision. As such, they are bereft of the interpersonal skills essential to negotiating a complex and nuanced world.

Before moving on, I want to at least touch on another side of the issue. Developmental biologists tell us that our brains 🧠 are about their adult size by age 5. After that, experiences and nurturing shape the brain in various specific ways. Some pathways are strengthened. Many neurons are lost due to inactivity. In some, a mylenization process results in faster relays of electrical impulses along specifuc oaths. In short, our brain is elastic and goes through a drastic restructuring in our tender years. Ages 10 through 14 are critical here. But even after our fully formed brains are set (in our early to mid 20s), further change is possible as has been demonstrated by the Dalai Llama and his Tibetan Buddhist monks.

That got me thinking about a topic I haven’t considered since high school. Back then, I read the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin … a Jesuit Priest who spent his life in pre-Communist China doing archeological work in addition to his pastoral and missionary duties. His thinking on evolution, which he tried to integrate with Catholic dogma, kept raising the ire of Vatican authorities. But for thinking Catholic youth, he was a hero, opening us up through his writings to newer ways of looking at the world. He was a bit of a rock star to some of us.

I vaguely recall (this was, after all, some 60 to 70 years ago) him developing the notion of the noosphere. His thinking on evolution had us on the cusp of another transformative moment in time. Increased connectedness among people, along with the communication revolution, would increasingly bind people together. It was merely a matter of time before a global consciousness would arise. Heady stuff for a working class kid struck in a narrow, religious bubble.

Of course, Teilhard could know nothing about the cyber revolution that was decades down the road, not hardly imagine the artificial intelligence (AI) earthquake that is upon us. Even we who are living through it cannot imagine where it will take us.

However, let us do a thought experiment. The great rewiring (as Jonathan Haidt calls it) that is reshaping the Gen X youth in disastrous ways (in his opinion) might be rather salubrious from a broader perspective. Perhaps the cyber connections being formed among the young (and old) are similar to the pruning and reshaping of individual brains during youth and adolescence. Just maybe we are in the infancy of the creation of a global consciousness (Chardin’s noosphere). All this connectedness, seemingly harmful in the short run, is a necessary step toward a next step in the evolutionary story.

The algothythms used by social media companies now are developing the basic pathways just as the individual’s early experiences help shape their personal brains. One day, we may wake up to realize that we need to take charge of this rewiring process. We cannot leave the rewiring of a global connectedness to chance. Our broader connectedness should be done in a more appropriate manner since short-term corporate profit is not a grand nor uplifting purpose.

If, however, there is something to this thought experiment. Might not we labor to create the future we want. I’m not sure I want such an important matter to be left, by default, to the baser instincts of a capitalist society.