Jonathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation" built its argument around four specific harms he ties to the smartphone era: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. The book is framed around teenagers, and the data he cites is genuinely stark — U.S. teen suicide rates up more than 50% since the early 2010s, tracking closely with the point smartphone adoption crossed 50%. But the four harms themselves aren't teenage-specific mechanisms. They're just easier to measure in teenagers, because the before-and-after is so clean.
Adults have the same four levers, just less data
Nothing about social deprivation, disrupted sleep, fragmented attention, or compulsive use is biologically unique to adolescence. Adults scroll in bed and lose sleep. Adults get pulled out of conversations by a buzzing phone in their pocket. Adults have their attention broken into the same shrinking intervals Gloria Mark has been measuring for twenty years. The research focus on teens isn't evidence that adults are exempt — it's mostly a reflection of where the clearest data happens to exist.
Why "I'm an adult, I can handle it" undersells the problem
Handling it implies the problem is a test of individual discipline, but the four harms are structural, produced by design choices in the product, not a character flaw in the person holding it. An adult with excellent self-control is still subject to the same attention fragmentation an interruption produces, the same sleep disruption a phone in the bedroom causes, the same compulsive-checking loop the apps were built to create.
What we take from this
Appblox isn't a parental control tool bolted onto Apple's Screen Time frameworks for kids — it's built on the assumption that the four harms Haidt documented in teenagers are worth taking just as seriously in the adults building the schedules, running the businesses, and raising those teenagers in the first place. The mechanisms don't check ID.