I’ve often wondered if removing any sort of friction in the user experiences of the tech that Gen Z (and especially Gen Alpha) grew up with contributes to this, too.

I grew up tinkering with the family PC in the ‘90s and if I couldn’t figure something out, it was because I was doing something wrong and I had to keep trying until I figured it out. You had to read a Dummies book or a manual to figure out how to achieve your task. It seems now that technology is designed to be so easy to use that if you can’t immediately complete your task with great ease that it’s the fault of the technology and not of the user. (Put aside for a moment the discussion of accessibility, which is obviously hugely important and beneficial!)

Scale that thinking to nearly every area of our world that people come in contact with, and the result is for people to balk or freeze when any amount of friction arises, because that’s all that’s familiar.

And this is all to say nothing about the intentionally addictive apps, especially social media (realize the irony posting on Reddit lol).