Reading Cal Newport’s excellent (and recommended) Digital Minimalism. He coins the term “Solitude Deprivation”: “A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.” Our current “obsession with connection” (connection having always been marketed as a benefit) yields widespread Solitude Deprivation — especially among young people born between 1995 and 2012. Many members of the “iGeneration” “have lost the ability to process and make sense of their emotions, or to reflect on who they are and what really matters, or to build strong relationships, or even to just allow their brains time to power down their critical social circuits, which are not meant to be used constantly, and to redirect that energy to other important cognitive housekeeping tasks. We shouldn’t be surprised that these absences lead to malfunctions.”