Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. ... This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.

The Enlightenment encouraged people to use their judgment. It led to great scientific discoveries and reoriented humanity toward a rational way of seeing the world. Every aspect of life was challenged by the reasoning, including cosmology, religion, and political order.

We ended up with technologies that give us access to the best information available. Those same tools keep us distracted and diminish our ability to think.

One might argue that we took the motto of the Enlightenment too far, but here we are, just a few hundred years after Kant, staring at our phones, slowly getting back to immaturity he was writing about. Why should I struggle with writing if AI can do that for me? Why should I bother understanding something myself if there are hundreds of entertaining videos published on that topic by the experts whose level I will never reach?

It’s not a new problem. Hamilton W. Mabie wrote a hundred years ago about this same issue:

It seems a great waste of time ... to spend much time with one’s own thought when the best thought of the world may be had for the opening of a volume close at hand.

In our case, we’re not even talking about a book. We’re holding a phone that gives us access to the best thinkers who have ever lived, plus a few thousand influencers. Mabie continues:

There is a kind of brazen effrontery in trying to think things out for ourselves when Plato’s Dialogues let us into a world of thought not only very noble in its structure, but enchanting in its atmosphere.

But the conclusion he makes is pretty much what we need to hear today:

In the long run, however, one would better do without Plato than lose the habit of thinking.

To not lose the habit of thinking, we need to experience life as it is, examine, and savor it. We should not see life through the videos and opinions of other people, through their lens. Mabie called it “touching life second hand”:

A man owes it to himself to stand in personal relations with life, and not to touch it second hand; and one would better see it for himself than get report of it from the keenest observer that ever studied it;

How do we examine life directly? How do we touch it firsthand? In a great book, “The Intellectual Life,” A.G. Sertillanges argues for the necessity of creating a zone of silence before attempting to have an intellectual life. For Sertillanges, contemplation, recollection, and leisure are essential elements of a well-lived life. Echoing Sertillanges, modern philosopher Zena Hits writes: “Leisure thrives only under certain conditions: free time, exposure to outdoors, and a certain mental emptiness.”

The zone of silence, contemplation, and the need for mental emptiness can point us in the right direction for reconnecting with life. How much mental emptiness do we allow ourselves to have? I argue from very little to none. Even when we have free time, we spend it consuming information, numbing our thoughts.

It’s great to have and use tools and technologies that can save us time and help us live more fulfilling lives. But we must be on the lookout for the downsides and protect what matters. If we see that a technology works in one area but comes at a high cost in many other areas of our lives, we should reassess.

To create that zone of silence, we should probably go easier on entertainment and cognitive stimulation. Mabie noticed this tendency in people as well. He wrote: “A great deal of originative force is absorbed in enjoyment in the library.” We lose incomparably more originative force by scrolling feeds on our phones.

It is rather interesting that we’re in a situation where the Enlightenment motto, “Have courage to use your own understanding” (Sapere Aude), remains relevant. It is relevant not because we’re striving to achieve it, but because we’ve probably taken it too far and ended up with tools that distract us and rob us of our thinking.

The first step is to restore connection with reality, to appreciate it, and to study it. Only after that can we start forming our understanding based on what “is,” not what we have seen online. We deserve better than 140 characters to form our opinions. We’re not that shallow to parrot the same message without a deeper understanding. The light of the Enlightenment has been dimmed by the bright screens of devices, but we can change that.