Smartphones are distracting and addicting, but according to Jonathan Haidt, and supported by our common experience, they can also keep us from a basic ingredient of human life: Experience.

Sometimes I wonder if the worst aspect of the “dopamine culture,” as culture critic Ted Gioia calls it, is not that we no longer have the attention spans to focus on our work, but that we no longer seem able to enjoy activities that aren’t based on screens. Simple pleasures like a good meal, meant to savor and digest at a slow pace, or going through a rich and complicated novel that yields real insight and literary joy, or even kissing an actual person in an affectionate way are all “old-school” pleasures that feel harder than ever to truly immerse in. It’s hard even to sit through a whole movie now without checking social media or email.

“Experience,” Haidt posted on LinkedIn recently, “not information, is the key to emotional development.”

We are more inundated with information and entertainment than ever, but our hands-on experience of the real world is lacking. Kids are getting smartphones at ever younger ages, with toddlers as young as two plopping before the glow of an iPad for hours at a time. Screens are the new pacifiers, the sure-fire method to get kids to stop going crazy and sit quietly in one place for a while.

What are kids missing out on when this sort of screen time becomes unanimous, though, and how is their emotional, mental, and physical development impaired?

Instead of getting outside, playing with other kids, and learning attentional habits like reading and drawing, kids are stunted from the start and are at a real disadvantage when they’re expected to perform academically.

We’re All in the Matrix, Now

But the issue extends beyond children. I’m in an airport right now. Most of us, myself included, are currently interacting with screens. One woman sits by the window observing a maintenance crew chance the tire of an airplane. “This will be fun to watch!” she told one of the flight attendants who announced the delay.

Her attention to the little details of a busy airport make me wonder what ordinary but interesting elements of the world I’ve missed simply by being so enamored by the screen. It’s not that I don’t want to see and experience the world. It’s that the more hooked to the phone I get, the less able I am to really see and experience my surroundings in any meaningful way.

As a writer, the loss of attention to physical detail is catastrophic to the craft. If a wordsmith or artist can’t pay attention, they can’t write, they can’t paint, and they can’t imagine or represent. More generally, though, screens block out the moments that might seem boring but have the potential to bear meaning.

What (and who) do we miss when we scroll but don’t see?

Christine Rosen’s new book The Extinction of Experience is a treatment of this problem; We live in a technological world so mediated by screens that we’re missing out on the range of human experience that makes us, well, human. In an age of constant distraction, we need those breakthroughs of beauty in our ordinary world, the star gazing and the walk in the park, the hand holding and the kiss on the cheek, and yes, perhaps we’d all do well to get outside and literally touch some grass.