On Children, Meaning, Media and Psychedelics
About this episode
Recorded before the first presidential debate, this episode uses Jia Tolentino's New Yorker piece on 'CoComelon' to ask what makes a good life in the age of smartphones. Tolentino and Klein compare having children to doing psychedelics — both scary, boundary-dissolving leaps driven by a hunger for meaning and 'real pleasure' rather than achievement. Tolentino argues 'CoComelon' represents children's entertainment reconfigured as raw attentional capture, built on YouTube recommendation algorithms, and that parents' fury at it is partly self-loathing: adults ask the same frictionless capture of their own feeds. They debate whether phones feel worse than magazines because of surveillance (Tolentino) or because attention feels less collected afterward (Klein), discuss research framing screen time as an indicator of parental distress, and conclude that the way out is finding things — dancing, friendship, reading, parenting itself — more mesmerizing than the screen.