They shunned smartphones. Now America is rediscovering what they knew all along

The irony was hard to miss last week. The same day that a documentary (with more than 35 million views as of Sept. 2) portrayed Hasidic restrictions on smartphones and the internet as evidence of a backward, insular world, Meta agreed to a proposed settlement worth up to $17 billion with a coalition of states over allegations that Facebook and Instagram harmed children through addictive design. Meta denies wrongdoing.

As a kid, I spent enormous amounts of time outdoors, growing up near the Santa Monica Mountains and later in the rural mountains of Tehachapi, California. I explored the hills, watched wildlife, fished, stared at the stars, listened to coyotes howl, and loved sleeping outside so much that sending me indoors for the night was my punishment.

Try that punishment on a child with a smartphone today. A bedroom can contain a universe more compelling than anything outside: social media, YouTube, video games, group chats and an infinite stream of entertainment engineered to keep us hooked. When our oldest daughter was one year old, she became so attached to her iPad Mini that she’d shake her crib, crying, “iPad! iPad! iPad!” when we took it away.

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In his documentary, Turkish filmmaker Ruhi Çenet takes viewers inside Hasidic communities in New York. Again and again, their distance from modern technology helps establish just how unusual and insular their world appears.

“Have you ever watched television?” Çenet asks one man. “Have you ever logged into the internet in your entire life?”

He learns that some members regard unrestricted internet access as dangerous to religious life. Some use “kosher” phones stripped of texting, web browsers and social media. Computers needed for work use filters restricting which websites users can visit. Instead of mainstream social media, some communities maintain telephone networks where people listen to stories, religious teachings and inspirational content.

Looking at one kosher phone, Çenet marvels: “There’s no way to send SMS. No way to search anything. It’s like a walkie-talkie.” Later, he remarks, “It feels like I traveled back in time,” his stunned tone framing these restrictions as inherently negative.

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Then, on the same day that viewers of Çenet’s documentary encountered religious restrictions on technology as evidence of a backward, insular world, Meta agreed to a settlement, still subject to court approval, that would impose restrictions of its own, including a default daily limit for teens, blocking access overnight and adopting other safeguards aimed at reducing compulsive use.

Perhaps the remarkable thing about a phone that “only makes calls” isn’t how little it can do. Perhaps it’s how little it can do to you.

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We routinely describe communities such as the Amish and some Jewish, Christian and Muslim groups as insular because they resist technologies that everyone else embraces.

Last week, for instance, California’s Catholic bishops backed AB 1709, legislation that would restrict covered platforms from providing addictive features to children under 16. While the legislation has not yet become law, that resistance can still look irrational from the outside. Why reject a device capable of placing nearly all human knowledge in your pocket?

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Of course, practices vary enormously. Some communities heavily restrict internet access; Chabad Lubavitch, the Hasidic movement with which I identify, embraces the internet as a tool for Jewish education and outreach.

For roughly 25 hours every week, my phone stops buzzing. Emails wait. Work stops. In our hyperconnected world, deliberately making yourself unreachable sounds restrictive. I experience it as freedom.

The lesson isn’t that these communities discovered the perfect technologies to prohibit. It’s that they believed they had the right to ask what technology would do to them before adopting it.

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Modern America mostly reversed the process. We asked what technology could do for us first and worried about what it was doing to us later.

We handed children extraordinarily sophisticated attention-capturing machines and then seemed surprised when they struggled to put them down.

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The U.S. Surgeon General’s office now calls harm from screen use among children and adolescents a public-health concern. Recent research has linked smartphone and screen use to depression, insufficient sleep and other adverse health outcomes. A 2026 Pediatrics study of 10,588 U.S. children found that smartphone ownership at age 12 was associated with higher odds of depression, obesity and insufficient sleep, although it’s important to note that the observational study could not establish causation.

Researchers continue to debate causation, individual vulnerability and which forms of screen use cause the greatest harm. But handing children unrestricted access to products deliberately engineered to capture attention amounted to an enormous social experiment.

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And we ran the experiment before knowing the results. Now mainstream society is trying to recreate boundaries that traditional communities never abandoned.

Phone-free schools. Devices outside bedrooms. Parental controls. Delayed smartphones. Screen-time limits. Social-media age restrictions. Notifications disabled overnight.

Practices that once looked like symptoms of religious insularity have acquired respectable secular names: digital wellness, screen hygiene and intentional technology.

Insularity carries genuine dangers. Communities that severely restrict outside information can suppress dissent, conceal abuse and limit access to ideas and opportunities. We should never romanticize that.

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But isolation and restraint are not the same thing. The Amish preserve face-to-face communal life and manual work. Hasidic communities center life heavily around family, synagogue, schools, religious study and communal gatherings. Orthodox Judaism gives me something even more radical: Shabbat.

For roughly 25 hours every week, my phone stops buzzing. Emails wait. Work stops. In our hyperconnected world, deliberately making yourself unreachable sounds restrictive. I experience it as freedom.

We tend to define technological freedom as more access, information, entertainment and choice. But the freedom to be unavailable is another kind of freedom. To be bored. To sit through dinner without checking who texted. To walk through the woods. To let children experience an afternoon without an algorithm deciding what should capture attention.

I don’t want to abandon modernity. Technology allows me to work, learn and maintain relationships in ways my grandparents could scarcely have imagined. The lesson isn’t to become Amish or Hasidic. It is to start with a hierarchy of values such as family, faith and community, and then ask where technology fits.

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When I was a child, being sent inside felt like punishment because the world I wanted was outside. Today, parents often fight the opposite battle: getting children to put down their devices and walk outside.

For years, we looked at people without smartphones and wondered what they were missing. Perhaps we should have spent more time asking what they were preserving. Not every boundary is a prison. Sometimes it protects what matters most.

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