Sorry, that's not true at all. My phone provides the same services to me digitally that the analog world provided. It just does it more efficiently. I can read a book, keep in touch, learn a new skill, or research a topic all from the same device. That's an insane amount of value and I won't panic over using it because we didn't in the old days.
This is not completely unlike saying "drugs can help me focus and boost my creativity". Sure, it can, and a diminishing and statistically insignificant minority use it exclusively for that. As to the rest of us... we're just junkies.
I don't think it's fair to blame phones for most people being near average.
90% of what 90% of people say just doesn't matter. So it doesn't matter if they're staring at their phones instead of talking about their weekend plans or their cousin's weddings, or any other tidbit of nothing that occupies their public vocalizations.
Nobody blames phones for most people being average. Phones are not the problem at all.
The problem is the companies that shape their services provided through the phone to be optimized towards abusing well-documented behavioral characteristics of 'average people'.
