The evidence is strong, if not quite conclusive, that smartphones damage children, and girls in particular. Governments should enact at least some of the legal curbs proposed in social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation. But take a moment to savour the secular miracle here. The smartphone panic exists because we are advanced enough to have invented such a device, rich enough that most people can afford one and, above all, so insulated from life-and-death issues that sad teenagers are what pass for news. Screen addiction is a disease. But a disease of success.

To that extent, it is a parable for the West, where life can be too good for our own good. Consider another problem that has received the Haidt treatment: the culture wars. Where did the “woke” movement take hold? America, more or less the richest nation on earth. When? In the economic expansion between the 2008 financial crash and the 2020 pandemic. Pronoun protocols, statue-toppling: this is what happens when the brain has nowhere to go, no material crisis to solve or fret about. If woke is the howl of the dispossessed, why didn’t it take hold in southern Europe after the euro crisis? Why aren’t America’s minorities all sold on it? It is, in the end, a winner’s dogma. It is an insider’s code.