As people begin to notice how technology negatively affects their lives, it is increasingly important to be aware of the effects we don’t directly feel. Humans are characteristically good at adapting — or maladapting — to changes in their environments and lifestyles. So as digital innovations take up more of our time, it is crucial to realize where we are and how we are changing. The tradeoff for adapting so well to the digital world is that we lose some of our ability to function in the physical world. Although there haven’t been large-scale studies to observe how people are exactly adapting to the digital world, there are many examples of groups having physically adapted to their environmental circumstances.

One example of this is the Huaorani people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, known for their uniquely shaped feet. Due to their hunter-gatherer lifestyle that often consists of climbing trees, their feet appear flat and bowed with thick and spread-out toes — clearly having adapted to suit their practices. What would be considered a normal foot to them would seem malformed to us, as our perception of what feet look like has been informed by our environment. Though even in our developed world we find our bodies attempting to adapt to our lifestyles — I am of course referring to bunions. These are malformations where the base of the big toe protrudes while the tip of the big toe points inwards, which are known to be caused by consistently wearing tight shoes. The product of our material living has caused an environmental circumstance to which our bodies can adapt to, that otherwise would not have happened.

Another example can be found in the Pacific Islands, where some groups like Samoans have the CREBRF gene, called the “thrifty” gene. This gene made it possible for Samoans to gain sustenance on less food for much longer than other groups of people, and proved to be especially advantageous in an environment where food sources were uncertain. However, modern processed food is more calorically dense than what their ancestors would have been used to eating. So, the gene overreacts and amplifies the extra calories. Therefore, Samoans are more prone to illnesses like obesity. The World Health Organization reported that nine out of the ten most obese countries were Pacific Islander countries, showing that certain adaptations that prove advantageous in one environment could prove to be detrimental when the circumstances of that environment change. 

From these examples, I hope to illustrate how flexible humans are to adapting. There’s a sort of feedback loop that we have with our environments. Natural difficulties cause us to adapt, then we change our environmental circumstances to make life easier, which necessitates new adaptations for our new environmental circumstances. However, these adaptations take several generations to appear with earlier generations experiencing difficulties as they learned about the world around them. All of this is to say that the digitization of the world over the past 30 years has significantly altered the world that we live in. Therefore we have to be aware of how we are adapting to these new environmental circumstances as our world becomes more digital than physical.

One instance is how technological innovations in communication actually make it harder to communicate in person. Researchers from the University of Maine conducted a study in 2021 to explore how well individuals can decode nonverbal information during interpersonal simulations. The difference between their subjects was how they used social media. One group was labeled as active users for posting selfies and writing comments, while the other group was labeled passive users for only reading and viewing the posts of others. Although the active users were more likely to claim that they had greater interpersonal decoding skills than the passive users, tests revealed that the passive users actually had the greater skill. Our conversations are built with nonverbal information — from our body language, to our tone of voice, to where our eyes look in order to communicate our feelings effectively. As an increasing number of people engage with their digital environments more than the physical ones, there may be a greater risk of pertinent messages being lost in translation. 

As in-person conversations become ineffective and therefore more difficult to participate in, people start avoiding them in favor of digital conversations. Another study from the University of St. Thomas found exactly that when they asked school social workers about the effects of texting. They reported that children have been avoiding conversations that they find too difficult, such as when they want to ask for help or navigate a conflict. One stated, “The other thing I have noticed over the years is a lack of or decreasing initiative in students… because with texting, they can take time to reword things… so they feel they have it perfect and then send it, they can’t do in-the-moment stuff anymore, so I feel in that way it has been very difficult and not good for the development of adolescents.” Additionally, the social workers concurred that their students’ spelling and grammar skills have also suffered. 

I already pointed out how Americans have been becoming more socially isolated since the 1960s, in what experts are calling the “loneliness epidemic” — though it may seem these trends are harder to reverse than I thought. It’s no longer the case that people are favoring the digital world out of a desire for entertainment or novelty, as we may be slowly adapting into a species that can solely live in an exclusively online space. These changes can be seen in studies that indirectly observe this phenomenon. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported in 2025 that the rate of children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder had risen to 1 in 31 children from 1 in 150 in 2003. There are multiple theories as to why this rate has been increasing, from changes in diagnostic criteria to a reduction in stigma to seek help. However, the vast acceleration of digital media use could be a contributing factor considering that some of the symptoms for ASD include difficulty in holding conversations and recognizing social cues, which was already found and published in a study on the National Institute of Health’s website back in 2020. Considering that many members of Generation Z and Generation Alpha are categorized as “iPad kids,” spending many of their developmental years staring at screens, these habits would definitely encourage adaptations to our ever-expanding digital environment.

It isn’t enough to be apprehensive of new technologies as foreign threats because we also have to realize just how digital our world has become. So when people advocate for legislation to regulate the digital space, it should be equally important to introspect as to why we fall prey to digital dangers in the first place. If we’re constantly pointing fingers at the world and bemoaning how it has changed, then we’ll be blindsided by all the ways that we have changed. If we can’t hold ourselves accountable for who we have become, then the world will humble us for it.