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Louis C.K.: Why I won't let my kids have cell phones

Should your children be as stupid as everyone else's? Louis C.K.'s stance, as the red-haired one explains to Conan O'Brien, is that he's not there to make them happy.

2 min read
Humans need to confront their aloneness, says Louis. Conan Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

"You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something."

This, as famed psychologist Louis C.K. explained to Conan O'Brien, is one of the reasons he doesn't want his girls to have cell phones.

Cell phones, he believes, are taking away "the ability to just sit there."

Underneath everything, you see, there's the knowledge that it's all for nothing and you're alone. Cell phones try to make you pretend that you can be in contact with someone all the time.

"People are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don't want to be alone for a second," he said. What was he talking about? Texting and driving, that's what.

Louis, you see, believes that he isn't raising kids. He's raising the adults they're going to turn into.

"I'm not there to make them happy," he said of his little girls. Because life is, after all, terrible.

"Just because the other stupid kids have phones doesn't mean that, OK, my kid has to be stupid otherwise she'll feel weird," he explained.

Yes, the choices we have in life are often awful. And you can decide that Louis C.K. was completely joking and believe that his kids are already playing with iOS 7.

On the other hand, you can decide that in every one of his observations there's that element of truth that describes life as we really know it.

You know, when no one's around and your cell phone has run out of battery.