Honestly, It's Probably the Phones

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/honestly-its-probably-the-phones

by jinjin2 • 3 years ago

671 605 3 years ago

noahpinion.substack.com

jhoechtl2• 3 years ago

Honestly, it's probably the ecosystem which came with the ecosystems enabled by smart devices.

We have phones like 100 years now? A phone is not the problem here.

cnity3• 3 years ago

"Phone" these days refers to smartphones. The article is obviously not talking about Alexander Graham Bell.

gotofritz• 3 years ago

There has ALWAYS gotta be a pedant, isn't there...

The article is obviously about smartphones and social media

usrusr2• 3 years ago

An it's about the phones even in the most pedantic way, because it's about how the phones have changed.

jhoechtl2• 3 years ago

Sure it's obvious. But why not name the baby accordingly?

thriftwy2• 3 years ago

There are the two famous Russian Questions:

"What is to be done?"[1]

"Who is to blame?"

As you have guessed correctly, the latter does not give you anything meaningful. If you take a phone off a depressed teenager, you get a suicidal teenager. What are you going to do about that?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F_(novel)

Majestic121• 3 years ago

" If you take a phone off a depressed teenager, you get a suicidal teenager. "

Do you ?

You're giving this as an obvious fact, however it really is not. Maybe it's true, but it goes against what happens for young adults, or against : "This paper investigates the extent to which social media are harmful for teenagers, leveraging rich administrative data from the Canadian province of British Columbia and quasi-experimental variation related to the introduction of wireless internet there. I show neighbourhoods covered by highspeed wireless internet have significantly higher social media use, based on Google search volume data…I link spatial data on broadband coverage to 20 years of student records that provide detailed information about individual student health. Using this novel data linkage, I estimate a triple-difference model comparing teen girls to teen boys in terms of school-reported mental health diagnoses, before and after visual social media emerged, and across neighbourhoods with and without access to high-speed wireless internet. Estimates indicate high-speed wireless internet significantly increased teen girls’ severe mental health conditions – by 90% – relative to teen boys’ over the period when visual social media became dominant in teenage internet use. I find similar effects across all subgroups. When applying the same strategy, I find null impacts for placebo health conditions – ones for which there is no clear channel for social media to operate."

thriftwy2• 3 years ago

A teenager is crippled without a smartphone. They can't participate in any social life or meet people because they use phones exclusively to arrange everything.

If it's a school prodigy they will find a way, but a random student will become a pariah.

poulpy1232• 3 years ago

funny for the first one I expected https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F so I was surprised to see (novel) at the end of the URL

amadeuspagel• 3 years ago

And third, in-person interaction is a network effect. If 20% of people would rather be on their phones, that reduces everyone else’s options for in-person hangouts by 20%.

That should only be a problem if you can only hang out with a fixed group. If you live in a city of five million people, it shouldn't make much of a difference if one million of them would rather be on their phones then hang out in person. That's still four million people to hang out with. The only question is how to find those people. Meetups are one way.

lapcat8• 3 years ago

1) We're talking about teenagers, many or most of whom don't even have cars.

2) There's only one city in the United States with a population of at least 5 million people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

djkivi• 3 years ago

Re (2), that's technically true, but the New York, LA, and other metro areas have far more than 5 million people.

sussexby• 3 years ago

Humanity needs constraint.

Beautiful art is created with constraint - here's a statue I carved purely out of one of the most difficult materials, marble.

The most significant speeches of our time are delivered once, not on repeat.

Even, on topic with the post, in my opinion Twitter's early attractiveness was the challenge of posting on a subject within the character limit constraint.

Our default state as a species is to find ways to survive. Constraint flexes our brains to develop innovative ways to reach a goal. Information about other people is a significant asset in survival because we're built to learn things from others and to use that knowledge to further out survival. Simply standing in my house and saying "oh wow" will make my kids run to me to ask what it is.

The current information age is tapping on all the systems we've evolved to survive in terms of information gathering, it's just that knowing that someone is eating a delicious meal in the city is not critical to survival - but once you know the information you can't unknow it leading to information overload. We're coaxed into feeling like we should care and we should know but it's a huge tax on the brain to deal with the complexity of the world.

"Could I interest you in everything all of the time." - Bo Burnham

licebmi__at__2• 3 years ago

I might agree with you with everything except twitter.

I feel strongly that twitter has been disastrous to a nuanced public discourse. The format is just shit for everything that is not a catchy slogan or an oversimplification.

bluescrn• 3 years ago

While Twitter brings out the anger and abuse, I think Reddit is more insidious, with heavy-handed moderation by a tiny number of all-powerful activist-moderators, simply erasing entire points of view from existence, giving users a rather distored view of the world.

worldsayshi2• 3 years ago

I think Twitter definitely goes both ways. It encourages and legitimises an ocean of garbage discourse. But then there are also people who use it as a tool for legitimate art.

Personally I think of those accounts when I try to justify staying on the platform. It's not a reasonable justification but somehow it keeps me there.

api5• 3 years ago

This type of argument is at least as old as writing:

https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/

Like every other new technology we need to learn how to properly integrate this one. We need systems of etiquette and social custom around these things, and perhaps laws in the most extreme cases. Most importantly we need to individually learn how to regulate our relationship with them.

hourago• 3 years ago

I guess that by phones it means "social media". The amount of hate poured into social media creates a false reality where many teenagers live.

The so called "free speech absolutists" that are just a facade for far-right activists looking to evade responsibilities for their xenophobic and usually violent remarks have created a hostile on-line community.

Any community that lets people spread lies, and hate without consequences is doomed to suffer from anxiety and lose trust in humanity. Teenagers are just the worst affected by this as they are still developing their personalities.

Another adaptation is probably to take social media less seriously. Twitter isn’t a field of combat where heroes decide the fates of nations — it’s just a silly room where people scream at each other and tell a bunch of lies.

Accepting defeat is not the way. I do not want to live in a society where lies are normalized and citizens are asked to just deal with it. Fix social media or close it. To ask millions of citizens to just accept the most cynical view of the world without being affected is neither realistic nor moral.

whywhywhywhy6• 3 years ago

I agree “free speech” is used to justify the spreading of hate but it’s completely absurd to blame teenagers feelings on what you’re describing when none of that exists on mainstream social networks and only terminally online people get deep enough to see anything resembling it anyway.

It’s for more insidious, it’s just the fact of everyone portraying far more beautiful, interesting and successful lives than them and the surfacing of validation and attention to a like number. There has always been a hierarchy in kids friend groups it’s just now we literally know it down to a number and that can’t feel good.

Just don’t believe that kids are as engaged with social media hate speech and misinformation as you think they are, sounds a lot more like too-online millennial problems tbh.

seba_dos1• 3 years ago

none of that exists on mainstream social networks

I may have missed the memo that YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok et al aren't considered "mainstream" anymore.

gladiatr72• 3 years ago

Number of kids in my 4th grade class that stealth-watched Eddie Murphy's, Raw: 2

Number of kids that learned all the "worst" parts of it in the following weeks : the rest of us.

One kid diving down a rabbit hole is not necessarily an act of isolation. There's also the motivation that some hole divers like making their peers squirm.

roca2• 3 years ago

I suspect AI is going to make today's teenagers feel a lot worse. How can you imagine a future for yourself when any skill you might learn might be obsolete by the time you learn it?

another_story2• 3 years ago

For the kids I teach this is a reality. Was asked this week what types of engineering jobs I thought wouldn't be automated.

Utkarsh_Mood6• 3 years ago

what was your answer?

api5• 3 years ago

Tell them the AI is a tool because it is. Engineers of the future will use that tool to automate what are in fact the most boring parts of the process. This will allow engineers to create far more elaborate and advanced designs in less time just like CAD and simulation did.

If the AI starts actually replacing the most important things engineers do then we are talking about sentient general intelligence and that will be a whole different ballgame. That wouldn’t be AI replacing people but a culture war about whether AI are people and whether it is wrong to use them like slaves.

Right now what we have a large generative models, not sentient machines.

usrusr2• 3 years ago

And the bleak general environmental prospects: I believe that much of what we consider regular youth behavior rests on the baseline assumption that unless something exceptional happens, their future lives will be like their parents lives, with some hope for upwards sprinkled in for the particularly ambitious. These days, even those who aren't really aware of unsustainability will at least have some suspicion that the pessimists might not be completely wrong.

29083011397778• 3 years ago

The same way my brother learned to play guitar, despite the phrase "No matter what you do or how hard you try, odds are good a 10 year old in China can do it better".

dotnet002• 3 years ago

Presumably not that different from how it has always been where unless you're literally the first person ever to develop a certain skill, you've always had to contend with the fact that someone much better than you exists.

roca2• 3 years ago

It's actually quite different. That "someone much better than you" has limited time and is probably expensive to hire, therefore there can still be opportunities for less-skilled people. When that "someone" is an AI, we expect it to be easily replicated to satisfy all demand, at much lower cost than the wages needed to support a human.

seydor• 3 years ago

It's like looking at their friends through a looking glass (literally) which i suppose does take some emotional toll and frustration on them

But there's also something more grave, the lack of digital skills that dumbed-down phones cannot teach. Post-millenials have just not experienced complex, hierarchical computer interfaces and it shows when they are required to use something that is complex or when they use old software. It isnt what the future was supposed to be

epups2• 3 years ago

I think we should talk more specifically than "phones" or "the Internet". For example, the rise of "phones" from 2012 onwards coincided with the dominance of social media.

I know this sounds pedantic but the author lists several studies pointing to social media impact, and still decided to go with that title and a big picture of Steve Jobs. If we forbid smartphones tomorrow and kept the rest of the Internet the same, I doubt anything would be much different at all.

tgv6• 3 years ago

Phones (and tablets) facilitate access much more than e.g. laptops and desktops. The thing buzzes or vibrates in your pocket, you grab it and look at it. It's immediate, it interrupts everything.

epups2• 3 years ago

And what does it interrupt you with? Social media notifications.

It's true that phones might be a better vector for it than most, but it's important to have clarity if we want to change anything. The article presents zero evidence for the damage phones cause without citing social media.

fleddr13• 3 years ago

I could not disagree more.

Before smartphones, one would "surf the web" for an hour or so at night, and physically sit down at a PC. That's a radically different experience compared to the 24/7 always-on information overload and forever temptation of the smartphone.

The very article points this out: there was a time where the internet complemented physical life, in good ways even.

Second, smartphone engagement is shallow. On a PC one tends to read more, write more extensively, because it's easy to do so.

tcmb• 3 years ago

The article erroneously links to a local file for a publication by Jean Twenge, which is most likely this one: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1176/appi.prcp.2...

whywhywhywhy6• 3 years ago

rise of smartphones was also the rise of “phubbing”, i.e. when people go on their phones instead of paying attention to the people around them

Got a few tips for this, first obviously if you’re meeting with people never do it yourself, one person doing it always causes chain reactions.

If you’re meeting with one person and they start doing it never use it as an excuse to check your own phone just sit there in silence waiting for them if they’re distracted by it. This works surprisingly well and it’s funny how often people apologize, when if you check your own phone it’s always considered fine you don’t get the apology.

If you’re in a group and talking about something factual like when a movie came out or a directors name and someone reaches for their phone to google because of the compulsion and just desire to stare into their phone is getting too much, just say “it’s not important” and move on or actually I’m going to start just lying I mean it doesn’t really matter we gain nothing from having the exact answer and actually sometimes the conversation is better and the answer comes to you if you don’t check. This one bugs me a lot because like all you get is someone messing around on their phone and then announcing “it was blah blah” then everyone going “oh ok” like the act of checking the phone added nothing to the conversation, we can talk around ideas without knowing exactly who or when what happened. It just made that person addicted to their phone get their fix.

brainzap• 3 years ago

shame is a powerful emotion that can even break some addiction

hn92726819• 3 years ago

I don't think so. You should check out Brenee Brown's research/books on shame. Her claim is that guilt can be a useful emotion, but shame is pretty ineffective at everything.

I tend to agree with the take and I think it's useful to differentiate between the two.

"Guilt is cognitive dissonance. Guilt says, I've done something or failed to do something that is aligned with my values. And it feels awful. I need to make amends, make a change and hold myself accountable. I need to fix it."
Shame, however, is a lot more damaging according to Brown, as it says "you are a bad person", and as a social species, "shame is death".

From: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-02/brene-brown-ted-talk-...

trabant00• 3 years ago

If you’re meeting with one person and they start doing it [...] just sit there in silence waiting for them if they’re distracted by it. This works surprisingly well and it’s funny how often people apologize

I've tried everything to get people off phones when we meet, this included. It works for the first couple of times but then they get desensitized to any form of feedback and go back on their phones. Which causes the chain reaction you mentioned and more people go on their phones.

So now I simply don't meet people who do this. Fool me once and so forth. I tried to be understandable about it, I tried to not to feel bad when they do and not take it personally. But this is draining and I always end up feeling uncomfortable and having negative thoughts. So now I only meet with people who are interested in interacting with me. Problem solved.

matwood3• 3 years ago

I'm too old to waste time, so I just ask them to stop. And, if we're 1:1 that's just really rude.

rhymeswithjazz• 3 years ago

I did a two week experiment where I carried a small notebook and a phone with almost every app disabled. Whenever I would find myself wanting the answer to some question and couldn't just look it I would write it down in my notebook and then look the answers up later, if at all. It was sort of fun, maybe I should revisit it.

matwood3• 3 years ago

just say “it’s not important” and move on

Admittedly I'm a bit older, but with my friends I explicitly say lets argue it out. That's part of the fun of debating when something came out or who was in what movie. But, I didn't have a cell phone growing up so wondering about something and trying to reason it out was normal.

jrumbut3• 3 years ago

I'm so sorry but this one is nails on a chalkboard for me.

My family collected reference books but they would still do this. I would spend entire holidays sitting there and listening to them debate whether Mack the Knife was still #1 on the charts on January 1st, 1960. I never heard anyone listen to Bobby Darin ever, but his career was discussed ad nauseam.

Just look it up or move on! It's the conversation equivalent of a rain delay.

whywhywhywhy6• 3 years ago

Definitely more fun just someone throwing a date out there and someone else debating it than just staring at a person googling.

screwt• 3 years ago

If you’re in a group and talking about something factual

A good rule of thumb for this that a few of my circles use: you can check, but only after 10 minutes have passed. Of course, 95% of the time by then no-one cares, as you say. Occasionally it's still relevant after 10 minutes, and so checking makes sense.

NikolaNovak4• 3 years ago

It's tricky. I agree thay phones are phenomenal distraction, but, they can be used for good or evil.

Until fairly recently, I got extremely dirty looks or even a talk from my boss, for bringing a laptop into a meeting. It was of course fine to bring your notepad and pen, but I type about 10 times faster than I write, and I can actually read it later. It ends up just being Luddite discrimination.

A few times I tried taking notes on a phone. It's always with me, the notes are electronically connected, but prejudice of me "not paying attention" was too strong to overcome (even though I'd send structured and summarized notes to everyone).

So in turn I've developed this weird distaste of notebooks and their (over-)privileged status in our society :-D

ricardobeat2• 3 years ago

90% of the time people will use their laptops to look at instant messaging, forums, emails, or event try to get some work done. So your boss is not wrong.

You might wanna get an iPad as it is, at least for the moment, socially acceptable in meetings, even with the keyboard cover :)

moritonal• 3 years ago

Consider getting a blue-tooth keyboard attached to your phone face-up on the desk and typing away. No-one will argue that you're doing anything but taking notes because you can see it.

colinflane2• 3 years ago

Still relies on writing, but have you considered ReMarkable or something along those lines? At least you'd still have sync. And not to judge, but I wonder about your concern for writing / typing speed: are you really just taking notes, or transcribing? If the former, I would imagine writing quick glyphs might suffice.

FWIW I don't use a ReMarkable or tablet. I'll use a text editor on my laptop, or a paper notebook, and it also troubles me I don't have effortless translation of the latter over to the former. But I have observed there is much less knee jerk to the ReMarkable form factor in meeting rooms, at least in my org.

vlod• 3 years ago

Maybe you can turn this into something positive by taking notes for everyone in the room.

In a lot of offices you can stream to a tv (via apple-tv or what-not).

By people seeing what you as typing and correcting any discrepancies, everyone will benefit. Win-win.. maybe?

quitit2• 3 years ago

A similar issue: finding a photo relevant to the discussion.

Photo searching has come a long way but it's often not fast enough to keep up a discussion. It really blunts the flow.

I just say "I'll send it later", and often I forget because it was unimportant.

naravara2• 3 years ago

I actively shame people when they reach for the phone to answer those questions. If the conversation hits a point where the exact answer is actually important, then we can relent. But I would rather settle a bet by tapping a stranger on the shoulder and asking them to guess, Family Feud style, than check IMDB or whatever.

stewx• 3 years ago

Smart watches are perfect for this. You can activate the voice assistant and ask "What year did The Godfather come out?" without pulling out your phone and perhaps without breaking eye contact with your friends.

pretendscholar2• 3 years ago

Lol I think you are missing the point. It could even be better to not know and argue about it for the purpose of conversation.

thefz• 3 years ago

If you google for things you could not possibly know, fine. But for things you should remember, like "what was this actor's name?", you are actually detroying the ability of your memory.

JohnFen18• 3 years ago

You can activate the voice assistant and ask "What year did The Godfather come out?"

Honestly, I'd really rather they pull out their phone and break eye contact than do this. I find when people use their voice assistants like this during a conversation it's even more derailing. It's pretty much the same as them making a phone call in the middle of a conversation and having it on speakerphone.

moremetadata• 3 years ago

>rise of smartphones was also the rise of “phubbing”, i.e. when people go on their phones instead of paying attention to the people around them

I remember when there werent just a few dominant phone manufacturers, so down the pub people used to show off their phone simply by placing it on the bar or table bench in the beer garden. As there were so many different phone's it was harder to steal because you might have been one of only a few in your town with the same type of phone.

Today, nearly other person has an iphone so there's nothing to show off about, and because there are so many, stealing them to order and then reverse engineering and hacking them has got cheaper, in order to get people's data for further criminal exploits.

tasuki5• 3 years ago

If you’re in a group and talking about something factual like when a movie came out or a directors name

Funny, in most my friends groups someone checks their phone and I'm glad they do. Why would we be talking about this if we didn't care about the truth of it?

we can talk around ideas without knowing exactly who or when what happened

Sure. Then perhaps talk about the ideas and don't mention who/when or just say you're not sure, and then of course people shouldn't check :)

dorchadas9• 3 years ago

Funny, in most my friends groups someone checks their phone and I'm glad they do

I hate it, it just completely disrupts the conversation, as OP said.

Why would we be talking about this if we didn't care about the truth of it?

Because often it doesn't matter. The truth of who plays in a movie really doesn't matter as much as people think it does, even when discussing the movie itself. And if it's not important enough to remember, I say it definitely doesn't matter as much as whatever else was going on in the conversation surrounding it.

pessimizer• 3 years ago

Just because we all realize that we can't remember the name of the director of the movie we were talking about doesn't mean somebody has to stop and look it up. But somebody will, and they'll miss out on the first minute+ of the conversation, possibly strangling it in its crib.

Why would we be talking about this if we didn't care about the truth of it?

Mentioning something in passing doesn't make it either the subject or the point of a discussion.

yucky6• 3 years ago

  > Funny, in most my friends groups someone checks their phone and I'm glad they do. Why would we be talking about this if we didn't care about the truth of it?

Interestingly enough, I miss the days where people would go back and forth trying to make their case on why their memory on something is right.

This was especially great for ultimately meaningless things like who hit the most homeruns in the 1980's. I could Google it, or me and a few friends could brainstorm it in conversation and agree on a set of facts, hammer out disagreements on some other details based on what we remember from our baseball card collections and going to games as a kid, which then leads to more conversation about other things and on and on. Ultimately the answer wasn't important but the connection you make talking as humans is what matters.

ianai• 3 years ago

There’s probably a point where too much analysis makes the conversation worse off, right?

sangnoir• 3 years ago

Why would we be talking about this if we didn't care about the truth of it?

Because it is fun! Don't you miss having friendly back-and-forths on whether it was Mark Wahlberg vs. Matt Damon who starred in some movie from years ago? Mobile phones can ruin that, if you let them- so the trick is to have the discussion to exhaustion, place bets, and then look up IMDb on your phone.

seizethecheese• 3 years ago

Opening your phone with a purpose, like looking something up, is drastically different from mindlessly scrolling. We shouldn’t conflate the two.

foobarbecue3• 3 years ago

My friends and I have a system: each person is allowed 2 googles per gathering. Or something like that; the "rules" are always changing but the point is to acknowledge the tension between not wanting to phub and wanting to be able to bring information into our banter.

JohnFen18• 3 years ago

My friends and I have no formal, agreed-to system about this. But what we actually do is never use our phones during a conversation, even to search for things -- unless, as sometimes happens, the group collectively decides an authoritative answer is actually needed. Then we select someone who is the official "searcher" and they look it up.

This isn't a conscious thing, it's just the pattern of behavior that has naturally emerged.

swader999• 3 years ago

Give it a bit more time and you'll see people settling arguments with ChatGPT and acting like its the final authority in any matter.

Buttons840• 3 years ago

just say “it’s not important” and move on or actually I’m going to start just lying I mean it doesn’t really matter we gain nothing from having the exact answer

This reminds me of some relatives who like to bring up political topics, they bring it up so I participate. By the time I'm ready to Google search something factual (most recently it was how much the US spends on defense), they're shutting down. Their political interest is one of their main interests in life but doesn't extend to actual facts. You probably know the type. I find it frustrating.

eru3• 3 years ago

Well, for most people politics is about tribal affiliation, not about facts.

See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-i...

Mountain_Skies2• 3 years ago

Google is just as capable of providing misinformation as it is of providing facts. Maybe some people shut down when confronted with political opinion being stated as fact. Even something as seemingly objective as the percentage of the federal government's budget spending on the military becomes tribal when one side wants the percentage to be based on the budget that includes entitlements and other side insists that's not allowed because those are non-discretionary funds.

renewiltord4• 3 years ago

That's about knowing the conversation you're having. When I'm talking with my gooner friends there is a tenor to the conversation. In addition to the fun of the games, we're tribal bonding.

Often you'll find new fans on /r/soccer who don't know what conversation they're having.

"I'm an Arsenal fan, too, but I don't think Henry was better than Ronaldo."

You moron. What are you doing. False chenzeme. We're bannering our colours here you idiot. Out with you.

Anyway, it's not about whether the police have been defunded or not or whether The Handmaid's Tale has come to America or not. It's about waving the appropriate flag and feeling the tribe strength wash over you and the energy of pure unity lift you skyward.

mapierce2• 3 years ago

If you’re in a group and talking about something factual like when a movie came out or a directors name

Check your phone, but lay the phone flat on the table or hold it so everyone can see the screen—this makes it about the group doing a fact check, instead of about one person diving into their phone away from the group.

whywhywhywhy6• 3 years ago

I just don't think it adds anything to the conversation and the fact never needed to be checked anyway, its just a compulsion.

At this point I actually would rather not know than have to have someone googling it for me.

Also I now believe by googling it you're denying someone the pleasure of remembering it.

Kerrick• 3 years ago

I'm fascinated by the concept of "phubbing" as a new and negative phenomenon. People would previously read/scan the newspaper in most situations that people scroll on their phone today: at the table, on public transit, and in casual group settings. But, importantly, it was considered a highly interruptible task.

If you were in a group setting but nobody was talking, somebody would probably start to look for interesting things in the paper to prompt discussion (as one might today on a phone). Rarely did anybody take that to mean they shouldn't talk to the person. If something more interesting or urgent came up, or even if somebody just felt like talking about a new topic, they'd just... bring it up. They'd have no qualms about interrupting the newspaper-holder, who also took no offense to being interrupted.

JohnFen18• 3 years ago

Rarely did anybody take that to mean they shouldn't talk to the person.

I've always taken that sort of thing as a social cue that the person doesn't want social interaction.

dw_arthur• 3 years ago

I can't recall anyone ever bringing a newspaper to a dinner table. I know what you're talking about but that was when you were informally hanging out and popping in and out of the room. The TV served the same purpose at times.

fleddr13• 3 years ago

I think the scenario you describe is the least of smartphone problems. You already are meeting physically with a friend. That's a good place to be in.

The far more impactful issue is that meeting simply not happening at all and contact being almost exclusively digital. And in the rare case when people go out in the physical world, to still be on their phone. To experience nothing of it and to be unapproachable by others.

bernawil• 3 years ago

But that's not a real conversation between a group of actual humans. Nobody talks about easily checkable facts.

An actual group conversation I had last week:

- Remember early 2000s when that team had that insane defense?

- Yeah, what was that other team they lost against one time for that other tournament?

- X team. Yeah back when PlayerX was still playing. Remember that guy?

- Ah yeah. Lol, remember that time that dude posted a picture of his fridge with his pictures on the beach printed on the panels?

- What? I need to see that.

*checks phone* *shows it around*

[conversation goes on for another hour about the logistics of getting your pictures printed on the panels of a refrigerator]

just checking something gives you something to keep the chat going.

scyzoryk_xyz• 3 years ago

This also applies to all screens in a work environment. They hypnotize, they distract, they give an easy way out, all of it.

Some of the best and most influential work I have ever done in my brief career as a PM was that one time we had a power outage.

furyofantares• 3 years ago

when a movie came out or a directors name and someone reaches for their phone to google

(realizing I've cut off some context, this isn't necessarily contradicting you)

My friend group seems to have adopted a habit of someone suggesting someone else look something up. For example if I think looking up something about a director would add something to the conversation, I point to someone who I think is also interested, and who isn't the person primarily speaking, and say "ooh, you wanna look it up?"

This makes it feel like a group activity, a defined task that's approved by more than one person and the result is meant for the whole group. Sometimes the other person says "nah" or someone says "it's not important" like you said, and sometimes the conversation continues and then there's a natural point for the person to interject with what they found

Tade02• 3 years ago

In any case, the data clearly shows that isolation is increasing. Teens had been getting gradually more isolated through the decades — perhaps as a result of larger houses and better entertainment options at home.

Or just the fact that according to surveys, Americans are, ahem, split on whether 12-year-old should, by law, be required to have supervision.

I don't have specific statistics on teenage suicide in the EU, but the general rate has been falling over the same period despite roughly the same level of exposure to phones and social media.

mattmanser• 3 years ago

Here's some figures, the UK stats, nothing like the US ones (graph is half way down):

https://stateofchildhealth.rcpch.ac.uk/evidence/mental-healt...

thom2• 3 years ago

Self harm figures are claiming though, especially for girls. Notably, more than half of US suicides (even in adolescents) are by firearms:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Aeolun2• 3 years ago

Note that referrals to the suicide hotline are escalating enormously though. This might just be a working health care system at work.

DeathArrow7• 3 years ago

Phones and social media addiction are affecting people worldwide, not just in US.

Tade02• 3 years ago

That's exactly my point - where's the uptick in suicides everywhere else?

makeitdouble6• 3 years ago

Eric Levitz points out that life in the U.S. is much better, in terms of material standards, than it used to be back in the days when teen suicide rates were much lower. In fact, if anything, wealth seems to make teens less happy;

This point was followed about liberal politics, before diving into why it was the phone.

Couldn't there be more of an effort to find what teens care about beyond money and politics ?

I'd also give an alternative take: the state of society is horrible and teens care about the world they'll be living in.

Sure phones make these issues more apparent, info flows faster, further. School shootings don't stay local news. Olympics Committee corruption is not burtied in the 20h news. Instagram pushes our esthetics stronger than previous media.

Then can't the issue be that we're horrible and it's way more exposed than before ?

The conclusion could have been to fix the world one step at a time, instead of going for the "close your eyes, shut your ears, hold your nose and you won't be bothered by the place you stand."

cnity3• 3 years ago

I hear you, but the solution to a flawed world isn't to push a negatively biased narrative (because let's admit it) down teen's throats until they are committing suicide. The article does go into this and doesn't assert what you say it does. In fact it suggests cultivating a sense of "optimistic determination" in response to the challenges we face in the world, which is clearly not the vibe one gets when doomscrolling.

jpgvm• 3 years ago

Probably because the actions of those that have any power to change anything aren't exactly "optimistically determined".

We have some of the most powerful men in the world attempting to start either another Cold War or at worst WW3. Existential challenges facing humanity aren't given the time of day compared to "hurrr durrr spy balloon!1!". Mass shootings go by and all anyone sees is some variation of "thoughts and prayers" yet nothing changes.

When the people with the power show no willingness to improve a world which is on a downhill slope from the perspective of many young people I am not surprised that doomscrolling merely reflects reality back at you.

Optimism needs to start with leaders that have the power to actually change things.

makeitdouble6• 3 years ago

I’d argue having people vocal about changing the narratives to discuss our issues would have a bigger impact than “optimistic determination”.

I’m thinking about for instance what happened during #metoo. The narrative wasn’t about optimism, but sharing that many understand the victims’ struggle, they aren’t alone, and can come to the front to tell their stories.

The same way telling people to not follow instagram has probably less impact than explaining how these photoshoots work, the money flow, the production staff behind, the eating disorders coming with these body styles etc.

I’m basically thinking that fighting poisonous narratives with “don’t look at them” or “be optimistic anyway” isn’t the best approach when facing kids who don’t have enough background to understand why the these narratives are wrong in the first place.

Mountain_Skies2• 3 years ago

High school kids are only a few years away from being able to vote. Some of them already can. There's tremendous pressure on them to pick a tribe that will identify them politically and increasingly and sadly, limit their social interactions. For those who are trying to get near-future voters into their tribe, destroying teens isn't something that matters to them, they just want the teen's allegiance, hopefully lifelong. If some commit suicide, that's a lost vote, but all of the other votes the tribe gains is worth that death. Afterall, there's no consequence to the tribe itself beyond the lost potential voter.

tgv6• 3 years ago

the state of society is horrible and teens care about the world they'll be living in.

I grew up with (the after effects of) an oil crisis, an economic crisis and a cold war. If you needed more doom, you could read the The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome. We were called "the lost generation" because of the high unemployment rate. And I'd argue there have been situations which were considerably worse to grow up in. I've heard first-hand stories about growing up in the final days of the Soviet Union, which were tough to even listen to.

So no, that's not a change that can account for the effect.

BoxOfRain2• 3 years ago

I was on a course last year and one of my fellow pupils was a Russian man who'd moved to the UK a decade or so prior. When we were in the pub after one of the day's sessions he told me something that's stuck with me since:

People in the UK vote like their lives couldn't get any worse, but as someone who lived through the fall of the Soviet Union and Russia in the 1990s things can get so much worse than you realise.

whstl5• 3 years ago

Half of my friends were born inside a city walled by a Warsaw-Pact state.

I myself was born in a military dictatorship and we knew some houses were locked because the people there "disappeared" a few years before.

The more I think about it, the more it feels like the 90s were an anomaly in history.

arp2423• 3 years ago

I remember a (Dutch) programme about teens in the 80s; the motto among the youth was "no future". Programme in question (in Dutch only): https://anderetijden.nl/aflevering/286/No-Future

TraumaZone ("What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy") is a pretty good film about the final days of the USSR and 90s Russia by the way.

makeitdouble6• 3 years ago

Didn't these dark period also come with a pretty significant amount of diagnozed or not mental health issues, teen bullying and suicide, and overall deep impact on people ?

I also have elder relatives who lived a decent part of their life in a third world country during the cold war and their stories are sprinkled with people dying early.

I think that yes, the current generation probably doesn't have it the absolute worse (depending on where they live), but it's also not a contest. Which generation had it worse doesn't really matter much IMHO.

spaceman_20202• 3 years ago

The author fundamentally misunderstands depression. "You have it so great so why are you depressed?"

Depression is almost always future-oriented - you get depressed because you don't see anything good happening to you in the future. Most depressed people will say that they can't even imagine the future, let alone imagine something good happening to them.

If young people are depressed today, it likely means that they don't imagine good things - better jobs, family, health, relationships - coming their way in the future.

piaste4• 3 years ago

Sure phones make these issues more apparent, info flows faster, further. School shootings don't stay local news. Olympics Committee corruption is not burtied in the 20h news. Instagram pushes our esthetics stronger than previous media.
Then can't the issue be that we're horrible and it's way more exposed than before?

Just because those problems are real, doesn't mean it's good or useful to have an endless stream of negativity and global problems mixed in with your everyday life. Either for you or for the world.

Learning, at some point, that the Olympics are a profoundly corrupt institution is a good thing to be aware of. Having every latest scandal slammed in your face by your Twitter feed at 7 AM and ruining your morning poop is not.

The conclusion could have been to fix the world one step at a time, instead of going for the "close your eyes, shut your ears, hold your nose and you won't be bothered by the place you stand."

False dichotomy. Problems can be real and in need of fixing, and yet blasting them out 24/7 to everyone can be harmful. Especially since we're talking about teenagers here.

makeitdouble6• 3 years ago

We're in agreement 24/7 manufactured outrage is a problem.

My point is that we should address that problem, and potentially create/help teens find content that is more nutritious than that, and guide them to the better places instead of telling them to lock their ohone because they're too young for the internet.

I'm basically advocating for better surfacing of the good parts of the net, and better moderation/flagging of the worst parts.

fleddr13• 3 years ago

We're not that horrible.

The chronically online character overconsumes news, which is almost always bad news, as that grabs the attention. Complemented by hysterical, pessimistic social media grifters.

When you almost exclusively consume the above, your world view will be deeply corrupted.

poulpy1232• 3 years ago

One possible reason, suggested by Taylor Lorenz, is that between climate change, inequality, precarity, and Covid, the world is just a much worse place than it was in 2011. But as I pointed out in a post last week, most of these things (except for Covid, obviously) were looking worse a decade ago:

Sorry but no. I was there ten years ago and climate change was much less clear for the average person than now.

In my country the inequalities and precarity were also less worse (I don't know for the US though)

I'm not downplaying social media and phones, they have a big responsability too

whywhywhywhy6• 3 years ago

If it’s climate change then wouldn’t we see teens raised in families who don’t believe in it having happier lives and less suicidal tendencies.

I mean we were taught extensively about climate change 30 years ago when I was in school, I don’t really thing the urgency has changed that much, if anything it feels less doomsday than some of the things we were told in school back then. Don’t recall anyone being that dramatic about it either beyond making sure to recycle.

_cenw• 3 years ago

Climate change has become mundane. Eventually the shock wears off and resignation sets in, especially because seemingly nobody is doing anything about it that is sufficient to move the needle. Or even stop it from going the wrong direction fast.

May I recommend http://readdesert.org/

burnished• 3 years ago

I imagine its hard to internalize that sort of denial when you grow up with everyone talking about the weather changing noticeably over the last decade or two

joenot443• 3 years ago

When I watched Inconvenient Truth almost 20 years ago, I left with the impression that Florida would be under water by now unless we made massive corrections in path. I’m now under the impression that while much of the science we knew back then still holds, some of it was exaggerated, and the lived effects hasn’t been as drastic as we were being told. Perhaps the average person, whomever you’re thinking of, is more aware, but personally I’ve seen a transition from sky is falling hysteria (underwater Florida) to real pragmatism and nuance in our predictions and models. Seems like the author got it right.

acuozzo• 3 years ago

some of it was exaggerated, and the lived effects hasn’t been as drastic as we were being told

Or we're still in the "insertion sort is faster than quicksort" part of the graph.

SV_BubbleTime• 3 years ago

I left with the impression that Florida would be under water by now unless we made massive corrections in path.

Yes, and those were absolutely lies then. And they knew it. No one but the people selling a tax plan seriously said that stuff.

It’s silly in retrospect.

heisenbit• 3 years ago

Was a teen in the seventies. I got to see cars not driving due to the energy crisis, read of the Club of Rome predictions, saw the anti-nuclear energy movement starting and lived in the reality of the Cold war which among other things implied the draft (in the US with a chance to travel Vietnam). And did I mention the baby boomers crowding universities pushing them to a point where late comers struggled to get in. Happy times.

fleddr13• 3 years ago

Similar. Teen(ish) in the 80s. Only during my early 30s did I learn that during that era, the nuke to end us all could very well drop, and it had one of the worst economic crises ever.

Had no idea during it all, didn't notice. Nor do I think I'd worry much about it had I known.

What that tells me is that modern teens over over-informed, it is non-stop, and the messaging is extremely negative.

mcv• 3 years ago

There's also the possibility that even things that are better or at least not-worse, are not moving in the right direction anymore.

For decades, almost everybody agreed that civil rights, human rights, democracy, equality and all that sort of thing, were good things, and it at least seemed like the world was slowly but steadily moving towards more of that. These last couple of years, it seems to have become appallingly popular to openly support and admire dictators, argue for authoritarianism, against democracy, etc. Especially after the fall of the USSR, there was a widespread belief that the threat of nuclear armageddon was over, those former communist countries would become democratic and everything would be better.

uoaei2• 3 years ago

Perhaps these new obsessive and reactionary tendencies are also encouraged by all the phone time?

NoGravitas3• 3 years ago

In the US, inequality has been increasing pretty steadily since the 1970s, with periodic brief dips. 10 years ago, we thought that we could hold global warming to 1.5°C over the course of the century. Of course, we've blown past that already, and if everyone cooperated, which we won't, we could probably hold it to 3°C now. Current median predictions are worse than the "worst case, won't happen" predictions of 10 years ago. Covid and other zoonotic diseases are deeply intertwingled with climate change; Covid is not the last pandemic we're going to see in our lifetimes.

When I was a kid in the 80s, we were living under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. That threat seemed to recede, but really, we just forgot about it. Now it's worse than it was then, because it seems that the social mechanisms we had for preventing it during the Cold War no longer exist.

zeroonetwothree10• 3 years ago

It's true that we probably aren't going to hit the 1.5 C goal but so far we are only at 1.2 C total, so we haven't actually "blown past" it.

Actually the worst case predictions of the past have proven to be wildly pessimistic. I think we're even doing better than the average case predictions, primarily because of less use of coal.

And COVID has nothing to do with climate change, that's just silly (especially with the recent evidence in favor of lab leak).

cousin_it• 3 years ago

I never had a smartphone. My social life did get worse when everyone around started getting smartphones. You could say just make friends with other people who dislike smartphones, but it's tricky when most people I come in random contact with (at work, in other environments) use smartphones.

sieste• 3 years ago

There is probably a meetup group for people who don't have phones ... oh, wait, nevermind.

whstl5• 3 years ago

I think it's much more than smartphones. It's also the Netflixes, Prime Videos, Twitches, and Steams of the world. Also Youtube and Reddit. I know plenty of people who pride on not having smartphone but barely come out of the house due to streaming or games. Also Amazon, and Uber Eats, and whatever that grocery store app who fired half their staff lately is called. Smartphones are just the visible tip of the iceberg.

People have no incentive to leave their house anymore. All their entertainment is inside. Hanging out barely exists for some people, even for some teenagers. We have WFH so we don't have to commute but I bet a lot is just gonna turn off one screen and turn another.

I don't know the cause. Everyone says they're perpetually tired. Perhaps that's it.

DeathArrow7• 3 years ago

I agree 100%. It's not about the phones, it's that technology makes everything seem effortless and many people want now instant gratification, if not, they are unhappy.

So the answer to this situation is to start being able to control yourself, let the game console, the phone the smart TV and everything else, go outside, take a walk, see what's new in town, meet with friends, go for a dinner at an restaurant, read a book, spend some time in nature.

Do some of the boring things people did before smartphones, the Internet and gaming consoles. From time to time.

timerol2• 3 years ago

Don't forget HN on that list. I think the minimalist design and lack of notifications are good nudges to log off, but it's very possible to spend too much time here. (As I would know from experience.)

Utkarsh_Mood6• 3 years ago

Definitely agree with this article, Im a teenager(17M) who doesn't keep a smartphone(shocker, I know) and the frequency with which my friends bring its usage into conversation is definitely frustrating and awkward at times. A lot of people basically now gauge the worth of others by the followers they have and it’s ridiculous. Then there’s also the hate accounts being made to target other individuals on Instagram and the like. Social media really has made people more shallow in my opinion and reduced the chance of actually having meaningful conversations with friends.

profstasiak2• 3 years ago

can you share what made you drop the smartphone? I wish my kids were like you and would like to push them in this direction

rubidium2• 3 years ago

It’s your job. You don’t “push” your kids. You instruct them, set expectations, and enforce the expected behavior.

General advice for kids and phones:

- no phones before 12 yr old

- shared phones between 12-16 (with other siblings or the “house” cell phone that also can be used by parents)

- own phone once 16 to acclimate them to healthy use while under your roof.

- a phone box for everyone in the household that gets used between 6-10pm every day (eg phone lives in the box, can still be checked if rings but then goes back in box not pocket)

- punishments that involve loss of phone privileges. This should follow the “x7 rule” where the punishment is much more severe than the disobedience (eg don’t listen to parent, 3 days without phone)

- model good behavior yourself. No phone out when your kids are around.

Utkarsh_Mood6• 3 years ago

can you share what made you drop the smartphone?

Sure, there were a few factors that made me not keep one:

Firstly, I’ve never been that active on social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat etc. I did have an account for a short period of time, but I noticed there’s really not much of value Im missing out on. 99% of teenage group chats are about teenage crushes and general high school drama which isn’t something Im much interested in. Ditching the smartphone thus didn’t really affect my communication with my friends.(I might have missed out on the popular kids parties though :P)

Then there’s also the problem that I found myself getting distracted and procrastinating on school-work which was affecting my productivity.

It wasn't an easy and I did have withdrawal symptoms initially, but I do think I'm able to focus more now for longer intervals and more ‘present’. I did receive a lot of derision from my friends, though.

I wish my kids were like you and would like to push them in this direction

You could maybe talk to them about whether they think it’s having a negative impact on them and what do they think they can to do reduce it. If its not mutually agreed upon it will be difficult to work on it.

Aeolun2• 3 years ago

I like the idea of just meeting up more. If I have no phone then that’s the only way to go.

matwood3• 3 years ago

A lot of people basically now gauge the worth of others by the followers they have and it’s ridiculous.

Kids measuring popularity is as old as kids. So don't take this as something unique or new.

Social media really has made people more shallow in my opinion and reduced the chance of actually having meaningful conversations with friends.

I didn't grow up with a cell phone and kids in HS were incredibly shallow in general. Does someone have a car? What shoes are they wearing? How are their jeans rolled (or whatever stupid thing we did back then)? What about their haircut? The list goes on.

Then there’s also the hate accounts being made to target other individuals on Instagram and the like.

This is the big change today. Pre-social media when kids left school, they could leave what for many was a very challenging environment. Now it follows them everywhere they go, 24/7. I was teased a lot and made fun of as a kid, but going home each day with neighborhood friends who knew me was my safe space. Nowadays that space just doesn't seem to exist.

arp2423• 3 years ago

A lot of people basically now gauge the worth of others by the followers they have and it’s ridiculous

When I was a teenager in the 90s I had a classmate tell me he "can't be friends with me because I don't have Nikes". These kind of popularity/status things amongst teenagers are nothing new; its just the measures of it that change. Teenagers can be horrible human beings. Its one of the reasons some countries have school uniforms (I don't know whether that actually helps).

Utkarsh_Mood6• 3 years ago

When I was a teenager in the 90s I had a classmate tell me he "can't be friends with me because I don't have Nikes".

Wow that is an insane level of pretentiousness. Probably dodged a bullet there.

Its one of the reasons some countries have school uniforms

Most schools do have uniforms here, honestly it doesn't really matter that much, teenagers (can and will) find another way to show off.

hbn• 3 years ago

Sure, but you didn't require Nikes to be kept in the loop with socializing with most of your peers. You could find plenty of people to hang out with that didn't require your wear Nikes. But there aren't a lot of people who are into the idea of limiting themselves to a small subset of available communication methods. All your friends are in a group chat and that's where the conversation is happening most of the time.

Not to mention the classic style of dating doesn't really exist any more. Now it requires a bunch of getting to know each other outside of dates through texting. Maybe you can find someone who isn't into that, but good luck. You've cut out most of your options, not to mention - where are you supposed to find this person? An online community for people who don't go online as much?

api5• 3 years ago

It’s not just phones. It’s social media combined with phones.

Social media is toxic but when it’s confined to a browser on a computer your use is somewhat limited. Making it so portable allows people to always be addicted.

The worst part of social media with phones is notifications. The social app literally vibrates in your pocket and demands your attention, taking it away from anyone you are with. A PC never did that.

I have no social apps on my phone and turn off most notifications. I do browse some things like this site but when I put it away it is away and doesn’t pester me.

naijaboiler3• 3 years ago

I agree. I was surprised at all the people blaming all other things. the answer is smart phones + social media. Worst thing that ever happened to teenagers mental health. You should look at teen sex & teen pregnancy rates. It was on the decline before and just plummeted after 2010. Smartphones have killed physical interaction, and then social media adds all sorts of negative pyschology on top of that. God help us. One day, we will look back and see this smartphone/social media era as one giant negative societal experiment that should never be repeated.

profstasiak2• 3 years ago

gentle reminder that browsing comments on HN makes you more isolated and less happy

Barrin92• 3 years ago

Eric Levitz points out that life in the U.S. is much better, in terms of material standards, than it used to be back in the days when teen suicide rates were much lower. In fact, if anything, wealth seems to make teens less happy; a new paper by Rudolf & Bethmann finds that although rich countries tend to have happier adults, their adolescents tend to have lower life satisfaction.

Noah Smith given his political persuasion dismisses the most obvious common thread, one that Robert Sapolsky has written about for decades. While absolute wealth has increased so has inequality, and there is strong empirical evidence that links relative inequality to mental and biological harm.[1]

The relationship to social media and smartphones seems intuitive. They're an amplifier and visualizer of inequality. Social media gives influencers, celebrities a gigantic platform to broadcast their unreachable lifestyles. and being a socialite/influencer is now often listed as the, or one of the, most popular 'professions' among teens. Even ordinary users constantly idealize their own appearance and circumstances.

It almost takes magical thinking to arrive at the conclusion that phones and the applications they enable have some mystical causal powers rather than accepting the most straightforward explanation. They're simply very accurate mirrors of the ever-increasing competitive and unequal social system which induces real, physiological stress in our populations.

[1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-economic-ineq...

orangecat• 3 years ago

While absolute wealth has increased so has inequality, and there is strong empirical evidence that links relative inequality to mental and biological harm.

The mental health of girls has worsened much more than that of boys in the last decade. Which of those groups is more likely to be following Andrew Tate and his Lambos, and which is more likely to be following genetic-lottery-winning "fitness influencers"? Both of those are "inequality" in some form, but raising taxes on the rich isn't going to do anything about the latter.

margorczynski• 3 years ago

Don't want to be a Ted Kaczynski but a lot of the tech progress we've made in the last decades was/is actually detrimental to human happiness.

We just ask ourselves "can we" instead of "should we" and the first to pay the price for that hubris are the children.

Beaver117• 3 years ago

I mean we collectively decided in 2020 to trade young people's livelyhoods for old peoples lives

lapcat8• 3 years ago

Young people have parents and grandparents. Pitting age groups against each other is mistaken, short-sighted, and self-destructive. We're all in this together. This isn't Logan's Run. It would be psychopathic for young people to not care about the fate of their elders. Also, they're going to become elders themselves someday.

PopAlongKid• 3 years ago

Assuming you are referring to covid lockdowns, you are mis-using the term "livelihood", which is the "means of securing the basic necessities (food, water, shelter and clothing) of life". Young people were not deprived of food, water, shelter, and clothing due to covid lockdowns.

tgv6• 3 years ago

In fact, our best move may simply be to wait for society to adapt. In the past, humans have shown a remarkable ability to change ...

But not so much with things that fuck with our minds. Religion is a phenomenon that changes our views fundamentally, and I can't say we have overcome its influence, despite it being around for over 5000 years.

MrGilbert• 3 years ago

So Jesus was, in fact, one of the first Influencers around?

Temporary_31337• 3 years ago

yes, except all the other religions, priests, oracles, pharaohs before him. And his religion was based on on an interpretation of Judaism which was a thousand years old religion at a time, Other than that you're spot on ;)

disgruntledphd23• 3 years ago

But not so much with things that fuck with our minds. Religion is a phenomenon that changes our views fundamentally, and I can't say we have overcome its influence, despite it being around for over 5000 years.

Honestly, the change is the lack of religion in modern society. Maybe we'll adapt, maybe we won't.

As a personal aside, Ireland de-catholicised really significantly during my lifetime, and while I'm super happy about lots of that, the loss of community in many places is quite real.

tgv6• 3 years ago

Lack of religion is a change, but I mentioned religion as something that influences our thoughts, attitudes and behavior, and which all over the world has lead to conflict, e.g. The Struggles. In that sense, we have not been able to deal with that particular phenomenon, and, as you say, the only way seems to be to get rid of it. Quite the analogy for social media.

causality0• 3 years ago

The smartphone was invented in 2007

Wrong. He's off by a full decade, or even more than a decade if you count the IBM Simon.

api5• 3 years ago

Teens didn’t use those so they’re not relevant to the topic.

jFriedensreich2• 3 years ago

read the part. they author claims that is when they were invented, and even mentions it was not used widely before 2010 so criticism is 100% valid

jFriedensreich2• 3 years ago

i read this so much, every time i die inside.

techstrategist8• 3 years ago

My recent anecdote. Last month my phone broke: the touch screen would stop responding, but I could still connect a Bluetooth keyboard and headphones. After maybe 5 hard resets in a row, the screen would work again for a few minutes or hours.

After a few days, my head was clearer. I was sleeping better. My relationship felt better than ever, because we wouldn’t both lay next to each other on our phones before sleeping. My time with my kids was more focused, and I was more patient and fun.

In week 2, I commented to my wife that I don’t know what changed, but I felt better than ever. At the time I attributed it to a new therapy lamp.

After a few weeks, I finally acknowledged that due to my responsibilities I do need a working phone 100% of the time and I replaced it with a newer, modestly fancier one. In the month since, nothing else has changed: same therapy light (and now longer daylight hours); no dietary or outside well-being changes or adverse events. But that positivity isn’t there anymore. I don’t think I fully acknowledged that until this moment. And I’m still not sure what do do about it.

suoduandao2• 3 years ago

There are apps that change a smartphone screen to be greyscale only. Probably not as good as not having one but it might reduce the addictive quality substantially, worth a try in any case

mtklein• 3 years ago

If you're an Apple user, it's built-in, and I've found it ergonomic to assign its toggle to a triple-tap on your phone's back and/or laptop power button.

Those triple-taps are effortlessly quick and rarely if ever misfire, making it totally reasonable to stay in greyscale by default and reengage color selectively when you're looking at something that merits it (film, family, friends, a Wordle scorecard...)

techstrategist8• 3 years ago

That’s a great idea. I tried a lot of similar techniques years ago without much success, but I should try again since I’ve been diagnosed and treated for ADHD since then.

npteljes2• 3 years ago

Android phones can do that in Developer mode.

https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74887/force-andr... (Old answer, but the placement is similar)

chuankl• 3 years ago

On my Pixel 6a running stock Android 13, the setting is under

Accessibility > Color and motion > Color correction > Grayscale.

No separate app and no development mode needed.

AJJB2• 3 years ago

There will be many answers about a technical solution for this (apps that limit apps, dumb phones, different launchers etc.). None will work.

Train yourself to not phone. Same as you can not consume advertising (cant adblock billboards).

All the technical solutions trim too much away about what makes a smartphone great, or add too much friction, either to configure or to disable again, which you will do anyways. Also these technical solutions are just products again. They exist not to actually work, but to make money. Sometimes both are true, but rarely.

This is a two tier society. Those who can train themselves to do this, who will be able to read books, learn, be present without Soma and ...

the zombies.

wilsonnb3• 3 years ago

There will be many answers about a technical solution for this (apps that limit apps, dumb phones, different launchers etc.). None will work.

Don't listen to this guy, all of those things work well for a lot of people.

danShumway2• 3 years ago

This is nonsense.

The correct response to advertising sapping your energy is to block ads. The correct response to billboards cluttering up our lives is to collectively ban billboards. "You're either strong enough to resist temptation or you're a 'zombie'" is terrible advice. To the extent that you are able to control your environment, do so. And then use that environmental control to make it easier to exercise self-control in the instances where you can't avoid temptation.

Also understand that willpower is a continuum. If you struggle with alcohol, and you spend all of your time in bars, I promise that you are eventually going to slip up and drink. If you struggle with alcohol and you don't go to bars, then when you're offered a drink you might have the willpower to refuse.

If you're dieting, don't leave food out on your counter. If you're addicted to cigarettes, look into nicotine patches and consider chewing gum. If you're struggling with anger issues, block Reddit. You're not a "zombie" if you take active steps to remove temptations from your life and put yourself in fewer situations where you'll be exposed to addictive behaviors. That is healthy behavior.

----

Same as you can not consume advertising (cant adblock billboards).

Case in point.

People vastly overestimate how good they are at ignoring advertising. It takes brain power to do that filtering (even if it's happening unconsciously). You can't block every ad, but block every ad that you can block. There's literally no reason not to.

Install an adblocker on your browser/phone. Install SponsorBlock for Youtube. There is no reason at all to artificially make this harder for yourself. It doesn't build up willpower, it just means you'll be inundated with more omnipresent ads that take more willpower to ignore. However strong you think you are, I promise that advertising does probably statistically affect you. Statistically speaking, you don't just ignore it with no consequences. So get rid of as much of it as possible.

As a species, we evolved brains that allowed us to dominate the planet because we had the capability to purposefully reshape the world around us. It's so silly to say that the true human relies on willpower alone. That has literally never been true in the entire evolutionary history of human beings. Imagine saying that it's 'zombie' behavior to use tools and to adapt your environment to make accomplishing tasks easier.

So the point is: install an adblocker. Limit your web-browsing, or block sites outright. If you need to go more extreme, switch off of a smartphone entirely and see if you can get an old-fashioned mobile. Try different strategies and see what works. You are a human being; so heckin act like one and use some tools.

falseassertions• 3 years ago

Idk, "my phone does not make noise and is permanently in DND" is a statement and people look like I've grown an extra head.

No, actually, nothing my phone is going to tell me is important enough to interrupt what I'm doing now. I'm still addicted enough that I'll look at it in the next hour or two. Repeat calls break through DND, but I have no dependents, my parents are half a globe away.

stvswn• 3 years ago

I think different things can work for different people, but here's what has worked for me:

First, what didn't work. I switched to a dumbphone last year with the plans to stick with it for Lent (6.5 weeks). I succeeded but quickly fired up my smartphone, because there were many problems with the plan. I wanted to stop feeling addicted, but I didn't really want to give up on access to Uber, or Venmo, or other things that people expect I can help out with.

So, this year, I did it differently. I keep my smartphone on DND and in my backpack at work or in my desk at home. I took out the SIM and put the SIM in my dumbphone, w/ my dumbphone capable of tethering, so I can (if I need)_ tether my smartphone to my dumbphone. There aren't any social media apps on the smartphone.

If I care enough about Googling something, I just find my laptop. If I need my phone for a task (like Uber), I know where to find it. I am about 2 weeks into it and I still have a bunch of moments where I feel like I should take my phone out of my pocket for no reason at all, but it isn't there, so I don't.

Group texts are the worst part. I would love a dumbphone that can do MMS, but I can't find one. Group texting is pretty essential for practical reasons (groups of parents will use it to organize children's events, for example). I can't retrain everyone else to fit my eccentricity (in their view), so I am left replying back to group MMS with individual replies, it's inconvenient. If I can solve this I will likely never return to everyday smartphone usage.

ace32229• 3 years ago

Sounds like you simply need a communication device - not necessarily a "phone" with all that encompasses nowadays. One option would be to disable all apps/functions that aren't calling or texting (maybe emailing too depending on your usage). Another option would be getting a non-smart phone to enforce the above.

techstrategist8• 3 years ago

Vouched to bring this comment back to life. Probably flagged because it’s an “actually your problem is very simple” response, but there’s truth to it.

My pocket device needs these features: (a touch short of absolute requirements, but who’s counting)

a nice camera; cellular connection for data, sms, and voice calls; receive notifications from various apps (email, school, daycare, whatsapp), actually open the apps that don’t put all the relevant information in the notification; and play spotify and libro.fm with a speaker and bluetooth headphones.

While reducing excess usage in ways that are not too complex to configure, and also not too easy to disable.

Maybe I could get close with a wifi camera + a cellular watch?

DeathArrow7• 3 years ago

And I’m still not sure what do do about it.

Maybe break the touch screen again?

techstrategist8• 3 years ago

I can always switch back to the old phone, if I can figure out how to ensure I can always answer calls and read notifications. I’d miss the upgraded camera but maybe it’s worth it.

jgrahamc2• 3 years ago

My relationship felt better than ever, because we wouldn’t both lay next to each other on our phones before sleeping

You could always do what I did and simply ban all electronics from the bedroom. In my bedroom there is a battery powered clock and that's it. No TV, phones or anything else.

RMPR2• 3 years ago

Same, but I do allow ebook readers obviously not connected to Internet.

JohnFen18• 3 years ago

This. The bed should be for sleeping and sex, nothing else.

techstrategist8• 3 years ago

Even just switching from phone at night to tablet or e-reader was a massive improvement. Something about the phone makes it much more compelling and harder to put down. Never had a bedroom tv and definitely won’t. I’d prefer that my wife also kept her phone out, but she’s an adult and I’m not going to ban it.

uoaei2• 3 years ago

It sounds like better sleep is probably a lot of the explanation of the improvement, too.

mixto• 3 years ago

Recently I uninstalled most of the applications on my phone, including the browser, email, youtube, and any other form of social media. Now I mostly use my phone for podcasts, texting, phone calls, maps, and as calendar. It's really great!

It's worth a try I think. You can always reinstall those apps if you change your mind.

shepherdjerred2• 3 years ago

I wish I could get rid of my phone, but I can't. it's too useful. What I did to use my phone less is:

* Set the screen to grayscale. I have a shortcut setup to toggle grayscale/color, so that I can view things like images/videos the friends send me, but I go straight back to grayscale afterwards. I found that I spent a lot less time on apps like Instagram when they're in grayscale.

* Set up time limits for apps. Android and iOS both have features for this. In addition, set it up so that you need to enter a PIN to go over the limit. This worked well for me for a bit, but I quickly became reflexive in going over the limit (even with a PIN!). Adding a little bit of friction to going over the limit gives me the chance to think and consider if I really want to be using my phone. So, don't memorize the PIN that you set -- write it down on a piece of paper and stick it between the back of your phone and your phone case. This adds some friction so that you don't reflexively go over your time limits -- if you _really_ need to use some app you can.

* Delete any apps that you don't actually need. For me, I deleted all social media apps, and basically anything I could access on my desktop/laptop. Go further, and really question what apps you need. Do you really need easy access to your email, or Discord, or Reddit, on your phone?

* If you're able to stomach it, delete your social media accounts. I did this last year, and I don't miss anything. I keep in touch with friends by texting them, asking to setup phone calls, and so on. I did like being able to see what's going on in my friend's lives, but I don't think it was worth the negative effects. If you want to keep in touch with people, you can do so without social media. Send postcards or letters to friends. Actually seek out talking to the people that you want to hear from, rather than passively posting/reading online.

* Consider your consumption of news like Reddit, Hacker News, news sites, and so on. I thought I needed Reddit. I thought that it added positive value. I spent a _lot_ of time on Reddit in college. But, after I graduated I slowly weaned myself off. Now I realize that it did have _some_ marginal benefit in keeping up with the news, but I think there was a giant negative impact. Reddit can be a very negative and cynical place; I think it can really influence your thoughts in ways you don't realize. I also saw that there are other ways to keep up with current (I now read the New York Times instead).

* Regarding Hacker News, take advantage of the noprocrast features. Also, I use hckr news [0] so that it only shows me the top 10 articles each day. This means I spend less time on here, but I still get the majority of the benefit of reading Hacker News.

Of course, you don't have to apply all of the above at once! According to iOS Screen Time, over the course of maybe ~2 years I went from using my phone 2.5-3 hours per day, to ~15 minutes per day now.

Hope that you find something that works for you! You (or anyone else!) feel free to email me if you need any advice. I'm certainly not an expert, but I'm so happy that I no longer reflexively pull out my phone.

* [0]: https://hckrnews.com/

danShumway2• 3 years ago

A lot of this is individual, and different strategies work for different people. I tried the grayscale trick and found that it weirdly enough increased my phone usage. Could be a long conversation potentially. Setting focus mode/time limits helped more.

But, it's good to experiment with this stuff, and this is a good list of things to experiment with.

In particular I want to throw out another vote for:

* Delete any apps that you don't actually need. For me, I deleted all social media apps, and basically anything I could access on my desktop/laptop. Go further, and really question what apps you need. Do you really need easy access to your email, or Discord, or Reddit, on your phone?

This is probably the first thing I recommend to people after "install an adblocker."

It is a really big deal if the only notifications that happen on your phone are actually important ones, and deleting messengers is a big part of that. My phone is an important part of my organizational life for calendar events, notes, alarms, etc... When it dings, I need it to ding specifically because there's an alarm or reminder or important email that's come through, not because somebody DMed me on Discord.

Again, everyone is individual, but I think more people should experiment with this as a first step. Most of that communication is asynchronous, you should be able to walk away from it and get some relief from it, and having it only a desktop computer allows for that more easily. And it's not just notifications, it's the blue dot that shows up next to the app, is being able to instinctively check it without thinking. Restricting that can be very helpful.

I've had a policy at every job I've worked at that I do not have Slack on any of my home devices.

There are privacy/separation reasons for that as well, but attention is a part of it. Even if I could have Slack on my phone with no privacy risks and it wasn't a work-related app on a personal device, I still need that separation from my job when I disconnect at the end of the day. If it's an emergency, people in the company have my email and phone number. But I don't need to be getting dings on my phone because someone posted a joke into the "random" channel. My phone dings when it's important.

Having more dedicated/purposeful devices can be a big deal. Of course, it's a little privileged for me to be able to make that choice, not everyone has multiple devices that they can turn into more specialized machines. But if you have that privilege, consider taking advantage of it.

mixmastamyk2• 3 years ago

Our internet shuts off at 11pm at the router so no way to modify that for hours.

colinflane2• 3 years ago

Exact same thing happened to me when we traveled to Costa Rica for a wedding and I unwittingly waded into the Pacific with my waterproof-but-cracked Galaxy in the pocket of my swimming trunks. Came out in death throes, scanning pink lines and emitting horrible noises. Bliss!

Returned to the States and decided to upgrade to an iPhone, but the wait times for the 14 was a couple weeks. Exceptionally lovely time. Go for a walk after wrapping up work -- and that's all it is!

AussieWog93• 3 years ago

And I’m still not sure what do do about it.

Start by disabling the browser. If you have to make a conscious decision every time you check Reddit, you'll find that you stop doing it so much.

ChaitanyaSai2• 3 years ago

The liberal/conservative gap is interesting. How much of that is due to religious or spiritual practice? What do we find deep meaning in now? For so many who are drawn to movements like effective altriusm, might that meaning come from a focus on challenges the world is facing. Does that focus dwell too much on the negative?

Falkon13132• 3 years ago

How much of that is due to conservatives generally lagging behind progressives simply by nature of being conservative? Especially rural conservatives vs urban progressives, when it comes to tech? (And presence/lack of good internet access.)

How much due to the fact that liberals tend to try to care for society and the world as a whole, and are affected by all the bad news, while conservatives tend to care for their own in-group, especially locally, and aren't affected as much by things that affect others or happen elsewhere (until or unless politicians/media try to rile them up about it specifically)?

ChaitanyaSai2• 3 years ago

That could be a part of it, but groups are usually too complex to reduce to a single dimension. As an outsider, I often browse NYT and Fox News and am struck by how utterly different front page coverage is. I don't mean the tone of coverage, just the articles and categories that make it to the front page, which either reflect an editorial bias and/or what's getting eyeballs.

boilerupnc• 3 years ago

This reminds me of that promotion for the “Offline Glass” [0]. Was a funny idea with some merit to encourage folks to either drink constantly or keep their phones down (as much as possible) “You can’t hold your phone because of the unique shape of the glass’ bottom.

The glass has a notch cut out of it so it will only stand if it’s situated on top of a phone”

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/18/the-offline-glass-ensures-...

thenerdhead4• 3 years ago

It's probably the phones when you zoom into the last few years. But it goes back even further.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest

The core idea is that something becomes so addicting that you lose the ability to do anything else.

Concrete example: A few years ago I decided I had enough technology usage and started to taper off and remove many devices from my living spaces. As I did this, I regained the ability to do more things. Some of those things involved writing a couple books(one on this topic specifically). Some of those things got me promoted at work. Some of those things had me present in my kids activities. Some of those things had me building a community around a new sport I've never played -- basketball.

DeathArrow7• 3 years ago

100% true. People will always find an addiction if they don't watch themselves. TV, social networks, gaming, it doesn't matter.

They answer is to be able to control yourself, and be moderate, no matter what the temptation is.

jeremyjh• 3 years ago

It is true but the difference also does matter; phones are always with us, they invade social situations in a way that TV and desktop internet could never do.

tomtheelder4• 3 years ago

But isn't it possible that these things have different degrees of addictiveness and destructiveness?

Drugs would be the (almost too) obvious analogy. There are many that people develop addictions or dependencies on, but it's pretty clear that there are some that are far more addictive than others, and that not all of them have the same deleterious social and physical consequences.

Why wouldn't activities be the same here? It seems to me that social media might be "worse" than a lot of the others. It's perpetually available, painstakingly engineered to be as addictive as possible, and may (jury is very much out here, but there's some research to suggest this) have properties that make it damaging to the psyche above and beyond normal addiction.

Just like there seem to be drugs whose abuse potential is too high to rely on self-control and moderation, maybe there are activities for which the same is true.

SamBam2• 3 years ago

To be clear, the conclusion of Bowling Alone was that the cause was "technology 'individualizing' people's leisure time via television and the Internet, suspecting that 'virtual reality helmets' would carry this further in the future." [1]

Sub in "phones" for "virtual reality helmets" and the authors conclusions mirror OP's article.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

tayo422• 3 years ago

How much tech did you remove. I'd imagine writing a good book would require a bit of research and stuff. At least the one you mentioned sounds like non fiction.

thenerdhead4• 3 years ago

I have a link in my bio of the book I wrote about it all. It doesn't contain much of these details. More of the driving philosophy.

How much did I remove?

- Stopped using my smartphone on a daily basis. Maybe 1-2 pickups a day. Down from ~60.

- Don't play video games for recreation, replaced with working out & basketball.

- Only allow my work devices in my office. Sets boundaries for personal/work life.

- Each device has a job-to-be-done. I can only write on my laptop. I can only communicate with my phone. I can only read on my iPad. I can only work on my work machine. etc

- Got rid of most streaming services and televisions. Watch maybe a 30-60 minute show every other night.

- Turned my bedroom into a cave, no artificial light.

- When bored, I pickup a book and place them all around my house so I'm not reaching for a device.

- etc.

lifefeed2• 3 years ago

Infinite Jest?

Of course, the first chapter is about one kid's final inability to communicate.

colineartheta• 3 years ago

The whole book is about the search for an entertainment disc so addicting anyone who watches it winds up so enraptured by it that they consume it endlessly until they wind up dying.

Sounds a bit like a less intensive phone/social media addiction if I've ever heard of one.

ravagat8• 3 years ago

I loved Bowling Alone and had Infinite Jest gathering dust, thanks for linking the to other books!

spaceman_20202• 3 years ago

Social media is such a weird thing. You feel envy even when you're doing pretty well.

Like I would see some old school friend sharing vacation pictures on Instagram and I would somehow feel an instant pang of envy. Even though I had been on a vacation literally a month back.

I concluded that I was getting absolutely nothing out of social media. The entertainment is middling at best. The connections are shallow. And the feeling of envy can be overwhelming.

Deleted Instagram and Facebook. Kept WhatsApp because that has actual friends and family. Kept Twitter because shitposting on anonymous accounts is actually fun and has no impact on my state of wellbeing.

Also, I don't know what TikTok is like because its banned in my country, but Facebook and Instagram (especially Instagram) seem to be the most mentally damaging of all social media apps. Maybe its because of its culture or maybe its designed to be that way, but it really, truly is awful.

is_true• 3 years ago

I think we should focus on not feeling envy when others are doing well. I always like to think that if everyone around me is rich, no one is gonna ask me money, haha.

piaste4• 3 years ago

It's not quite envy, it's expectations.

It's like being at a dinner party full of people dressed up to the nines while you're just there in a clean but unremarkable shirt and blazer. You can genuinely like everybody at the table, you'll still feel an undercurrent of discomfort.

And that dinner party lasts 24/7.

lakomen• 3 years ago

It's not and never has been phones. It's the state of the "world", relationships or lack thereof. As if you've never been a teenager and forgot all about it. Teenagers are people who are trying to break off from parental and supervision in general. Find their path, get confronted with them being mortal, as a kid you have no idea what that means.

Personally I had a goth phase, well at first it was Rap music, then Gothic, then Techno. Music is very important when you're a teen. In my goth phase I listened to depressing music dealing with death and injustice. I wore black clothes. One day I had enough of the self torture and Techno was the new thing which I liked very much since I was also playing games on the C64 and those had great music. When I was into Rap I did scratch a lot so later I was throwing parties and was trying to make it as a DJ and music producer. But without money and false friends, my records got stolen and trackers were the only tech for cheaply creating music on the computer back then, later with windows 95 98 and so on you had actual virtual synths.

Anyhow I digress...

Even as an adult the state of our world gets me down. The white is black newspeech or let's call it the Orwellian Dystopia we live in. The wars and injustices. The corruption. The disregard for life and lack of respect and knowledge and most of all tolerance and understanding for being human and not being perfect. The do or die. The fact that this world could be a paradise but the powers that be choose that it shouldn't. The American imperialism, the Chinese lunacy, the European arrogance and fakeness and the Russian imperialism. Just stop with the world domination game and selling weapons. Stop profiting from the deaths of innocents. Why can't we all be friends?

2010 I remember very well. I had a girlfriend. She cheated on me. I was heartbroken and got abandoned by everyone. 2010-2012 I spend playing an MMORPG. It was the place where I was happy once. So I returned there. But it was changed. People were hateful and aggressive. The guild I've been a part of was no more. It got destroyed by some asshole kids, who acted like they own the place. In real life people were also worse, less understanding and more hateful. 2012 I quit playing that game, I was still hurting every day. I joined Google+ and focused on my income. I learned JS and Go. AngularJS. 2014 then financial success. And that broke the pain I felt every day in my chest since she cheated. That went until 2020. Now I'm applying for social security. That is a personal low. I always fought against being dependant on anyone. I never wanted state alms. I never had debt. I'm a proud person. This isn't easy. And I hate that it has come to this. Most job ads suck. They're essentially ads for the company. They want you to be their bitch, requiring you to be responsible for the whole process. "You will be working with our Cloud infrastructure where you will write , test, deploy and monitor the application stack, improve out infrastructure and evaluate alternative technologies, and well pay you 1/4 of an American and you'll like it". Yeah and on the side I'll save the world from famine and normalize the climate, and end all wars.

They don't want colleagues, they want slaves. And I have a problem with that.

Contract work, only with connections, which I don't have anymore. I'm in a contractor database. I ask 75€/h or 600€/day. Others ask 100€+/h. I've done PHP for 11 years, I've seen the 2001 bubble burst. I had a web hosting service, a top 1000 site on Alexa, worked freelance for national players, fixed scripts students abandoned because they were unable to do it properly. I know my stuff but I can't get in there. Those social networks are no social at all. LinkedIn sucks ass, all they do is push their tech. You search for Go jobs, they show you .net C# jobs. Mastodon sucks too. You can't have a normal conversation. Most don't even respond and if they do most of the time they're acting aggressive or ignorant. Why are they on a social network then? Should I intensify my Java knowledge? But I hate Java. Go is the way. Should I learn more about C# and .net? Should I go back to PHP where I'd work on e-commerce boredom? Meeeeh. There's only one way out, finish my projects and hope people find them usefu, meanwhile being on social security. I feel like I'm this talent that goes to waste because no one ever discovered me because I'm not in the clique and live a hermit life, but I also dislike big city life. Can't have your cake and eat it too. Or like they say in the country my mom is from, you can't clench and fart at the same time ;)

What I really want to do though is travel the world, like a digital nomad, before I die. Where are the low maintenance remote jobs?

DeathArrow7• 3 years ago

Doesn't matter. I would still blame the conservatives and Elon Musk for this!

quitit2• 3 years ago

Anecdotally (i.e. the children around me and clients who have approached me with specific problems because they're not well versed with social media).

- 1. Spending a long amount of time interacting online, obviously means that what happens online is a bigger part of their world. Reducing online time is not a small feat, the child needs alternatives not just to be subjected to boredom.

- 2. Better access to information has matured a lot of the topics that children are exposed to. Young people often feel their life position is in immediate danger as they don't know how to fully interpret risks like their parents.

- 3. It's much easier to see what you do and don't have in comparison to others (a problem not unique to children.)

- 4. Online allows for more adversarial discourse (plenty here in HN too), a lot of people don't know how to disagree without involving some kind of personal and emotionally driven response. They feel that all ideas are somehow attached to and define oneself, and thus must be protected - even from new information. While this is tied to the development of the brain, parents here can impart skills to their children to better manage these situations.

- 5. Kids have found new ways to be cruel to each other that extends beyond the playground and easily supervised spaces.

- 6. Online/social media has embraced reaction/feedback systems to harvest data for algorithmically generated content and moderation. This in turn has made people accustomed to valuing their input based on how others have valued it. Unlike the past, kids can see very clearly who doesn't like them. It's also a pathway for sexual abuse as children can be coerced (i.e. groomed) into posting more and more revealing content for 'likes' - even from their peers: as they may learn to value themselves by their appearance.

- 7. Kids feel even more pressure to conform and disguise themselves. Reddit has their "hivemind" for example, and presenting counter-points must be done carefully, almost PR-like manner or risk being abused by strangers.

Parents need to find ways of disrupting these negative influences and reducing online time to deemphasise the role it has in childrens' lives. Games and activities are a good way of developing the child's interests in a way that can make online/social media feel small in comparison, while also helping them develop confidence and coping skills (such as dealing with disappointment, adversaries or those that disagree.) In general I notice that people who use online as a resource are mentally better than those who use it to fill boredom.

unityByFreedom• 3 years ago

See also Jonathan Haidt's "Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence."

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

yamrzou• 3 years ago

Discussed 7 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34901571

JustSomeNobody• 3 years ago

It's social media, the attention economy and fucked up algos that psychologically addict people to it. Phones just made it easier to access.

Havoc2• 3 years ago

Things started getting worse around 2012 or 2013:

That's easy:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=i...

zeroonetwothree10• 3 years ago

The chart plateaus at 2014 but we see an increase in depression continue well past that. It seems unlikely there would be an 8 year lag in effects (studies seem to find more like a mere 2 weeks!)

Havoc2• 3 years ago

Not sure I'd expect continuous good correlation throughout (esp with tiktok, fb reels etc noise). Posted the link more to highlight the start date.

It can't be a coincidence that bunch of girl start getting depressed right in the year an app takes off that is famous for filter heavy distorted reality of what other's perfect lives and perfect bodies look like.

Not super scientific I know but seems quite persuasive to me.

6_6_6• 3 years ago

this article is a garden variety of corelations

life is more complex and intertwined

slifin• 3 years ago

Probably also from an increase in car dependency

It means kids cannot play outside or go to a friends house etc

Adults don't typically suffer the same restrictions so at least have an alternative to their phones

arsome• 3 years ago

That's certainly not a development new since 2010.

alexb_• 3 years ago

A part of the problem is that social media is at a point where being the 1 person to drop it as a teenager could have significant worsening effects purely because you now have absolutely no way to talk with friends outside of school (because they are all on social media)

MagicMoonlight• 3 years ago

Maybe the world did end in 2012

bnralt• 3 years ago

Side note: Interestingly, teen loneliness briefly went way down from about 1996 to about 2006. That’s consistent with the idea that the old computer-based internet was a complement to in-person interaction

That’s been my experience too. In the early year, I remember having long conversations with different friends every night on AIM. Even some casual acquaintances ended up being good friends because of the conversation we had. I kept up with people all over the world with personal e-mail, sometimes for years.

It does seems that between 2010-14 or so, people disappeared en masse from AIM. People stopped writing back to personal e-mail. Everyone migrated to social media, even though social media wasn’t a replacement. Every thing was public, good friend and strangers being in the same bucket. Long form conversations between two people disappeared. Someone would through out something to everyone they were connected to, and you could comment or ignore it. Communication just became very public, impersonal, and shallow.

foobarbecue3• 3 years ago

Absolutely.

My workplace is in the throes of a "back to the office" vs "pro-telework" battle, and it seems to me that those of us who grew up during those wonderful instant messaging / email years are the core of the pro-telework camp.

We know the power of asynchronous communication. We know it can transmit deep thought. We know it can create and sustain friendships, and it can be fun! We also know that the technology is all messed up now and needs a lot of work if we're going to regain what corporations destroyed in the last decade.

vehemenz• 3 years ago

This is my experience too, but I think it possibly corresponds to the transition to mid 20s and adulthood, where a lot this contact drops off anyway (not that it should).

I'd be interested to know what it was like for older adults, but my guess is that a lot of them weren't using AIM that way in the first place.

JohnFen18• 3 years ago

I'm an older adult, and my experience of that period of time echoes this. The dropoff wasn't related to age, it was an effect of that moment in time.

khornschemeier• 3 years ago

This is a good point and a similar experience for me (I was in high school 1996-2000). I'll add that, in my experience, those private, deep conversations through AIM and email enhanced my in-person relationships. While phones and social media have interfered with them.

toastal• 3 years ago

With rose-tinted glasses, we can and probably should go back to this. I fondly remember YIM from high school and eventually getting Pidgin/Adium to wrangle ICQ, MSN, AIM, and the mass of options Jabber-based options via libpurple. I'd chat with folks about what they were doing on the weekend and where to meet up--to get away from the computer. XMPP is still around and being worked on with decentralization and with OMEMO we can have the encrypted chats we didn't at the time. I've even seen some clients picking up "stickers" that some folks love. I also agree with the public persona of social media eroding the intimacy of conversation as well--just like in real life 1-on-1 conversation is always more intimate than going with a group (or hanging in the MUC). When you'd head to a MUC, it wasn't uncommon to add someone you thought was interesting to your roster and check in with a DM every once in a while.

doublepg232• 3 years ago

I think you’re just using the wrong platforms for that experience.

I’ve been on Telegram for ages and talk daily to people who live on the other side of the world. I’ve never met them in person but we’ve had rich, personal, discussions and I consider them my friends.

On the meatspace side I video call daily with my childhood friends even though we’re hours away. I’m not sure how I could have kept up my friendship if I didn’t have modern technology to video call, game, instant message etc. We always end up grounding it with visits every two months or so but it’s essential to my relationship to stay in the loop.

pixl97• 3 years ago

It's not they are using the wrong platform exactly... FB for example started with the idea that people should talk to each other.

But then it's worth a lot more money if they stop talking and start buying

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...

AlwaysRock2• 3 years ago

Yup. Actual conversations were replaced by liking or commenting something short. Those micro interactions are almost useless.

foobarbecue3• 3 years ago

I upvoted this... And then literally smacked my head.

reidjs2• 3 years ago

I disagree, those micro interactions complement async conversations - an easy way to acknowledge something, equivalent of saying 'lol' or 'ok'.

justin_oaks• 3 years ago

Whenever I comment on Hacker News, I'm always thrilled to get reply comments. It shows that someone read my comment, thought about it, and had something more to contribute to the conversation.

While it's nice to see "number go up" from the upvotes on my comments, that simply doesn't have the same value to me as having the conversation move forward.

Sadly, Hacker News isn't the best place to have conversations. Threads can start fast on 1st page articles, run up a bunch of comments, and then the discussion dries up within hours. Ugh.

orange_fritter• 3 years ago

Arguably worse than nothing in some situations. It's easy to speculate that upvotes/downvotes may contribute to bubbles, blind spots, and polarization when there is a tribal divide or some other kind of groupthink pathology.

edit- specifically, I'm thinking of politically-minded forums where the top comments are just comments that reinforce the accepted mentality without really challenging anybody's ideas

treis3• 3 years ago

This seems like just another iteration of old people decrying technology they don't like:

Communication these days is so impersonal. Why can't they have a chat instead of public posts

Why can't they call and actually talk to each other instead of chat

Why can't they write each other e-mails instead of these superficial chats

Why can't they send letters instead of these impersonal e-mails

Why can't they meet up in person like we used to

Communication changes and life goes on. Don't really see much difference with phones. It's just the same "kids these days" and the same obliviousness as always that they've become the "old man yelling at cloud".

GeoAtreides• 3 years ago

Don't really see much difference with phones

except, you know, the topic we're discussing. Teenage unhappiness. With actual hard data, for example, the number of suicides. So it might just be this time is different.

And, last but not least: past performance is not indicative of future results.

horsawlarway2• 3 years ago

Objectively speaking - I think we've never had as many companies vying for our attention as we do today.

Worse - we've never had the ability to give those companies real time feedback on whether their strategies are working like we do today.

So while I somewhat agree with:

Communication changes and life goes on. Don't really see much difference with phones. It's just the same "kids these days" and the same obliviousness as always that they've become the "old man yelling at cloud".

It's pretty hard to argue with the plain fact that teen suicide rates are WAY up compared to the last 40 years.

So if you're going to take the opinion "this is just old people being curmudgeons" I don't really see you making a compelling argument that they're wrong. If anything - maybe they're right...?

pavon• 3 years ago

It does seems that between 2010-14 or so, people disappeared en masse from AIM. People stopped writing back to personal e-mail. Everyone migrated to social media, even though social media wasn’t a replacement.

In my experience, it was texting (and similar 1-on-1 phone apps) that displaced IM, not social media.

gnicholas• 3 years ago

IME it was before 2010. I was in college 2000-2004, and people used AIM then to keep in touch. But by the time I was in law school from 2004-2007, AIM was sparsely used by my peers. I wasn't texting at the time either, nor was I on FB. I guess we just emailed.

ravagat8• 3 years ago

I wouldn't say it displaced but rather emphasized the instantaneous part of IM (Instant Messaging). The portability and convenience with the innovation in social media combined pros of the AIM, personal e-mail, etc.

cma2• 3 years ago

I would be shocked if there wasn't a monotonic increase in group chat/private chat during all those years to now. AIM just never made the transition to phones successfully.

thequadehunter2• 3 years ago

One of the few places I was able to recapture the early internet magic was on Discord from 2015-2018.

Unfortunately, that is very difficult nowdays with the popularity it's found. When I was using the internet in the late 90's/early 2000's it felt like a safe haven for a geek like me to be myself without being punished for it. A lot of that magic wears off when the people who used to kick my ass for being a nerd became chronically online.

ccanassa• 3 years ago

In my country, the internet was frustratingly slow and expensive. To enjoy online gaming with my friends, we resorted to hosting LAN parties at someone's house. These gatherings were incredibly enjoyable, far surpassing the experience of playing alone online.

Moreover, our LAN parties had an unexpected benefit: we all became TCP/IP network experts. Each of us knew how to construct our cables.

ravagat8• 3 years ago

I think another part to this drop was home-computers vs. portable computers like laptops rise in popularity. I remember an emphasis of seperation with a home-computer that didn't move with me vs. a portable computer that was always there. I still practice this and advocate others to do the same. Hell a lot of people just end up using their laptops as home-computers anyway with a monitor and dock setup. Funny how that is

superb-owl• 3 years ago

If you're looking to detox, but don't want to regress all the way to a dumbphone, Unihertz has some great tiny Android phones: https://www.unihertz.com/

Everything works (Maps, Uber, etc) but the screen is so small you won't want to use it very much.

SamBam2• 3 years ago

This is very appealing to me. I'm going to assume that the camera sucks, but I guess I could get back to carrying a point and shoot.

(Does a point and shoot camera exist that has the same smarts as a phone camera? Obviously a real camera with a better lens is the best, but that's bulkier. If I'm going to have a crap tiny lens, then I do think the phone's AI adds something.)

polar8• 3 years ago

Just get a phone (iphone or android, your choice) and delete everything except camera, phone, sms. Include google maps and whatever else you want. You can even set parental restrictions and leave the code in a drawer to avoid needing to exercise self control.

app4soft2• 3 years ago

Things started getting worse around 2012 or 2013

During 2012-2013 all Symbian[0] smartphones got last updates and then was abandoned by Nokia.[1,2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian

[1] https://www.phonearena.com/news/The-last-Symbian-update-FP2-...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/13/rip-symbian/

ravagat8• 3 years ago

Was looking for something along this subject. When Symbian died I thought it was really bad that development on it would die switching from open source. I think there is or will be a market for a simpler phone OS like Symbian. Surprisingly I've seen folks in the country and internationally who still use Symbian/Nokia phones although the discontinuation of 2G/3G support is removing that unfortunately.

app4soft2• 3 years ago

I think there is or will be a market for a simpler phone OS like Symbian.

As for me, Symbian is not simpler OS, instead Symbian in many cases is better than Android or iOS even now.

INTPenis• 3 years ago

I have my own hypothesis. I was born in the mid 80s, just FYI in case it makes a difference to my perspective.

It's information overload. And not just information overload, but the type of information people are consuming from online sources.

The brain is a lot better at quickly picking up subtle information than we might give it credit for. Just scrolling through a feed you see hundreds of impressions every minute, maybe thousands.

We might think we're just scrolling and we're not actually picking anything up but the brain is subtly reading all of those little messages. Not only is it hard to digest, but the type of information is often unfiltered intrusive thoughts that one wouldn't normally share IRL.

Add to that the fact that you can't just be yourself these days without someone filming you, and you become a meme. We started laughing at people for being themselves and being filmed, and now we're afraid of becoming a meme ourselves.

So two major factors for unhappiness in this age I believe are people censoring their real selves, or feeling ashamed of what's in their heads, and constantly being fed the opinions of thousands of strangers in a never ending stream.

English isn't my first language so I'm sorry if this is misunderstood by someone, please know that I'm just freely typing here with no former education or any research to back this up. It's just a gut feeling.

I just don't think the human brain was designed to cope with all this constant information. Not just news, but also psychological information about what people think or feel, all over the world. It's confusing us and distracting us from self care.

xbar• 3 years ago

Worth a read for both its prescient accuracy and its insight on the topic of information overload: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock

mydriasis• 3 years ago

Yes, it's the phones. This comment section feels a little better than the last few times this obvious idea has been pointed out -- generally when folks have blamed the phones in the past, dopamine fiends have come out of the woodwork to defend their devices and blame _everything else but the phones_.

This tech is _straight up bad for you_. We like to pretend like having the internet accessible at all times is strictly a marvel of human achievement. While it is indeed a marvel, it's also been contorted into a disgusting mess that's specifically designed to keep you coming back to it like an addict after a fix. An entire industry has been built around sucking you into your device.

The idea that we're giving something this poisonous to children -- and further, that it's a social norm to do so -- _really_ gives me pause.

cribbles• 3 years ago

I think the reluctance to blame phones is not just that people have a personal, dopaminergic fixation on them.

There are a couple of other factors at play:

1. Thinking people, especially of the sort that frequent Hacker News, want there to be a more complex and multivariate reason behind the "big problems" like loneliness and alienation. It feels wrong to just say "phones bad."

2. Many of us grew up with emerging technologies, like video games and the internet itself, that were reflexively rejected by generations older than us for reasons that seem poorly thought out in retrospect. We pattern match on the type of blithe Luddism we grew up with, and are instinctively reluctant to say "phones bad" for fear of falling symptom to it.

But I agree with you, and the thesis of this article. The "phones" argument has such obvious explanatory power for a wide range of regressive social phenomena that there needs to be overwhelmingly strong evidence for some other catalyst to drop it from consideration.

luckylion• 3 years ago

This tech is _straight up bad for you_.

What tech? Being able to talk on the phone? Having a phone you can play on? Or is it the apps that you have on your phone and that are available to you 24/7, and are engineered so you feel the need to engage with them 24/7? Because I don't think it's useful to say "it's the phones" in that case. If it's social media, it's social media, not the device you use to access social media.

I'm not addicted to my phone, I'm one of those boring people that use like 50mb of mobile internet a month, and my phone screen is off 99% of the day, so I'm not sure how accurate your assessments are.

mattlondon• 3 years ago

Phones are not the problem. Social media is.

Just don't install twitter or Facebook or whatever, and use the phone as normal. You do not need to use Instagram or tiktok or whatever to use a phone.

timmytokyo• 3 years ago

The essay addresses this issue. Social media may be the more proximate cause of social isolation, but it's the phones that make social media more available.

  Phones provide a behavioral “nudge”, like a pantry stocked with junk food — 
  when your phone is right there in your pocket, it’s easier to just text a
  friend instead of going and hanging out, even if the latter would be
  less fulfilling.

(I think he meant "former", not "latter".)

The "just" in "Just don't install social media" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Yes, that can work. But the temptations offered by that powerful little computer in your pocket makes social media that much more difficult for many to ignore.

diordiderot2• 3 years ago

I spend 100x more time on forums than social and I'm sure I'm not alone

inkcapmushroom• 3 years ago

I don't have social media on my phone. I just had to uninstall Youtube as I am addicted to watching it on my phone (don't watch nearly as much on the computer) and it is causing attention and relationship issues for me.

I get the next argument is something like "Youtube is just like those other ones", but I've also done this same cycle with plenty of other apps which were not social media related. The screen itself is addictive to look at in a way that older devices were not.

zeroonetwothree10• 3 years ago

Social media predates smartphones and yet the increase was specifically when smartphones became prevalent.

throwaway20377• 3 years ago

This overlooks the network effect. If you are between 14 and 24 there is literally _no way_ that you are not on social media. Peer pressure is immense at that age. If you weren't, you would be a social weirdo. To be clear: I agree with your comment, but I'm old, so it's OK to be a social weirdo and avoid social media. :)

thequadehunter2• 3 years ago

Lately I've been working through some mental health issues including some pretty bad OCD. It's always been there since I was diagnosed with autism as a toddler, but these last few years it was getting worse and worse.

I started doing a lot of analysis because I remembered being much happier and more present when I was around age 18-23, then slowly going downhill from there.

I realized that the decline in my mental health directly coincided with age 23, when I got my first smartphone. I didn't want to believe the solution was that simple...but turning off all my notifications and limiting my phone time/turning off my phone restored my mental health back to baseline levels within a week. It's actually astounding how toxic it was, and I didn't even use a lot of instagram or facebook type stuff...the issue was mostly work alerts, constant texts from my gf and friend groups, and reddit.

DeathArrow7• 3 years ago

A few days ago I saw two dudes who sat at a restaurant table and were talking to each other instead of staring at their phones like normal people do. What weirdos, I thought at first. But maybe there's a better explanation, maybe their phones were broken.

VLM• 3 years ago

Its a pity the data is so out of date in the article. Remember, things start, but they also stop. Sounds dumb but in context its insightful.

Lets take the hypothesis as true that as as smart phone use goes up 10% per year, the "Z" measure goes up 0.5. Whatever a "Z" is? Regardless, cell phone use started going up coincidentally at the same time Z started going up. Thus is astrology proven. No wait seriously the point is cell phone use can only go up to near 100% one time. So what happened to the annual 0.5 increase in "Z" after cell phone use topped out at 80% or 90% or 100% or so? Sorry, no data provided.

Another interesting idea: There's a deeper level to phone or social media use. Perhaps its Facebook. I know my kids generation has pretty much abandoned FB, so if its a FB specific problem it should reflect in "Z" levels. Or online dating. Or onlyfans as a job market.

Another interesting idea long the lines of astrology where coincidences prove cause and effect: Peak legacy style TV viewing hours per day was around 2010. Perhaps enormous amounts of professionally produced propaganda had a sedative effect on teens, or professionally produced propaganda in TV form is more effective than social media form.

timerol2• 3 years ago

TFA has a section called "The Burden of Proof" which is a collection of causal studies and natural experiments on the topic of smartphone use.

iamnotsure3• 3 years ago

Smartphones are one of the greatest inventions of humanity. That they democratize access to information about the unfortunate state of the world is a different matter.

chadlavi• 3 years ago

People said this dumb shit about novels too. It's not the phones.

It's the dystopian late stage capitalist hell world they live in. They see no good future for themselves. They know their lives will be worse than ours, which are worse than our parents' were on average in the US.

fleddr13• 3 years ago

Nice try, Taylor Lorenz.

crawfordcomeaux• 3 years ago

At what point does carrying around cell and wifi jammers become a public health service? What's the safest protocol for doing this? The last thing I would want is to be involved in a car accident and prevent medical personnel from being called.

hn8305823• 3 years ago

Phones are certainly a major factor but what about kids not being allowed to play outside? Numerous studies have shown spending time in nature provides significant mental health benefits, so the extreme opposite must be pretty awful.

naijaboiler3• 3 years ago

but why go play outside, when you can find ways to entertain yourself by yourself with your phone

eru3• 3 years ago

One possible reason, suggested by Taylor Lorenz, is that between climate change, inequality, precarity, and Covid, the world is just a much worse place than it was in 2011. But as I pointed out in a post last week, most of these things (except for Covid, obviously) were looking worse a decade ago: [...]

Eh, what people worry about vs how bad things actually are is only weakly correlated.

pohl• 3 years ago

But as I pointed out in a post last week, most of these things (except for Covid, obviously) were looking worse a decade ago

No, they weren't, because a decade ago there was still hope that democratic process could lead to sensible public policy. Now it's not even clear that we can avoid authoritarian capture.

NoGravitas3• 3 years ago

Eh, the phones don't help, and surely contribute to the problem, but fact is, young people are growing up in a cyberpunk dystopia with No Future but the Jackpot. Anxiety and depression are perfectly normal reactions to that. Trying to be a Pinker Thinker and claiming that everything is rosy is just sticking your head in the sand because you personally benefit from the status quo.

swalling• 3 years ago

I would pay money to see a video of Pinker forced to make his “everything is better than you think” argument to a room full of teenagers. No one growing up today cares if they're better off on average than 100 years ago when they're anxious and depressed.

jrochkind13• 3 years ago

This rings so true to me.

I'm in my late 40s, so sometimes I think this is just a consequence of my age -- everyone at this age, for a thousand years, has started thinking things were better when they were kids (get off my lawn!), and the cause is technological changes.

But frequently my much younger acquaintances will agree with me... on the other handn they didn't actually experience it, maybe they just think that's what they're supposed to say.

I still suspect I'm right, and all of this OP matches my thoughts/observations.

Especially that it's about social isolation -- and that the technology of connection in our pockets, despite everything 1990s techno-utopian Mondo 2000 me would have thought -- has led to drastically increased social isolation.

Covid hasn't helped.

I really believe that if we didn't have the internet, we coudln't possibly have isolated as much as we did -- as much as we, on the whole still are, with social changes that seem permanent -- in response to covid -- no matter the dangers. (They couldn't possibly have isolated to the level we did in response to the early 20th c flu epidemic, can they?)

The internet is what made it possible to have that level of isolation.

Or to seem possible.

In fact, it is disastrous for us personally and socially and continues to be -- what seemed possible is not in fact possible as a successful way to live and have a society.

naijaboiler3• 3 years ago

It's the irony of modern world, we are more connected than ever before, and we are more isolated than than ever before. The same tools that connect us, isolates us.

fleddr13• 3 years ago

We're biological creatures evolved to be outside, to interact with the physical world and real people.

It's easily replicable. Go out for some more walks, plan more visits with friends, do some wood craft, gardening or whatever else physical. Your mood will instantly improve, reliably. Because this is your natural state.

At the same time, we also have the built-in tendency to optimize for convenience. That too is perfectly natural. Hence we fully embrace all technology but forget about the cost: drifting ever further away from our very being. We're our own enemy. A common example here on HN would be the excitement regarding working from home. I get it, I love it too. But let's not dismiss that this further tilts things into a flat, isolated, touchless society. You want it, but it's still really bad for you.

Further, as conscious creatures we're not designed to process the information avalanche of the modern age. We process more of it in a day than somebody did in an entire lifetime 2 centuries ago. Likewise we're not designed for the current speed of change.

And finally, we're social creatures but not designed for it at a scale of millions or billions of people. We cannot empathize with the culture, politics and differences of that scale.

jrochkind13• 3 years ago

I'm with you 100% until the last paragraph.

We are definitely social creatures, and living lives of increasingly less social interaction is not going to work out for us personally or as societies.

But I see no reason we can't handle society at a scale of millions or billions of people. It, after all, always is experienced as less than that, even people who live in NYC or Mexico City have regular interactions with a smaller group of 100-200 people at most, even if incidental daily interactions with more people than most of us.

But those incidental daily interactions with a huge number of people -- I am pretty sure are actually positive. To the extent that I'd predict that even in the present society with social interaction limited by the social forces we're talking about -- someone living in manhattan who, on the average can't help but interact incidentally with a huge number of people daily (on average, there are exceptions, going up with wealth!) -- is likely on average to be happier, due to those interactions, than someone in a suburb working remotely who has one to two incidental interactions... a week?

I think those incidental interactions are in fact key to happiness, the more the better, and there is no problem if due to living in some of the densest places on the planet, they are with a huge number of diverse people.

Also I think people seriously under-estimate the extent to which humans have lived in "urban" societies for many thousands of years. Granted, the scale of "urban" was smaller than it is now (a city of 20K people was enormous 500 years ago), but we have always been extremely social creatures, always in fact, in general on aggregate, looking to maximize our number of relationships and interactions. (See eg _Dawn of Everything_). (I also think people way over-estimate the universal cultural homogeniety of "ancient" and "pre-historical" civilizations. Things were not as we assume).

idiotsecant2• 3 years ago

Parent post is right, we are inherantly tribal creature capable of really empathizing and aligning ourselves with maybe 7-10 people. We can find a tribal identity with maybe 30 people. We can productively coordinate with groups of as many as 50-75 people. Any more than that, and we simply can't hold those relationships in our monkey brains and default to 'stranger bad'.

Fortunately, at some point we gained an abstraction layer on top of our monkey brains, capable of empathizing with abstract characteristics such as nation, race, religion, etc. These abstractions are socketed right into our monkey layer and are a hack that can simulate the 50-75 people type relationship for billions of people. Unfortunately that layer needs to be trained, and it's even more unfortunately very easy and quite profitable to train in the wrong ways.

somenameforme3• 3 years ago

Your prediction is extremely intuitive, but there's a bit of a surprise here. People in rural areas tend to experience substantially less loneliness than those in cities. I'll link to a random study [1] showing this, but I'm not saying this because of that study. It's a well known result that's been repeatedly and consistently demonstrated.

I think the probable reason is pretty straight forward. When there are "too many" people in an area there's a really good chance any given person you encounter is someone you'll never encounter again, or sporadically at best. So you start seeing other people as something more like NPCs. We obviously understand other people are other people, but given you'll probably never see this person again any sort of encounter is generally going to be exceptionally superficial.

And even if you try to change that, it's probably not going to be reciprocated. If somebody in a small town wanted to kick up a conversation with and get to meaningfully and really know me, I'd happily reciprocate. Go to their house for a beer or even dinner? Sure, why not? If it happened in a large city, I'd expect he's probably a scammer or just not all there. In either case, I'm going to be looking to end the conversation and move along ASAP.

So you get this paradoxical scenario where people surrounded by orders of magnitude more people end up lonelier than those with far fewer faces about.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30609155/

seaners2• 3 years ago

Why didn't Noah link to the best work being done on this right now? There's a huge, collaborative Google Doc https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

JPKab3• 3 years ago

Noah is the man, BUT he has a really nasty habit of talking about subjects without referring to some canonical sources of his ideas that pre-date his own takes by a ton.

Haidt was WAY ahead of him on the smartphones causing depression by YEARS.

Additionally, with geopolitics, he encapsulates a lot of work by Peter Zeihan without ever referring to him directly.

molsongolden2• 3 years ago

I don't understand why so much of the "social media is harmful" discussion focuses on social isolation and teen judgment. These are obviously important but none of the linked resources discuss the shift in expectations for life outcomes that is caused by social media and internet usage.

The cliche saying is that happiness = reality - expectations.

The spread of the internet has broken users free of their local bubbles and exposed them to an entire world of possibilities. Everyone is now able to compare their life to the global maximum instead of their local maximum. It's much easier now to be successful (along any axis) and miserable because there will always be people who are more successful. All of this has been moved into the internet user's scope of daily existence.

Any links to research or writing in this area will be appreciated. Also, I am not a specialist but would be open to assisting with research in this area.

tayo422• 3 years ago

A common example here on HN would be the excitement regarding working from home. I get it, I love it too. But let's not dismiss that this further tilts things into a flat, isolated, touchless society. You want it, but it's still really bad for you.

work from home and working remote lets me live a way richer life then working in the office allowed for. I have time and energy to dive into hobbies, pick up more hobbies and have the flexibility to travel.

There is so much more to life then spending it in an office, making money for someone else, then commuting for 2 hours, wasting another hour getting ready to do that commute.

ian-g• 3 years ago

I think it's that second piece that's important about wfh. You need to take advantage of it to do more things. I could commute to the suburbs, or I could work from home and leave earlier to hang out with friends.

Or I can go on a road trip and work part of that time doing things in the evening and weekends, taking long lunches, etc...

Working remotely is great if you take advantage of it

mbork_pl• 3 years ago

I have a fairly small apartment where I live with my wife and two kids (7 & 13). I read/write a lot while commuting by public transport.

Work from home is a nightmare for me, even though I have to commute 10+ km to the office.

I mean, to each his own – I don't have any problem with you loving working remotely. But please do not forget that people are in various situations. (I'm not claiming you do, just wanted to mention another perspective.)

diordiderot2• 3 years ago

Your beef isn't with the office it's with capitalism.

UncleOxidant• 3 years ago

Agreed. WFH allows me more time for gardening and getting out in nature.

slothtrop11• 3 years ago

If working doesn't give you any meaning, your job sucks. People tend to like validation, participating in society, creating value for others, etc. Work is usually the best vector. Dicking around with art for the sake of leisure provides some meaning, but doesn't deliver what a good job does. If it did, it would be a job.

micromacrofoot• 3 years ago

It's important to track your work time and actually do something else instead of commute though. I fall into pattern of working longer if I'm not careful.

fleddr13• 3 years ago

Your response is as predictable as HN can possibly be.

godelski• 3 years ago

work from home and working remote lets me live a way richer life then working in the office allowed for. I have time and energy to dive into hobbies, pick up more hobbies and have the flexibility to travel.

Personally I have more time to

> Go out for some more walks, plan more visits with friends, do some wood craft, gardening or whatever else physical.

Working from home I don't feel compelled to sit and do all work at a set period of time. Oh, it's nice and sunny at 3pm when I'm getting a natural decline in output? I'll go for a walk. Takes an hour, I feel happier, and I come back way more productive. Want a longer lunch with friends? No biggie. (This combined with the commuting aspect you mention, which is actually a high stress period of time for me. My days have far less anxiety working from home. Including the reduced time pressure) I'd argue that I have far more productive work hours between 9 and 6 because of WFH.

I see people making fun of your answer but I think the big difference is how people treat work from home vs work in the office. There's definitely also environmental factors. I'm sure there are others that greatly benefit from a very fixed structure. Probably depends on personality and what you do. I'm a researcher and I'm not sure there's ever really an "off the clock" time for me, so the flexibility is far more enjoyable to me. I'm sure there's people that can disconnect better than me. I'm sure there are even researchers that enjoy the structure.

To each their own and I thought that's what we were supposed to learn from this WFH experiment. People are different, who knew? Honestly I'd prefer jobs have work space available but also allow for flexible schedules and not requiring to always be in the office. Hybrid of "x days in the office" isn't the real solution to me. The solution is "let people figure out what's optimal for themselves and make the environment where they can do that thing." (Some days I do work in my office because I need to be in a different space or need to work with someone else. Flexibility is key)

unsui• 3 years ago

I am in the fortunate position where both my wife and myself work from home.

It has been an incredible privilege being able to spend quality time with the person I care for the most without the pressure to optimize what little precious time I have outside of work.

e.g., being able to have lunch together, or just taking a quick break to check in on each other's lives.

Would so much rather have this than sitting in a cubicle or forcibly socializing with people who are acquaintences at best (maybe the introvert in me speaking).

Yes, there are some folks who need the social interaction. There are also those who prefer quality interactions over quantity.

dorchadas9• 3 years ago

Just wanted to say I couldn't agree with you more. So many people have just lost connections to nature and other people, and then wonder why they constantly feel like shit and depressed. We're going down a bad path, and American capitalism and technology "full steam ahead societal consequences be damned" attitudes are only going to make things much, much worse.

kitsunesoba4• 3 years ago

A common example here on HN would be the excitement regarding working from home. I get it, I love it too. But let's not dismiss that this further tilts things into a flat, isolated, touchless society. You want it, but it's still really bad for you.

Speaking for myself, yes I want to work from home, but I don't want a "flat, isolated, touchless society". In fact, regular face to face interactions with others is something I'd like more of, but I'd prefer that the majority of that be outside the workplace.

Don't get me wrong, everywhere I've worked I've loved most of my coworkers and got along with them well enough, but the workplace being a context that can't be opted out of by virtue of being one's livelihood can make it restrictive in ways that I'm not sure is healthy when serving as the place for the bulk of socialization.

Unfortunately building social groups outside of work is difficult and gets increasingly so with age.

Wowfunhappy2• 3 years ago

In fact, regular face to face interactions with others is something I'd like more of, but I'd prefer that the majority of that be outside the workplace.

If you're working 8+ hours a day, I think the raw numbers make it difficult to get substantial face-to-face interaction time outside of work, with people you don't live with. You'd need to be militant about planning an outing every evening.

I know someone who wakes up every morning at 4 am (so for her it's mornings rather than evenings) for either her breakfast club, running group, morning dance party (this is a thing, called Daybreaker), dodge ball league, etc.

Maybe you're like her. I'm not. If I don't meet people at work, I'm alone most days.

zeroonetwothree10• 3 years ago

I don’t know how to get friends :(. I’m stuck with only virtual relationships.

JPKab3• 3 years ago

If you're being serious, as a human being I want you to know I have compassion towards your situation. Even though I'll never meet you, I don't like seeing your message and thinking about the suffering that loneliness causes.

Easiest way to make friends quick:

Activities activities activities. In-person hobbies are awesome for meeting people. I met a big chunk of my friends by doing a highly social activity that attracts cool, laid back intellectuals: Brazillian Jiu Jitsu. Not your speed? Think of any kind of outdoor hobby that requires multiple people. Ultimate Frisbee/Frisbee golf, for example. Think Frisbee sucks? So do I! But meeting up outside and sucking at throwing a Frisbee is still fun, because of the people there, and your outside in fresh air and sun! Drone racing is another nerdy, fun, social hobby as well. Chess in the park, etc etc.

molsongolden2• 3 years ago

Virtual relationships with NPCs or digital relationships with other humans?

fleddr13• 3 years ago

Go do volunteer work, it's where you meet people that like to see you coming. Then build from there.

hoot• 3 years ago

Yeah there's nothing better for mental health than spending 2 hours a day in a car to sit in a dark windowless room for 8 hours with headphones. I went back to remote work this past fall and it has been such a massive boost to my mental health. I spend a ton more time with my family and friends. I take a long lunch every day to spend with my daughter. Never going back to an office.

WheatMillington2• 3 years ago

It sucks that this was your office experience, but your experience is not universal. I commute around 14km taking around 25mins, or considerably less when I take my motorcycle. My office is a large, vibrant building filled with interesting people.

WFH is challenging for me, with two young kids and not enough space. I feel bored and isolated spending so much time alone.

PpEY4fu85hkQpn• 3 years ago

Why would someone choose to live an hour car drive away from a place they agreed to be 5 days a week?

Existenceblinks• 3 years ago

I'm about 900km+ far from almost ALL of my friends. It's just 1 hour by flying, of course +3 hours for the whole end-to-end transport ceremony. Plus hotel cost if it's more than 1 day. If it's only 1 day it's also not worth the round-trip ticket price.

an_ko• 3 years ago

Beware of the "appeal to nature" fallacy [1]. You are right that exercising and going outside have been experimentally demonstrated to improve mood, but there is no such thing as "your natural state", and even if you arbitrarily pick some definition, there is nothing inherently good about it. Is agriculture "unnatural"?

The "we're not designed for the current speed of change" argument has also been made many times 2 centuries ago, for example with claims that the unnatural speed of train travel drives people insane. [2] Such claims are hilarious in retrospect. In 200 years, what will people think of your comment?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature [2]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/railway-madness-victor...

zdragnar• 3 years ago

Is agriculture "unnatural"?

Many species modify their environment intentionally, and some go so far as to engage in a form of farming / animal husbandry. Various ants farm fungi, some species herd aphids for their "honeydew" secretions, pocket gophers cultivate tree roots, etc.

Humans are physical beings, and it is our nature to experience the world through our physical senses. The psychosomatic relationship between our brain and the rest of our nervous system is also well documented (i.e. effects of exercise, gut health and diet on mood, etc).

The digital world is a semi-shared fantasy. The longer you spend there, the more the neglected parts of you will suffer for it.

travisjungroth• 3 years ago

I don't think you'd find the claims of train madness hilarious after being on BART.

In general, I find the "someone made a similar claim in the past and they were wrong then so you're wrong now" argument not persuasive.

jancsika• 3 years ago

In 200 years, what will people think of your comment?

Probably the same think I currently think of the typical Baptist warning that letting a municipality go wet will lead to an uptick in sinful fornication and fisticuffs. (And dancing!) The reasoning is almost certainly off. But as far as consequences, they're not wrong. :)

I'm more concerned about those who would hand wave problems that come from these specific pieces of social media technology in a growing number of studies of those specific social media services. Referring to train-induced insanity reveals OP's flawed reasoning, but it doesn't address at all what "the Phones" are probably doing to U.S. girls and young women.

shrimpx4• 3 years ago

To say that sitting in front of a screen is just as natural as foraging for mushrooms is nonsense from the perspective of what your body is optimized to do, on an evolutionary timescale.

kar5pt3• 3 years ago

Yeah. Virtually none of the suggestions OP is making are "natural" in any meaningful way. Even going for walks usually implies walking in a park, which is an invention of the past 100 years or so. It's also very Euro-centric. In many other cultures its considered strange to just walk around for no reason.

pharrington• 3 years ago

The appeal to nature definitely doesn't hold up, but I'm pretty sure that the historical consensus in 200 years will be that early 21st century social media was psychologically predatory.

super_flanker• 3 years ago

Agreed on most of the part, except work from home/office argument. Working from home allows me to spend lot more time with people who I want to spend time with. I have more time for Gardening, DIY things, working out, etc.

psychomugs• 3 years ago

I don't disagree at all, but your arguments (and, frankly, all of HN, [and, even more frankly, all of the internet which we seem to love to hate]) would really benefit from sources, quotes, etc. Citations are signposts, acknowledgements, and backups that elevate truisms to arguments [1].

[1] https://www.academia.edu/download/32976112/citations_importa...

justajot• 3 years ago

Thank you. And I completely agree.

superultra• 3 years ago

Everyone reading this needs to go read the book the Dawn of Everything. That book - long as it is - synthesizes a lot of preexisting research to argue, among many things, that the thing that makes humans humans is our wild and wacky adaptability.

This idea that there is some kind of pre-idyllic Eden state of nature and man is a myth propagated by wildly unsubstantiated guesses that involved very little or no science or data.

I’m not saying your main point, that getting outside does us some good and that we’re social creatures, is wrong. It’s just that it’s one facet of our long history as evolved animals.

We’re literally built for change. It’s that very adaptability that has allowed us to survive and change.

slothtrop11• 3 years ago

All animals adapt (or try to). In the first place, it doesn't necessarily work (things go extinct), and if it does, it may require evolutionary changes which take a (really) long time. If you think of examples of short-term adaptability, they don't substantially change the animal (e.g. reward circuits); usually it involves strategies and/or symbiosis. For simpler beings like bacteria maybe it's faster.

Some conditions are sure to be either entirely negative, or at least lead to deleterious effects for a very long indeterminate length of time. For instance, chronic calorie restriction (or overconsumption), or having no exposure to bright light or sunlight. Survival is one thing and quality of life is another. Some animals may have evolved to be solitary; how many of those were previously social beings, in the evolutionary chain? That may suggest how likely and viable a strategy that is. Language has evolved as a human power because we are so social - it seems infants learn from direct exposure but don't pick up language well from videos. I don't think emotional needs can be satisfied with cheap substitutes, and as entertainment technology develops, you see the offerings trying to more closely mimic real human interaction (VR, AI, etc). If we surpass the uncanny valley it will be because the synthetic experiences will be indistinguishable, which makes them redundant. It would mean that the way to "adapt" to isolated virtual living is to deceive ourselves with false reality (also see Brave New World and all the consequences entailed as to agency, liberty, the human experience). It becomes a support system for living in isolation - as opposed to devising a support system for living well.

tomtheelder4• 3 years ago

We are uniquely adaptable, but our ability to adapt does not necessarily imply that there are not ideal states. Not only that, there are clearly limits to our adaptability. We can be pushed to the point that we begin to break.

An awful lot of research exists to suggest that exposure to the outdoors has positive effects on mood and well being, and a veritable ocean to suggest that loneliness is toxic to both mental and physical health. It's not a simple appeal to nature- there is empirical data backing the claims that the original commenter made.

Aperocky• 3 years ago

But let's not dismiss that this further tilts things into a flat, isolated, touchless society.

Does it though? I lived in trees that I can just take a stride in for lunch break. There are no trees next to the office.

shrimpx4• 3 years ago

To push back a bit against our being naturally social, ancestral primates were solitary foragers with no natural tendency toward socializing. And even later when we became social hunter gatherers, I venture to imagine it was common to lose your group and become alone, due to the small number of people and dangers abound. Insisting that we’re naturally social is probably more far fetched than admitting it’s fairly normal to become alone.

slothtrop11• 3 years ago

Notwithstanding I'm skeptical of your claim, being "naturally social" is the entire reason language has evolved. A (very) distant ancestor's nature has no claim on your nature.

justrightnow657• 3 years ago

I mean you can call it what it is. An overstressed society generates more economic output than the opposite. It's definitely not healthy, but it has never been about our health. Ever since Frederick Taylor and the factory optimization movement started. It has never stopped. It probably never will. You can't left the cat out of the bag in a world full of identical bags and expect it to finds it's way back to the same bag.

skeaker• 3 years ago

I wonder how/when we'll fix this. Arbitrary needs built into us because it was advantageous a bajillion years ago that only serve to make us unhappy now seem like the kind of thing that we could do without. My money's on brain chips as a bandaid fix, followed eventually by genetic modification patching out that whole issue.

JohnFen18• 3 years ago

this further tilts things into a flat, isolated, touchless society. You want it, but it's still really bad for you.

Working from home does not mean you can't still get out and socialize. It even makes that easier to do.

Fr0styMatt88• 3 years ago

The social thing is really interesting to me; we’re inherently social creatures but why don’t we want to be social? As in, why does social anxiety seem so rampant?

Even in non-tech circles I notice it; people get anxious about talking on the phone, people don’t speak to their neighbours. We were taught ‘stranger danger’ as kids. People are nervous about asking others for directions. On the bus nobody wants to talk to anybody else.

It seems so counterintuitive. In my experience it pre-dates the smartphone age too. If people didn’t find socialising inherently unpleasant, would they have flocked to avoid it en-masse?

ravagat8• 3 years ago

we also have the built-in tendency to optimize for convenience.

Amen, one thing I've noticed just talking and shooting the shit, a lot of people seem to forget their agency. Convenience has not helped at all with that.

Likewise we're not designed for the current speed of change.

+1. Some folks are really overwhelmed because of this and have basically retreated/hibernated on aspects of their lives. Worrying especially for those without anyone.

Great comment

cafard• 3 years ago

If go out for walks in my neighborhood, I interact with plenty of real people. I am on a first-name basis with persons living five blocks away, and know the names of dogs belonging to families I haven't met. Working from home for a year and some months increased the number of walks considerably.

If I go out for walks from work, admittedly I see a greater variety of people. But my interactions with them are limited.

klooney2• 3 years ago

TV was despised by whole generations of educated Americans — an “idiot box” that would shorten your attention span and rot your brain.

The whole first or second chapter of Bowling Alone is about network effects causing downward spirals in socialization, with TV as the primary substitute. It's basically the same story as Haidt's. They were probably right.

zeroonetwothree10• 3 years ago

Why were depression rates so low in the 90s/00s then? It doesn't really add up

klooney2• 3 years ago

TV rots your brain and helped break apart the social fabric, but it makes you happy. Cheers, Friends, The Office- lots of shows basically performed the function of companionship.

XorNot3• 3 years ago

I find it very hard to believe "it's the phones", when 1 in every 8 teen girls reports being a victim of rape.[1]

Of note: 18% of teen girls said they had experienced some form of sexual violence in the past year, compared to only 5% of teen boys.
The rate of teen girls who have experienced sexual violence has increased by 20% since 2017, when the CDC first started tracking the measure, per ABC News. "The percentage of male students who experienced sexual violence by anyone did not change," the report stated. Nearly 15% of teen girls said they had ever been forced to have sex, a 27% jump from 2019 and the first increase since the CDC began tracking the metric, per the Washington Post.

    4% of teen boys said they had ever been forced to have sex, with no increase reported.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2023/02/13/teen-girls-sadness-violence...

fleddr13• 3 years ago

You're contradicting the entire point of the article. You mention increases as of 2017 and 2019 whilst the phone narrative aligns with 2012 and beyond. Mental health fell of a cliff since 2012 and seems to keep degrading ever since. One other study showed that even COVID had a limited effect, it was just a continuation of a trajectory happening since 2012.

XorNot3• 3 years ago

Yes I am, because the article opens with it's conclusion and then steadfastly ignores data regarding serious crimes being perpetrated about the age group it claims to be worried about.

Continuing the one true sociological trend: nobody believes women when they say they've been assaulted.

SilverBirch• 3 years ago

I don't know if my work is impacting how I'm viewing my procrastination from my work, but I view this the same way that I view basically everything I see at my job: "You don't have enough data to say that". Graph of depression scores between 2000-2018. Ok, that tells us...er... not much! And then to take that really limited bit of data and just pick a random technology that doesn't really line up with the timeline at all.... errr? Social media was at like 50% penetration in 2010, we know young people were early adopters, and yet the depression numbers don't break out of their normal range 2013. This is taking very little data and lining it up to things that happened in the world that sort of line up but not really. It couldn't be a better example of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The reason I'm really pushing hard on the "It's not much data" side, is because here's a question - Is teen depression higher than normal? Or was it lower than normal during the early 2000s - a period of high economic growth, US cultural hegemony and monoculture? Who knows! It seems kind of absurd that we should argue one creaky theory should be our prior. If you don't really have enough data to strongly say something is true, your prior should be to say "We don't know". It doesn't help your reasoning to assume one theory at all, and points us in one direction where the answer maybe something completely different.

For example - what if it's actually the case that this is a function of social acceptability. In the past we saw a situation where it was socially unacceptable to be gay (and legally unacceptable worth noting), when that was the case you could survey people and find there were very few gay people. When it became more acceptable, suddenly the surveys showed far more gay people. There genuinely were people at the time this happened that were making the claim this was a conspiracy making people gay. Well, what if the destigmatization of mental health has had a similar effect? There were always depressed teens, but they never "came out" as it were. Then this whole discussion about phones is just... a weird distraction?

greenhearth• 3 years ago

"News organizations and social media shouters have an incentive to show you bad news, because that’s what gets them attention and clout and/or money."

Yeah, maybe there's a lot of this stuff, e.g. Vice is the major misery fetish peddler. But can't the journalists be reporting the bad news because it's actually news and needs to be reported?

smm11• 3 years ago

I honestly think that if Steve Jobs were still around this phone/social media dynamic would have turned out differently.

pksebben• 3 years ago

Industrial society itself was feared and hated for centuries by people who thought it would separate us from the land and commodify our existences. And yet very few of those panics were borne out in the long term

this was not a great point to end that list with. We are commodified to the gills.

logicalmonster• 3 years ago

Anything complicated when it comes to society usually has more than 1 direct or indirect cause. I'm sure phones (and IMO the way online dating works) contribute heavily to some young peoples unhappiness, but there's many other potential reasons why young people might be hopeless for the future. And it might not necessarily be the phones in and of themselves, but something within social media itself.

lampshades• 3 years ago

I know a complain about WFH frequently (maybe you’ve seen me post about it) but I’m pretty sure it’s not doing anything to help our isolation situation.

finfrastrcuture• 3 years ago

Anecdotal, but I've noticed that the seniors in my life are often just as addicted - if not more so - than the 'youths'. Seniors not only have just as much free time as teenagers, but also nobody to tell them no / stop it!

I would love to see an article of the same caliber exploring if the data suggests a link between the rise of phones and senior depression rates.

JPKab3• 3 years ago

I'm a subscriber of Noah's, really like his writing, and think this is a pretty good take. However, he doesn't have kids, and probably doesn't get a full dose of some of the nuance as to some further observations that would give his claims higher confidence.

He misses the tipping point:

Kids on phones and highly addictive, social/collaborative video games (think Fortnite) means less kids in any given OUTSIDE space hanging out. The less kids hanging out in those spaces, the less likely a kid encounters peers their age in a given outdoor/social space. The less likely they encounter peers in those spaces, the less likely they'll even TRY to go to those spaces. It's a tipping point that executes the network effects of growth in reverse. And it's entirely a cascade caused by lazy, overly permissive parents who use screens as babysitters and rationalize it away with either learned helplessness ("I'm too old to understand this tech, how can i regulate it") or the utter BS of "they're learning technology for a future career", as if scrolling tiktok for 7 hours a day teaches kids to code.

I have a 16 year old son. It's hard to emphasize how little they socialize in person nowadays. If a kid spends the night, he'll complain about us having only one Xbox and TV, and how he can't play Fortnite at the same time as the other kid. They PREFER to be in their room at home, playing the same game while talking to my son over a headset.

xthrown1• 3 years ago

I wonder if these people ever talked to friends on the actual telephone. I remember spending hours in the 90s talking to friends there because I was so bored of the TV. Then in the 00s with voip we could talk to more than one person at a time.

Reading this I wonder if this is some sort of baby like forgetting or if I was truly so out there.

MikeTheRocker• 3 years ago

Your anecdote about your son's behavior is the kind of insight that convinces me that parents have a window into the future the rest of us don't. I'm relatively young (mid 20's), but even still it's clear to me the even younger generations are developing fundamentally different ways of operating in the world than I did.

I think phenomena like the reverse network effect resulting in isolating young people are terrifying. I don't know what will be the ripple effects, but I'm inclined to think they won't be good. I also don't know what to do about it, but I get the feeling this is going to become a huge problem modern society hasn't paid enough mind.

zeroonetwothree10• 3 years ago

When I was 16 I played video games the entire time I was visiting my friends too and yet I didn't have these issues. So I suspect video games are not really problem. If anything, socializing while gaming is pretty healthy.

ravagat8• 3 years ago

Yes yes yes. I have similar experience and sentiment. The youth today socialize too little. Fortunately, I've found success holding events/hangouts/hosting for both the kids and parents, sometimes separate and together. It's simple but not easy or hard, effort goes a long way.

jeffwask2• 3 years ago

Sure, it's the phones... not the non-stop barrage of psychological manipulation from the ad driven capitalist hellscape we have created that poison their underdeveloped minds in everything they interact with from websites to games to TV to movies. Never mind they live in a constant state of alertness looking for which classmates going to waltz into school one day and start shooting.

I'm sure though if they put the phone down and touch grass for 15 minutes that will all go away.

jeffwask2• 3 years ago

To me this is a mirror to the problems, I have seen with my generations parents who grew up on "Fairness Doctrine" media. They were used to fair and balanced Walter Kronkite who by law was required to present untainted news. Many never adapted to news as infotainment and the new requirements around seeking multiple sources and such to understand the actual facts.

Our children have similarly been presented a world where the laws protecting children from aggressive ads have been eroded, the psychology of ads has been ramped up, and ads have been hidden and added to products they never existed in.

As an example, I recently saw a TikTok where a young woman was walking people through her 12 year old sister's skin care and makeup routines. She had hundreds of products just an obscene amount of chemicals and ungents. These products and the need for them is often not pushed through typical ads but testimonials from creators and influencers who may or may not indicate they are being paid to push these products.

Even in the escapism of games, teens are bombarded with in game ads, micro transactions, content partnerships, etc. It used to be fire up Mario Bros and play. It's now fire up Fortnight and here's the store, did you buy a battle pass, how about some skins, you better not be using default skins because then you aren't cool. Buy more, pay more, be the cool kid in the latest skin. Entire teams paid to drive monetization by exploiting the psychology of children and adolescents.

It's non-stop and how does a 12 year old have the critical eye to identify these manipulations when most of their parents don't even understand the worlds and communities they live in.

A phone is just a screen and we have dozens of screens in our homes and every one blasts aggressive psychological manipulation at this vulnerable population who used to be protected.

DFHippie• 3 years ago

The people who point to the current state of material plenty and say it therefore can't be the state of the world are mistaken. If you anticipate loss, you will be unhappy. It doesn't matter how rich and comfortable you are. Anxiety is about anticipated threat. And if you believe you are powerless to counter an anticipated threat anxiety becomes despair.

As to whether it is phones, maybe. I know I have three college age kids who are all varying degrees of unhappy, aside from the one who just took his own life. The one who died had almost no presence on social media at any time in his life. The happier of the remaining two spends the most time on her phone and social media.

There must be some underlying cause or suite of causes. I know the phone doesn't fit in their cases. The ever more evident horribleness of much of humanity has clearly weighed on all three. I don't think it was the principle factor in the death of my son. And I know the "but they're rich, healthy, and safe!" argument doesn't do all the work it's supposed to do.

anonymoose33282• 3 years ago

I think it’s also how we interact with them. I remember being “chronically online” as a teenager 15 years ago without a phone, just playing MMORPGs all day and me and my friends (all internet friends the same age, didn’t meet IRL until our early 20s) didn’t have the same issues that teenagers are dealing with now.

I think there’s something inherently comparative and consumerist to social media. I’ve travelled a lot, despite being under 30, and in the last couple years I really felt like a lot of it was just to earn some “achievement” after seeing other people I know traveling places.

I haven’t been on any social media for over a year now, and that latent background noise of “I need to do this, go there, buy that” has faded.

I’d usually consider myself pretty immune to stuff like that but social media often feels like MTV Cribs, just for every social class, and that’s maybe what’s so insidious about it.

Clent• 3 years ago

This issue isn't the device.

It's how the device is being used.

Most of this is explained by social media algorithms.

If you are a developer on these projects, it's going to be hard but you need to accept your slice of responsibility here.

braingenious• 3 years ago

Gotta love all these articles navel-gazing about the cause of teenage depression by econ bloggers.

Has anybody done a poll and asked teens what they’re sad about?

It’s really quite funny to see somebody take Matt Yglesias seriously. The self-described “professional take-haver” looked at two graphs, nodded his head and wrote down “this is causation”, and he’s talking about people having progressive politics!

fundad2• 3 years ago

More people are getting care for depression.... this is terrible!

fundad2• 3 years ago

If the author believe the stigma against neurodivergence wasn't that bad or had some merit, then it's easy to see their perspective that something ruined our perfect society.

bryananderson• 3 years ago

So my prior is definitely "it's the phones", and I am totally fine with being old-man-who-shakes-fist-at-cloud about what phones and social media are doing to kids (and all of us).

But this article does the thing that infuriates me the most about any kind of discourse in the US, across all political tribes: Ameri-solipsism.

How do youth suicide, depression, anxiety, and isolation trends in the US compare to other countries? Across countries, what's the correlation with smartphone and social media adoption? Is there a plausible causal link where we see these trends rise in each country a few years after wide adoption? If it doesn't always follow, what factors separate countries where phones seem to cause depression from those where it doesn't? How do political polarization, economic shifts, and different cultural norms correlate with these things across countries?

No idea! Because a space alien reading this article would come away thinking that Earth consists of precisely one country. Use comparative data to tease out other factors at play? Ha! As if America could have anything to learn from anyone else.

I expect this from jingoistic conservatives, but it's infuriatingly common even among progressives who supposedly reject nationalistic exceptionalism: dive deep into some big problem (which on its surface has nothing US-specific about it) without any curiosity whatsoever about how anyone who's not American deals with it.

Name_Chawps• 3 years ago

Could a healthy middle ground between doing nothing and banning all social media be banning social media on small mobile devices?

Only allow TikTok and Instagram etc. to be installed on desktop computers, laptops, and maybe tablets?

That way people can use them without being glued to them 24/7?

expazl• 3 years ago

The most plausible explanation for teenage unhappiness.

For any explanation to be plausible it has to take into consideration that America is not the world. We don't see the same sharp rises in depression amongs teens in europe, and guess what, europe has phones too, it has social media too. The explanation has to be rooted in something that's taking into account the differences between USA and the rest of the world. One thing that comes to mind is that children likley suffer trauma when they see students murder other students or shoot their teachers, or hear news about such events. But I don't quite think the size of the problem matches the size of depression statistics, even if rampant school shootings and gun violence are a uniquely american problem.

justsocrateasin• 3 years ago

Not true. What statistics do you have here? I've been following Jonathan Haidts substack and he researches this extensively. https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

He cites multiple studies that talk about how the same trends are going on in other countries, and the same trends are occurring under similar timelines in places that receive high speed internet.

lubesGordi• 3 years ago

Anecdotally my anxiety and unhappiness started going way up around 2012/2013 because the loose social groups I was involved with were using facebook to organize, and I'm one of those people who is too literal or sarcastic or something to come off right on social media and so I had difficulty integrating. Previously, my socializing involved more face to face or calls or texts about what was going on, something I'm much better at.

lizard_brain• 3 years ago

Blaming the phones is like blaming Gutenberg for the Thirty Years War.

The prime issue is a lack of intentionality and discipline around how people spend their time.

numbers_guy• 3 years ago

The "phones" aka the Internet ruined everything for me when it come to social life. It used to be, and I caught that briefly, but it used to be that if you had to do something, you had to meet up with people. Maybe we hated it at the time, but meeting up with people forces you to socialize and also keeps you grounded. And moreover it provides social opportunities. I mean, this is not just teenagers suffering from lack of opportunities to socialize.

archarios• 3 years ago

Obligatory plug for the Light Phone 2. I have had one for two years now and I love it. I still keep a smart phone around for some things but it is generally in a drawer powered down. I have had a significant improvement in my mental health since I've gotten it.

timbit42• 3 years ago

Without social media, the phones would be fine.

ixtli2• 3 years ago

Im really happy that people are talking about this but the article doesn't seem to consider the fact that over this period we (americans) have also dramatically increased the quality and breadth of our conversation around mental health. so it could just be that now people are reporting things

zwkrt• 3 years ago

Chicken and egg, I think. I am a firm believer that people don't have much better or worse mental health now over-all. But I do think that in the past mental health was something that was more intuitive and that people got more support for from their immediate social circle. Now that society is further isolated, people both have more time to ruminate about the specifics of their mental health, and the solution to having bad mental health is more frequently to talk to a therapist.

Even this would not by itself cause the increased medicalization of totally normal human problems. However, therapists need to bill insurance and it is not really possible to bill insurance for general malaise. Additionally, more people are expected to be rational economic agents more of the time, and rational economic agents don't have any emotions. So people that fall outside of the narrow bounds of what is considered acceptable and exhibit behavior outside of the narrowing band of that which allows for gainful employment means that more people are categorized as having specific ailments.

People that /are/ able to crush themselves into the little boxes that are required of them to not end up on the streets have their own mental health problems as spill-over.

TL;DR: society optimized for money causes people to feel crazy.

ixtli2• 3 years ago

There's a lot i could say but tbh i agree with most of what you say here.

o_nate• 3 years ago

Phones may have something to do with it, but I'm surprised that nowhere in his article does Noah mention the other major change in the US social landscape over this time range: the widespread legalization of marijuana products. I realize it's not "legal" for teens but you're not living in reality if you don't think it's become much easier for teens to get ahold of potent weed and a myriad of products like weed gummies that didn't even exist before. The links between marijuana use and teen depression are well documented.

TurkishPoptart• 3 years ago

I miss my old life. It feels like another world. Before Twitter took over the world and back when I saw people every day, and didn't think the world was conspiring to turn me into an API input and output.

taeric2• 3 years ago

Oh wow. I was all prepared to agree that it is a big smoking gun; and then I got to the "smart phones were invented in 2007."

I mean, not wrong? Ish. But phones were a much larger part of especially college age youth well before that. Were they as "smart" as what we have now? Of course not. But they still had tons of text and basic news capability for a long time.

I think it is still a strong correlation that does need to be shown as not causal. I cannot think they "sprang from nowhere" as implied by the claim, though.

zeroonetwothree10• 3 years ago

Before smart phones the only thing young people did on phones was text. It's not really comparable.

taeric2• 3 years ago

Fair. I know I was in a fairly text messaging heavy subculture. I remember ICQ took over on the computer and many of the folks that were there would jump over to texting each other. So, I have to grant that things are different.

Workaccount2• 3 years ago

Hah

Just wait a few years until we get AI companions, and everyone else in your life sucks by comparison.

jcadam• 3 years ago

One possible reason, suggested by Taylor Lorenz...

Stopped reading right there.

MBCook• 3 years ago

Yep. The phones.

Not the erosion of rights. Not the Supreme Court ignoring precedent and making partisan decisions. Not books being taken away from schools. Not a pandemic. Not seeing an attempt at overthrowing the government. Not the planet boiling and no one doing anything anything about it.

It can’t be that they can’t find jobs that treat them decently. Or even like the job wanted them to live. Or that they can’t afford school. Or a car. Or to move out. Or to have kids. Or healthcare. Or that they likely know someone crippled by medical debt. Or the opioid crisis. Or that they’ve seen police abuse of power (in person and/or the media). That no one seems accountable for anything.

Couldn’t be the fact the can’t find a counselor/psychiatrist even if they could afford it because there aren’t enough. Or there’s a war on threatening global tensions. No one is “in it together”, the pandemic proved that, so you’re on your own. Extracurriculars cost too much, so you may not even get to try. Your teachers are burnt out and leaving. Even if they aren’t and are good there is a good chance you can’t learn well thanks to disruptive students. Good luck if you’re bored because you need more challenge.

Also? School bathrooms didn’t work for months because other kids kept tearing stuff off the walls as a “prank”.

That’s all off the top of my head.

Yeah. It’s the phones. If we took the phones away everything would be peachy and kids would be happy again.

EDIT: all that and I forgot school/mass shootings and active shooter drills!

dools• 3 years ago

A lot of the stuff you mentioned is quite recent OR doesn’t actually impact teenagers, and the really egregious politics didn’t kick off that badly until Trump got in. The graph shows a sharp rise in teen happiness starting about 2011.

rubidium2• 3 years ago

Given your comment, may I so boldly suggest you probably would be happier without your phone.

sublinear• 3 years ago

the timing just lines up really well. The smartphone was invented in 2007, but it didn’t really become commonplace until the 2010s, exactly when teen happiness fell off a cliff

Oh man so trivially incorrect. Plenty of people had smartphones before that despite the iPhone. What happened in 2010 was social media getting hit by politics and marketing. This isn't even up for debate. It's straight facts.

disqard• 3 years ago

"it’s easier to just text a friend instead of going and hanging out, even if the latter would be less fulfilling"

I think that's a typo, and should be "the latter would be more fulfilling"?

Or else, I'm confused...

low_tech_love2• 3 years ago

One other possible explanation is that phones are everywhere, regardless of most any other factor. Take any teenager, anywhere, in any walk of life, age, or social group, nation, etc. They very, very probably have a phone. Guess what’s also mostly everywhere, regardless of other factors?

None of these are perfect explanations, obviously, but I’ve seen what phones do to my kids (even in the limited amount of time they have) and others. It’s absurd to ignore it. Sure, I can’t prove that phones are the cause, but my son goes from the sweetest kid to an anxious, angry mess as soon as he has a phone in his hands (and before you ask, yes, sometimes it’s inevitable, I live in a capitalist society that expects me to both work my ass off and to take care of my kids at the same time. Also, I don’t have the illusion that I can stop him from ever using one, so I’d better be around and teach him how to deal with it the best way possible).

mbrochh• 3 years ago

That, and the carbs. The time and attention that the phones suck up, also make everyone more likely to consume quick an easy carbs. But it's the carbs that ultimately fuck up your body and then your brain.

moving_sofa• 3 years ago

What also contributes to <18 (and the elderly) social isolation is the car-centric urban planning which denies mobility freedom to this demographics. This is even more relevant in North America

Why We Won't Raise Our Kids in Suburbia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw

Honestly, It's Probably the Phones

Related Stories