"Smartphones" are only "smart" compared to what came before. Which to the youth is irrelevant, because before their day. To them a phone and a smartphone are the same thing. All your comment does is to let everyone know you are old enough to remember phones which weren't smart. Not sure what it adds to the conversation
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?
" 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."
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.
> 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.
That's technically true, but... so what? As I noted, teens might not have access to transportation, so enlarging the geographical area doesn't necessarily help. And it doesn't help teens who don't live in those big metro areas.
Not to mention, you can't just hang out with people who you don't know.
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
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.
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.
Reddit is much worse than that. Reddit is a shrine to consumerism. It's almost entirely about consuming and buying stuff. Be it expensive computers, headphones, computer games, guitar pedals, modular synths. Or maybe it's about over-consuming bad news from your favorite political bubble, or from your city, or country. But it's a website that makes almost every single community regurgitate the same jokes and memes non-stop to the point it could perhaps be replaced already by ChatGPT.
"Oh but thanks to Reddit I found my dream headphones and I'm finally as happy as I was before finding /r/headphones".
I disagree, by filtering and subscribing carefully, I've learned a tremendous amount from Reddit. There's whole subreddits about history, art, literature, finance, programming, fitness, cooking, and economics. That being said, after awhile I've moved more and more to just reading books instead.
But on the other hand: even some communities that are seemingly fountains of knowledge, also thrive by having masses of addicted consumers. Sure, it's much better to be addicted to a valid and interesting subject than to something that's harmful. But it's still a form of addiction to spend an excessive amount of time on them, like some people do (yes I am aware not everyone does it).
I have a complicated relationship with Reddit but it really depends on what you're subscribed to I think. A lot of the direction you're nudged in is consumerist rubbish and the whole platform has enough crappy astroturf to build a country's worth of poor quality football pitches, but if you're very careful about what subs you subscribe to and are diligent at blocking what you dislike it can be a useful platform.
I'd drop it in a heartbeat for the old, slightly janky PHP forums it ate though.
Looking at what makes it to r/all, I think it's mostly about tribal political hot air and cute pictures. And then asking the same questions over and over on askreddit.
You can't divorce hobbies from some level of consumerism, half of what you mentioned is related to music. I can't imagine that a high percentage of redditors are interested in modular synths or boutique headphones. I think you have a conclusion in search of evidence, because that's what you think of people.
Notwithstanding that having some interest in specialty products doesn't necessitate that one "over"consumes. Your level of consumption doesn't scale with your subreddit subscriptions.
I don't understand the recreational sneering of consumption by other consumers, but I think the problem we have now is a culture of passive consumption (tv, social media, this site) rather than biasing towards action. Action doesn't preclude purchases.
Except Reddit is thousands of subforums. If one is toxic, there's another better suited. When moderation on a sub gets out of control it takes maybe 2 clicks for someone to create an alternate subreddit.
Twitter doesn't have anything like that. If there's a problem, well, your only recourse is to become a billionaire, buy out the entire site, fire most of the employees, and try to bend it to your will. But that's more likely to make it worse than better.
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.
Maybe I don’t follow the right people; but even for creators I deeply respect, I haven’t found one who I believe their content benefits of the platform constraints. Any recommendations?
In each tweet she manages to capture a very nuanced point that doesn't seem to require further explanation. The last couple of tweets doesn't feel like they are totally representative thought.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I told them it was a difficult question to answer and that they shouldn't be wholly basing their decisions on what they see today. Job markets shift and so will their interests as they go into university. Be flexible and
build up skills and they'll find something which works well for them. As an example I told them I studied biology and chemistry before moving into CS, and then after being a developer for years I went into teaching.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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".
TBH I think our political system and most of our OpEd pages could benefit from an infusion of shame. Many of them are bad people and continue having prominent roles due to their complete lack of shame. Maybe in psychologically healthy people it’s ineffective, but we do live in a world stalked by psychopaths and I have to believe the shame response evolved to put a check on them.
I feel that the big mid-2015s transition was that shaming reached such critical levels that a whole chunk of public figures flipped to shamelessness, like antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
"Oh you're pointing out something I've done that doesn't align with my stated value system or common decency? Who cares, and I'll do it again"
The Last Psychiatrist blog was obsessed with narcissism, their model of it was that people have a self-image such as "I am a great man", "I am a good mother", "I am a proper Christian", "I am a success with a nice house and sports car and attractive blonde partner" and their main priority is making sure that everyone else has the same image of them as they have. That things which damage the image anger narcissists more than anything else.
In that model, shame is "I wish you hadn't caught me doing that because you will think less of me and I can't accept that". Guilt is "I wish I hadn't done that because it harmed other people and other people matter" which extreme narcissists don't feel. That is, the child who has torn clothes and one parent worries that the child might be hurt under their watch, compared to the parent who punishes the child for making them look like a worse parent to all the bystanders.
And that pattern is something to see everywhere, from internet arguments to international news.
i.e. guilt is [1] "Greek transport minister Kostas Karamanlis has resigned following a rail crash which killed at least 38 people; Mr Karamanlis said he felt it was his “duty” to step down “as a basic indication of respect for the memory of the people who died so unfairly”"
Shame is [2] Turkey blocking social media immediately after the recent earthquake and arresting people who posted things which made the government look bad. Instead of first thought being to the injured or the corruption, it was trying to control how the government looks and punishing those who hurt that image.
Guilt is not something social media can encourage - the other people are names on a screen, far away.
But a focus on your image, the image you present to the world, the perfect life you live, the perfect friends you have, the beautiful places you go, the clever knowledge you have, the busy Github commit log, the witty Twitter stream, those kinds of things are what social media promotes uncomfortably well.
When someone sees you crying or without makeup, that's not the macho or beautiful Instagram image you've cultivated, harm done - to you, to your image - shame shame shame emergency response damage control, post something which puts it in context and explains it, attack back. When you call someone an unfunny moron on Twitter, no harm done but when someone calls you an unfunny moron, damage control - the world must think of me as witty and inciteful because that's all I have on Twitter and if I lose that, I'm nobody, attack back.
i.e. the phones are a proxy, reading a book with other people around instead of talking to them can still feel sociable. Seeing beautiful people on a billboard advert has been a thing for decades. The projection of yourself to the world, text, pictures, videos, blogs, streams, to an internet where all there is is a projection of you which you have to control, seems like more of a problem.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Oof, this makes me sad. Sure it's always good to have the facts at hand if actually necessary, but open discussion is great and sorely missing from a lot of modern interactions.
It's not open discussion though. All avenues are closed except ones that can lead to figuring out a piece of trivia about someone who isn't there!
I guess it works if everyone is equally into a subject but that's pretty rare and by this point I've been put out by it so many times even if I am interested, I'm not interested.
The unknown isn't something to be scared of. It's alright if something isn't settled in stone, you don't need to resolve every little question. You don't even need to resolve the big ones!
Eh, the fact a phone can resolve the question of whether Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs was released first doesn't stop us discussing which is the better film.
> 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.
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
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 :)
You're not wrong that it's more socially acceptable.
It's insane though. IPad is fundamentally a media consumption device. I'm a touchless, fast, organized typer on my laptop (I used to be primary screensharer when I was ops manager). All that socially acceptable iPad would do is handicap me severely :-/
If you can type touchless, try putting the laptop off to the side, and typing
your notes without looking at the screen. The presenter might feel much less ignored if he still has your eye contact.
Yup; it's what I do now that I'm remote - I look directly into the camera while I type :). Alternatively, I screenshare so everybody sees / benefits from the notes.
The horror of trying to do something productive at work…
My guess is most of the gains in productivity during COVID are people not paying attention in pointless meetings and doing real work instead of placating socialites’ ego-driven meglomania.
> 90% of the time people will use their laptops to look at instant messaging, forums, emails, or even try to get some work done. So your boss is not wrong.
> even try to get some work done
I assume it's not what you meant, but it's interesting nonetheless: if being in this meeting does not mean getting work done, maybe the real problem mandatory attendance?
It has me wishing the TRS-80 Model 100/Dynabook form factor had caught on more.
Honestly, yes, I can understand this. A laptop screen pointed towards you feels like a private space, since other people can't easily see it. And indeed, I've definitely gotten work done in meetings for this reason. A device with a screen easily visible to everyone at the table I don't think would have this temptation.
I sometimes use a Model 100 when I need to take notes without distractions, actually.
A Clockworkpi DevTerm [1] is a modern equivalent of TRS-80 Model 100 and could work for this. Should try bringing mine next time I have to go to an onsite.
Could also use a proper one with a serial/wifi modem and telnet into a remote system to take notes [2].
I wish Clockwork Pi would release the DevTerm with a full-size keyboard. Same internals, same everything (even the screen could stay the same size). Without a full-size keyboard it's not really a solid replacement for the Model 100 for writing/notetaking.
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.
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.
Yes, I use a Supernote (competitor to ReMarkable) and it's socially way better than using a laptop.
The laptop has a screen turned to its user, meaning other people don't see their screen and it visually creates a "wall" between the user and the rest of the group.
A tablet doesn't have this problem, it lays on the table.
>>are you really just taking notes, or transcribing
Good point - both :). Sometimes it depends on meeting, sometimes I take turns - i.e. I'll "transcribe" (mindlessly type as I listen/pay attention), and then in a lull or after we covered an "atomic unit" of idea/thought/topic, I'll revise and summarize (convert it into "notes").
My mind works extremely hierarchically, which is why laptop is my preference over any digital paper, with its ability to rearrange - bullet points are my note-taking weapon of choice, and indentations are my friend.
Many people say that they don't need to take a look at their written notes, they get benefit just from writing it down, and it works similarly for me I think - if I end a meeting with a structurally-indented bullet-list, it helped me structure topics/ideas/priorities/actions in my mind, and I'm good to go :)
(many meetings I do both simultaneously - I'll be transcribing mindlessly on private monitor, and screensharing a second monitor where I periodically organize key points and actions for everybody. Like driving manual gearshift, it's a skill that seems distracting initially but develops and becomes automated/reflexive with practice. Usually the transcribing part can be thrown out at the end - it's just there to support the organizing/summarizing/"hierarchizing" action:)
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.
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.
Exactly. It's like that quote about being angry: if it's not something you'll be mad about 6 weeks / 6 months / 6 years from now, why be mad?
Unless it's the point of the conversation, like you're discussing dev salaries and you want to pull up levels.fyi or layoffs.fyi to compare, who cares? Will anyone be better off if they knew which actor you were talking about 6 weeks from now? Meanwhile once I heard about levels.fyi I've been checking it compulsively every month since then...
> It could even be better to not know and argue about it for the purpose of conversation.
This very concept is foreign to me, and having been in too many of these "conversations", I would rather leave entirely than sit through one. Figure out the answer to the question and switch topics.
There's billions of topics to talk about (and that's without getting into polarizing topics like religion, sex, and politics), so why do we waste time arguing over trivia that doesn't matter and could be answered in seconds?
The art of conversation includes moving between each, and pulling a phone out every few minutes stunts that normal conversational flow.
There is also the problem of what is a fact (Alaska is part of the United States) and what is a "fact" (e.g. Covid came from bat soup in a wet market, Russia's invasion of Ukraine was "totally unprovoked" etc.) Discussion is the entire point in those cases, since we can't trust our entire set of "facts" anymore thanks to censorship.
I think you're missing my point. They were both presented as facts and discussion online was (and still is in the case if Ukraine) presented as such. The only way to move past those types of bottlenecks is through discussion. "Looking it up" will likely give you an answer that doesn't pass the sniff test in a normal discussion.
Basically the point is to be funny about it or use it as a generator for a new topic. Skill at conversation is almost topic agnostic. Entertaining people can be entertaining about almost anything.
I never thought of it as arguing over who is right, honestly, because nobody cares who is right. It's more like a puzzle-solving exercise used as grist for the conversational mill.
This also ties into the suggestion that our memories are getting worse because of smartphone use. A discussion of who played in a particular role in a movie exercises the neural connections we make between things. They were in that other movie, someone remembers something about an interview they were in with something else, etc.
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.
For a second I wanted to argue with your claim that looking up stuff destroys the ability to remember, but then I realized that since Google Maps exists, I can't reliably circle a block without my phone and not get lost in the process.
> 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.
> >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.
> 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 :)
> 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.
I guess the parent commenter and I don't understand why the specific fact is even mentioned if it doesn't matter. In other words, in what situation would you mention "X acted in that movie" but that detail doesn't matter to the broader point that you're trying to make. If it's important to get right then you should verify and if it's not important then don't specify the detail and instead only say the necessary details which add to your point and that you're confident about.
Sometimes to tell a story you add a bunch of extra details, that are not critically relevant to whatever you are trying to say. Maybe you're saying you love Michael Bay movies, and then you list off a bunch of movies. And the other participant in the conversation might be like: actually I don't think Michael Bay did The Notebook. You might engage in the dispute, or move past it. Or if it's a very casual conversation, turn it into a rhetoric exchange where you try to convince it must indeed have been Michael Bay. Point being, just be aware of why you're having the conversation. If for you it is an exchange of facts, fine, do the dive (sometimes, I do this). But often, it doesn't seem to matter for the larger story you are trying to tell - I love boom boom Michael Bay movies, share your favourite boom boom movies.
Last thing is, sometimes people come across as totalizing in text but they're really just saying something broadly. This is good conversational style, kinda like this thread, where you go through a collaborative exposition. Vs someone who nails all the details from the get go, and also manages to capture the relative weightings of each scenario in a way that read lightly.
Okay, maybe I am rambling a bit now...what was Michael Bay's last movie again?
And yet, this information enriched nobody. Almost certainly, we’ll all forget within 15 minutes of leaving this conversation. And what if everyone walked away thinking it was actually Transformers 12? Well, that’s okay. It doesn’t matter at all. Everyone’s gonna forget in 15 minutes, and for people who care a lot, they probably already know and can tell others.
I think we tend to like to analyze because it gives us a sense of control. That sounds a little crazy, but the more I break it down (and read the work of intelligent people who had/have similar beliefs), the more I believe it.
A common example is how people examine their feelings and experiences as a means to distance themselves from it and to gain a sense of superiority or power over it. The more we analyze and break it down, the better we think we understand it and have a higher vantage.
In reality all we're doing is constantly separating ourselves further and further from immediate experience at the expense of "knowing" things. Ironically, the more we "know" the less we can actually know because we're so detached from the experiences we're analyzing.
Apologies if that seems totally out there and not founded in anything logical. It's one of those things that makes sense to me, but I haven't yet found practical or concise ways to express the problem.
I definitely do find people, phones, and needing to know everything seems to be in lock-step with this phenomenon. Another good example is the need to put down things (i.e. celebrities, video games, movies, music; typically things we consume as part of cultural expression) which don't actually have much meaning, but might destabilize our identities in some inconsequential way. People do this a tremendous amount, and it means absolutely nothing. Sort of like, oh man that Kim Kardashian, what a loser. I saw her do X and Y on Z tv show and [insert why that's lame you're better]. It's this bizarre need we have to elevate ourselves over experience rather than simply let things be what they are.
I don't know if you'll see this, but I just stumbled upon Bruno Latour's On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, and from the Google description it sounds like it has a lot in common with what you're talking about (granted, I've only read the description and not the book itself). Maybe worth looking into!
That said, I completely agree with everything you, and the person ahead of you, have said. It completely ruins the conversation, and detaches us from the actual experiences, which I think is an inherently negative thing (if such wasn't clear from my other comments lol)
I’ve been wanting to read Bruno Latour! Thanks for making that connection, that gives me extra motivation to get around to it.
I feel like it’s a topic I don’t understand well, but seems extremely important to get a grip on and see clearly how it relates to my life and how I live it.
Absolutely. I'd actually love to hear what you think about it when you do get around to it. It's something I've been coming to terms with in general too, especially as it relates to facts and this overarching desire to know everything at all times immediately that has grown out of our modern technology ans being constantly connected. Even when it comes at a loss to the actual human connection taking place.
I've got an essay idea in mind relating this to humanity's desire to get rid of the Night, but still have a lot more reading to do on the various topics. Anyway, that's enough of my rambling. Feel free to send me an email if you want to discuss it more! It's in my profile.
Because conversation doesn't (and shouldn't) work like that. There's plenty of asides, or casual mentions of things that are only slightly relevant or add to the point without being all that important.
Say we're talking about genetic engineering and I say something like 'This reminds me of that one movie where the one like normal guy, I think it was Tom Cruise, is trying to go into space'. It doesn't matter that I'm talking about Gattaca, or that it was Ethan Hawke and not Tom Cruise (a name just pulled out of the hat) and maybe even messing up plot details, and stopping to look it up just completely ruins the flow and break conversation.
I had this happen in person last week when someone mentioned Irish had a word for a three month period, but nobody could remember it. Several people went to their phone dictionaries immediately and it just stopped the conversation (and none were able to find it, either).
So there's lots of times we bring stuff up just as an aside or to add a little more flavour without it being important in conversation. I'd say that's hoe conversation should work not just 'Here's my point and all the facts that back it up.' There's no flow there, it becomes more like a debate or presentation, not a conversation. And if people are curious or it really was important, you can always look it up and send it later, but you'll often find nobody is that curious and it isn't that important.
> Because conversation doesn't (and shouldn't) work like that.
It often does.
Not everyone is like you.
Not everyone wants the same things from a conversation as you.
I agree that a lot of times, the veracity of these details don't matter. I know I'm going to get a lot of hate for this, but: In my experience, there is a strong correlation between those who do not like being fact checked in these social situations, and those who make factually incorrect statements when it clearly matters (e.g. accusing someone of poor behavior, business transactions, etc).
We may be in the minority, but some of us do care to know whether you can be trusted. It's one thing to be up front and speak tentatively, and be open that you've gotten details wrong. It's another to give a fantastic narrative that happens to be full of incorrect details, and then complain when someone points it out.
If someone is telling you a fantastic story about their background in hopes to con you, obviously fact checking is useful.
If someone is simply weaving an interesting narrative, fact checking is at best a distraction, and often just a way for someone to “well actually” themselves into the spotlight.
Whether that’s justified is a question that has no absolute answers, but for most people the conversation is the fun part. (Not me, but I’m an anti-social loner and I have no interest in making other people more unhappy than is necessary.)
Exactly. And I'd argue that the vast majority of conversations are of the second type, not the first type. And if all you want/have are the first type, I think you need to experience more of the second type.
But using the "true details" (who cares if it's Ethan Hawk or Tom Cruise or whoever in Gattaca when you're discussing the relevance of the genetic engineering aspects of it) as a measure of how trustworthy someone is? That's just ridiculous to me, especially because for most conversations it doesn't matter.
> But using the "true details" (who cares if it's Ethan Hawk or Tom Cruise or whoever in Gattaca when you're discussing the relevance of the genetic engineering aspects of it) as a measure of how trustworthy someone is? That's just ridiculous to me,
It is ridiculous, and not something I was advocating.
The signal is not in whether their story is riddled with inaccuracies, but whether they get upset when questioned about it, and whether they are willing to simply say "Yeah I probably got some of the details wrong."
Of course, if someone questions every detail of the story, it kills the story. The storyteller merely needs to say "Yeah, some of the details are probably off" .
Yeah, I misread. But it is often rude and disrupting the conversation, though it can be done tactfully "Oh, I believe it was Ethan Hawke actually". It can also open up room for more conversation "No, I'm pretty sure it was Tom Cruise", where the debate of it becomes the conversation. Which is fine, and still doesn't say anything to me about the trustworthiness of the person who was telling the story. Nor does it necessarily imply they need to be fact checked on Google right now; again, it's tangential to the overarching part of the conversation. I still think using that single measure as a measure of trustworthiness is ridiculous. Especially in a conversation that's not deep.
> The storyteller merely needs to say "Yeah, some of the details are probably off" .
I feel this is an unwritten rule of conversation in general. It certainly is amongst my friend groups, even recounting stories where we were all present. It obviously wouldn't work for debates, or if you were discussing things like political policy, but most conversations don't fall into those types of things. Just sitting around shooting the shit.
> I feel this is an unwritten rule of conversation in general.
There is a bit of cognitive dissonance that I observe.
It indeed is an unwritten rule. Most people agree with this rule.
Yet wait a while after the conversation, and people who listened treat the story as a lot more factual than what that rule implies, and more than they themselves believed it in the moment. The only antidote I have seen to prevent this transformation is to always be skeptical (without being judgmental):
"It was a fun conversation, and the guy/story is probably full of shit."
> But using the "true details" (who cares if it's Ethan Hawk or Tom Cruise or whoever in Gattaca when you're discussing the relevance of the genetic engineering aspects of it) as a measure of how trustworthy someone is? That's just ridiculous to me, especially because for most conversations it doesn't matter.
It depends. In this example, if the listener says "I don't think it was Tom Cruise in that movie" and the speaker says "Whatevs, that doesn't matter", then sure, it didn't matter.
If the speaker said "No, it WAS Tom Cruise", then obviously it does matter. You can't know whether it matters or not until you express doubt.
The problematic behavior I speak of is not of someone trying to con me, but of someone who simply is not reliable with details when it does matter. I'm not implying any malicious intent.
I love a fantastic narrative, and am quite OK with it being riddled with inaccuracies. I just treat the whole story as fiction, and that should be fine. What worries me is that I have observed most of the other listeners do not treat it as fiction. Almost every week I get a story retold to me as if it is fact. Do people not understand the "telephone" game? Almost every week someone comes to me and says "John told me last week that ..." and treat it as factual.
So, in your example of the Irish word, that's exactly how misinformation gets spread so easily. I doubt anyone is in danger from thinking a certain Irish word exists which doesn't actually exists. But the exact same scenario can be used when people drop a "Did you know <group I don't like> is doing <bad thing>? They're so awful." And then that gets carried to the next conversation each person has.
I think we do benefit a little bit from curiosity to know the truth behind the bullshit people say to us.
And there's a compromise, too. It's actually possible to finish a train of thought or conversation and then look up the facts, keeping everybody on the same page. It's even more fun that way.
> It's actually possible to finish a train of thought or conversation and then look up the facts, keeping everybody on the same page. It's even more fun that way.
I'd be careful about "keeping everybody on the same page". If you know they'd appreciate it, then sure. But a significant portion of the population do not like being fact checked. They assume malicious intent (not realizing you factcheck everyone and not just them).
Below is an email I once got. The context: A bunch of us were having a social conversation after an event. A professor made a claim about how hot it would get in his country. It struck me and another one as off because the number was a bit higher than the world record. We hinted at it but he insisted we were wrong.
Some hours later, at home, my friend fact checked and sent a polite email pointing out that the highest ever recorded temperature in his country was a few degrees lower than his claim. His response:
"If I were you i would not have spent a minute doing that unless
you want to prove a point: I was a liar. ... At last, that's why I do not hang around with you guys."
People will jump to conclusions about your motives.
Sending an email several hours later to fact check someone is not even in the same ballpark as pulling out your phone at the end of a discussion and looking up the fact together. Honestly, I think most people would consider that malicious or at best kind of arrogant.
Take a poll to see what people think. IME, the majority do not want to check it during the conversation - they usual flow is they'll move on to other topics.
I'm not sure why the email thing is malicious or arrogant. It's the equivalent of saying it in person the next time you all meet: "Hey, remember we were talking about X last time? I looked into it and ..."
But your reaction emphasizes the point: People will jump to conclusions about your motives.
Yes! Most conversation is not about fact-finding, but about the conversation itself.
Comparing a situation where facts serve as a conduit for further discussion, and people weighing in to try to establish something, versus a situation where someone looks at their phone, finds the answer, and effectively ends this conversation topic, I vastly prefer the former.
It's similar to experiencing a movie and being surprised by the twist, versus reading what the twist is. The journey is more important than the result.
Well, it matters to me that I be corrected sooner rather than later.
We're sitting in a conversation and someone says "well, that actor also played $CHARACTER in $OTHERFRANCHISE", and I think that it was actually $OTHERACTOR, I'd rather know for certain whether I have misconceptions or not.
Obviously, if we're actually talking about it, it does matter to the participants.
To you actors may not matter, but I guarantee you're not sitting around idly having conversations where the topic doesn't matter to you.
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.
> 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.
I prefer talking about things that are important to me. It does not matter to me who hit the most homeruns in the 1980s and I can't well imagine making a connection talking about it.
If you re-read my original comment and still don't understand the importance of leisurely bullshitting with friends, then I probably can't help explain it better.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
And if that was a point someone wanted to make, then they're free to be specific about what they think should be included - which is also widely and publicly available information because the US budget is in fact not secret in it's volume of spending by category, it's annually published information by law.
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.
lol I'm English and have lived amongst football fans my whole life. Yet I have always felt that even if I spent a year studying football, learning the history, the techniques of the players, I would never be able to hold a convincing conversation with a football fan and be accepted.
It's almost as if the football is merely a vehicle for a kind of unspoken, shared mindset that is never articulated, but always keenly enforced. My whole life I've never felt like I had a way in with the football fans I know.
Thanks for helping me understand the mindset better.
> 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.
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.
Interesting. People on BART ten years ago would read over my shoulder or borrow a section. Or talk to me about the book I'm reading. I like holding books up at eye level rather than looking down at them in my lap just for neck strain. That makes the cover more visible for sure, but I don't think it's a significant factor in the interrupting. Just in the noticing.
How strange. I wonder if this is a SF thing? Or a recent development (10 years ago counts as "recent" to me)?
In my part of the country, anyway, that sort of behavior has always been considered extremely rude (or at least over my entire lifetime). I wouldn't even consider doing it, and the few times it happened to me, it was exceedingly irritating.
Fascinating. I've only been in the Bay Area for 10 years or so, but I recall this would very rarely happen to me on East Midlands trains before that. Certainly never on the Tube. But I've also changed in that time and it is possible some aspect of my demeanour invites this. All for the best, I suppose, that people treat us both as we wish to be treated.
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.
From my experience, I used to always have a stack of newspapers on the dining table as a kid (in the 90's). We'd clear it off for dinner, but for breakfast or lunch I would read the comics section as I ate.
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.
> 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
> 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.
I’m just commenting on the relative trends in the US and UK. I suspect the trend of ‘unhappiness’ is probably similar, but suicide is slightly less of a signifier in the UK compared to self harm.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
It's possible we're interpreting the phrase differently. To me, "having people vocal about changing the narratives to discuss our issues" _is_ optimistic determination, because it indicates both a desire to make things better and a belief that they can.
Because I agree with pretty much everything you're saying.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I hear you, but trying to evaluate if a generation feels worse while having it better in absolute terms feels like a pretty hard challenge.
For instance the article focuses on teen suicide rate raising with the uptake of modern smartphones, but of course there’s other peaks in the past, especially for males between 1980 and 1995 for instance.
Did these specific boys have it worse at that time ? I genuinely have no idea how we’d evaluate that, I wouldn’t be checking how much money they had to judge that, and it would be probably tough to compare to girls today.
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.
> 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.
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.
Ah, I thought your previous post meant "we should make the world less awful so that teenagers won't be exposed to that". Apologies.
> 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.
Those are just two ways of saying "teenagers shouldn't be given a raw twitter/reddit/tiktok feed, and should be spending their time on something more mentally healthy", aren't they?
Whether that requires active restrictions or not depends on whether you believe you can make the mentally healthy activities more captivating than the doomscrolling.
> we should make the world less awful so that teenagers won't be exposed to that
I also think that, but am way more pessimistic on this part. If there is a path forward, I’d assume it starts by reducing the amount of people hating the world as it is today and deciding to bail out eternally.
> Whether that requires active restrictions or not depends on whether you believe you can make the mentally healthy activities more captivating than the doomscrolling
My knee-jerk reaction would be “we should ban content targeted at hurting other people’s mental health”, but I don’t see it as a viable approach in so many ways, from how to define what is hurtful, what is intentional, and freedom of expression in the first place.
But the same way we can design cities that improve residents’ well-being, I wish we found better designs (and probably business models and incentives) for our social media landscapes.
I actually enjoyed a lot more the social media before facebook (even Instagram, before it got purchased…thinking about it, those were all available on our phones too) and I still see niches (mostly small sub-reddits) that work different from the other bigger networks. Not saying we should go back there, but there’s stuff that could be inspiring.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
When I was 8 years old in the 90s I was already worried about climate change. But I did read a lot more than most kids so I probably was kind of weird.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
>shared phones between 12-16 (with other siblings or the “house” cell phone that also can be used by parents)
lol good luck trying to enforce that when almost every 12 year old kid has their own smartphone today. 'Your' kid will most certainly feel left-out,different and noticed and will be commented on by their friends.
> model good behavior yourself. No phone out when your kids are around.
Yeah I dont think this is a really effective way to go about this, sure I get your point, but parents(or adults in general), have way more responsibilities and pressing matters to attend to. Not saying thats always the case, but its an apples to oranges comparison here.
Liked your other comments but this one was disappointing. Kids would eat ice cream for all meals if you let them. But they don’t because parents say no. “Lol good luck… other kids” is not an appropriate response to that duty.
That said, the lockbox part is not practical I think. More workable is to avoid data plans and use screen time/cut wifi outside core hours.
> 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)
This is a thing. I grew up in a conservative Christian family and saw some of this. For some families (not mine) punishment was considered the primary tool of teaching. As the Bible says: spare the rod, spoil the child.
What most people don't seem to know is the "rod" isn't something you're supposed to hit a sheep with. You nudge and guide them with it.
How does a consequence that's deliberately disproportionate to what they've done teach children anything? Are you trying to prepare your children for the world, or to ensure they correspond to some ideal you have imagined?
Good points, I'd add since a lot of kids these days have technology in general and are incorporating in some schooling and such you can add a device for single-purpose use, i.e iPad for reading, watching, demo-ing, etc. with structured timing like phone box, shared times, etc.
> 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.
> 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.
Are you sure you're 17 haha? You sound more mature than many adults.
> 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.
> 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).
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?
Yes, I agree; I've made similar comments before. I was only replying to "gauge the worth of others by the followers they have", and not giving a full essay on my thoughts about every aspect.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Fortunate toddlers do go to school. Lots of babies and toddlers only get interaction with other children in daycare, which I assume provides some developmental benefit.
Yes, it was a tangent, but just wanted to point out that, for many in the US at least, it is not like decades ago when kids were out playing in the neighborhood. It is very possible that most, if not all, social interaction between kids happens in daycare, school, gym classes, or otherwise supervised get togethers.
I'm not against taking measures during a pandemic so that people don't die brother I just think taking and taking and giving absolutely nothing in return is a little disrespectful and your sharp debating skills won't make me any less empathetic for young people
> I'm not against taking measures during a pandemic so that people don't die
But I was talking about taking measures during a pandemic so that people don't die, because I was replying to this comment: "we collectively decided in 2020 to trade young people's livelyhoods for old peoples lives".
Thus, changing the subject in your reply to me seems strange, unhelpful, and unfair.
No one is pitting age groups against each other, it is just math due to drastically reduced fertility rates. There exists a point where society’s resources, including young people’s labor, is disproportionately benefiting the old.
I would even go so far as to say the asset price inflation and currency devaluation that is afflicting the developed countries is governments transferring a greater and greater proportion of the working population’s productivity to the non working population.
Sorry, I meant that the while it was not necessarily the political calculus, the fact remains that some things can be beneficial for one age group that are detrimental to other age groups.
Where this gets interesting is when half the population does not have kids, will population wide wealth transfer from working to non working be sufficiently politically popular?
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.
> 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.
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 ;)
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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...)
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.
On LineageOS, it's been a regular setting, with a quick tile, for quite a while. And in recent mainstream Androids (12, I think?) it's available under bedtime settings or something.
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 ...
Just guessing but maybe the poster meant that those things don't attack root cause which is sad but simple - screen/media addiction and easiness of obtaining next kick from it, versus actual physical relationships which are much harder to manage and it only gets worse with age. They help you existing around this gaping dark hole but not doing much with it itself, just trying to divert you staring into it. Well guess what, its now part of you, permanently. Admitting that to yourself ain't an easy task on its own, especially if one works with IT or with computers all day.
With that being established, addictions can be tackled in numerous ways, but lets be frank here - our mind, often our greatest asset, is our greatest enemy with addictions. An addict has a permanent crack in persona, something you can put some glue in but things will never be the same as before, you are in recovery for rest of your life.
Since screens and media are everywhere, its pretty hard addiction, similar to say cigarettes in terms of shedding it off. So I think all those tools mentioned work to some extent, for some, but actually getting off the drug shows different, more intense results. The effects are quite subtle unlike say heroin so there isn't societal outcry yet, everybody just complaints about 'kids these days' and moves on.
That's why I consider criminal to let small kids play endlessly with phones/computers or sit in front of tv all day, getting their first addictions from their own parents who are often deep in their own rabbit holes.
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.
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> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I had a similar experience as you but ended up reducing my requirements and getting a dumb phone (Jethro SC490) with no direct internet access and the ability to set up a hotspot.
If I need anything besides SMS/MMS and voice calls I turn on a hotspot and take out my laptop. I'm "offline" by default but still reachable in emergencies.
I do cheat on the camera portion by using my partner's smartphone for pictures where I care about the quality.
You lose conveniences but the tradeoff was very worth it in my case. I have no plans of going back to a smartphone.
I'm roughly the same. All I want is a phone that lets me play Spotify, tracks my steps during the day/gps on runs, and lets me use messaging apps (Telegram, WhatsApp) along with SMS and call. Really need nothing else on it (and am starting to get that way). Maybe a smart watch is the best option, but I really don't like the design of most of them, and prefer my old school kinetic powered watch.
What you’re asking for has been available for years. The answer is to swallow your pride and have a friend set up parental controls on your phone and safeguard the password from you.
No worries, I’ve made this suggestion to a lot of people but no one has followed through with it afaik, not even me.
I do find that https://freedom.to/ is one of the few things that has worked for me. It’s more difficult to bypass than ScreenTime, and syncing blocklists with the laptop during the day is great for overcoming procrastination. It works through a VPN profile (though not an actual VPN), so it also blocks apps.
I‘ve used it with schedules that go from 05:00 to 19:00 and it’s just such an eye opener when even a week after implementation I still open safari and reflexively type the urls for Twitter, hacker news, and Reddit even though they’ve only produced blank pages for days. Restricting it to the evening and going a couple of hours longer than the workday means I can still enjoy some mindless surfing but if I get busy doing something else I’m less likely to get sucked in. I also really like some of the suggestions here to restrict time wasters from the phone completely and only do social media stuff on the desktop. The extra effort for me to go to the office would mean that I’m more likely to use the time doing something else.
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.
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.
Sure, there's lots of nice things to do in bed other than those two. But years ago, I took that advice from my business partner. Doing that improved my sleep (and life) significantly. It may or may not work for you (and you may not need it), but several people I know who started doing it reported that they benefitted greatly.
My hypothesis is because it trains your mind to associate bed with just those activities. Mostly sleep, because you're probably doing a whole lot more of that than sex.
So what ends up happening is that just getting into bed signals your mind that it's time to sleep. When you get in, sleep comes quickly.
I do the other stuff, reading, etc., in a nice, quiet place that isn't in bed. Then I get tired and go to bed, and I'm sleeping soundly very quickly.
Thanks, I’ve just moved furniture around to make space a reading corner. I really like 15-60 minutes of reading and reflection in the evening, and it seems like a good idea to move it out of the bed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Great ideas about the adblocker, and I totally forgot about notifications!
I've turned off all notifications on my phone, aside from texts and phone calls. It really helps. I don't have my calendar on my phone. I bought and use an nice, leather bound calendar/planner now (aside from work stuff, which I have a calendar on my laptop). It works really well for me.
For things like email and Discord, I just check them on my computer. If there's some reason I need Slack/Discord on my phone, like I'm meeting up with friends who have a Discord group chat, or I'm at a conference with co-workers that communicate with Slack -- I'll download and use the app for the period of time I need it, and then delete it ASAP.
I've told my friends if they need me to reply instantly, they should text me. People often look at me funny/ask why I don't have Discord on my phone. Most will understand when I answer that I don't want to be distracted.
---
A lot of this is a huge mindset shift. I'm 25 but I have (some of) the habits of a 70 year old. I think it's worthwhile to use technology (some things just require a smartphone), but you can get 90% of the benefit while avoiding most/all of the downsides if you take a step back and think about what you're doing and why you're doing it.
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!
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?
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)?
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.
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”
618 comments
[ 657 ms ] story [ 6364 ms ] threadWe have phones like 100 years now? A phone is not the problem here.
The article is obviously about smartphones and social media
"Smartphones" are only "smart" compared to what came before. Which to the youth is irrelevant, because before their day. To them a phone and a smartphone are the same thing. All your comment does is to let everyone know you are old enough to remember phones which weren't smart. Not sure what it adds to the conversation
"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)
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."
If it's a school prodigy they will find a way, but a random student will become a pariah.
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.
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...
Not to mention, you can't just hang out with people who you don't know.
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
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.
"Oh but thanks to Reddit I found my dream headphones and I'm finally as happy as I was before finding /r/headphones".
But on the other hand: even some communities that are seemingly fountains of knowledge, also thrive by having masses of addicted consumers. Sure, it's much better to be addicted to a valid and interesting subject than to something that's harmful. But it's still a form of addiction to spend an excessive amount of time on them, like some people do (yes I am aware not everyone does it).
These are only an issue if your view on them is shallow enough that you think they exist merely for the purpose of buying more expensive things.
I'd drop it in a heartbeat for the old, slightly janky PHP forums it ate though.
You can't divorce hobbies from some level of consumerism, half of what you mentioned is related to music. I can't imagine that a high percentage of redditors are interested in modular synths or boutique headphones. I think you have a conclusion in search of evidence, because that's what you think of people.
Notwithstanding that having some interest in specialty products doesn't necessitate that one "over"consumes. Your level of consumption doesn't scale with your subreddit subscriptions.
I don't understand the recreational sneering of consumption by other consumers, but I think the problem we have now is a culture of passive consumption (tv, social media, this site) rather than biasing towards action. Action doesn't preclude purchases.
Twitter doesn't have anything like that. If there's a problem, well, your only recourse is to become a billionaire, buy out the entire site, fire most of the employees, and try to bend it to your will. But that's more likely to make it worse than better.
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.
Yeah you're probably right.
The main account i had in mind when I wrote my comment was this: https://mobile.twitter.com/Ayishat_Akanbi
In each tweet she manages to capture a very nuanced point that doesn't seem to require further explanation. The last couple of tweets doesn't feel like they are totally representative thought.
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.
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.
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.
I may have missed the memo that YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok et al aren't considered "mainstream" anymore.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
"Oh you're pointing out something I've done that doesn't align with my stated value system or common decency? Who cares, and I'll do it again"
In that model, shame is "I wish you hadn't caught me doing that because you will think less of me and I can't accept that". Guilt is "I wish I hadn't done that because it harmed other people and other people matter" which extreme narcissists don't feel. That is, the child who has torn clothes and one parent worries that the child might be hurt under their watch, compared to the parent who punishes the child for making them look like a worse parent to all the bystanders.
And that pattern is something to see everywhere, from internet arguments to international news.
i.e. guilt is [1] "Greek transport minister Kostas Karamanlis has resigned following a rail crash which killed at least 38 people; Mr Karamanlis said he felt it was his “duty” to step down “as a basic indication of respect for the memory of the people who died so unfairly”"
Shame is [2] Turkey blocking social media immediately after the recent earthquake and arresting people who posted things which made the government look bad. Instead of first thought being to the injured or the corruption, it was trying to control how the government looks and punishing those who hurt that image.
Guilt is not something social media can encourage - the other people are names on a screen, far away.
But a focus on your image, the image you present to the world, the perfect life you live, the perfect friends you have, the beautiful places you go, the clever knowledge you have, the busy Github commit log, the witty Twitter stream, those kinds of things are what social media promotes uncomfortably well.
When someone sees you crying or without makeup, that's not the macho or beautiful Instagram image you've cultivated, harm done - to you, to your image - shame shame shame emergency response damage control, post something which puts it in context and explains it, attack back. When you call someone an unfunny moron on Twitter, no harm done but when someone calls you an unfunny moron, damage control - the world must think of me as witty and inciteful because that's all I have on Twitter and if I lose that, I'm nobody, attack back.
i.e. the phones are a proxy, reading a book with other people around instead of talking to them can still feel sociable. Seeing beautiful people on a billboard advert has been a thing for decades. The projection of yourself to the world, text, pictures, videos, blogs, streams, to an internet where all there is is a projection of you which you have to control, seems like more of a problem.
[1] https://www.wandsworthguardian.co.uk/news/national/23356731....
[2] https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/twitter-down-in-tu...
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.
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.
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.
I guess it works if everyone is equally into a subject but that's pretty rare and by this point I've been put out by it so many times even if I am interested, I'm not interested.
Then why do you want to argue about it?
I just don't want conversations to grind to a halt to figure out a piece of trivia, moving on is fine as is looking it up.
I'm the sort of person to argue about which sportsperson was better than which other. The stats are just the stats.
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.
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
You might wanna get an iPad as it is, at least for the moment, socially acceptable in meetings, even with the keyboard cover :)
It's insane though. IPad is fundamentally a media consumption device. I'm a touchless, fast, organized typer on my laptop (I used to be primary screensharer when I was ops manager). All that socially acceptable iPad would do is handicap me severely :-/
The horror of trying to do something productive at work…
My guess is most of the gains in productivity during COVID are people not paying attention in pointless meetings and doing real work instead of placating socialites’ ego-driven meglomania.
> even try to get some work done
I assume it's not what you meant, but it's interesting nonetheless: if being in this meeting does not mean getting work done, maybe the real problem mandatory attendance?
Honestly, yes, I can understand this. A laptop screen pointed towards you feels like a private space, since other people can't easily see it. And indeed, I've definitely gotten work done in meetings for this reason. A device with a screen easily visible to everyone at the table I don't think would have this temptation.
I sometimes use a Model 100 when I need to take notes without distractions, actually.
Could also use a proper one with a serial/wifi modem and telnet into a remote system to take notes [2].
1. https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/devterm-kit-r01
2. https://www.buildon.aws/posts/i-deployed-kubernetes-with-a-1...
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.
The laptop has a screen turned to its user, meaning other people don't see their screen and it visually creates a "wall" between the user and the rest of the group.
A tablet doesn't have this problem, it lays on the table.
Good point - both :). Sometimes it depends on meeting, sometimes I take turns - i.e. I'll "transcribe" (mindlessly type as I listen/pay attention), and then in a lull or after we covered an "atomic unit" of idea/thought/topic, I'll revise and summarize (convert it into "notes").
My mind works extremely hierarchically, which is why laptop is my preference over any digital paper, with its ability to rearrange - bullet points are my note-taking weapon of choice, and indentations are my friend.
Many people say that they don't need to take a look at their written notes, they get benefit just from writing it down, and it works similarly for me I think - if I end a meeting with a structurally-indented bullet-list, it helped me structure topics/ideas/priorities/actions in my mind, and I'm good to go :)
(many meetings I do both simultaneously - I'll be transcribing mindlessly on private monitor, and screensharing a second monitor where I periodically organize key points and actions for everybody. Like driving manual gearshift, it's a skill that seems distracting initially but develops and becomes automated/reflexive with practice. Usually the transcribing part can be thrown out at the end - it's just there to support the organizing/summarizing/"hierarchizing" action:)
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?
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.
Unless it's the point of the conversation, like you're discussing dev salaries and you want to pull up levels.fyi or layoffs.fyi to compare, who cares? Will anyone be better off if they knew which actor you were talking about 6 weeks from now? Meanwhile once I heard about levels.fyi I've been checking it compulsively every month since then...
This very concept is foreign to me, and having been in too many of these "conversations", I would rather leave entirely than sit through one. Figure out the answer to the question and switch topics.
There's billions of topics to talk about (and that's without getting into polarizing topics like religion, sex, and politics), so why do we waste time arguing over trivia that doesn't matter and could be answered in seconds?
There is also the problem of what is a fact (Alaska is part of the United States) and what is a "fact" (e.g. Covid came from bat soup in a wet market, Russia's invasion of Ukraine was "totally unprovoked" etc.) Discussion is the entire point in those cases, since we can't trust our entire set of "facts" anymore thanks to censorship.
Neither of those are statements of fact, though. The first is speculation, the second is opinion.
But it does appear to be true that many people don't understand what a "fact" actually is. I don't think "censorship" really plays into this much.
Again, this does not make sense. The point of an argument over trivia is... being funny? Maybe tell jokes or funny anecdotes instead?
> a generator for a new topic.
"Hey Reilly, (what did you do this weekend|how did the trip to Yellowstone go|how's your kid doing in school)?"
Because it's not about getting answers or determining facts. It's about the social interaction.
If its a waste of time talking about it why waste time looking it up.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
I guess the parent commenter and I don't understand why the specific fact is even mentioned if it doesn't matter. In other words, in what situation would you mention "X acted in that movie" but that detail doesn't matter to the broader point that you're trying to make. If it's important to get right then you should verify and if it's not important then don't specify the detail and instead only say the necessary details which add to your point and that you're confident about.
Last thing is, sometimes people come across as totalizing in text but they're really just saying something broadly. This is good conversational style, kinda like this thread, where you go through a collaborative exposition. Vs someone who nails all the details from the get go, and also manages to capture the relative weightings of each scenario in a way that read lightly.
Okay, maybe I am rambling a bit now...what was Michael Bay's last movie again?
The Forever Purge
I googled it, but made sure I wasn't phubbing anyone in the process
I think we tend to like to analyze because it gives us a sense of control. That sounds a little crazy, but the more I break it down (and read the work of intelligent people who had/have similar beliefs), the more I believe it.
A common example is how people examine their feelings and experiences as a means to distance themselves from it and to gain a sense of superiority or power over it. The more we analyze and break it down, the better we think we understand it and have a higher vantage.
In reality all we're doing is constantly separating ourselves further and further from immediate experience at the expense of "knowing" things. Ironically, the more we "know" the less we can actually know because we're so detached from the experiences we're analyzing.
Apologies if that seems totally out there and not founded in anything logical. It's one of those things that makes sense to me, but I haven't yet found practical or concise ways to express the problem.
I definitely do find people, phones, and needing to know everything seems to be in lock-step with this phenomenon. Another good example is the need to put down things (i.e. celebrities, video games, movies, music; typically things we consume as part of cultural expression) which don't actually have much meaning, but might destabilize our identities in some inconsequential way. People do this a tremendous amount, and it means absolutely nothing. Sort of like, oh man that Kim Kardashian, what a loser. I saw her do X and Y on Z tv show and [insert why that's lame you're better]. It's this bizarre need we have to elevate ourselves over experience rather than simply let things be what they are.
That said, I completely agree with everything you, and the person ahead of you, have said. It completely ruins the conversation, and detaches us from the actual experiences, which I think is an inherently negative thing (if such wasn't clear from my other comments lol)
I feel like it’s a topic I don’t understand well, but seems extremely important to get a grip on and see clearly how it relates to my life and how I live it.
I've got an essay idea in mind relating this to humanity's desire to get rid of the Night, but still have a lot more reading to do on the various topics. Anyway, that's enough of my rambling. Feel free to send me an email if you want to discuss it more! It's in my profile.
Say we're talking about genetic engineering and I say something like 'This reminds me of that one movie where the one like normal guy, I think it was Tom Cruise, is trying to go into space'. It doesn't matter that I'm talking about Gattaca, or that it was Ethan Hawke and not Tom Cruise (a name just pulled out of the hat) and maybe even messing up plot details, and stopping to look it up just completely ruins the flow and break conversation.
I had this happen in person last week when someone mentioned Irish had a word for a three month period, but nobody could remember it. Several people went to their phone dictionaries immediately and it just stopped the conversation (and none were able to find it, either).
So there's lots of times we bring stuff up just as an aside or to add a little more flavour without it being important in conversation. I'd say that's hoe conversation should work not just 'Here's my point and all the facts that back it up.' There's no flow there, it becomes more like a debate or presentation, not a conversation. And if people are curious or it really was important, you can always look it up and send it later, but you'll often find nobody is that curious and it isn't that important.
It often does.
Not everyone is like you.
Not everyone wants the same things from a conversation as you.
I agree that a lot of times, the veracity of these details don't matter. I know I'm going to get a lot of hate for this, but: In my experience, there is a strong correlation between those who do not like being fact checked in these social situations, and those who make factually incorrect statements when it clearly matters (e.g. accusing someone of poor behavior, business transactions, etc).
We may be in the minority, but some of us do care to know whether you can be trusted. It's one thing to be up front and speak tentatively, and be open that you've gotten details wrong. It's another to give a fantastic narrative that happens to be full of incorrect details, and then complain when someone points it out.
If someone is telling you a fantastic story about their background in hopes to con you, obviously fact checking is useful.
If someone is simply weaving an interesting narrative, fact checking is at best a distraction, and often just a way for someone to “well actually” themselves into the spotlight.
Whether that’s justified is a question that has no absolute answers, but for most people the conversation is the fun part. (Not me, but I’m an anti-social loner and I have no interest in making other people more unhappy than is necessary.)
But using the "true details" (who cares if it's Ethan Hawk or Tom Cruise or whoever in Gattaca when you're discussing the relevance of the genetic engineering aspects of it) as a measure of how trustworthy someone is? That's just ridiculous to me, especially because for most conversations it doesn't matter.
It is ridiculous, and not something I was advocating.
The signal is not in whether their story is riddled with inaccuracies, but whether they get upset when questioned about it, and whether they are willing to simply say "Yeah I probably got some of the details wrong."
Of course, if someone questions every detail of the story, it kills the story. The storyteller merely needs to say "Yeah, some of the details are probably off" .
> The storyteller merely needs to say "Yeah, some of the details are probably off" .
I feel this is an unwritten rule of conversation in general. It certainly is amongst my friend groups, even recounting stories where we were all present. It obviously wouldn't work for debates, or if you were discussing things like political policy, but most conversations don't fall into those types of things. Just sitting around shooting the shit.
There is a bit of cognitive dissonance that I observe.
It indeed is an unwritten rule. Most people agree with this rule.
Yet wait a while after the conversation, and people who listened treat the story as a lot more factual than what that rule implies, and more than they themselves believed it in the moment. The only antidote I have seen to prevent this transformation is to always be skeptical (without being judgmental):
"It was a fun conversation, and the guy/story is probably full of shit."
It depends. In this example, if the listener says "I don't think it was Tom Cruise in that movie" and the speaker says "Whatevs, that doesn't matter", then sure, it didn't matter.
If the speaker said "No, it WAS Tom Cruise", then obviously it does matter. You can't know whether it matters or not until you express doubt.
The problematic behavior I speak of is not of someone trying to con me, but of someone who simply is not reliable with details when it does matter. I'm not implying any malicious intent.
I love a fantastic narrative, and am quite OK with it being riddled with inaccuracies. I just treat the whole story as fiction, and that should be fine. What worries me is that I have observed most of the other listeners do not treat it as fiction. Almost every week I get a story retold to me as if it is fact. Do people not understand the "telephone" game? Almost every week someone comes to me and says "John told me last week that ..." and treat it as factual.
I think we do benefit a little bit from curiosity to know the truth behind the bullshit people say to us.
And there's a compromise, too. It's actually possible to finish a train of thought or conversation and then look up the facts, keeping everybody on the same page. It's even more fun that way.
I'd be careful about "keeping everybody on the same page". If you know they'd appreciate it, then sure. But a significant portion of the population do not like being fact checked. They assume malicious intent (not realizing you factcheck everyone and not just them).
Below is an email I once got. The context: A bunch of us were having a social conversation after an event. A professor made a claim about how hot it would get in his country. It struck me and another one as off because the number was a bit higher than the world record. We hinted at it but he insisted we were wrong.
Some hours later, at home, my friend fact checked and sent a polite email pointing out that the highest ever recorded temperature in his country was a few degrees lower than his claim. His response:
"If I were you i would not have spent a minute doing that unless you want to prove a point: I was a liar. ... At last, that's why I do not hang around with you guys."
People will jump to conclusions about your motives.
I'm not sure why the email thing is malicious or arrogant. It's the equivalent of saying it in person the next time you all meet: "Hey, remember we were talking about X last time? I looked into it and ..."
But your reaction emphasizes the point: People will jump to conclusions about your motives.
Comparing a situation where facts serve as a conduit for further discussion, and people weighing in to try to establish something, versus a situation where someone looks at their phone, finds the answer, and effectively ends this conversation topic, I vastly prefer the former.
It's similar to experiencing a movie and being surprised by the twist, versus reading what the twist is. The journey is more important than the result.
Well, it matters to me that I be corrected sooner rather than later.
We're sitting in a conversation and someone says "well, that actor also played $CHARACTER in $OTHERFRANCHISE", and I think that it was actually $OTHERACTOR, I'd rather know for certain whether I have misconceptions or not.
Obviously, if we're actually talking about it, it does matter to the participants.
To you actors may not matter, but I guarantee you're not sitting around idly having conversations where the topic doesn't matter to you.
> 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.
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.
The "ultimately the answer wasn't important" part of your comment mystifies me. If the answer is not important, why even talk about 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.
I most definitely don't and never have. And I even know who Matt Damon is!
This isn't a conscious thing, it's just the pattern of behavior that has naturally emerged.
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.
See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-i...
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.
It's almost as if the football is merely a vehicle for a kind of unspoken, shared mindset that is never articulated, but always keenly enforced. My whole life I've never felt like I had a way in with the football fans I know.
Thanks for helping me understand the mindset better.
Like opiates. And, also like opiates, once you get hooked, it's very difficult to get off even when you realize that it's not actually good for you.
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.
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.
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.
I've always taken that sort of thing as a social cue that the person doesn't want social interaction.
I never minded.
In my part of the country, anyway, that sort of behavior has always been considered extremely rude (or at least over my entire lifetime). I wouldn't even consider doing it, and the few times it happened to me, it was exceedingly irritating.
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.
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.
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.
(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
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.
https://stateofchildhealth.rcpch.ac.uk/evidence/mental-healt...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
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."
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.
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.
Because I agree with pretty much everything you're saying.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
For instance the article focuses on teen suicide rate raising with the uptake of modern smartphones, but of course there’s other peaks in the past, especially for males between 1980 and 1995 for instance.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
Did these specific boys have it worse at that time ? I genuinely have no idea how we’d evaluate that, I wouldn’t be checking how much money they had to judge that, and it would be probably tough to compare to girls today.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Those are just two ways of saying "teenagers shouldn't be given a raw twitter/reddit/tiktok feed, and should be spending their time on something more mentally healthy", aren't they?
Whether that requires active restrictions or not depends on whether you believe you can make the mentally healthy activities more captivating than the doomscrolling.
I also think that, but am way more pessimistic on this part. If there is a path forward, I’d assume it starts by reducing the amount of people hating the world as it is today and deciding to bail out eternally.
> Whether that requires active restrictions or not depends on whether you believe you can make the mentally healthy activities more captivating than the doomscrolling
My knee-jerk reaction would be “we should ban content targeted at hurting other people’s mental health”, but I don’t see it as a viable approach in so many ways, from how to define what is hurtful, what is intentional, and freedom of expression in the first place.
But the same way we can design cities that improve residents’ well-being, I wish we found better designs (and probably business models and incentives) for our social media landscapes.
I actually enjoyed a lot more the social media before facebook (even Instagram, before it got purchased…thinking about it, those were all available on our phones too) and I still see niches (mostly small sub-reddits) that work different from the other bigger networks. Not saying we should go back there, but there’s stuff that could be inspiring.
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.
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
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.
May I recommend http://readdesert.org/
Or we're still in the "insertion sort is faster than quicksort" part of the graph.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Phones aren't even the problem if you use them well. The problem is the apps that try to make you "engaged".
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.
This is probably the most important part (and the hardest, for a lot of people).
lol good luck trying to enforce that when almost every 12 year old kid has their own smartphone today. 'Your' kid will most certainly feel left-out,different and noticed and will be commented on by their friends.
> model good behavior yourself. No phone out when your kids are around.
Yeah I dont think this is a really effective way to go about this, sure I get your point, but parents(or adults in general), have way more responsibilities and pressing matters to attend to. Not saying thats always the case, but its an apples to oranges comparison here.
That said, the lockbox part is not practical I think. More workable is to avoid data plans and use screen time/cut wifi outside core hours.
I'm a strict parent, but... what?
What most people don't seem to know is the "rod" isn't something you're supposed to hit a sheep with. You nudge and guide them with it.
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.
Are you sure you're 17 haha? You sound more mature than many adults.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
We just ask ourselves "can we" instead of "should we" and the first to pay the price for that hubris are the children.
But I was talking about taking measures during a pandemic so that people don't die, because I was replying to this comment: "we collectively decided in 2020 to trade young people's livelyhoods for old peoples lives".
Thus, changing the subject in your reply to me seems strange, unhelpful, and unfair.
I would even go so far as to say the asset price inflation and currency devaluation that is afflicting the developed countries is governments transferring a greater and greater proportion of the working population’s productivity to the non working population.
Comment I was replying to: "we collectively decided in 2020 to trade young people's livelyhoods for old peoples lives"
Where this gets interesting is when half the population does not have kids, will population wide wealth transfer from working to non working be sufficiently politically popular?
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.
It's like saying science was a mistake, when the urge to figure things out appears to be a universal trait of humanity.
It's kinda the epitome of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Wrong. He's off by a full decade, or even more than a decade if you count the IBM Simon.
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.
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...)
https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74887/force-andr... (Old answer, but the placement is similar)
Accessibility > Color and motion > Color correction > Grayscale.
No separate app and no development mode needed.
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.
Don't listen to this guy, all of those things work well for a lot of people.
With that being established, addictions can be tackled in numerous ways, but lets be frank here - our mind, often our greatest asset, is our greatest enemy with addictions. An addict has a permanent crack in persona, something you can put some glue in but things will never be the same as before, you are in recovery for rest of your life.
Since screens and media are everywhere, its pretty hard addiction, similar to say cigarettes in terms of shedding it off. So I think all those tools mentioned work to some extent, for some, but actually getting off the drug shows different, more intense results. The effects are quite subtle unlike say heroin so there isn't societal outcry yet, everybody just complaints about 'kids these days' and moves on.
That's why I consider criminal to let small kids play endlessly with phones/computers or sit in front of tv all day, getting their first addictions from their own parents who are often deep in their own rabbit holes.
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.
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> 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.
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.
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.
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?
If I need anything besides SMS/MMS and voice calls I turn on a hotspot and take out my laptop. I'm "offline" by default but still reachable in emergencies.
I do cheat on the camera portion by using my partner's smartphone for pictures where I care about the quality.
You lose conveniences but the tradeoff was very worth it in my case. I have no plans of going back to a smartphone.
I do find that https://freedom.to/ is one of the few things that has worked for me. It’s more difficult to bypass than ScreenTime, and syncing blocklists with the laptop during the day is great for overcoming procrastination. It works through a VPN profile (though not an actual VPN), so it also blocks apps.
I‘ve used it with schedules that go from 05:00 to 19:00 and it’s just such an eye opener when even a week after implementation I still open safari and reflexively type the urls for Twitter, hacker news, and Reddit even though they’ve only produced blank pages for days. Restricting it to the evening and going a couple of hours longer than the workday means I can still enjoy some mindless surfing but if I get busy doing something else I’m less likely to get sucked in. I also really like some of the suggestions here to restrict time wasters from the phone completely and only do social media stuff on the desktop. The extra effort for me to go to the office would mean that I’m more likely to use the time doing something else.
Maybe break the touch screen again?
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.
Some people like reading a book in there, too.
And, of course, smaller humans like to jump.
My hypothesis is because it trains your mind to associate bed with just those activities. Mostly sleep, because you're probably doing a whole lot more of that than sex.
So what ends up happening is that just getting into bed signals your mind that it's time to sleep. When you get in, sleep comes quickly.
I do the other stuff, reading, etc., in a nice, quiet place that isn't in bed. Then I get tired and go to bed, and I'm sleeping soundly very quickly.
It's worth a try I think. You can always reinstall those apps if you change your mind.
* 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/
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.
I've turned off all notifications on my phone, aside from texts and phone calls. It really helps. I don't have my calendar on my phone. I bought and use an nice, leather bound calendar/planner now (aside from work stuff, which I have a calendar on my laptop). It works really well for me.
For things like email and Discord, I just check them on my computer. If there's some reason I need Slack/Discord on my phone, like I'm meeting up with friends who have a Discord group chat, or I'm at a conference with co-workers that communicate with Slack -- I'll download and use the app for the period of time I need it, and then delete it ASAP.
I've told my friends if they need me to reply instantly, they should text me. People often look at me funny/ask why I don't have Discord on my phone. Most will understand when I answer that I don't want to be distracted.
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A lot of this is a huge mindset shift. I'm 25 but I have (some of) the habits of a 70 year old. I think it's worthwhile to use technology (some things just require a smartphone), but you can get 90% of the benefit while avoiding most/all of the downsides if you take a step back and think about what you're doing and why you're doing it.
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!
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.
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)?
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-...