have you been outside recently? I mean outside without a phone for a couple of months. Give yourself a no-data diet, and just observe what is going on in others. Wait alone at a bus-stop or alone at a pub or cafe. You can see them addicted to their screens everywhere. It's the norm now to immediately reach for the phone because god forbid they might otherwise feel 2 seconds of boredom. They are no longer human as far as I'm concerned. The problem is never that AI and technology will replace us. We are becoming (actually we have already become) so much like AI/robots that it's impossible to stomach. Everyone isolated into their own little algorithmic prisons without any need to listen to others. It's much much worse than any hard drug you could be addicted to because with hard drugs you still have others who you can do them with. Just do yourselves a favor and never unplug because what you see might be so upsetting that you might wonder if it's still worth living.
I won't even get started on the problem of "fixing loneliness" with an app. You don't "fix" loneliness with an external tool. The only solution to fix this is inside you (and it hurts if you do it right). Pain is part of it and anyone who claims they can take away the pain, or make it easy should be metaphorically incinerated.
These things aren't increasing empathy. They're the opposite: They are empathy sinks!
y'all do yourselves a favor and read Jacques Ellul "La Technique" (The Technological Society) and stop peddling and defending more Tech just for the Benjamins.
> They are no longer human as far as I'm concerned.
Holy dehumanization Batman! You arrived at this point frighteningly fast.
They are staving off boredom with X - they aren't human anymore. Despite staving off boredom being literally one of most human things to do.
Yeah, you probably can't fix some problem with another app, but the same can be said of most things. Loneliness is a complex thing to solve. Not to mention the problem might lie on a much deeper societal level.
>god forbid they might otherwise feel 2 seconds of boredom.
All the other things aside, this is, in my opinion, the worst part, and will have the longest, most negative implications for society. Boredom is when you are allowed to explore your own mind, daydream, think about things. We have eliminated it.
Anecdotal - we live 45 minutes away from the nearest "city" with grocery stores. We do not let our children use technology during these drives; they're only 45 minutes. Our friends all treat us like we're awful people.
Boredom is good for children. It encourages thought and introspection. Eliminating opportunities for boredom, as a species, I am sure will have negative repercussions we cannot imagine.
Agreed, and to add another thing: Ignorance (or wonder, mystery, surprise)
there's a paradoxical duality about progress. It was defined as a way to remove the cost of previous eras. You couldn't go far (solved by transportation), you didn't have time (tools), you were curious (wikipedia).
By optimizing everything away I think we damaged a big part of the very unoptimized nature of life.
I normally don't post here but i just wanted to say that i've noticed the same thing around me and have also felt the crushing depression that comes with the realisation that everyone is addicted to something that's destroying the very fabric of our society.
And your point about fixing loneliness through a painful but personal journey is spot on. If it doesn't hurt, you're not really doing it properly.
Go out and meet new people, talk about new ideas and remember that all storms will pass.
I'm like 99% certain that phrase has been said in one form or another throughout every single generation.
Wasn't there an article about how magazines were deemed bad when they first made an appearance and people would bury their heads in them?
Honestly, I just think for the most part people are afraid of change and would rather things continue the way they have. I try to remind myself of this every once in a while, and it helps me stay optimistic.
As with most things, humans are generally predictable. People in every generation will feel like their own society threatened in one form or another.
I'm not afraid of change - i grew up around technology during the 90s where we played outside every day and consider myself "up to date" wrt the current zeitgeist. I firmly believe technology (especially space tech) is the way forward but i still have reservations about the current sate of social media due to the effects on the psyche i see in people in my life. But that's just my experience.
You don't "fix" loneliness with an external tool. The only solution to fix this is inside you (and it hurts if you do it right).
Thinking this way is utterly toxic. It puts 100% of the onus to resolve an issue on the individual with no room for people to help each other. You might as well be telling depressed people to "think happy thoughts more" or telling anxious people to "snap out of it and be more resourceful".
No amount of claiming "tech is bad" will change the fact that tech is a great way of connecting people. If an app is useful to bring people who need help together with people who want to help them then that is a very good thing.
You are very right but it's also true that there's a low hanging fruit factor with 'application' to solve anything which often just shapeshift the problem.
Let's not forget the good old 'use the right tool'
late ps: half kidding, I often wonder what would happen if internet got cut for a long time (week~).
Anxiety is helped immensely by snapping out of spiraling negative thinking, CBT is pretty much the de facto starting point for addressing anxiety and depression.
I have no data on social apps solving either anxiety or depression. I suspect long-term it is an overall net-negative solution by itself.
DyslexicAtheist 49 minutes ago | parent | on: Secret’s founder returns with anti-loneliness app ...
have you been outside recently? I mean outside without a phone for a couple of months. Give yourself a no-data diet, and just observe what is going on in others. Wait alone at a bus-stop or alone at a pub or cafe. You can see them addicted to their screens everywhere. It's the norm now to immediately reach for the phone because god forbid they might otherwise feel 2 seconds of boredom.
I think you're vastly overestimating how social people were before smartphones were widespread. This is a really awful source, but it proves the point pretty well [0].
> It's much much worse than any hard drug you could be addicted to because with hard drugs you still have others who you can do them with.
I hope you don't really believe this. I don't disagree that some modern tech/algorithm solutions are making the world a worse place, but to say that you'd be better addicted to heroin than Facebook is nonsense. Humanity is always calling the "next" thing worse than the current thing when the current thing is normalised (music, rock music, television, video games, smart phones) - here's [1] an article from 30 years ago speaking about TV addiction.
> Just do yourselves a favor and never unplug because what you see might be so upsetting that you might wonder if it's still worth living.
I sincerely hope you don't feel this way, and if you really do, you should speak to someone about your feelings.
That first source - at least everyone appears to be reading roughly the same thing. I think it’s still a further step of isolation for every person to be doing something different on their phone. Similar to a TV in a living room vs everyone watching something different on their device.
> They are no longer human as far as I'm concerned.
Well, yeah. We’re cyborgs now and have been for a while. Smartphones have basically become an integrated extension of ourselves.
> It's the norm now to immediately reach for the phone because god forbid they might otherwise feel 2 seconds of boredom.
Probably because I have a wealth of information in my pocket. I can utilize my idle time and study flash cards or chess theory or get back to someone. Sometimes I just meditate or think about things instead.
I do agree that apps can’t possibly fix social issues like people no longer having communities to fall back on. However this comment is an unnecessarily pessimistic take in my opinion. I’m pretty sure people have tried to douse their loneliness with external sources for millennia.
Edit: to be clear, internet / smartphone addiction is a real issue that isn’t seriously discussed as far as I’m aware. However this is different from simply using your phone. In any case being antagonistic and referring to people as not human is probably not a great method of spreading one’s ideas.
But how do we stop? My wife and I got rid of our smartphones for a few months and just felt profoundly lonely because there’s no one to talk to. It feels like the only way to actually stop would be to have a community all willing to do so at the same time.
Wait, really? Do you have family? Do you have friends? You don't have anyone to talk to at all???
Join a club. Pick up a new hobby. Join a church. Attend local events. There is probably a hundred things you could do to meet and talk with all kinds of people.
Well, it seems like it's not popular to actually say what you can witness with your eyes and near you. I've noticed the same exact thing myself, and I have been observing it for years already.
I wonder if people have noticed similar behavioral things in the past. Something like an exaggeration of Emperor's clothes, where we collectively disregard what is absolutely evident, and then we reason about what the reality should be like, and we believe that just by reasoning/talking/thinking about it, reality will somehow magically change to our liking.
That's my best attempt to not offend anyone while discussing this. Being blunt, I would simply say it's delusional behavior if you haven't noticed the same exact thing. And it's not just in rich countries, either; people in third world countries do the same thing (with phones, digital life, obsession with social media, etc.)
In my opinion, boredom and being alone is not that big of a problem, really. Everyone is alone in this world. There are very few true friendships. Most people just hang out together in the same vicinity, but they are not really friends. There's a lot of envy, hatred, jealousy, you name it. Even Blaise Pascal noticed the same thing: If everybody knew what everyone else says about them, there would be hardly any friends left.
I think only time can create friendship bonds. My friends are people that I know like 1-2 decades.
But sharing the same moral values is a prerequisite. Otherwise, it's all fake and a mask and usually it's because one of the "friends" needs something from the other.
It might be a moral decadence/degeneration problem, rather than tech-specific problem. I find it absolutely puzzling how more people aren't aware of this, since it's so simple to witness and there's ample evidence, just go out once in a while..
I won't even get started on the problem of "fixing loneliness" with an app. You don't "fix" loneliness with an external tool. The only solution to fix this is inside you (and it hurts if you do it right). Pain is part of it and anyone who claims they can take away the pain, or make it easy should be metaphorically incinerated.
These things aren't increasing empathy. They're the opposite: They are empathy sinks!
y'all do yourselves a favor and read Jacques Ellul "La Technique" (The Technological Society) and stop peddling and defending more Tech just for the Benjamins.