We're biological creatures evolved to be outside, to interact with the physical world and real people.
It's easily replicable. Go out for some more walks, plan more visits with friends, do some wood craft, gardening or whatever else physical. Your mood will instantly improve, reliably. Because this is your natural state.
At the same time, we also have the built-in tendency to optimize for convenience. That too is perfectly natural. Hence we fully embrace all technology but forget about the cost: drifting ever further away from our very being. We're our own enemy. A common example here on HN would be the excitement regarding working from home. I get it, I love it too. But let's not dismiss that this further tilts things into a flat, isolated, touchless society. You want it, but it's still really bad for you.
Further, as conscious creatures we're not designed to process the information avalanche of the modern age. We process more of it in a day than somebody did in an entire lifetime 2 centuries ago. Likewise we're not designed for the current speed of change.
And finally, we're social creatures but not designed for it at a scale of millions or billions of people. We cannot empathize with the culture, politics and differences of that scale.
> A common example here on HN would be the excitement regarding working from home. I get it, I love it too. But let's not dismiss that this further tilts things into a flat, isolated, touchless society. You want it, but it's still really bad for you.
work from home and working remote lets me live a way richer life then working in the office allowed for. I have time and energy to dive into hobbies, pick up more hobbies and have the flexibility to travel.
There is so much more to life then spending it in an office, making money for someone else, then commuting for 2 hours, wasting another hour getting ready to do that commute.
I am in the fortunate position where both my wife and myself work from home.
It has been an incredible privilege being able to spend quality time with the person I care for the most without the pressure to optimize what little precious time I have outside of work.
e.g., being able to have lunch together, or just taking a quick break to check in on each other's lives.
Would so much rather have this than sitting in a cubicle or forcibly socializing with people who are acquaintences at best (maybe the introvert in me speaking).
Yes, there are some folks who need the social interaction. There are also those who prefer quality interactions over quantity.
A million times this! I feel like I unlocked so much productivity and energy levels to work out and be healthy whereas before the soul crushing commute and open office plan made me feel on edge when trying to be in a flow state and had me drained at the end of the day. I can’t imagine going back to the office just to talk to work acquaintances that are busy with kids and their own lives.
I have a fairly small apartment where I live with my wife and two kids (7 & 13). I read/write a lot while commuting by public transport.
Work from home is a nightmare for me, even though I have to commute 10+ km to the office.
I mean, to each his own – I don't have any problem with you loving working remotely. But please do not forget that people are in various situations. (I'm not claiming you do, just wanted to mention another perspective.)
I was just thinking and can't remember anyone being bothered by someone wanting to go to the office and work there. I do know people who are offended by people who want to work from home though and they can be pretty aggressive and annoying (not pointing at you here btw.).
The commute I have is aprox. 50 min and I stand on the train and tube the whole way in the morning. No room to read or write. We also have fairly big 3-bed apartment and one of the smaller bedrooms is our home office. It's really amazing and for two adults and a child plenty of space for everyone.
Yes, to each his own. If you prefer to go to an office go ahead. Don't expect others to be there though.
Also, the money I save from commuting goes straight into paying up our mortgage and doing a lunch or two and dinner at our local town restaurants. Great Italian and Turkish food around. Certainly beats Greggs in the City and even some fancier restaurants and pubs.
I find it funny how the push to the office comes with let's support "local businesses" - what they mean by that is actually big chains. Well, now I can actually support local businesses and spend money locally. Earlier I couldn't as, you know, I only came home to sleep.
I think the office/home misses the point when it comes to interaction. It’s more about whether you’re working in the same physical location as your colleagues, and while no one is stopping people heading into the office, if no other colleagues are there you’re not working in the same physical location.
Personally, I live alone, and when I spend a day without in depth conversations with co located people I feel very down. Obviously I can head out in the evening, but during work hours it’s very hard to both do my job, and have conversations with co located people. This is true whether I’m at home, or in an empty office.
Now, rationally, I know it’s not in anyone’s job description to come into the office to look after my personal mental health - and as a manager I push for people being able to work from home where it makes sense, and support those people as best I can. However, I’ve now decided I will likely soon leave my current role and look for a job where I know I will be co located 4-5 days a week, because I know it’s what is best for my mental health. Even if that means a significant career change I’d be happy to do it.
Again, I have no issues with people wanting to work from home, and I’m sure it’s had a great positive impact for those people. For me, it’s had a major negative impact, and it’s now something I’ll be sure is a criteria in future roles.
So GP's lived experiences are not real? Your reply reads like "yeah, but for me..." All of the HN discussions about work from office vs home always devolve into the same No True Scotsman arguments. It doesn't matter what anyone says, someone else will inevitably say: "yeah, but for me..." Nothing new is learned. Everyone's mind stays closed to other's peoples lived experiences.
And wait until you have teammates that don't want to pick-up the (video) phone or reply to your chats or emails. Suddenly, you won't be having those "in depth conversations working remotely". Can you empathize with GP's experience?
I never even thought, let alone said, anything remotely like that.
> Your reply reads like "yeah, but for me..."
And it was. What's wrong with that? The commenter was expressing their personal reality, and I was expressing mine. Why is it bad when I do it but not when they do it?
Since the whole WFH/RTO debate (and it's silly this debate even exists because the two aren't mutually exclusive) is entirely about everyone's personal preferences, expressing personal preferences seems appropriate.
I guess you live in/around London. Thank you to share your experience. The commutes that my London teammates endure sound like soul-sucking hell.
Real question: If you could afford the same setup closer to city center (say, zone 2 or something) but a 15-minute bicycle from the office, would you do it? My point: What London needs is more housing (a sh-t ton of it), then it will become affordable housing. Real estate prices are so out of control in London... forcing most to live far outside the city, and endure a hellish commute.
Prices where we are are similar to zone 2 but much better access to green belt and major roads that get you out to the 'countryside'. That's why we decided to buy here and not go for central London.
If we were to live closer to our offices I would probably go in more, yes.
That's the problem. Don't take it personally, but if we are in the same team, I don't care at all if you go to the office to work; I'm happy working from home. But, if you want to work from the office it's because you (probably) want to work with people there... so the company forces the rest to come to the office some days per week. So it's not really "to each his own": working from the office is not a personal choice, it's rather a team/company decision.
Yeah ... I have a moderately sized house where I live with my wife. She loves working from home because it frees her to be flexible. She can take meetings without a headset, grab snacks whenever, play music, play with the cats, or - if she's no longer being productive - turn on the TV.
For all the reasons my wife enjoys working from home, I enjoy working from the office. I love her dearly, but I also want to work during my work time. There's only so much I can tune out while remaining productive.
I see this pattern a lot in straight couples. The wife has much lower economic productivity. Why? Please don't read this as a slight against your wife! (A person's economic value is completely separate from their value as a human being.)
My statement comes with a lot of assumptions. I cannot believe that someone who works like that actually makes decent money. Are they working the absolute minimum and paid enough to feel satisfied?
We work in the same industry. While I do make more money, that is primarily due to being older and having a little more experience. She makes decent money.
The lesson here might be that having more fucks to give does not necessarily lead to better performance reviews or more promotions. Or equally likely, my wife is smarter than I am and is able to exceed expectations with far less effort.
(Not GP) It's not a "to each his own" - I don't have any problem with you working in an office, in a place where public transit is a functional commute. I'd probably want a return to office if I lived somewhere that had that, but I don't. It's not so much that I'm "choosing" remote, it's that non-remote commutes make office jobs that much worse because of the lack of functional public transit for that commute. And, in other cases, because office locations are shit (office parks).
(I live in LA: We do actually have great public transit... kind of. It just goes to limited places, so those places are packed. Otherwise it's buses, and those don't work as a read/write commute - at least in LA, both b/c busses also have to deal with traffic, and the US's social safety net... issues).
> work from home and working remote lets me live a way richer life then working in the office allowed for. I have time and energy to dive into hobbies, pick up more hobbies and have the flexibility to travel.
Personally I have more time to
>> Go out for some more walks, plan more visits with friends, do some wood craft, gardening or whatever else physical.
Working from home I don't feel compelled to sit and do all work at a set period of time. Oh, it's nice and sunny at 3pm when I'm getting a natural decline in output? I'll go for a walk. Takes an hour, I feel happier, and I come back way more productive. Want a longer lunch with friends? No biggie. (This combined with the commuting aspect you mention, which is actually a high stress period of time for me. My days have far less anxiety working from home. Including the reduced time pressure) I'd argue that I have far more productive work hours between 9 and 6 because of WFH.
I see people making fun of your answer but I think the big difference is how people treat work from home vs work in the office. There's definitely also environmental factors. I'm sure there are others that greatly benefit from a very fixed structure. Probably depends on personality and what you do. I'm a researcher and I'm not sure there's ever really an "off the clock" time for me, so the flexibility is far more enjoyable to me. I'm sure there's people that can disconnect better than me. I'm sure there are even researchers that enjoy the structure.
To each their own and I thought that's what we were supposed to learn from this WFH experiment. People are different, who knew? Honestly I'd prefer jobs have work space available but also allow for flexible schedules and not requiring to always be in the office. Hybrid of "x days in the office" isn't the real solution to me. The solution is "let people figure out what's optimal for themselves and make the environment where they can do that thing." (Some days I do work in my office because I need to be in a different space or need to work with someone else. Flexibility is key)
I think it's that second piece that's important about wfh. You need to take advantage of it to do more things. I could commute to the suburbs, or I could work from home and leave earlier to hang out with friends.
Or I can go on a road trip and work part of that time doing things in the evening and weekends, taking long lunches, etc...
Working remotely is great if you take advantage of it
It's important to track your work time and actually do something else instead of commute though. I fall into pattern of working longer if I'm not careful.
What is wrong with pointing out a possible error in this claim?
> excitement regarding working from home. I get it, I love it too. But let's not dismiss that this further tilts things into a flat, isolated, touchless society. You want it, but it's still really bad for you.
Not spending 1 hour+ per day commuting allows one to go to city meetings, go to the gym, walk around the neighborhood when the sun is out for those in northern latitudes, etc.
If anything, spending so much time commuting to and from work is what tilted things into a flat, isolated, touchless society.
Your error is that as seen by the sky high and increasing obesity rates, for example, most people are not as motivated (due to personality or just environment), and I'm quite sure work from home will cause obesity to spike in 5-10 years (there's a bit of lag to get the numbers).
At least the commute was forcing a lot of these people to move around.
And before you start with gyms and such, remember that New Year's resolutions prompt a huge amount of people to register at gyms but a crazy number, something like 80-90% drop out by March.
But then you're in an office and you have to move around. Maybe go out to lunch at a cafeteria.
I wore a pedometer for a while. While I was working from the office I was averaging about 8000 steps, while during a full day at home sometimes the average was as low as 800 steps.
If working doesn't give you any meaning, your job sucks. People tend to like validation, participating in society, creating value for others, etc. Work is usually the best vector. Dicking around with art for the sake of leisure provides some meaning, but doesn't deliver what a good job does. If it did, it would be a job.
They aren't mutually exclusive, but consider that the best predictor of men's happiness is their job. Not their hobbies, not what they consume, not how many vacation days they have, not how many hours they work; their job.
Beware of the "appeal to nature" fallacy [1]. You are right that exercising and going outside have been experimentally demonstrated to improve mood, but there is no such thing as "your natural state", and even if you arbitrarily pick some definition, there is nothing inherently good about it. Is agriculture "unnatural"?
The "we're not designed for the current speed of change" argument has also been made many times 2 centuries ago, for example with claims that the unnatural speed of train travel drives people insane. [2] Such claims are hilarious in retrospect. In 200 years, what will people think of your comment?
To say that sitting in front of a screen is just as natural as foraging for mushrooms is nonsense from the perspective of what your body is optimized to do, on an evolutionary timescale.
I'm really quite sure that people can grasp that when you put a fish on dry land, it's not made for that. And that similarly, we're not made for social isolation, living indoors, extreme overstimulation of the senses, non-stop negativity, lack of cognitive breaks, etc.
Anecdotally, it doesn't seem to be the case. For those who have their spouse and children (if they've reached that point), and in a WFH situation it's possible not to encounter a single other person in the day during the week, until running errands.
If you're living alone, then it's trivially possible not to socialize at all for days at a time (and beyond) - you now have to rearrange your life to meet people in your leisure time. You have to join meetups, sports, clubs, after working all day because work is devoid of watercooler talk, of idle chit-chat. And so is your home. The precedence of having made friends in formative years and keeping them helps, but they're busy too - you won't see them every day.
So now you're looking at spending real $ just to meet an adequate threshold of social time every week.
I agree that the parent comment kinda misses the point that social isolation is bad for you. But "we're not designed to process the information avalanche of the modern age" does make me squint.
My intuition tells me that cavemen probably had worse quality of life (experience-wise) than modern humans.
Information input risen drastically long time ago, what was it, three thousand years from "here, this is a knife, you cut here" to a full blown education system?
I think our brain elasticity is good enough to handle much much more before it overloads (or whatever are the consequences of "unnatural" amount of information).
"My intuition tells me that cavemen probably had worse quality of life (experience-wise) than modern humans."
That's a very suggestive judgment. It's likely they felt incredibly more in line with their body, emotions and environment. They were probably experiencing states of "flow" for the majority of their active hours, and frequent genuine happiness and sadness.
But then it's impossible to measure things like fulfillment and happiness from bone remnants and fragments of DNA, so we wouldn't know for sure.
> The parent comment is pointless intellectualism.
Someone posts a thoughtful and polite reply, with links to back up their statements, and this is your response? This isn't appropriate at all.
As to your argument in general — well, I'll just include this section from the Wikipedia article 'Criticism of Evolutionary Biology' because I think every one of the criticisms discussed below could be applied to your comments:
> Critics of evolutionary psychology accuse it of promoting genetic determinism, pan-adaptationism (the idea that all behaviors and anatomical features are adaptations), unfalsifiable hypotheses, distal or ultimate explanations of behavior when proximate explanations are superior, and malevolent political or moral ideas.
> In 200 years, what will people think of your comment?
Probably the same think I currently think of the typical Baptist warning that letting a municipality go wet will lead to an uptick in sinful fornication and fisticuffs. (And dancing!) The reasoning is almost certainly off. But as far as consequences, they're not wrong. :)
I'm more concerned about those who would hand wave problems that come from these specific pieces of social media technology in a growing number of studies of those specific social media services. Referring to train-induced insanity reveals OP's flawed reasoning, but it doesn't address at all what "the Phones" are probably doing to U.S. girls and young women.
Many species modify their environment intentionally, and some go so far as to engage in a form of farming / animal husbandry. Various ants farm fungi, some species herd aphids for their "honeydew" secretions, pocket gophers cultivate tree roots, etc.
Humans are physical beings, and it is our nature to experience the world through our physical senses. The psychosomatic relationship between our brain and the rest of our nervous system is also well documented (i.e. effects of exercise, gut health and diet on mood, etc).
The digital world is a semi-shared fantasy. The longer you spend there, the more the neglected parts of you will suffer for it.
The appeal to nature definitely doesn't hold up, but I'm pretty sure that the historical consensus in 200 years will be that early 21st century social media was psychologically predatory.
Yeah. Virtually none of the suggestions OP is making are "natural" in any meaningful way. Even going for walks usually implies walking in a park, which is an invention of the past 100 years or so. It's also very Euro-centric. In many other cultures its considered strange to just walk around for no reason.
> In many other cultures its considered strange to just walk around for no reason
Name a single one.
Walking being natural, as is meant colloquially, is not contingent on whether the environment has been altered. It's contingent on being out-in-the-world.
I was referring to a book I read by a Brit who lived in Africa for 30 years. He wrote about an interaction where he moved to an African village and "went for a walk" through the village. The locals thought he was strange to walk for no reason and assumed he was looking for workers.
1. I was referring to walking as recreation, not walking in general (not sure how people missed this)
2. Body parts don't have a "purpose" unless you believe in a creator-god.
Yeah there's nothing better for mental health than spending 2 hours a day in a car to sit in a dark windowless room for 8 hours with headphones. I went back to remote work this past fall and it has been such a massive boost to my mental health. I spend a ton more time with my family and friends. I take a long lunch every day to spend with my daughter. Never going back to an office.
It sucks that this was your office experience, but your experience is not universal. I commute around 14km taking around 25mins, or considerably less when I take my motorcycle. My office is a large, vibrant building filled with interesting people.
WFH is challenging for me, with two young kids and not enough space. I feel bored and isolated spending so much time alone.
Woah. 14km in 25min is 33.5km/h. What is your mode of transport, beside motocycle? Who commutes that fast anywhere in the world? Then you said "considerably less when I take my motorcycle". Are you traveling on average > 50km/h during your commute? That is incredible in the modern, developed world -- extremely rare.
similar for me, 8km commute (~15 mins), at home I am alone and don't have concentration to work, in the office I am with people and environment makes me to easier to do my job
Usually that's because it's the closest job that will pay their current rent, but won't pay the rent of a place that's closer. Almost nobody "chooses" that.
We are definitely social creatures, and living lives of increasingly less social interaction is not going to work out for us personally or as societies.
But I see no reason we can't handle society at a scale of millions or billions of people. It, after all, always is experienced as less than that, even people who live in NYC or Mexico City have regular interactions with a smaller group of 100-200 people at most, even if incidental daily interactions with more people than most of us.
But those incidental daily interactions with a huge number of people -- I am pretty sure are actually positive. To the extent that I'd predict that even in the present society with social interaction limited by the social forces we're talking about -- someone living in manhattan who, on the average can't help but interact incidentally with a huge number of people daily (on average, there are exceptions, going up with wealth!) -- is likely on average to be happier, due to those interactions, than someone in a suburb working remotely who has one to two incidental interactions... a week?
I think those incidental interactions are in fact key to happiness, the more the better, and there is no problem if due to living in some of the densest places on the planet, they are with a huge number of diverse people.
Also I think people seriously under-estimate the extent to which humans have lived in "urban" societies for many thousands of years. Granted, the scale of "urban" was smaller than it is now (a city of 20K people was enormous 500 years ago), but we have always been extremely social creatures, always in fact, in general on aggregate, looking to maximize our number of relationships and interactions. (See eg _Dawn of Everything_). (I also think people way over-estimate the universal cultural homogeniety of "ancient" and "pre-historical" civilizations. Things were not as we assume).
Your prediction is extremely intuitive, but there's a bit of a surprise here. People in rural areas tend to experience substantially less loneliness than those in cities. I'll link to a random study [1] showing this, but I'm not saying this because of that study. It's a well known result that's been repeatedly and consistently demonstrated.
I think the probable reason is pretty straight forward. When there are "too many" people in an area there's a really good chance any given person you encounter is someone you'll never encounter again, or sporadically at best. So you start seeing other people as something more like NPCs. We obviously understand other people are other people, but given you'll probably never see this person again any sort of encounter is generally going to be exceptionally superficial.
And even if you try to change that, it's probably not going to be reciprocated. If somebody in a small town wanted to kick up a conversation with and get to meaningfully and really know me, I'd happily reciprocate. Go to their house for a beer or even dinner? Sure, why not? If it happened in a large city, I'd expect he's probably a scammer or just not all there. In either case, I'm going to be looking to end the conversation and move along ASAP.
So you get this paradoxical scenario where people surrounded by orders of magnitude more people end up lonelier than those with far fewer faces about.
I would propose a different hypothesis: that populations in urban areas might be more itinerant and much more likely to be removed from family structures.
I think that one is pretty straightforward: homogeneity. I grew up in a much more rural area than I live in now, and you just don't get your perspectives and views challenged very much (unless you happen to be outside the norm, in which case your life can be extremely difficult).
I don't think most really realize how neglected rural communities are. It can take something like a miracle to get the government to fund paving a road off the beaten path. Now put yourself in their shoes, and imagine how it feels when you see a government sending hundreds of billions of dollars to countries half way around the world.
This is why things like 'America first' resonate so strongly with rural communities. It's not some jingoistic message, let alone some sort of a secret dog whistle for some sort of a race nationalism thing. It's just people seeing tremendously large amounts of money and interest being spent on things like countries halfway around the world, with little to nothing to show for it all domestically.
The thing is, depending on what kind of rural community type we're talking about, there's no amount of money available in this world that could save them.
Even if you could theoretically build all that infrastructure, the maintenance burden would just crush you 20 years down the line, it would crush your kids and your grand kids.
With all due respect, you have to appreciate that nobody everybody thinks as you do. People in rural areas don't want to be "saved", and the vast majority have no interest in moving, let alone to a city - especially in current times, regardless of cost. Surprisingly there was a very recent poll on this exact issue [1].
As for maintenance, I'll elaborate on that story. People on the road of this town had been petitioning the government for years to get their road paved. Each time it'd rain, the road (made of mostly compacted dirt) would get into pretty rough shape. There'd been several accidents precisely because of this, particularly with kids, and it was also pretty rough on people's vehicles. People, as in people - not the government, would patch it up, but that'd take time, and it was non-trivial.
The government clearly had no interest in paving the road, so eventually the people raised the funds themselves over a rather lengthy period of time, and then paved the road themselves. As for maintenance, spot repairing potholes is a whole lot easier than dealing with part of a road getting washed out by rain. It wasn't cheap. And so things like this really make you wonder why you're paying taxes. And then you see headlines of a government and president seemingly gloating about sending hundreds of billions of dollars to countries half way around the world. It just doesn't inspire positive feelings, and makes the government seem desperately out of touch.
It's not really less empathetic, it's just more parochial (i.e. empathy tends to be reserved for the in-group).
Conversely, I find that urban politics often produce the kind of "empathy" where people say things in the abstract that are in line with empathy, but it doesn't translate to actual person-to-person interactions - i.e. it's more of a play act.
The "monkeysphere" concept comes to mind, and it does make me wonder sometimes if true empathy can even be scaled to large and diverse populations in principle.
Parent post is right, we are inherantly tribal creature capable of really empathizing and aligning ourselves with maybe 7-10 people. We can find a tribal identity with maybe 30 people. We can productively coordinate with groups of as many as 50-75 people. Any more than that, and we simply can't hold those relationships in our monkey brains and default to 'stranger bad'.
Fortunately, at some point we gained an abstraction layer on top of our monkey brains, capable of empathizing with abstract characteristics such as nation, race, religion, etc. These abstractions are socketed right into our monkey layer and are a hack that can simulate the 50-75 people type relationship for billions of people. Unfortunately that layer needs to be trained, and it's even more unfortunately very easy and quite profitable to train in the wrong ways.
I suppose we can all keep posting "I'm right", "No, I'm right"!
I believe people have in fact been routinely living in groups of far more than 30 people for tens of thousands of years (in some but not all places/times over that span, sure), it's a misconception to think this is new or unusual for humans.
We have not only done fine with it, we have thrived with it.
(Also having relationships over distance too, for a long long time).
> I believe people have in fact been routinely living in groups of far more than 30 people for tens of thousands of years
Ok but could they follow 500 influencers, watch people die everyday, get the ever up to date flow of new disease, earthquakes, terrorists attack fed 24/7, compare themselves to the best of the best, see the worst of the worst, &c. ?
For people who lived/grew up before the 90s/2000s it is very obvious that things changed in a massive way extremely quickly, a lot due to internet but eve more due to pocket computers.
I think you're massively underestimating the scale of the issue. People don't thrive on social medias interactions, they're addicted to them, depending on the survey/study you look at it's anywhere from 4 to 9 hours per day on average.
Have we thrived, though? If we're talking about monkey brains and evolution, we need to keep in mind that all of the stuff we're talking about is even only a tiny fraction of the time that humans have been anatomically modern (300000 to 100000 years ago depending on exactly how modern you mean, with the 100k years ago mark being where an autopsy wouldn't be able to tell the difference unless it were specifically trying to date the corpse based on things like carbon13 or noting the dental care etc).
So all things considered, I don't think we can really say that we've proved out that the stuff we've been up to since the dawn of agriculture (10k years ago) is going to stand the test of time. Maybe let's at least see where global warming goes over the next 100-200 years before we start throwing around words like "thrive".
I agree that it doesn't come by itself, it takes will and dedication and work... I don't think we can take for granted that everything will go by itself. I'm quite pessimistic as to the actual outcomes, to be honest -- but not because I think it's impossible, but I think we're in the process of kinda failing at it. We're certainly not excelling.
> As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shews us how long it is, before we look at them as our fellow-creatures. [...] This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings. As soon as this virtue is honoured and practised by some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually becomes incorporated in public opinion.
> A common example here on HN would be the excitement regarding working from home. I get it, I love it too. But let's not dismiss that this further tilts things into a flat, isolated, touchless society. You want it, but it's still really bad for you.
Speaking for myself, yes I want to work from home, but I don't want a "flat, isolated, touchless society". In fact, regular face to face interactions with others is something I'd like more of, but I'd prefer that the majority of that be outside the workplace.
Don't get me wrong, everywhere I've worked I've loved most of my coworkers and got along with them well enough, but the workplace being a context that can't be opted out of by virtue of being one's livelihood can make it restrictive in ways that I'm not sure is healthy when serving as the place for the bulk of socialization.
Unfortunately building social groups outside of work is difficult and gets increasingly so with age.
> In fact, regular face to face interactions with others is something I'd like more of, but I'd prefer that the majority of that be outside the workplace.
If you're working 8+ hours a day, I think the raw numbers make it difficult to get substantial face-to-face interaction time outside of work, with people you don't live with. You'd need to be militant about planning an outing every evening.
I know someone who wakes up every morning at 4 am (so for her it's mornings rather than evenings) for either her breakfast club, running group, morning dance party (this is a thing, called Daybreaker), dodge ball league, etc.
Maybe you're like her. I'm not. If I don't meet people at work, I'm alone most days.
This is true, and I think it highlights a major structural flaw in our society. Our lives really shouldn't be as dominated by our jobs as they are, particularly with how productivity has skyrocketed in the past several decades.
It's worth pointing out that this is not a real choice in any meaningful way, because of the pressures of reality.
If you could work less but earn the same amount then it actually becomes a real choice to work less.
But if you work less and there are financial tradeoffs involved, the hardship caused by those tradeoffs essentially means you are forced to choose to continue working the same amount. Not a real choice.
Very few people earn enough money to actually choose to work less.
> Very few people earn enough money to actually choose to work less.
I don't believe that.
I don't know GP's income, but I'd hazard a guess that most Hacker News users are making significantly above the median income in their country of residence. To the individual who has gotten used to a certain lifestyle, it may well feel as though they need as much money as they have, but there are lots of people who live on much less.
That means people are choosing to prioritize their current lifestyles over working less. And that's fine, but it is absolutely a choice!
(I do think culture has a roll to play as well—when 40 hours is the expectation, going down to 30 often means more than the 25% pay cut it logically should entail. But the fact remains that people don't do it.)
Lifestyle is certainly a factor, but the bigger thing is the safety net one has built (or is in the process of building) for themselves, which depending on place of living can be crucial.
In the US where I live and the public safety net is rather thin for example, one could downsize income in pursuit of better work life balance and be getting along fine, but wind up in trouble when say major medical expenses strike and chew through income and start eating through savings.
So even if I started living extremely frugally I wouldn’t feel comfortable moving to part-time until I have enough padding to not be completely financially ruined by a series of unfortunate events. Of course this is possible even working full-time, but the increased income that brings improves the situation considerably.
The system is set up in such a way that it punishes people who are not chasing higher incomes, up to a point.
Past that point it starts to reward people heavily. When you make enough that you stop worrying about saving and start affording vacation homes and yachts and flying first class everywhere. That's the "lifestyle" thing.
Most people don't earn nearly enough to have expensive lifestyles unless they are heavily in debt. And those people have heavily borrowed from their own futures to finance their current lifestyle, it will bite them later
Most people's incomes leave them in a lot of uncertainty. One or two major expenses in a row will screw them.
If the choice is "work full time and have a stable, comfortable income" or "work part time and have an uncertain, shaky income" that's not a real choice.
If people could work part time and still make the stable income, more people would. I guarantee it.
> That means people are choosing to prioritize their current lifestyles over working less
If their lifestyle is extravagant, then yes, you are correct.
But if it's a choice between having a stable lifestyle with the ability to save for retirement versus living paycheck to paycheck, that's not a real choice, is it?
For a more absurd example, just about anyone could live more cheaply in a van. But saying to people "you could work part time if you were just willing to downgrade your lifestyle and live in a van" would be absurd. Not living in a van is a "choice" that we all make, but it's not really a choice, is it?
I think this is somewhat dependent on where you live. I've noticed that since I've moved to Ireland it's easier to get face-to-face interaction outside the workplace. Granted, it all involves the pubs, which is another issue, but it's much more doable because people go there just to have a pint and chat. I can go down to the one closest to me and just start chatting with any of the old people there, and they're usually happy to do so. Couldn't do that in America, sadly (except in my hometown one where I already knew the people).
It's the same for me. I want to work from home, at least most days, but then it's quite difficult to actually get out and see people. Past jobs have provided the bulk of my social interaction, unfortunately. Now it's kind of lose-lose, because commuting by car 4+ days/wk is horseshit and intolerable. But my friend group has shrunk significantly and I keep coming up empty-handed when I try to create regular hangouts that I actually enjoy.
I don't understand why so much of the "social media is harmful" discussion focuses on social isolation and teen judgment. These are obviously important but none of the linked resources discuss the shift in expectations for life outcomes that is caused by social media and internet usage.
The cliche saying is that happiness = reality - expectations.
The spread of the internet has broken users free of their local bubbles and exposed them to an entire world of possibilities. Everyone is now able to compare their life to the global maximum instead of their local maximum. It's much easier now to be successful (along any axis) and miserable because there will always be people who are more successful. All of this has been moved into the internet user's scope of daily existence.
Any links to research or writing in this area will be appreciated. Also, I am not a specialist but would be open to assisting with research in this area.
Noah is the man, BUT he has a really nasty habit of talking about subjects without referring to some canonical sources of his ideas that pre-date his own takes by a ton.
Haidt was WAY ahead of him on the smartphones causing depression by YEARS.
Additionally, with geopolitics, he encapsulates a lot of work by Peter Zeihan without ever referring to him directly.
To push back a bit against our being naturally social, ancestral primates were solitary foragers with no natural tendency toward socializing. And even later when we became social hunter gatherers, I venture to imagine it was common to lose your group and become alone, due to the small number of people and dangers abound. Insisting that we’re naturally social is probably more far fetched than admitting it’s fairly normal to become alone.
Notwithstanding I'm skeptical of your claim, being "naturally social" is the entire reason language has evolved. A (very) distant ancestor's nature has no claim on your nature.
> Language doesn’t prove the absence of natural solitude. It just shows we’ve been “pretty social” for a while.
For modern humans it does.
You can't dedicate a huge percentage of your brain to speech and communication in general, and allocate a sizeable percentage of your total energy usage (!) to them, and still be meant to be a solitary species.
Talking about absolute states. Our being social beings doesn't preclude also experiencing solitude or having more or less tendency towards introversion. A solitary nature in this case has a meaning that we also ascribe to certain animals wholesale, because it describes a biologically driven behavior that can't be said of humans.
Presumably we needed to “notice” an orange in a tree before we could point to it. Before you could communicate with signs, you could probably realize something equivalent to “that’s food”, despite not having language yet.
If go out for walks in my neighborhood, I interact with plenty of real people. I am on a first-name basis with persons living five blocks away, and know the names of dogs belonging to families I haven't met. Working from home for a year and some months increased the number of walks considerably.
If I go out for walks from work, admittedly I see a greater variety of people. But my interactions with them are limited.
Everyone reading this needs to go read the book the Dawn of Everything. That book - long as it is - synthesizes a lot of preexisting research to argue, among many things, that the thing that makes humans humans is our wild and wacky adaptability.
This idea that there is some kind of pre-idyllic Eden state of nature and man is a myth propagated by wildly unsubstantiated guesses that involved very little or no science or data.
I’m not saying your main point, that getting outside does us some good and that we’re social creatures, is wrong. It’s just that it’s one facet of our long history as evolved animals.
We’re literally built for change. It’s that very adaptability that has allowed us to survive and change.
We are uniquely adaptable, but our ability to adapt does not necessarily imply that there are not ideal states. Not only that, there are clearly limits to our adaptability. We can be pushed to the point that we begin to break.
An awful lot of research exists to suggest that exposure to the outdoors has positive effects on mood and well being, and a veritable ocean to suggest that loneliness is toxic to both mental and physical health. It's not a simple appeal to nature- there is empirical data backing the claims that the original commenter made.
All animals adapt (or try to). In the first place, it doesn't necessarily work (things go extinct), and if it does, it may require evolutionary changes which take a (really) long time. If you think of examples of short-term adaptability, they don't substantially change the animal (e.g. reward circuits); usually it involves strategies and/or symbiosis. For simpler beings like bacteria maybe it's faster.
Some conditions are sure to be either entirely negative, or at least lead to deleterious effects for a very long indeterminate length of time. For instance, chronic calorie restriction (or overconsumption), or having no exposure to bright light or sunlight. Survival is one thing and quality of life is another. Some animals may have evolved to be solitary; how many of those were previously social beings, in the evolutionary chain? That may suggest how likely and viable a strategy that is. Language has evolved as a human power because we are so social - it seems infants learn from direct exposure but don't pick up language well from videos. I don't think emotional needs can be satisfied with cheap substitutes, and as entertainment technology develops, you see the offerings trying to more closely mimic real human interaction (VR, AI, etc). If we surpass the uncanny valley it will be because the synthetic experiences will be indistinguishable, which makes them redundant. It would mean that the way to "adapt" to isolated virtual living is to deceive ourselves with false reality (also see Brave New World and all the consequences entailed as to agency, liberty, the human experience). It becomes a support system for living in isolation - as opposed to devising a support system for living well.
I mean you can call it what it is. An overstressed society generates more economic output than the opposite. It's definitely not healthy, but it has never been about our health. Ever since Frederick Taylor and the factory optimization movement started. It has never stopped. It probably never will. You can't left the cat out of the bag in a world full of identical bags and expect it to finds it's way back to the same bag.
The social thing is really interesting to me; we’re inherently social creatures but why don’t we want to be social? As in, why does social anxiety seem so rampant?
Even in non-tech circles I notice it; people get anxious about talking on the phone, people don’t speak to their neighbours. We were taught ‘stranger danger’ as kids. People are nervous about asking others for directions. On the bus nobody wants to talk to anybody else.
It seems so counterintuitive. In my experience it pre-dates the smartphone age too. If people didn’t find socialising inherently unpleasant, would they have flocked to avoid it en-masse?
I don't disagree at all, but your arguments (and, frankly, all of HN, [and, even more frankly, all of the internet which we seem to love to hate]) would really benefit from sources, quotes, etc. Citations are signposts, acknowledgements, and backups that elevate truisms to arguments [1].
> we also have the built-in tendency to optimize for convenience.
Amen, one thing I've noticed just talking and shooting the shit, a lot of people seem to forget their agency. Convenience has not helped at all with that.
> Likewise we're not designed for the current speed of change.
+1. Some folks are really overwhelmed because of this and have basically retreated/hibernated on aspects of their lives. Worrying especially for those without anyone.
I wonder how/when we'll fix this. Arbitrary needs built into us because it was advantageous a bajillion years ago that only serve to make us unhappy now seem like the kind of thing that we could do without. My money's on brain chips as a bandaid fix, followed eventually by genetic modification patching out that whole issue.
Agreed on most of the part, except work from home/office argument. Working from home allows me to spend lot more time with people who I want to spend time with. I have more time for Gardening, DIY things, working out, etc.
If you're being serious, as a human being I want you to know I have compassion towards your situation. Even though I'll never meet you, I don't like seeing your message and thinking about the suffering that loneliness causes.
Easiest way to make friends quick:
Activities activities activities. In-person hobbies are awesome for meeting people. I met a big chunk of my friends by doing a highly social activity that attracts cool, laid back intellectuals: Brazillian Jiu Jitsu. Not your speed? Think of any kind of outdoor hobby that requires multiple people. Ultimate Frisbee/Frisbee golf, for example. Think Frisbee sucks? So do I! But meeting up outside and sucking at throwing a Frisbee is still fun, because of the people there, and your outside in fresh air and sun! Drone racing is another nerdy, fun, social hobby as well. Chess in the park, etc etc.
Just wanted to say I couldn't agree with you more. So many people have just lost connections to nature and other people, and then wonder why they constantly feel like shit and depressed. We're going down a bad path, and American capitalism and technology "full steam ahead societal consequences be damned" attitudes are only going to make things much, much worse.
I'm about 900km+ far from almost ALL of my friends. It's just 1 hour by flying, of course +3 hours for the whole end-to-end transport ceremony. Plus hotel cost if it's more than 1 day. If it's only 1 day it's also not worth the round-trip ticket price.
>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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
>>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:)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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".
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.
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"
> 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
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.
> >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.
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.
> Side note: Interestingly, teen loneliness briefly went way down from about 1996 to about 2006. That’s consistent with the idea that the old computer-based internet was a complement to in-person interaction
That’s been my experience too. In the early year, I remember having long conversations with different friends every night on AIM. Even some casual acquaintances ended up being good friends because of the conversation we had. I kept up with people all over the world with personal e-mail, sometimes for years.
It does seems that between 2010-14 or so, people disappeared en masse from AIM. People stopped writing back to personal e-mail. Everyone migrated to social media, even though social media wasn’t a replacement. Every thing was public, good friend and strangers being in the same bucket. Long form conversations between two people disappeared. Someone would through out something to everyone they were connected to, and you could comment or ignore it. Communication just became very public, impersonal, and shallow.
My workplace is in the throes of a "back to the office" vs "pro-telework" battle, and it seems to me that those of us who grew up during those wonderful instant messaging / email years are the core of the pro-telework camp.
We know the power of asynchronous communication. We know it can transmit deep thought. We know it can create and sustain friendships, and it can be fun! We also know that the technology is all messed up now and needs a lot of work if we're going to regain what corporations destroyed in the last decade.
With rose-tinted glasses, we can and probably should go back to this. I fondly remember YIM from high school and eventually getting Pidgin/Adium to wrangle ICQ, MSN, AIM, and the mass of options Jabber-based options via libpurple. I'd chat with folks about what they were doing on the weekend and where to meet up--to get away from the computer. XMPP is still around and being worked on with decentralization and with OMEMO we can have the encrypted chats we didn't at the time. I've even seen some clients picking up "stickers" that some folks love. I also agree with the public persona of social media eroding the intimacy of conversation as well--just like in real life 1-on-1 conversation is always more intimate than going with a group (or hanging in the MUC). When you'd head to a MUC, it wasn't uncommon to add someone you thought was interesting to your roster and check in with a DM every once in a while.
In a forum like this, though, it's appropriate. Does anyone really want to wade through a bunch of replies to a comment that just say "I agree" without adding anything?
That said, I'm guilty of the occasional "I agree" reply like that, and it typically gets downvoted -- as it should.
Honestly, this was/is rarely a problem in forums that have no upvote/downvote feature. The important part is that they don’t have the UI of a chat and have affordances that make them convenient for asynchronous use.
Right. My point is though that many people will just like someones wedding photos or whatever life event instead of having a conversation with them and discovering that information.
Acknowledging something is fine if you then talk to that person but most people replaced the conversation with the like.
I think the bigger issue is that instead of having conversations with those around me I can choose to interact with people like you who may be a thousand miles away instead.
Whenever I comment on Hacker News, I'm always thrilled to get reply comments. It shows that someone read my comment, thought about it, and had something more to contribute to the conversation.
While it's nice to see "number go up" from the upvotes on my comments, that simply doesn't have the same value to me as having the conversation move forward.
Sadly, Hacker News isn't the best place to have conversations. Threads can start fast on 1st page articles, run up a bunch of comments, and then the discussion dries up within hours. Ugh.
Arguably worse than nothing in some situations. It's easy to speculate that upvotes/downvotes may contribute to bubbles, blind spots, and polarization when there is a tribal divide or some other kind of groupthink pathology.
edit- specifically, I'm thinking of politically-minded forums where the top comments are just comments that reinforce the accepted mentality without really challenging anybody's ideas
This is a good point and a similar experience for me (I was in high school 1996-2000). I'll add that, in my experience, those private, deep conversations through AIM and email enhanced my in-person relationships. While phones and social media have interfered with them.
This is my experience too, but I think it possibly corresponds to the transition to mid 20s and adulthood, where a lot this contact drops off anyway (not that it should).
I'd be interested to know what it was like for older adults, but my guess is that a lot of them weren't using AIM that way in the first place.
> It does seems that between 2010-14 or so, people disappeared en masse from AIM. People stopped writing back to personal e-mail. Everyone migrated to social media, even though social media wasn’t a replacement.
In my experience, it was texting (and similar 1-on-1 phone apps) that displaced IM, not social media.
IME it was before 2010. I was in college 2000-2004, and people used AIM then to keep in touch. But by the time I was in law school from 2004-2007, AIM was sparsely used by my peers. I wasn't texting at the time either, nor was I on FB. I guess we just emailed.
Interesting. College for me was 2004-2008, and AIM was still the primary means of chatting where I was. I remember people giving their AOL screen names as contact information on semi-official documents. What did start to change was expressing ourselves on our Facebook pages instead of using our AIM "away" messages.
I kept my AIM client logged in and running on my laptop throughout 2009 after moving away for my first job, but that's when I remember things shifting quickly to SMS text messaging. I resisted hard, kept using a dumb phone without a keyboard, and probably missed out on a lot of social connections in the first few years after college because of it.
This reminds me of another recent thread in which I talked about Facebook turning to crap soon after I graduated college. Someone replied that they started college in 2010 and thought Facebook was fun until about 2015.
I wouldn't say it displaced but rather emphasized the instantaneous part of IM (Instant Messaging). The portability and convenience with the innovation in social media combined pros of the AIM, personal e-mail, etc.
This seems like just another iteration of old people decrying technology they don't like:
Communication these days is so impersonal. Why can't they have a chat instead of public posts
Why can't they call and actually talk to each other instead of chat
Why can't they write each other e-mails instead of these superficial chats
Why can't they send letters instead of these impersonal e-mails
Why can't they meet up in person like we used to
Communication changes and life goes on. Don't really see much difference with phones. It's just the same "kids these days" and the same obliviousness as always that they've become the "old man yelling at cloud".
Objectively speaking - I think we've never had as many companies vying for our attention as we do today.
Worse - we've never had the ability to give those companies real time feedback on whether their strategies are working like we do today.
So while I somewhat agree with:
> Communication changes and life goes on. Don't really see much difference with phones. It's just the same "kids these days" and the same obliviousness as always that they've become the "old man yelling at cloud".
It's pretty hard to argue with the plain fact that teen suicide rates are WAY up compared to the last 40 years.
So if you're going to take the opinion "this is just old people being curmudgeons" I don't really see you making a compelling argument that they're wrong. If anything - maybe they're right...?
Rates went way down in the 90s & early 2000s before rising back to where they were before.
>I don't really see you making a compelling argument that they're wrong. If anything - maybe they're right...?
When someone cries wolf in the same way that adults have for basically all of human history you don't need a compelling argument to dismiss them. If I had to look at what is different for kids today than when I grew up I'd point to:
(1) Their economic future is uncertain and general economic stress level is higher
(2) Related to (1) the pressure around college is dramatically up. Schoolwork is up, resume building activities are up, and parental pressure is up.
See this is exactly what I'm talking about. 20 years ago the prevailing wisdom was that this was caused by violent video games and explicit music. This is what you sound like to me:
except, you know, the topic we're discussing. Teenage unhappiness. With actual hard data, for example, the number of suicides. So it might just be this time is different.
And, last but not least: past performance is not indicative of future results.
I think you’re just using the wrong platforms for that experience.
I’ve been on Telegram for ages and talk daily to people who live on the other side of the world. I’ve never met them in person but we’ve had rich, personal, discussions and I consider them my friends.
On the meatspace side I video call daily with my childhood friends even though we’re hours away. I’m not sure how I could have kept up my friendship if I didn’t have modern technology to video call, game, instant message etc. We always end up grounding it with visits every two months or so but it’s essential to my relationship to stay in the loop.
I’m hopeful for protocols like Matrix and ActivityPub continue taking off where monetization is an issue but they place communication as paramount.
More “modern retro-tech” like Gemini is also promising. I made a great friend there which I feel is related to self-selection - as in, maybe most of the people on Twitter and Facebook aren’t a good fit for a HN netizen.
One of the few places I was able to recapture the early internet magic was on Discord from 2015-2018.
Unfortunately, that is very difficult nowdays with the popularity it's found. When I was using the internet in the late 90's/early 2000's it felt like a safe haven for a geek like me to be myself without being punished for it. A lot of that magic wears off when the people who used to kick my ass for being a nerd became chronically online.
I think another part to this drop was home-computers vs. portable computers like laptops rise in popularity. I remember an emphasis of seperation with a home-computer that didn't move with me vs. a portable computer that was always there. I still practice this and advocate others to do the same. Hell a lot of people just end up using their laptops as home-computers anyway with a monitor and dock setup. Funny how that is
In my country, the internet was frustratingly slow and expensive. To enjoy online gaming with my friends, we resorted to hosting LAN parties at someone's house. These gatherings were incredibly enjoyable, far surpassing the experience of playing alone online.
Moreover, our LAN parties had an unexpected benefit: we all became TCP/IP network experts. Each of us knew how to construct our cables.
I would be shocked if there wasn't a monotonic increase in group chat/private chat during all those years to now. AIM just never made the transition to phones successfully.
Yes, it's the phones. This comment section feels a little better than the last few times this obvious idea has been pointed out -- generally when folks have blamed the phones in the past, dopamine fiends have come out of the woodwork to defend their devices and blame _everything else but the phones_.
This tech is _straight up bad for you_. We like to pretend like having the internet accessible at all times is strictly a marvel of human achievement. While it is indeed a marvel, it's also been contorted into a disgusting mess that's specifically designed to keep you coming back to it like an addict after a fix. An entire industry has been built around sucking you into your device.
The idea that we're giving something this poisonous to children -- and further, that it's a social norm to do so -- _really_ gives me pause.
I think the reluctance to blame phones is not just that people have a personal, dopaminergic fixation on them.
There are a couple of other factors at play:
1. Thinking people, especially of the sort that frequent Hacker News, want there to be a more complex and multivariate reason behind the "big problems" like loneliness and alienation. It feels wrong to just say "phones bad."
2. Many of us grew up with emerging technologies, like video games and the internet itself, that were reflexively rejected by generations older than us for reasons that seem poorly thought out in retrospect. We pattern match on the type of blithe Luddism we grew up with, and are instinctively reluctant to say "phones bad" for fear of falling symptom to it.
But I agree with you, and the thesis of this article. The "phones" argument has such obvious explanatory power for a wide range of regressive social phenomena that there needs to be overwhelmingly strong evidence for some other catalyst to drop it from consideration.
Just don't install twitter or Facebook or whatever, and use the phone as normal. You do not need to use Instagram or tiktok or whatever to use a phone.
The essay addresses this issue. Social media may be the more proximate cause of social isolation, but it's the phones that make social media more available.
Phones provide a behavioral “nudge”, like a pantry stocked with junk food —
when your phone is right there in your pocket, it’s easier to just text a
friend instead of going and hanging out, even if the latter would be
less fulfilling.
(I think he meant "former", not "latter".)
The "just" in "Just don't install social media" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Yes, that can work. But the temptations offered by that powerful little computer in your pocket makes social media that much more difficult for many to ignore.
This overlooks the network effect. If you are between 14 and 24 there is literally _no way_ that you are not on social media. Peer pressure is immense at that age. If you weren't, you would be a social weirdo. To be clear: I agree with your comment, but I'm old, so it's OK to be a social weirdo and avoid social media. :)
I don't have social media on my phone. I just had to uninstall Youtube as I am addicted to watching it on my phone (don't watch nearly as much on the computer) and it is causing attention and relationship issues for me.
I get the next argument is something like "Youtube is just like those other ones", but I've also done this same cycle with plenty of other apps which were not social media related. The screen itself is addictive to look at in a way that older devices were not.
What tech? Being able to talk on the phone? Having a phone you can play on? Or is it the apps that you have on your phone and that are available to you 24/7, and are engineered so you feel the need to engage with them 24/7? Because I don't think it's useful to say "it's the phones" in that case. If it's social media, it's social media, not the device you use to access social media.
I'm not addicted to my phone, I'm one of those boring people that use like 50mb of mobile internet a month, and my phone screen is off 99% of the day, so I'm not sure how accurate your assessments are.
Lately I've been working through some mental health issues including some pretty bad OCD. It's always been there since I was diagnosed with autism as a toddler, but these last few years it was getting worse and worse.
I started doing a lot of analysis because I remembered being much happier and more present when I was around age 18-23, then slowly going downhill from there.
I realized that the decline in my mental health directly coincided with age 23, when I got my first smartphone. I didn't want to believe the solution was that simple...but turning off all my notifications and limiting my phone time/turning off my phone restored my mental health back to baseline levels within a week. It's actually astounding how toxic it was, and I didn't even use a lot of instagram or facebook type stuff...the issue was mostly work alerts, constant texts from my gf and friend groups, and reddit.
The core idea is that something becomes so addicting that you lose the ability to do anything else.
Concrete example: A few years ago I decided I had enough technology usage and started to taper off and remove many devices from my living spaces. As I did this, I regained the ability to do more things. Some of those things involved writing a couple books(one on this topic specifically). Some of those things got me promoted at work. Some of those things had me present in my kids activities. Some of those things had me building a community around a new sport I've never played -- basketball.
To be clear, the conclusion of Bowling Alone was that the cause was "technology 'individualizing' people's leisure time via television and the Internet, suspecting that 'virtual reality helmets' would carry this further in the future." [1]
Sub in "phones" for "virtual reality helmets" and the authors conclusions mirror OP's article.
It is true but the difference also does matter; phones are always with us, they invade social situations in a way that TV and desktop internet could never do.
But isn't it possible that these things have different degrees of addictiveness and destructiveness?
Drugs would be the (almost too) obvious analogy. There are many that people develop addictions or dependencies on, but it's pretty clear that there are some that are far more addictive than others, and that not all of them have the same deleterious social and physical consequences.
Why wouldn't activities be the same here? It seems to me that social media might be "worse" than a lot of the others. It's perpetually available, painstakingly engineered to be as addictive as possible, and may (jury is very much out here, but there's some research to suggest this) have properties that make it damaging to the psyche above and beyond normal addiction.
Just like there seem to be drugs whose abuse potential is too high to rely on self-control and moderation, maybe there are activities for which the same is true.
The argument that ”there is always going to be something” is a lazy one, and I agree with you. That’s why we don’t legalize heroin sale just because ”oh you need to be able to control yourself, it’s not the heroin seller’s problem”. Somethings are yes very very dangerous, and phones are maybe one.
That said, the truth is that, the more obvious it becomes that phones are the problem, the stronger will be the attacks against this conclusion and the more people will deny it. There is no going back. If you agree with it, take care of yourself and your kids, and act on it to protect your loved ones. Everyone else will have to deal with it themselves. It’s too late for any kind of structural change.
How much tech did you remove. I'd imagine writing a good book would require a bit of research and stuff. At least the one you mentioned sounds like non fiction.
I have a link in my bio of the book I wrote about it all. It doesn't contain much of these details. More of the driving philosophy.
How much did I remove?
- Stopped using my smartphone on a daily basis. Maybe 1-2 pickups a day. Down from ~60.
- Don't play video games for recreation, replaced with working out & basketball.
- Only allow my work devices in my office. Sets boundaries for personal/work life.
- Each device has a job-to-be-done. I can only write on my laptop. I can only communicate with my phone. I can only read on my iPad. I can only work on my work machine. etc
- Got rid of most streaming services and televisions. Watch maybe a 30-60 minute show every other night.
- Turned my bedroom into a cave, no artificial light.
- When bored, I pickup a book and place them all around my house so I'm not reaching for a device.
This is inspiring. I think I’ll pickup your book. I used to be on the lower tech path in the early smart phones days. I remember I refused to have data service on my phones for years, but sadly I caved eventually and here I am now phone addicted like everyone else.
> Each device has a job-to-be-done. I can only write on my laptop. I can only communicate with my phone. I can only read on my iPad. I can only work on my work machine. etc
I, too have turned multi-purpose devices to single-purpose. I've bought some various/older devices just for this reason too. Always recommending this for folks to try
The whole book is about the search for an entertainment disc so addicting anyone who watches it winds up so enraptured by it that they consume it endlessly until they wind up dying.
Sounds a bit like a less intensive phone/social media addiction if I've ever heard of one.
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 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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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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.
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).
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.
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.
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 have my own hypothesis. I was born in the mid 80s, just FYI in case it makes a difference to my perspective.
It's information overload. And not just information overload, but the type of information people are consuming from online sources.
The brain is a lot better at quickly picking up subtle information than we might give it credit for. Just scrolling through a feed you see hundreds of impressions every minute, maybe thousands.
We might think we're just scrolling and we're not actually picking anything up but the brain is subtly reading all of those little messages. Not only is it hard to digest, but the type of information is often unfiltered intrusive thoughts that one wouldn't normally share IRL.
Add to that the fact that you can't just be yourself these days without someone filming you, and you become a meme. We started laughing at people for being themselves and being filmed, and now we're afraid of becoming a meme ourselves.
So two major factors for unhappiness in this age I believe are people censoring their real selves, or feeling ashamed of what's in their heads, and constantly being fed the opinions of thousands of strangers in a never ending stream.
English isn't my first language so I'm sorry if this is misunderstood by someone, please know that I'm just freely typing here with no former education or any research to back this up. It's just a gut feeling.
I just don't think the human brain was designed to cope with all this constant information. Not just news, but also psychological information about what people think or feel, all over the world. It's confusing us and distracting us from self care.
> 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
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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."
> 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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I'm in my late 40s, so sometimes I think this is just a consequence of my age -- everyone at this age, for a thousand years, has started thinking things were better when they were kids (get off my lawn!), and the cause is technological changes.
But frequently my much younger acquaintances will agree with me... on the other handn they didn't actually experience it, maybe they just think that's what they're supposed to say.
I still suspect I'm right, and all of this OP matches my thoughts/observations.
Especially that it's about social isolation -- and that the technology of connection in our pockets, despite everything 1990s techno-utopian Mondo 2000 me would have thought -- has led to drastically increased social isolation.
Covid hasn't helped.
I really believe that if we didn't have the internet, we coudln't possibly have isolated as much as we did -- as much as we, on the whole still are, with social changes that seem permanent -- in response to covid -- no matter the dangers. (They couldn't possibly have isolated to the level we did in response to the early 20th c flu epidemic, can they?)
The internet is what made it possible to have that level of isolation.
Or to seem possible.
In fact, it is disastrous for us personally and socially and continues to be -- what seemed possible is not in fact possible as a successful way to live and have a society.
It's the irony of modern world, we are more connected than ever before, and we are more isolated than than ever before.
The same tools that connect us, isolates us.
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.)
Was looking for something along this subject. When Symbian died I thought it was really bad that development on it would die switching from open source. I think there is or will be a market for a simpler phone OS like Symbian. Surprisingly I've seen folks in the country and internationally who still use Symbian/Nokia phones although the discontinuation of 2G/3G support is removing that unfortunately.
I'm a subscriber of Noah's, really like his writing, and think this is a pretty good take. However, he doesn't have kids, and probably doesn't get a full dose of some of the nuance as to some further observations that would give his claims higher confidence.
He misses the tipping point:
Kids on phones and highly addictive, social/collaborative video games (think Fortnite) means less kids in any given OUTSIDE space hanging out. The less kids hanging out in those spaces, the less likely a kid encounters peers their age in a given outdoor/social space. The less likely they encounter peers in those spaces, the less likely they'll even TRY to go to those spaces. It's a tipping point that executes the network effects of growth in reverse. And it's entirely a cascade caused by lazy, overly permissive parents who use screens as babysitters and rationalize it away with either learned helplessness ("I'm too old to understand this tech, how can i regulate it") or the utter BS of "they're learning technology for a future career", as if scrolling tiktok for 7 hours a day teaches kids to code.
I have a 16 year old son. It's hard to emphasize how little they socialize in person nowadays. If a kid spends the night, he'll complain about us having only one Xbox and TV, and how he can't play Fortnite at the same time as the other kid. They PREFER to be in their room at home, playing the same game while talking to my son over a headset.
Your anecdote about your son's behavior is the kind of insight that convinces me that parents have a window into the future the rest of us don't. I'm relatively young (mid 20's), but even still it's clear to me the even younger generations are developing fundamentally different ways of operating in the world than I did.
I think phenomena like the reverse network effect resulting in isolating young people are terrifying. I don't know what will be the ripple effects, but I'm inclined to think they won't be good. I also don't know what to do about it, but I get the feeling this is going to become a huge problem modern society hasn't paid enough mind.
I wonder if these people ever talked to friends on the actual telephone. I remember spending hours in the 90s talking to friends there because I was so bored of the TV. Then in the 00s with voip we could talk to more than one person at a time.
Reading this I wonder if this is some sort of baby like forgetting or if I was truly so out there.
Yes yes yes. I have similar experience and sentiment. The youth today socialize too little. Fortunately, I've found success holding events/hangouts/hosting for both the kids and parents, sometimes separate and together. It's simple but not easy or hard, effort goes a long way.
When I was 16 I played video games the entire time I was visiting my friends too and yet I didn't have these issues. So I suspect video games are not really problem. If anything, socializing while gaming is pretty healthy.
Social media is such a weird thing. You feel envy even when you're doing pretty well.
Like I would see some old school friend sharing vacation pictures on Instagram and I would somehow feel an instant pang of envy. Even though I had been on a vacation literally a month back.
I concluded that I was getting absolutely nothing out of social media. The entertainment is middling at best. The connections are shallow. And the feeling of envy can be overwhelming.
Deleted Instagram and Facebook. Kept WhatsApp because that has actual friends and family. Kept Twitter because shitposting on anonymous accounts is actually fun and has no impact on my state of wellbeing.
Also, I don't know what TikTok is like because its banned in my country, but Facebook and Instagram (especially Instagram) seem to be the most mentally damaging of all social media apps. Maybe its because of its culture or maybe its designed to be that way, but it really, truly is awful.
I think we should focus on not feeling envy when others are doing well. I always like to think that if everyone around me is rich, no one is gonna ask me money, haha.
It's like being at a dinner party full of people dressed up to the nines while you're just there in a clean but unremarkable shirt and blazer. You can genuinely like everybody at the table, you'll still feel an undercurrent of discomfort.
>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.
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
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
If you're looking to detox, but don't want to regress all the way to a dumbphone, Unihertz has some great tiny Android phones: https://www.unihertz.com/
Everything works (Maps, Uber, etc) but the screen is so small you won't want to use it very much.
This is very appealing to me. I'm going to assume that the camera sucks, but I guess I could get back to carrying a point and shoot.
(Does a point and shoot camera exist that has the same smarts as a phone camera? Obviously a real camera with a better lens is the best, but that's bulkier. If I'm going to have a crap tiny lens, then I do think the phone's AI adds something.)
Just get a phone (iphone or android, your choice) and delete everything except camera, phone, sms. Include google maps and whatever else you want. You can even set parental restrictions and leave the code in a drawer to avoid needing to exercise self control.
> 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.
> 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.
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 ;)
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.
Phones are certainly a major factor but what about kids not being allowed to play outside? Numerous studies have shown spending time in nature provides significant mental health benefits, so the extreme opposite must be pretty awful.
Eh, the phones don't help, and surely contribute to the problem, but fact is, young people are growing up in a cyberpunk dystopia with No Future but the Jackpot. Anxiety and depression are perfectly normal reactions to that. Trying to be a Pinker Thinker and claiming that everything is rosy is just sticking your head in the sand because you personally benefit from the status quo.
I would pay money to see a video of Pinker forced to make his “everything is better than you think” argument to a room full of teenagers. No one growing up today cares if they're better off on average than 100 years ago when they're anxious and depressed.
Anecdotally (i.e. the children around me and clients who have approached me with specific problems because they're not well versed with social media).
- 1. Spending a long amount of time interacting online, obviously means that what happens online is a bigger part of their world. Reducing online time is not a small feat, the child needs alternatives not just to be subjected to boredom.
- 2. Better access to information has matured a lot of the topics that children are exposed to. Young people often feel their life position is in immediate danger as they don't know how to fully interpret risks like their parents.
- 3. It's much easier to see what you do and don't have in comparison to others (a problem not unique to children.)
- 4. Online allows for more adversarial discourse (plenty here in HN too), a lot of people don't know how to disagree without involving some kind of personal and emotionally driven response. They feel that all ideas are somehow attached to and define oneself, and thus must be protected - even from new information. While this is tied to the development of the brain, parents here can impart skills to their children to better manage these situations.
- 5. Kids have found new ways to be cruel to each other that extends beyond the playground and easily supervised spaces.
- 6. Online/social media has embraced reaction/feedback systems to harvest data for algorithmically generated content and moderation. This in turn has made people accustomed to valuing their input based on how others have valued it. Unlike the past, kids can see very clearly who doesn't like them. It's also a pathway for sexual abuse as children can be coerced (i.e. groomed) into posting more and more revealing content for 'likes' - even from their peers: as they may learn to value themselves by their appearance.
- 7. Kids feel even more pressure to conform and disguise themselves. Reddit has their "hivemind" for example, and presenting counter-points must be done carefully, almost PR-like manner or risk being abused by strangers.
Parents need to find ways of disrupting these negative influences and reducing online time to deemphasise the role it has in childrens' lives. Games and activities are a good way of developing the child's interests in a way that can make online/social media feel small in comparison, while also helping them develop confidence and coping skills (such as dealing with disappointment, adversaries or those that disagree.)
In general I notice that people who use online as a resource are mentally better than those who use it to fill boredom.
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”
A few days ago I saw two dudes who sat at a restaurant table and were talking to each other instead of staring at their phones like normal people do. What weirdos, I thought at first. But maybe there's a better explanation, maybe their phones were broken.
Its a pity the data is so out of date in the article. Remember, things start, but they also stop. Sounds dumb but in context its insightful.
Lets take the hypothesis as true that as as smart phone use goes up 10% per year, the "Z" measure goes up 0.5. Whatever a "Z" is? Regardless, cell phone use started going up coincidentally at the same time Z started going up. Thus is astrology proven. No wait seriously the point is cell phone use can only go up to near 100% one time. So what happened to the annual 0.5 increase in "Z" after cell phone use topped out at 80% or 90% or 100% or so? Sorry, no data provided.
Another interesting idea: There's a deeper level to phone or social media use. Perhaps its Facebook. I know my kids generation has pretty much abandoned FB, so if its a FB specific problem it should reflect in "Z" levels. Or online dating. Or onlyfans as a job market.
Another interesting idea long the lines of astrology where coincidences prove cause and effect: Peak legacy style TV viewing hours per day was around 2010. Perhaps enormous amounts of professionally produced propaganda had a sedative effect on teens, or professionally produced propaganda in TV form is more effective than social media form.
> One possible reason, suggested by Taylor Lorenz, is that between climate change, inequality, precarity, and Covid, the world is just a much worse place than it was in 2011. But as I pointed out in a post last week, most of these things (except for Covid, obviously) were looking worse a decade ago: [...]
Eh, what people worry about vs how bad things actually are is only weakly correlated.
> TV was despised by whole generations of educated Americans — an “idiot box” that would shorten your attention span and rot your brain.
The whole first or second chapter of Bowling Alone is about network effects causing downward spirals in socialization, with TV as the primary substitute. It's basically the same story as Haidt's. They were probably right.
TV rots your brain and helped break apart the social fabric, but it makes you happy. Cheers, Friends, The Office- lots of shows basically performed the function of companionship.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
A part of the problem is that social media is at a point where being the 1 person to drop it as a teenager could have significant worsening effects purely because you now have absolutely no way to talk with friends outside of school (because they are all on social media)
The chart plateaus at 2014 but we see an increase in depression continue well past that. It seems unlikely there would be an 8 year lag in effects (studies seem to find more like a mere 2 weeks!)
Not sure I'd expect continuous good correlation throughout (esp with tiktok, fb reels etc noise). Posted the link more to highlight the start date.
It can't be a coincidence that bunch of girl start getting depressed right in the year an app takes off that is famous for filter heavy distorted reality of what other's perfect lives and perfect bodies look like.
Not super scientific I know but seems quite persuasive to me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The people who point to the current state of material plenty and say it therefore can't be the state of the world are mistaken. If you anticipate loss, you will be unhappy. It doesn't matter how rich and comfortable you are. Anxiety is about anticipated threat. And if you believe you are powerless to counter an anticipated threat anxiety becomes despair.
As to whether it is phones, maybe. I know I have three college age kids who are all varying degrees of unhappy, aside from the one who just took his own life. The one who died had almost no presence on social media at any time in his life. The happier of the remaining two spends the most time on her phone and social media.
There must be some underlying cause or suite of causes. I know the phone doesn't fit in their cases. The ever more evident horribleness of much of humanity has clearly weighed on all three. I don't think it was the principle factor in the death of my son. And I know the "but they're rich, healthy, and safe!" argument doesn't do all the work it's supposed to do.
I find it very hard to believe "it's the phones", when 1 in every 8 teen girls reports being a victim of rape.[1]
> Of note: 18% of teen girls said they had experienced some form of sexual violence in the past year, compared to only 5% of teen boys.
> The rate of teen girls who have experienced sexual violence has increased by 20% since 2017, when the CDC first started tracking the measure, per ABC News. "The percentage of male students who experienced sexual violence by anyone did not change," the report stated. Nearly 15% of teen girls said they had ever been forced to have sex, a 27% jump from 2019 and the first increase since the CDC began tracking the metric, per the Washington Post.
4% of teen boys said they had ever been forced to have sex, with no increase reported.
You're contradicting the entire point of the article. You mention increases as of 2017 and 2019 whilst the phone narrative aligns with 2012 and beyond. Mental health fell of a cliff since 2012 and seems to keep degrading ever since. One other study showed that even COVID had a limited effect, it was just a continuation of a trajectory happening since 2012.
Yes I am, because the article opens with it's conclusion and then steadfastly ignores data regarding serious crimes being perpetrated about the age group it claims to be worried about.
Continuing the one true sociological trend: nobody believes women when they say they've been assaulted.
I think it’s also how we interact with them. I remember being “chronically online” as a teenager 15 years ago without a phone, just playing MMORPGs all day and me and my friends (all internet friends the same age, didn’t meet IRL until our early 20s) didn’t have the same issues that teenagers are dealing with now.
I think there’s something inherently comparative and consumerist to social media. I’ve travelled a lot, despite being under 30, and in the last couple years I really felt like a lot of it was just to earn some “achievement” after seeing other people I know traveling places.
I haven’t been on any social media for over a year now, and that latent background noise of “I need to do this, go there, buy that” has faded.
I’d usually consider myself pretty immune to stuff like that but social media often feels like MTV Cribs, just for every social class, and that’s maybe what’s so insidious about it.
At what point does carrying around cell and wifi jammers become a public health service? What's the safest protocol for doing this? The last thing I would want is to be involved in a car accident and prevent medical personnel from being called.
Phones may have something to do with it, but I'm surprised that nowhere in his article does Noah mention the other major change in the US social landscape over this time range: the widespread legalization of marijuana products. I realize it's not "legal" for teens but you're not living in reality if you don't think it's become much easier for teens to get ahold of potent weed and a myriad of products like weed gummies that didn't even exist before. The links between marijuana use and teen depression are well documented.
Oh wow. I was all prepared to agree that it is a big smoking gun; and then I got to the "smart phones were invented in 2007."
I mean, not wrong? Ish. But phones were a much larger part of especially college age youth well before that. Were they as "smart" as what we have now? Of course not. But they still had tons of text and basic news capability for a long time.
I think it is still a strong correlation that does need to be shown as not causal. I cannot think they "sprang from nowhere" as implied by the claim, though.
Fair. I know I was in a fairly text messaging heavy subculture. I remember ICQ took over on the computer and many of the folks that were there would jump over to texting each other. So, I have to grant that things are different.
The "phones" aka the Internet ruined everything for me when it come to social life. It used to be, and I caught that briefly, but it used to be that if you had to do something, you had to meet up with people. Maybe we hated it at the time, but meeting up with people forces you to socialize and also keeps you grounded. And moreover it provides social opportunities.
I mean, this is not just teenagers suffering from lack of opportunities to socialize.
Anecdotally my anxiety and unhappiness started going way up around 2012/2013 because the loose social groups I was involved with were using facebook to organize, and I'm one of those people who is too literal or sarcastic or something to come off right on social media and so I had difficulty integrating. Previously, my socializing involved more face to face or calls or texts about what was going on, something I'm much better at.
Anything complicated when it comes to society usually has more than 1 direct or indirect cause. I'm sure phones (and IMO the way online dating works) contribute heavily to some young peoples unhappiness, but there's many other potential reasons why young people might be hopeless for the future. And it might not necessarily be the phones in and of themselves, but something within social media itself.
I know a complain about WFH frequently (maybe you’ve seen me post about it) but I’m pretty sure it’s not doing anything to help our isolation situation.
What also contributes to <18 (and the elderly) social isolation is the car-centric urban planning which denies mobility freedom to this demographics. This is even more relevant in North America
Gotta love all these articles navel-gazing about the cause of teenage depression by econ bloggers.
Has anybody done a poll and asked teens what they’re sad about?
It’s really quite funny to see somebody take Matt Yglesias seriously. The self-described “professional take-haver” looked at two graphs, nodded his head and wrote down “this is causation”, and he’s talking about people having progressive politics!
Anecdotal, but I've noticed that the seniors in my life are often just as addicted - if not more so - than the 'youths'. Seniors not only have just as much free time as teenagers, but also nobody to tell them no / stop it!
I would love to see an article of the same caliber exploring if the data suggests a link between the rise of phones and senior depression rates.
Not the erosion of rights. Not the Supreme Court ignoring precedent and making partisan decisions. Not books being taken away from schools. Not a pandemic. Not seeing an attempt at overthrowing the government. Not the planet boiling and no one doing anything anything about it.
It can’t be that they can’t find jobs that treat them decently. Or even like the job wanted them to live. Or that they can’t afford school. Or a car. Or to move out. Or to have kids. Or healthcare. Or that they likely know someone crippled by medical debt. Or the opioid crisis. Or that they’ve seen police abuse of power (in person and/or the media). That no one seems accountable for anything.
Couldn’t be the fact the can’t find a counselor/psychiatrist even if they could afford it because there aren’t enough. Or there’s a war on threatening global tensions. No one is “in it together”, the pandemic proved that, so you’re on your own. Extracurriculars cost too much, so you may not even get to try. Your teachers are burnt out and leaving. Even if they aren’t and are good there is a good chance you can’t learn well thanks to disruptive students. Good luck if you’re bored because you need more challenge.
Also? School bathrooms didn’t work for months because other kids kept tearing stuff off the walls as a “prank”.
That’s all off the top of my head.
Yeah. It’s the phones. If we took the phones away everything would be peachy and kids would be happy again.
EDIT: all that and I forgot school/mass shootings and active shooter drills!
A lot of the stuff you mentioned is quite recent OR doesn’t actually impact teenagers, and the really egregious politics didn’t kick off that badly until Trump got in. The graph shows a sharp rise in teen happiness starting about 2011.
"News organizations and social media shouters have an incentive to show you bad news, because that’s what gets them attention and clout and/or money."
Yeah, maybe there's a lot of this stuff, e.g. Vice is the major misery fetish peddler. But can't the journalists be reporting the bad news because it's actually news and needs to be reported?
Im really happy that people are talking about this but the article doesn't seem to consider the fact that over this period we (americans) have also dramatically increased the quality and breadth of our conversation around mental health. so it could just be that now people are reporting things
Chicken and egg, I think. I am a firm believer that people don't have much better or worse mental health now over-all. But I do think that in the past mental health was something that was more intuitive and that people got more support for from their immediate social circle. Now that society is further isolated, people both have more time to ruminate about the specifics of their mental health, and the solution to having bad mental health is more frequently to talk to a therapist.
Even this would not by itself cause the increased medicalization of totally normal human problems. However, therapists need to bill insurance and it is not really possible to bill insurance for general malaise. Additionally, more people are expected to be rational economic agents more of the time, and rational economic agents don't have any emotions. So people that fall outside of the narrow bounds of what is considered acceptable and exhibit behavior outside of the narrowing band of that which allows for gainful employment means that more people are categorized as having specific ailments.
People that /are/ able to crush themselves into the little boxes that are required of them to not end up on the streets have their own mental health problems as spill-over.
TL;DR: society optimized for money causes people to feel crazy.
> Industrial society itself was feared and hated for centuries by people who thought it would separate us from the land and commodify our existences. And yet very few of those panics were borne out in the long term
this was not a great point to end that list with. We are commodified to the gills.
That, and the carbs. The time and attention that the phones suck up, also make everyone more likely to consume quick an easy carbs. But it's the carbs that ultimately fuck up your body and then your brain.
I miss my old life. It feels like another world. Before Twitter took over the world and back when I saw people every day, and didn't think the world was conspiring to turn me into an API input and output.
> The most plausible explanation for teenage unhappiness.
For any explanation to be plausible it has to take into consideration that America is not the world. We don't see the same sharp rises in depression amongs teens in europe, and guess what, europe has phones too, it has social media too.
The explanation has to be rooted in something that's taking into account the differences between USA and the rest of the world. One thing that comes to mind is that children likley suffer trauma when they see students murder other students or shoot their teachers, or hear news about such events. But I don't quite think the size of the problem matches the size of depression statistics, even if rampant school shootings and gun violence are a uniquely american problem.
He cites multiple studies that talk about how the same trends are going on in other countries, and the same trends are occurring under similar timelines in places that receive high speed internet.
I don't know if my work is impacting how I'm viewing my procrastination from my work, but I view this the same way that I view basically everything I see at my job: "You don't have enough data to say that". Graph of depression scores between 2000-2018. Ok, that tells us...er... not much! And then to take that really limited bit of data and just pick a random technology that doesn't really line up with the timeline at all.... errr? Social media was at like 50% penetration in 2010, we know young people were early adopters, and yet the depression numbers don't break out of their normal range 2013. This is taking very little data and lining it up to things that happened in the world that sort of line up but not really. It couldn't be a better example of post hoc ergo propter hoc.
The reason I'm really pushing hard on the "It's not much data" side, is because here's a question - Is teen depression higher than normal? Or was it lower than normal during the early 2000s - a period of high economic growth, US cultural hegemony and monoculture? Who knows! It seems kind of absurd that we should argue one creaky theory should be our prior. If you don't really have enough data to strongly say something is true, your prior should be to say "We don't know". It doesn't help your reasoning to assume one theory at all, and points us in one direction where the answer maybe something completely different.
For example - what if it's actually the case that this is a function of social acceptability. In the past we saw a situation where it was socially unacceptable to be gay (and legally unacceptable worth noting), when that was the case you could survey people and find there were very few gay people. When it became more acceptable, suddenly the surveys showed far more gay people. There genuinely were people at the time this happened that were making the claim this was a conspiracy making people gay. Well, what if the destigmatization of mental health has had a similar effect? There were always depressed teens, but they never "came out" as it were. Then this whole discussion about phones is just... a weird distraction?
If the author believe the stigma against neurodivergence wasn't that bad or had some merit, then it's easy to see their perspective that something ruined our perfect society.
Smartphones are one of the greatest inventions of humanity. That they democratize access to information about the unfortunate state of the world is a different matter.
> the timing just lines up really well. The smartphone was invented in 2007, but it didn’t really become commonplace until the 2010s, exactly when teen happiness fell off a cliff
Oh man so trivially incorrect. Plenty of people had smartphones before that despite the iPhone. What happened in 2010 was social media getting hit by politics and marketing. This isn't even up for debate. It's straight facts.
But as I pointed out in a post last week, most of these things (except for Covid, obviously) were looking worse a decade ago
No, they weren't, because a decade ago there was still hope that democratic process could lead to sensible public policy. Now it's not even clear that we can avoid authoritarian capture.
One other possible explanation is that phones are everywhere, regardless of most any other factor. Take any teenager, anywhere, in any walk of life, age, or social group, nation, etc. They very, very probably have a phone. Guess what’s also mostly everywhere, regardless of other factors?
None of these are perfect explanations, obviously, but I’ve seen what phones do to my kids (even in the limited amount of time they have) and others. It’s absurd to ignore it. Sure, I can’t prove that phones are the cause, but my son goes from the sweetest kid to an anxious, angry mess as soon as he has a phone in his hands (and before you ask, yes, sometimes it’s inevitable, I live in a capitalist society that expects me to both work my ass off and to take care of my kids at the same time. Also, I don’t have the illusion that I can stop him from ever using one, so I’d better be around and teach him how to deal with it the best way possible).
So my prior is definitely "it's the phones", and I am totally fine with being old-man-who-shakes-fist-at-cloud about what phones and social media are doing to kids (and all of us).
But this article does the thing that infuriates me the most about any kind of discourse in the US, across all political tribes: Ameri-solipsism.
How do youth suicide, depression, anxiety, and isolation trends in the US compare to other countries? Across countries, what's the correlation with smartphone and social media adoption? Is there a plausible causal link where we see these trends rise in each country a few years after wide adoption? If it doesn't always follow, what factors separate countries where phones seem to cause depression from those where it doesn't? How do political polarization, economic shifts, and different cultural norms correlate with these things across countries?
No idea! Because a space alien reading this article would come away thinking that Earth consists of precisely one country. Use comparative data to tease out other factors at play? Ha! As if America could have anything to learn from anyone else.
I expect this from jingoistic conservatives, but it's infuriatingly common even among progressives who supposedly reject nationalistic exceptionalism: dive deep into some big problem (which on its surface has nothing US-specific about it) without any curiosity whatsoever about how anyone who's not American deals with it.
People said this dumb shit about novels too. It's not the phones.
It's the dystopian late stage capitalist hell world they live in. They see no good future for themselves. They know their lives will be worse than ours, which are worse than our parents' were on average in the US.
Obligatory plug for the Light Phone 2. I have had one for two years now and I love it. I still keep a smart phone around for some things but it is generally in a drawer powered down. I have had a significant improvement in my mental health since I've gotten it.
Sure, it's the phones... not the non-stop barrage of psychological manipulation from the ad driven capitalist hellscape we have created that poison their underdeveloped minds in everything they interact with from websites to games to TV to movies. Never mind they live in a constant state of alertness looking for which classmates going to waltz into school one day and start shooting.
I'm sure though if they put the phone down and touch grass for 15 minutes that will all go away.
To me this is a mirror to the problems, I have seen with my generations parents who grew up on "Fairness Doctrine" media. They were used to fair and balanced Walter Kronkite who by law was required to present untainted news. Many never adapted to news as infotainment and the new requirements around seeking multiple sources and such to understand the actual facts.
Our children have similarly been presented a world where the laws protecting children from aggressive ads have been eroded, the psychology of ads has been ramped up, and ads have been hidden and added to products they never existed in.
As an example, I recently saw a TikTok where a young woman was walking people through her 12 year old sister's skin care and makeup routines. She had hundreds of products just an obscene amount of chemicals and ungents. These products and the need for them is often not pushed through typical ads but testimonials from creators and influencers who may or may not indicate they are being paid to push these products.
Even in the escapism of games, teens are bombarded with in game ads, micro transactions, content partnerships, etc. It used to be fire up Mario Bros and play. It's now fire up Fortnight and here's the store, did you buy a battle pass, how about some skins, you better not be using default skins because then you aren't cool. Buy more, pay more, be the cool kid in the latest skin. Entire teams paid to drive monetization by exploiting the psychology of children and adolescents.
It's non-stop and how does a 12 year old have the critical eye to identify these manipulations when most of their parents don't even understand the worlds and communities they live in.
A phone is just a screen and we have dozens of screens in our homes and every one blasts aggressive psychological manipulation at this vulnerable population who used to be protected.
It's not and never has been phones. It's the state of the "world", relationships or lack thereof.
As if you've never been a teenager and forgot all about it.
Teenagers are people who are trying to break off from parental and supervision in general. Find their path, get confronted with them being mortal, as a kid you have no idea what that means.
Personally I had a goth phase, well at first it was Rap music, then Gothic, then Techno. Music is very important when you're a teen.
In my goth phase I listened to depressing music dealing with death and injustice. I wore black clothes. One day I had enough of the self torture and Techno was the new thing which I liked very much since I was also playing games on the C64 and those had great music.
When I was into Rap I did scratch a lot so later I was throwing parties and was trying to make it as a DJ and music producer.
But without money and false friends, my records got stolen and trackers were the only tech for cheaply creating music on the computer back then, later with windows 95 98 and so on you had actual virtual synths.
Anyhow I digress...
Even as an adult the state of our world gets me down. The white is black newspeech or let's call it the Orwellian Dystopia we live in.
The wars and injustices. The corruption. The disregard for life and lack of respect and knowledge and most of all tolerance and understanding for being human and not being perfect. The do or die.
The fact that this world could be a paradise but the powers that be choose that it shouldn't.
The American imperialism, the Chinese lunacy, the European arrogance and fakeness and the Russian imperialism.
Just stop with the world domination game and selling weapons. Stop profiting from the deaths of innocents.
Why can't we all be friends?
2010 I remember very well.
I had a girlfriend. She cheated on me. I was heartbroken and got abandoned by everyone.
2010-2012 I spend playing an MMORPG. It was the place where I was happy once. So I returned there. But it was changed. People were hateful and aggressive.
The guild I've been a part of was no more.
It got destroyed by some asshole kids, who acted like they own the place. In real life people were also worse, less understanding and more hateful.
2012 I quit playing that game, I was still hurting every day. I joined Google+ and focused on my income. I learned JS and Go. AngularJS. 2014 then financial success. And that broke the pain I felt every day in my chest since she cheated.
That went until 2020. Now I'm applying for social security. That is a personal low. I always fought against being dependant on anyone. I never wanted state alms.
I never had debt.
I'm a proud person. This isn't easy. And I hate that it has come to this.
Most job ads suck. They're essentially ads for the company. They want you to be their bitch, requiring you to be responsible for the whole process.
"You will be working with our Cloud infrastructure where you will write , test, deploy and monitor the application stack, improve out infrastructure and evaluate alternative technologies, and well pay you 1/4 of an American and you'll like it". Yeah and on the side I'll save the world from famine and normalize the climate, and end all wars.
They don't want colleagues, they want slaves.
And I have a problem with that.
Contract work, only with connections, which I don't have anymore. I'm in a contractor database. I ask 75€/h or 600€/day.
Others ask 100€+/h.
I've done PHP for 11 years, I've seen the 2001 bubble burst. I had a web hosting service, a top 1000 site on Alexa, worked freelance for national players, fixed scripts students abandoned because they were unable to do it properly.
I know my stuff but I can't get in there. Those social networks are no social at all. LinkedIn sucks ass, all they do is push their tech. You search for Go jobs, they show you .net C# jobs.
Mastodon sucks too. You can't have a normal conversation. Most don't even respond and if they do most of the time they're acting aggressive or ignorant. Why are they on a social network then?
Should I intensify my Java knowledge? But I hate Java. Go is the way. Should I learn more about C# and .net? Should I go back to PHP where I'd work on e-commerce boredom? Meeeeh.
There's only one way out, finish my projects and hope people find them usefu, meanwhile being on social security.
I feel like I'm this talent that goes to waste because no one ever discovered me because I'm not in the clique and live a hermit life, but I also dislike big city life. Can't have your cake and eat it too. Or like they say in the country my mom is from, you can't clench and fart at the same time ;)
What I really want to do though is travel the world, like a digital nomad, before I die.
Where are the low maintenance remote jobs?
"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
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.
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It's easily replicable. Go out for some more walks, plan more visits with friends, do some wood craft, gardening or whatever else physical. Your mood will instantly improve, reliably. Because this is your natural state.
At the same time, we also have the built-in tendency to optimize for convenience. That too is perfectly natural. Hence we fully embrace all technology but forget about the cost: drifting ever further away from our very being. We're our own enemy. A common example here on HN would be the excitement regarding working from home. I get it, I love it too. But let's not dismiss that this further tilts things into a flat, isolated, touchless society. You want it, but it's still really bad for you.
Further, as conscious creatures we're not designed to process the information avalanche of the modern age. We process more of it in a day than somebody did in an entire lifetime 2 centuries ago. Likewise we're not designed for the current speed of change.
And finally, we're social creatures but not designed for it at a scale of millions or billions of people. We cannot empathize with the culture, politics and differences of that scale.