[looknee]

I always see discussions on this topic online immediately start discussing how the content of social media is the driver of the mental health issues (comparison to others, everyone projecting their best selves etc).

My own experiences with social media and phone addiction leads me to believe its not JUST the content, but also (equally, perhaps moreso) the fact that teenagers AND adults with social media and phone addiction are just spending so much of their time absorbed into a screen scrolling and getting quick dopamine hits for hours and hours.

When that is your default that you revert to to distract yourself at almost any point of discomfort, slight boredom, lapse in focus, anxiety or feelings of sadness, all it does is just dampen those feelings momentarily. You live in almost a fugue state where those things just fester as you avoid them instead of learning to cope with them or respond to them in an agentic or healthy manner.

Working to cut out social media, reddit, youtube etc on my phone, leave my phone by our front door while at home, never have my phone in bed, and spend time writing/journaling my thoughts and actually engaging with my feelings of anxiety or depression or stress instead of avoiding them has been by far the most significant improvement on my mental health compared to many other things I've worked out.

This is definitely anecdotal, and its definitely my experience, but after the time i've spent working on these things and with what I see in the teenagers, young people, and friends in my life I feel very strongly about it.

[DavidPiper]

I'm in the same boat as you, and feel equally strongly about it, despite being in a bit of a relapse period at the moment.

"The medium is the message" never stops being relevant. The 'content' of social media is just the 'reward' mechanism for your engagement.

This is the fourth (?) time on HN I've recommended "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman. If you're a reader, I think you might enjoy it. It is both descriptive of its time in the age of Television, and incredibly prescient. It has aged flawlessly, you can draw a straight line from it to our modern, socially mediated world.

[t888]

Once I finally actually deleted all of the social media apps from my phone, it suddenly became a really pleasant and useful tool again. I have even started to read ebooks again.

Social media is so much the problem.

[crotchfire]

... and how they steer the discussion from "social media" to "screen time".

Wikipedia helpfully selected a picture of somebody using an ebook reader as their illustration of what "screen time" means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_time

I'm just flabbergasted with the level of smokescreen that goes on in this discussion. Pretty sure reading books on ebook readers is not what is driving teenage mental health problems.

[canadiantim]

Very on point