[nmg]

I'm surprised by the negative comments here so far that sound more indignant or "called out" than anything else.

The article's argument is not only thoughtfully made and unusually well-written, in my opinion it's correct. There's nothing sexy about essentially staring at something in your hand for an hour or more every day. Smartphones provide a level of private immersion in silent, "socially-flavored" dopamine consumption that's antithetical to robust, vibrant socialization. Which is decidedly not sexy.

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[Aurornis]

Years ago, one of my friends who was really into fitness offered a free service to help people with meal planning and setting up their diets.

A lot of people would come to him and say they wanted to lose weight, but when he started discussing their diet and shopping lists they would get defensive. They didn’t like the implication that something they did or a choice they made was a factor in their weight gain.

Instead, they wanted to blame everything but themselves. It wasn’t their fault they picked the packaged, ultra-processed thing at the store. It was the food industry’s fault for making it unhealthy. It wasn’t their fault they didn’t buy vegetables at the store, it was their parents’ fault for not teaching them how to cook as a kid. It was common to hear people claim that they were doing calorie restriction but it didn’t work because of microplastics, toxic chemicals in the soil, pesticides, or other environmental factors.

This mentality even swept through the “rationalist” community online recently. A blogger wrote a long series with over a dozen long posts trying to find any other explanation for weight gain. In the very first article he had a graph showing that caloric consumption was up and activity was down over the years where obesity was on the rise, but he concluded that couldn’t be it. It must be chemicals in the water! The blog series was very popular in rationalist communities and IIRC even Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex gave the author a financial grant.

The story with phones is the same: People don’t want to hear that it’s their fault for using phones so much. They want to blame the algorithm or their job for “making” them spend hours on the phone.

Resistance to any concept of self accountability is stronger than ever on the internet. Social media delivers convenient excuses, which can be seen throughout this thread.

[arkh]

> It wasn’t their fault they picked the packaged, ultra-processed thing at the store.

It is their fault. But the recent development with anti-hunger molecules and their effect point to something many well wishing people don't want to hear: not everyone is the same regarding satiety.

It is easy to tell people "just eat less" when you are never really hungry yourself. It requires empathy to try and imagine a world where after eating a whole pizza instead of feeling ready to puke it back out your body is asking for MORE. And not just this one day because you did not get a good breakfast in the morning. But every day. All day. "You just lack willpower". Yeah sure, like you demonstrate having any.

In a totally orthogonal subject, I used to have an untreated prolactinoma giving me 0 libido which may have started around my teenage years: I never understood why many people could not stop themselves from "thinking with their penis". Just "have some willpower, it's easy". Well let's just say 1 month after starting some treatment my view changed a lot. And it's not too hard to extend this kind of experience to other subjects regarding why people make bad decisions.

I wish we had a drug to give some of the "just put the fork down" people to let them experience being really hungry for like a couple month.

[pjc50]

> Social media delivers convenient excuses, which can be seen throughout this thread.

This is definitely a factor, and people can build "communities of excuses" like r/antiwork.

But .. there's definitely a social factor as well. I think people understand that, say, buying heroin or falling for a Nigerian Prince scam are irrational mistakes. However in those cases we also put blame on the pushers and the fraudsters. People tried "just say no to drugs" and "personal responsibility" and of course these things still happen.

Social media is not as addictive as heroin, but people are starting to have a discussion around X and tiktok and the harms thereof.

[arthurofbabylon]

When looking at a system, it is appropriate to identify the causes (plural) and the intervention points (plural).

I believe it is at once possible to both blame or seek to change an extrinsic factor and do what one can with their own initiative. I do not think it is appropriate to dismiss extrinsic factors in order to emphasize personal initiative.

[casey2]

I want to upvote this a million times. Even for hard drugs and lifetime alcoholics withdrawal symptoms don't last longer than a month in the vast majority of cases. Probably about a month for decreased portion sizes too.

Some people believe society should be free of one or another human experience be it pain, pleasure, addiction, mind altering, disease, pests etc for the most part it's a childish mentality. All human experience is created by the brain and as a being with a high level of consciousness you are free to ignore them at your own risk. Diseases and pests you can't ignore and their management is extremely difficult comparatively.

[potato3732842]

>Resistance to any concept of self accountability is stronger than ever on the internet. Social media delivers convenient excuses, which can be seen throughout this thread.

I think that while the broad culture has moved in that direction it's still very filter bubble dependent. Spaces centered around men's hobbies with higher than zero barriers to entry are usually pretty hard the other way.

[doright]

It could be that finding oneself at fault for life choices but being without enough motivating energy to make better choices is an even worse personal outcome than blaming others, and deciding to externalize blame is a defense mechanism against crippling stress/shame that such people have developed consciously or not. It may be far from helpful but it prevents people from feeling trapped if they give themselves something to crusade against.

I think people that are quick to blame external factors would be more visible towards others than people who do choose to blame themselves, but even in the case where the latter feel trapped with learned helplessness and unable to act. There isn't much to say to the latter except "it's hard, but you should do the work." Which I would believe they've heard thousands of times already, so it only makes them feel worse. Such dialogue by its nature doesn't make for "engaging content," so to speak. Whereas a lot of (bullshit or not) arguments arise with the former that serve as a more effective distraction.

[plsbenice34]

Your comment leads me to be a bit confused regarding what you're saying about free will. You seem to want to place blame on the individual but it is philosophically and scientifically unsound. It is absolutely undeniable that people's diets are the result of the culture they live in. Many of our behaviours are the result of the advertising industry, data science and algorithms being applied like an attack on us. These problems I am referring to have been explored by Sapolsky and Yuval Harari.

Do people need to exert a determined sense of self-control to overcome this, reeducate themselves, and take responsibility for their own health? Absolutely. But placing blame on them seems irrational, unnecessary, counterproductive. I wouldn't want to get diet tips from someone that had that antagonistic attitude toward me

[suddenlybananas]

Incredibly poor understanding of how addiction works and how society functions. If ever your solution to a societal problem is "if everyone just..." you can be safely ignored as it will never happen that everyone "just ...".

[jddj]

The interesting thing is that the death of individual responsibility didn't make people (in aggregate) any happier.

It could have, or you could imagine a world where it could have, but the kids and teens are (apparently) reporting that they're more miserable than ever.

I think the goal was to remove shame, which seems like noble enough a goal. But it hasn't helped. Can we come up with a way to say, as a society, "whatever it is may not be your fault, but you're still the only one who can do anything about it and you might be better off if you view it through that lens"?

[mattgreenrocks]

I worry a significant portion of the populace does not have anything better to fill their time with, so phones/Internet fill the void. You have to put something better than that in place, but that can be hard when everything is hyper-optimized for dopamine. If we step back, it’s obvious we’ve created TV 2.0. A lot of people prior to the Internet had TV fill this same role.

These people need to decide they want something better for themselves to have a chance of changes sticking.

[goatherders]

I've been making a series of changes in last 18 months that fit the "deciding they want something better for themselves." I've lost 40# in 18 months. I stopped drinking alcohol cold on Oct 2nd after being a daily moderate/heavy drinker for ~25 years. I deleted X, FB, IG and LI on my phone 4 days ago (still schedule posts on LI via desktop).

All of these decisions were really hard right up until I did them. In reflection I don't miss the food (yes Ozembic, best decision I've made for myself as an adult). I don't miss booze - which is incredible. I haven't yet missed social media.

To replace SM I keep the kindle app on the home screen of my phone. I read a couple pages of a book then go back to something else. To replace drinking a bottle of wine while watching a movie I go for more walks outside than I used to (10k steps instead of 6k a day kind of thing).

Long way to go, but I'm hopeful. I realized I was doing things that were bad for me (food, drink, phone time) and it was impacting me in increasingly negative ways.

[HumblyTossed]

> I worry a significant portion of the populace does not have anything better to fill their time with...

Or... people are exhausted from the daily grind and want some sort of escape. The lives of most people are not improving; they're having to work harder and harder for less and less.

[leidenfrost]

IMHO it's because in the phone world only a handful of people look good naturally. Another handful learns to compensate by using really complex lighting setups (akin to a real photographic studio).

And the rest of us are left behind. We can even look "approachable enough" for some people by showing your way to approach the world, how we talk, how we move. But all of that is way harder to capture on a static photo.

I personally look terrible in front cameras, and I have a hard time creating any kind of profile in a dating app.

[formerphotoj]

One might go so far as to say in the real world (IRL), only a handful of people look good "naturally."

Try looking at everyone around you in public-EVERYONE. The beautiful people in the media sense are an incredibly small minority. I would argue even in places like L.A., sure lots of glam, but take the population as a whole and wow, such a small percentage. I'm speaking as a former pro photog, FWIW. I look at everyone.

[aredox]

Has there been studies about what criteria/effect make some people "photogenic" compared to "in person"? I am not talking about post-prodeffects or maquillage, but the fact that some physical traits seem better after lens distortion than viewed witht the naked eye in person.

[baobun]

This is very little about looks. Those handful of good-looking people aren't necessarily feeling sexier, happier, or more fulfilled.

[pjc50]

> I'm surprised by the negative comments

This is, shall we say, not the kind of audience that is going to give this article a fair reading.

[potato3732842]

Well of course it won't get a charitable reading here. Roughly speaking HN built this monster.

On a macro level I agree that phones and connectivity have some pretty huge downsides and bad effects on society but once you drill down more than that there are serious flaws with the article and the author seems to be longing for a past that if it existed at all was never sustainable and wouldn't exist long. It falls into the same category as romanticizing commercial whaling or feeding a family of four with a know-nothing job riveting spring hangers onto Chevrolets.

[jdietrich]

It is extraordinarily generous to describe an article as thoughtful when it begins with the words "Scrolling on our phones is killing us. This is a statement of fact that needs no citation". To my mind, bald assertion is the opposite of thoughtfulness. If an article is well-written because it creates a plausible justification for a belief held without evidence, then I think I'd prefer a badly written one.

[TeMPOraL]

Well, I have an instinctive negative reaction to your comment. Specifically, to this line:

> Smartphones provide a level of private immersion in silent, "socially-flavored" dopamine consumption that's antithetical to robust, vibrant socialization.

Regardless of whether the article is right (it might be) and smartphones in general, some of us find ourselves feeling trapped in this reality of "robust, vibrant socialization", and crave any form of "private immersion". Myself, I'm not glued to phones or the usual social media sites (HN on the other hand), but the very thought that the goal is to give up what little "private immersion" time I have, and embrace "robust, vibrant socialization" instead, just makes me want to finally bite the bullet and install TikTok.

(Yes, this says much more about me than about your comment. But there's some source of this feeling. I don't know what it is, but I suspect I'm not the only one feeling like this - so it perhaps could be a factor in the "smartphone equation".)

[GJim]

> I'm surprised by the negative comments here so far that sound more indignant or "called out" than anything else.

I'm not.

This forum is dominated by people who write software for, and are addicted to, fondle slabs.

[dmje]

Fondle Slabs gets my vote!!

[_rpxpx]

love "fondle slabs". I've been going with "slave phones"

[SirMaster]

How is that the phone's fault? You don't have to stare at it anywhere near that long, and all those apps are completely optional things to install and use.

This just feels like making excuses and not having any self-control or self-discipline.

[xnx]

> There's nothing sexy about essentially staring at something in your hand for an hour or more every day.

Like a book?

[yifanl]

Have books of any form ever been categorized as sexy?

[grajaganDev]

>sound more indignant or "called out" than anything else.

Yes - some people are very defensive regarding their phones.

This underscores the point of the article.

[tokai]

Its just a bad blog post full of inaccuracies, falsehoods, and trivial takes. Your shallow dismissal of the critiques just underscores the hollowness of the articles content.

[yamazakiwi]

A lot of what is stated is out of touch with reality and more fits a narrative of someone's choosing. Like a news article that tells you Nintendo DS are bad because they facilitate communication between strangers and children in PictoChat.

There is a lot of information and accuracies left out of this article to create a viewpoint when mostly the writer is nostalgia baiting.

[kevinsync]

I think a lot of the negative comments here just miss the spirit and point of the article, which for me is that, as the phone is now an omnipresent literal extension of your body, we collectively have chosen to relocate many human experiences from inside of our chests to the very ends of our arms. We don't look up and out anymore, we look down. Our senses and sensibilities are being processed and filtered by an external peripheral rather than by our natural hardware. We are effectively already transhumanists and biohackers, albeit crude ones that lack invasive implants, tuning and modulating our neural pathways in ways that have been heretofore unseen, frequently as simple-minded consumers of the modulation rather than conscious curators of our own metamorphosis.

Author is opining for the way things used to be, is expounding upon the real, significant consequences of this transformation, and just wondering in general what the hell happened and why we let it get to be like this lol

It's also worth noting that the author is a woman, so if you're a dude and feel attacked by the article somehow (or god forbid instinctively dismiss the whole thing because it's not from a male perspective), just take a deep breath and try to recognize that other people have valid, salient thoughts and opinions too. She's just suggesting we all 'touch grass' in a much more substantial way than a bite-sized meme phrase.

[yamazakiwi]

Nah they're just trying to police other people's behavior with nostalgia-bait. The fact that you think there is a group of people who are actually mad at reading this and are trying to minimize any criticism as gender bias is...something.

[xela79]

it's as "sexy" as reading a book for an hour or more every day. oh wait... I didn't know that using a phone or reading a book was meant to be sexy for others when a person uses a phone or reads a book. woopsie

[xyst]

The article to me feels like it pussyfoots around the real issue and perpetuates the “blame {some new tech} on downfall of society” fallacy.

Yes, personally I agree that doom scrolling is not ideal but this is a symptom of a much larger issue — no time available for a majority of people to invest in real relationships. Real issue here is a significant number of people left behind in this economy and this largely due to shitty economic policy based on neoliberalism

[SpicyLemonZest]

I don't think it's true that a significant number of people have less time available today than in the article's "late 90s and early 2000s" time frame. I'd concede that many people feel like they do (sometimes including me!), and I think it's pretty clearly because of how much time we're spending on our phones.