I'm not sure I agree. We had all these complaints about TV going back to the 1970s (the earliest clear memories I have). It was called "the plug in drug" and "the boob tube."
Homebound and housewives used to watch hours of game shows and soap operas all day.
If a kid liked to read, some parents would tell them to "get your head out of that book and go outside."
We've had those complaints for a long time, and associated stereotypical problems with them - like daydrinking housewives. And now we have increased loneliness, mental health issues, etc. So maybe there's something to the complaints. Maybe sticking your face in media cloistered away at home 24/7 is worse for the mental health of most people than socializing, having to get out there and find ways to entertain yourself with others.
If you never practice making and having friends, how are you ever going to have them?
at least from what i've seen, most Americans now live in communities where even if they wanted to there are an increasing lack of places to just hang out, particularly if you don't want booze involved.
the real estate shortage is driving two effects; places not optimized for revenue are being priced out of existence, and workers need higher wages to pay housing costs which squeezes these places further and results in things like shorter operating hours even if full closure doesn't happen.
If they weren't constantly driving themselves to distraction most people would be able to make at least 1 or 2 friends at work or from a shared hobby, based on the experience of all the decades prior.
The US not having "third spaces" went into the founding story of Starbucks. The big difference today is people not even having friends and no longer knowing how to even do so, thanks to the addiction machines. Why risk rejection when you can just go back to your scroll?
malls have basically also optimized for sales per square foot to the detriment of their former status as hangout spots. at the modern mall, "kids just hanging out" is considered a loitering nuisance these days. and the malls that are surviving are those geared towards upper incomes, which means that the availability of third places is bifurcating like everything else in the economy.
amongst the people I know, a fair amount are not able to willing or host events because they have roommates who they are not necessarily friends with; and amongst those lucky enough to live alone, new build apartment sizes have been shrinking.
I would actually say the (indoor) mall apocalypse is a contributing factor since for all their faults, malls were third places in a way that strip shopping centers are not.
At least for retail the problem is moreso that lenders and landlords are playing hot potato with inflated rent and extend and pretend; some(most?all?) commercial loans go into default if rent goes below a certain amount
Not a super useful metric because third places probably wouldn’t be zoned residential. This is like saying 75% of fruits are apples, so there’s no room for asparagus
Ideally they would be in a place zoned residential, just not exclusively residential. If everything is zoned for only single family homes, there won't be a third place nearby. The density is low and it's not mixed use.
Where would those friends ever be in the first place? Everyone I know and see is on their phone doing the same exact thing. Nobody socializes except at work where they're forced to be.
TV is still addictive, and it was. I felt it myself in 80s and 90s, good content was rare and I had to set an alarm in the middle of the night to watch some good stuff. And stick around 5 minute block of ads. Active screens, especially ones always in the pocket or on the table, are way more addictive.
It takes some... special mindset to be polite to not see it literally everywhere, the scale and intensity of it, the addiction of kids especially. They have no freakin' defenses and often didn't experience normal life, ever. Ask any child psychologist about their opinion of screens among kids before say 14, and even afterwards.
It can be fought, we are quite successful so far with our kids and we have quite a few parents around us with same mindset, but we have to lead by example.
Easiest is to unplug from active social cancers (fb, instagram, tiktok or whatever kids are addicted to these days). Ignore most of the news, read about topic from source far away from place/country affected. TV can serve some quality content but one has to do some effort, no ads. Computer games are a waste of time and life (I know, I've wasted half of my childhood with them, 100x that for any online gaming), if one is bored then get a sport, passion, read a book, force yourself into some social action, whatever is vastly better. Then comes along junk food, again parents lead by examples.
Life is freakin' short, its pretty sad view to waste it on all above in more than a minimal fashion. Its sort of life success in 'look I am not a homeless person or heroine addict', but just a good fat notch above that. Literally anybody can do better.
I agree with quite a few points here especially on short form content and the mainstream news these days. However on computer games I am still a little undecided. I tend to (try to?) play "creative" games... think Minecraft, Factorio, etc... where you have the chance to execute some project or vision without any real world costs.
Thinking about it, my overall position is to maintain a balance between dopamine from long-term sources and short-term ones. I think long-running creative projects that make you think are generally good whether they are digital (see: 3D animators/artists) or physical - it's just personal preference which one you tend towards. The types of games I try to limit are those with temporary rounds/matches/etc... unlike a Minecraft world, there is no cumulative aspect, no long-term planning apart from your own increase in skill. Despite that, the short satisfaction from momentary successes in each game keep you playing.
Look, there are way more harmful ways to spend time than those creative games you mention. It can be even net positive for many, especially compared to more mind numbing activities.
I just hate seeing them in hands of kids who should get development pressures from anything but glowing interactive screens, and generally folks who form addictions very easily (I am simply on the opposite side for whatever reason, when comparing to many peers in various drugs but also general mental habits... but I feel if I fell for it hard enough my defenses would weaken across the board, probably permanently).
I never claimed I live a perfect life, but I am trying my best and calling things proper names, even if they are ugly and harmful (in my opinion) yet feel good. Too much time spent in HN comments can be harmful too obviously, mind easily falls for addictive behavioral patterns. Although for me its probably best really good usable information from all aspects of life gained vs time spent ratio for all discussed. And spending 0-30 mins daily, usually during work, commute or similar empty time rather than reading some outrage-filled news is something I am fine with.
Is what I describe so unreachable for you that you make your words make sound... unkind?
I am also doing these passions while helping raising 2 small kids: hiking, sport climbing, via ferratas, skiing, ski touring, diving, and recently abandoned paragliding due to brushing death in pretty bad accident. Those take way more time and effort than coming here. I spend almost 0 time in front of TV, don't have consoles, play like 1 game per 2 years, offline and on desktop PC only (last one was Baldur's Gate 3).
Not the OP, but it's because what's on HN is generally much more informative than the 10-sec TikTok meme videos and click-bait news headlines or FB feeds. I wouldn't be on HN otherwise. (I deleted my FB account 10 years ago, and my Twitter account 3 years ago.)
You weren’t watching TV every free instant you had, like at a red light, on the escalator, while using the urinal, etc. I mean some of these people must not think at all. All free time they could have spent daydreaming or planning or whatever is just taken up by the dumb app in tiny dopamine driving chunks of time. This has to have some effect on brain wiring over time. Just giving yourself absolutely no time for your own thoughts.
Yep. You'd be shocked (or maybe not) at how many people I looking at their phones on a freeway.
I wonder if there's any statistics comparing deaths and injuries from drunk driving versus distracted driving over the past 20 years or so. Is it a comparable at all?
Nah, this misses the point entirely. The scale of the problem today is multiple orders of magnitude greater, for several reasons.
First, TVs were stationary. Unlike smartphones, you couldn't take them wherever you went. If you were wealthier, you could somewhat compensate for this by having multiple TVs, for example in the bedroom in addition to the living room. But whenever you stepped outside your house the TV did not come with you. Places like doctors offices or hotel lobbies might have them in waiting rooms but that was really it in terms of the average person's exposure.
Second, TV programming was not explicitly designed to be addictive. Sure, studios wanted people to watch their programs because that's how they got ad revenue, but they had neither sophisticated tools nor the methods to dial addictiveness to the max. They did not have algorithms, for example, to serve you personalized content based on your tastes and desires. You picked from a limited selection of what was available in that week's programming.
Third, TVs did not have built-in mechanisms to demand re-engagement when you had them turned off. No such thing as notifications. At best you had blurbs about what is next on the program, but those were both channel-specific and also required your TV to be on. So people were not constantly bombarded with micro dopamine hits like they are today.
I could go on, but yeah, your rebuttal does not stand up to critical scrutiny. What we have today is a global scale addiction. It is absolutely nothing like TVs or newspapers/books before them.
I think even highly-engaging well-written high-production-value TV doesn't satiate all of your brain's achievement circuits. Being an Internet native, I was binge watching shows well before the term was invented, and before shows were fluffed out to compensate for bulk half-engaged viewing. When an episode ends I don't want to leave the universe - it's so easy to up-arrow, backspace to the episode number, tab, enter. But I always found there was kind of a limit whereby eventually I would have "had enough" and move on to something different to feel like I was actually achieving something - getting back to work, social interaction, physical chores, etc.
Whereas the plethora of web/apps can provide simulations for all those different circuits in your brain, as you move between them each satiating a different aspect of your personality. And then when you've got time to really "relax", you can still turn on TV in the background to be engaged in multiple low effort stimulations at once.
It was bad then. But it's much worse now because it's ubiquitous -- you're carrying it around in your pocket to fill every empty moment. Not to mention that back then, your "favorite shows" were on a couple of times a day if you were lucky. Now, it's 24/7.
The quantity and availability of "visual entertainment" for me as a child of the 70s pales in comparison to what my young kids have available to them. As parents we're continuously fighting it, including shutting off the router at set times.
Perhaps they disagree with the idea that it’s an addiction or that it’s a problem with screens in particular, rather than a problem with people not being able to or not knowing how to spend their free time in other ways.
If you stare at a wall all day because you have nothing to do, are you addicted to staring at the wall, or do you just have nothing to do?
If someone stops drinking for a long enough period, with no urge to return to drinking, then yes, they aren't an alcoholic. You just made up a silly 12 hour window so you could beat a straw man to death.
If an alcoholic has been clean for decades, he is still an alcoholic, because the second he takes alcohol again, his brain switches back to addiction mode. That's the thing with addictions, they even destroy the good feeling you initially had about with drug.
When you are staring at a wall all day, you can probably think of a lot of other things you could do and did. When you stare at a wall all day, and think of nothing and enjoy it, then I would say you have mental problems. The problem isn't that you do something for a long time, the problem is that you can't think of something else or can't control you to do something else, even if you want.
I can see that, but IMO the main difference is that this feels like it's intentionally trying to be an active detriment to your life. TV et. al are fairly neutral generally. Even with the ads.
But with targeted advertisement, it feels a lot more like they're trying to get inside your mind to steal your money.
And with content on social media, it feels specifically engineered to make your life as bad as possible. More fear, more anger, more racism, more sexism. Here's some big boobies, now look at this disgusting immigrant. Isnt Earth awful? Aren't these guys ruining everything?
This. Targeted adds + bespoke algorithms make our current tech incomparable to the previous boogeyman of TV et al. We have devices that are designed to keep and farm our attention at all costs
We had opium dens in the past, why not fentanyl dens today?
It's just something to do to fill the boredom.
(That's to say: Just because something was mildly bad in the past doesn't mean that the current, somewhat similar, thing in the present isn't horrifically bad. The issues are orthogonal +- 5deg max)
If we kept opium dens there probably wouldn’t be widespread fentanyl use, isn’t it a reaction to the challenges of getting less dangerous opiates, i.e. is more potent and easier to smuggle?
Many places have “supervised consumption” sites or decriminalization now that has gone very poorly, I think in retrospect having opium dens for those who choose to live that way might have been a better alternative to the current state.
Homebound and housewives used to watch hours of game shows and soap operas all day.
If a kid liked to read, some parents would tell them to "get your head out of that book and go outside."
It's just something to do to fill the boredom.