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Comment by Bakary | Hacker News Reader

In my own experience struggling with addiction I've found that it is a symptom rather than a cause. Once you craft a life that is actually stimulating the tech loses its hold over you pretty quickly, if not instantly (for example when you go on a weekend outing in nature and completely forget your phone). Of course, the time and energy wasted due to the dysfunctional behavior presents a chicken-and-egg roadblock against making this happen.

I recall the studies showing the difference between Vietnam veterans who got hooked on dope and those who didn't, as well as Bruce K. Alexander's Rat Park experiments.

The other thing I've learned is that control or blocking tools can be self-defeating, since they transform fighting the addiction into a perpetually unfinished task ("It's been Y time since I did X") that naturally remains to the forefront of your brain and leaves you vulnerable if you end up in an environment without those restrictions. It's ultimately easier to address the underlying causes of trying to escape through technology.

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This is what I've realized about myself and addition. I get into new things fast and tend to over commit or over indulge early on and once I realize it pull back. I've got it under control now because I realized my excessive drinking or drug usage was in large part because I was bored.

Shit television or movies are much more entertaining when drunk or high. Social engagements that are not mentally stimulating to me are much more bearable when in an altered state.

I picked up a few hobbies that I really enjoy and I no longer feel the need to hit the weed vape pen 5 times on my walk home from work. I paint, do yoga multiple times a week, read a lot, and I'm more selective about the social events I go to because I've got other things I can occupy my time with.

I realize I'm just one data point but I think a lot of people use their vices to stave off boredom and make a life that is not all that interesting, interesting.

Tech addition is a bit different because it's hard to unplug entirely because many of us need to use screens for work. Removing all the social media apps from my phone and limiting my screen time at home has been huge for my ADHD brain. I don't have to have my phone at my side constantly anymore. I find myself enjoying experiences instead of trying to bottle them up for presentation on an app.

Maybe I sound a bit anti-tech but I believe a lot of people have gone too far down the rabbit hole and haven't realized it yet.

Started for me with Slashdot, then reddit, then HN. HN was a safer space than reddit. The /r subreddits seem to be ok now for specific topics.. Maybe specific researchers on Twitter are ok too.

Started for my Dad with email, then the blackberry, now the iPhone/FB etc...

Before that you could argue cable tv (for most kids after school)..

Don't forget about Netflix binges today etc...

> I realize I'm just one data point but I think a lot of people use their vices to stave off boredom and make a life that is not all that interesting, interesting.

It increasingly looks to me like the problem with vices like this (anything from Facebook to pot) is exactly what you describe.

Too often, we talk about them like they ruin people's lives directly. There are a hundred thinkpieces taking correlations like "men who work shorter hours play more games" or "unhappiness is correlated with Facebook use" and concluding "therefore games drive you to not work and social media makes you unhappy!" But we're not talking about things with physical mechanisms or direct brain-chemical impacts here, and I wouldn't expect all the Skinner Box design in the world to make "flashy lights on a screen" more compelling than a tasty dinner or a good hug.

Rather, social media, games, or endless Reddit scrolling slot all too easily into downtime and unsatisfying situations. My experience with them has always been that of a mild sedative; they create a tolerable baseline state for what might otherwise be intolerable situations. (I think the analogy to drinking prior to a crap TV show or a boring event is a great one. It's not alcohol addiction or abuse in any standard sense, but it's still alcohol legitimizing some other bad situation.)

That can still make tech a problem inasmuch as it stops people from breaking out of those situations. But if the situation is externally imposed then it's playing a positive role, and if the situation can be broken with an offering tech doesn't interfere with then it's not playing a negative role. I do think there are people who would benefit from cutting back on tech, and I think we underestimate the impact of push notifications and instant focus switching on our attention. But I also think we neglect a lot of cases where tech is a palliative for some other problem we would be better off attacking directly.

Thanks for sharing. I resonated with a lot of what you said. That's all, I have nothing to add :)

Wow, really succinct comment and you seemed to sum up a lot of what i'm feeling re: this whole thing.

I'm a gamer and about as attached to tech as you can be without actually having mental issues over it.

My wife and I recently bought a house and I've been finding that I'd rather spend time fixing it up than playing games or doing other stuff with electronics much of the time.

That doesn't mean that I've quit wholesale, though. I eventually get physically or mentally tired and want to just relax, and it's back to the games I go.

My point is that tech isn't what drives my life, it's just one of the things that I enjoy. And actually improving our house has proven even more enjoyable.

I don't think the "solution" for "tech addiction" (as most people see it) is limiting phone time or focusing on the tech at all. Instead, the solution is for people to find a hobby that doesn't require an internet/cable connection and enjoy that instead.

And if they don't, it doesn't bother me a bit. People can do what they want, so long as it doesn't harm others.

People who have an actual "addiction" should seek professional help, though. Not some random guy that's making a startup, but someone with an actual degree in a profession that can help with mental issues.

actually improving our house has proven even more enjoyable

Plus you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor.

That was what completely killed my interest in any amount of game grind- it hit me mid-game that if I spent that time grinding my actual corporeal self, I'd have something to show for it after.

I've since improved my AeT mile pace (your "all-day" level) from around 15:00 to 10:00ish. (My dream/goal is to get to 7:00-8:00 at that level of exertion)

This is exactly my experience.

It probably helped that I did just enough game design to be acutely aware of even less-obvious time sink mechanisms, but I don't think it was an essential feature of what changed. Even simple puzzle games and other things that aren't manipulative started to pale in the face of the realization that "hey, I could go fix a broken shelf or read a book or exercise and get a lasting benefit".

It's not a sense of duty or anything else people would describe as "not being lazy", doing something fruitful just started feeling better. I still play games, and I'm happy with that, but the set of games has shrunk to things with ongoing interest and no grind, and the timing to stretches where I'm tired, stuck (e.g. at an airport), or playing with friends.

I don't doubt that addictiveness is a real factor, but I think lots of horror stories about gaming and tech addiction grab the wrong end of the stick. I've seen a half dozen people take "young men now work fewer hours, and game for a similar number more hours" and say "obviously, games destroyed their will to work!" Meanwhile, half my friends have gamed heavily when they had crap jobs, short-term rented apartments, etc, and then stopped as soon as they got bored and found opportunities for lasting improvements. Games are a fantastic way to kill a lot of time comfortably, but that doesn't mean they override all our other impulses.

I generally only read fiction, so I see video games and books as being in the same category: They're great for relaxation and entertainment, and occasionally bring a new plot or idea, but generally not nearly as useful as fixing or making things.

And that's okay. But getting myself to believe that was okay took some doing. I struggled with it for years before I finally found a good balance that didn't make me think I should be more production instead of relaxing.

Yes! I don't like games that grind. I have more important things to do with my time. I'll put _some_ time into some grind-y games. I like hearthstone, but don't grind. I play ~5-10 minutes a day. I like diablo, but I get maybe an hour or two a month in usually. I never keep up with everyone. If the game is more adventure and skill based, it grabs me longer, but if I feel the grind, I lose interest fast.

> That was what completely killed my interest in any amount of game grind- it hit me mid-game that if I spent that time grinding my actual corporeal self, I'd have something to show for it after.

I wish I could relate to this. IRL grinding seems hilariously inefficient and unreliable, which I think is why people enjoy their gaming grinds so much.

Unreliable? It's a lot harder, and a lot slower, but if you learn the ropes & train your body you will get faster/stronger/whatever.

I agree with you, but at the same time, I have to point out that not everyone might have that perspective (anecdotally or not). I'd argue sometimes that the rewards from grind in real-life might seem so marginal such that some people feel as if they have made no effective progress.

Yes, it's definitely a slower grind than a video game, where it feels like a slog but you make progress in days or even hours. I have now run many hundreds of miles over the course of years to reap gains I can feel really good about.

That might have been easier for me to sign up for now that I am older, and more comfortable thinking about multi-year horizons.

(1) Professional help for addiction tends to be very expensive; in contrast, even buying a "specialty" smartphone to replace one's existing smartphone would cost much less.

(2) Even those who can easily afford the best professional help, e.g., Ben Affleck, end up having to go back into an in-patient addiction treatment center multiple times (3 times so far for Affleck, the first time's being in 2001), which casts doubt on the effectiveness of professional help.

(3) Some people need to advance in their career before they can afford professional help, but addiction makes it harder for a person to make progress in life. An affordable tech solution or partial-solution to addiction can help break this vicious cycle.

Not relevant, since the fundamental issues still aren't being addressed. By and large, dysfunction will just find a different way to manifest itself.

Moreover, treating the symptom without treating the disease will be an inordinate struggle until the underlying issues are understood, processed and addressed. This will leave most of the afflicted no better off, and in some ways, significantly worse for the failed effort.

Mental health is costly and difficult. There is no shortcut around this. You can't replace it with an app, or we would have replaced it with a book.

Recovering mental health usually takes years. The sufferer or people who care about the sufferer have to learn enough to solve the problem. They must free themselves from false beliefs and keep trying things till they find something that works.

Addiction is an obstacle to learning and (more generally) to making progress in life because a large fraction of one's potentially-productive time gets absorbed by the addictive behavior.

Replacing an iPhone or Android phone with a phone that is even slightly less addictive (if such a phone existed) would allow a person and those who care about the person to engage in the probably-years-long process of learning and trial and error faster, resulting in fewer years lost to addiction (statistically speaking).

* * *

Seeing concrete examples of lives ruined by addiction (or by some other illness) makes a person uncomfortable. A natural human response would be for me to reduce that uncomfortable feeling by telling myself it will happen to me because, e.g., (a) the sufferer behaved immorally whereas I am moral or, e.g., (b) the sufferer did not obey the rules of society whereas I do.

Are you sure that you haven't reduced your discomfort around addiction by telling yourself that it cannot happen to you or those you love because you and those you love are willing to do the hard work of getting to the "root cause" of the addiction?

(Or maybe you believe that it can happen to you, but that you will be able to fix the root cause before a large fraction of your life is ruined by the addiction.)

I ask because your comment skates close to what we might call "essentialism", in which you argue that it is useless for you and I try to help the addict because what is wrong is something essential to the addict, so of course only the addict himself can help.

I never said it was useless to try and overcome addiction.

However, we know that is useless and wasteful to treat a symptom of addiction as if it was a disease - milquetoast penny pragmatism notwithstanding.

Thanks for your reply.

I wonder whether this next would be considered by you as merely treating the symptom of addiction:

Joe notices that most of the time he spend on the web is wasted time. So he cancels his home internet connection and relies on his connection at work to get done everything that needs to get done on the web. For example, at work he downloads movies and TV shows from the iTunes Movie Store (or whatever they're calling it now) onto his MacBook for watching at home. (or he uses youtube-dl to download Youtube and Daily Motion videos.)

Is that in your opinion uselessly treating a symptom of addiction?

If it was that easy for Joe, he wasn't addicted, and it was his integrated recognition of the problem, and not the ritual he imposed as a result, that substantiated the change.

If he was, he found something else to replace it, and is no better off.

>My wife and I recently bought a house and I've been finding that I'd rather spend time fixing it up than [engaging in things that many people get addicted to]

I propose that most of the hours lost to tech addiction will be lost by people with a severe life problem (e.g., they're paralyzed and in a wheelchair; e.g., they have an incurable disabling illness; e.g., they cannot get a job because they're ugly and have an IQ of 70) in addition to the addiction. Most of them will not be able to find anyone trustworthy and sane to marry them. Most of them will not be able to buy a house.

It is natural for a person to respond to the assertion that X is dangerous (or pernicious) by focusing on how dangerous X is to people sufficiently like themselves without considering the danger (or perniciousness) to people in different life circumstances.

The private market will do a far better job fixing the status quo than the government or industrial complexes will. Some "random guy that's making a startup" presumably would do things to be safe, and ethical, no? You can make generalizations and assumptions otherwise, though that isn't very helpful. If you've ever had the displeasure to experience the healthcare system, you'd learn too that "professionals" are indoctrinated in a system that doesn't update their knowledge, keeps their knowledge in silos, and overall is inefficient and not getting people access to the most recent/best information/knowledge.

Edit to add:

I should have clarified/furthered my thoughts - and it's true you shouldn't by default trust a startup to do things safely or ethically, you should certainly do your due diligence that they aren't making claims that can't be backed up, nor are following processes (etc) that can do more than what is a pre-existing level of acceptable risk/harm.

Presumably however, if they're/a startup is expecting to survive in the long-term they'd need to be leveraged and connected with safety and people with the appropriate knowledge, because they should be scrutinized more thoroughly if they're involved with health. Otherwise they're going to die off - and hopefully without hurting too many people or getting too big, like where we could reference Theranos.

> If you've ever had the displeasure to experience the healthcare system, you'd learn too that "professionals" are indoctrinated in a system that doesn't update their knowledge, keeps their knowledge in silos, and overall is inefficient and not getting people access to the most recent/best information/knowledge.

This is crankery. Not all doctors are the best medical practitioners, but I will always trust a random medical doctor more than a random “health” startup.

Your statement is equally a "crankery" if you've never had to deal with or experience the healthcare system. Unless you educate yourself on a topic to try to understand what's going on with yourself (unless it's something very simple), then you'll likely have as good of odds deciding if a doctor is good at what they do/figuring something out, as does a "health" startup. The systems of indoctrination are real and human error is a huge problem, likewise, doctors are selected primarily for their memorization skills and not critical thinking. - so if it is something more than simple, - good luck. They will listen to you for symptoms (assuming your self-awareness is adequate to notice everything important and your ability to share those symptoms is adequate) to then match up what might be going on, and then send you for testing, further specialist opinion, or whatever else. Technology will replace most of the processes in health - and that is good. Another example is using AI to analyze x-rays and MRIs for issues. Your family physician will depend on the report to decide if there's anything that needs to be treated - I have had more than one MRI reports where on second look by a different doctor they spot something that the original didn't.

> Some "random guy that's making a startup" presumably would do things to be safe, and ethical, no?

That's a very risky assumption to make. Ethics are often secondary considerations for engineer and business thinking (for better or worse). To the point that people advocate the removal of ethics courses from university STEM curricula (not sure how widespread this viewpoint is, but I've heard it my entire adult life, so this whole century).

Anecdotal evidence, but I personally know quite a few people with mental health issues who’ve found psychiatrists very helpful. I don’t know anyone who has received significant help with mental health from a tech startup. Startups are great, but they aren’t the answer to everything.

Many of the tech startups currently are platforms to connect people to services - like psychiatrists.

So directory services? Great, but then they have nothing to do with the actual healthcare, so your original comment on private market care doesn't apply.

Sorry but I don't understand how my comment on the private market doesn't apply? I think there is definitely difficulty in seeing the underlying aspects of where innovation comes from, mainly because the "lowest hanging fruit" is what will get investment money first, and part of that lowest hanging fruit will scale quickly too - meaning it'll be what gets the most mainstream exposure - so that can skew people's view about private vs. public.

Do you have much experience personally dealing with healthcare systems to reference?

What about the last 15 years leads you to believe that we can rely on startup founders to care about safety and ethics?

I can only imagine there are a lot of health tech companies we could find/reference who have received VC money, and who haven't hurt anyone - who are aware of the ethics and are good people. Of course there will be people who are naive, perhaps the "mercenary" type who see an opportunity, get money, and try to push for growth and marketshare without caring about health and safety first; Theranos seems to be one of these situations.

You first argue that the free market is suited to solve these problems, then criticize the health-care industry for problems caused by its competitive nature.

I want to address your point here, but I have no idea what it is.

There's an educational complex (including for/with medicine-healthcare), a manufacturing line of people's education towards "higher education." I am not saying this is inherently bad, however it has allowed indoctrination and stagnancy in practices to take hold in some areas - and which other means of education haven't caught up (via the private/"free" market) to counter-balance this for the mainstream masses to use and benefit from; programming has easily become a decentralized task with platforms like Codecademy, as one example.

There is also a difference between healthcare in countries like Canada vs. the US, where you can compare how "free market" the different systems are - see where more innovation has occurred or stagnated due to policy or other.

My point is that it's dangerous to blindly trust professionals - professional titles that were/are created and maintained through systems that include indoctrination - and just because they have a degree in something doesn't mean you should trust them (on a simpler level, just because someone has their driver's license - doesn't mean you should assume or trust they're a good driver). And obviously I'm not relating this type or level of trust to say someone who's gone through schooling who's a brain surgeon, to trusting someone else who just claims to be a brain surgeon but has no references or experience.

The problem with indoctrination is there is new knowledge and tools being developed every year, however that knowledge is not distributing - it takes far too long, in part, because of indoctrination.

There's indoctrination within individual organizations/companies as well, with like Theranos, where the VCs and controllers must not have understood the science themselves - or had trusted parties they could refer to outside of the company - and so it could grow to the scale it did.

The free market can counter these complexes, it's just not going to be a simple endeavour, it will be complex. And just because the free market can solve these issues, doesn't mean there shouldn't be societal changes and rules enacted, and doesn't mean that this same free market and say health-care industry can't be part of creating problems that then need to be addressed.

> Some "random guy that's making a startup" presumably would do things to be safe, and ethical, no?

I assume the exact opposite of nearly every startup.

Good - as you and everyone should - however, in the context of a health startup, and if the startup wants to have a long existence, they're not going to last very long if they're hurting people? I didn't mean to imply to blindly trust, like you shouldn't blindly trust any doctor you see.

> Some "random guy that's making a startup" presumably would do things to be safe, and ethical, no?

“They ‘trust me.’ Dumb fucks.”

In context I was speaking of health-related companies, that generally are scrutinized more - you can't create a medication and just start giving it to everyone, and you can't claim a medicine does something it hasn't been proven to do in studies, etc.

And once again, Facebook et al, ties into health as social is health. Facebook did some experiments/research specifically to see the impact of showing more positive or more negative posts to people, on a large scale, and without people expressly knowing or asking to participate. They should have gotten into huge trouble for this. How would you prevent this otherwise than having good whistler-blower laws, along with substantial rewards for doing so? Is the best option have someone else notice the problems and develop competition that is a better solution? It's difficult of course to compete with things like network effect and economies of scale, so then it will take more effort, more ambition, more passion, and perhaps more resources and time to reach the same scale - if that scale is even healthy.

Soylent and Theranos are two recent counterexamples that come to mind. In the former case, a company made many claims they have since dialed back; and in the latter case, outright fraud, though it may not have started out that way.

23andMe were shut down for a period by the FDA.

There are of course plenty of healthcare startups that are working within the established boundaries of the existing system, but if you want to push those boundaries, it's going to take a while for regulations to catch up, and in the meantime caveat emptor.

Can you give more information on Soylent being fraud?

Yeah I dunno about that.

A month or so ago, I took a two week trip across France and Spain, it was one of the most lovely experiences of my life, staying in great places, eating amazing food, etc. It was honestly about as wonderful and stimulating of an experience as I've ever had.

About halfway through it I started to realize that I was still attached to my phone. I was sitting on trains reflexively checking Twitter for the disastrous updates in American politics instead of looking out the window at the Pyrenees, or in a museum constantly reaching for my pocket.

In my personal story I took drastic action. I added parental controls to the phone, deleted some apps, made a commitment to keep the phone out of the bedroom, and other stuff, and have noticed a drastic improvement in mental health.

I don't discount your experiences, they likely work for you and I believe you. Just like how many people can go into bars without becoming alcoholics, but there are other people who need to take affirmative steps towards abstinence, and avoid certain people places and things, as they say.

But that's the nature of an addictive cycle. Not sure it actually in fact matters how great your life is, once you've acquired that addiction it's a habit that requires being affirmatively broken.

> A month or so ago, I took a two week trip across France and Spain, it was one of the most lovely experiences of my life, staying in great places, eating amazing food, etc. It was honestly about as wonderful and stimulating of an experience as I've ever had.

But were they really?

The thing I'm no longer afraid to admit about myself - I don't enjoy such stuff. I don't derive much pleasure from views of nature, don't like typical tourist destinations (for instance, last year I went to Pripyat, and liked it much better than Lviv or Kiev). I don't enjoy eating local cousine, I prefer regular commercial-grade pizza, thank you. I tried pretending that I like "normal" things for a long time, but this cognitive dissonance isn't worth it.

I still agree with GP here - if the things you do are fulfilling, you'll be less inclined to pick up the phone. For me, it won't be France or Spain, but it will be a programming side project. It won't be hiking, but it will be going out with an air gun and shooting a bit. I don't feel an addiction to tech then, but get me back to the office, and suddenly the addiction is back too.

To be clear: I'm not discounting the addictiveness of consumer-oriented tech - but I do feel that it's often easier to break the feedback loop by fixing the other end of it.

Yes they were really. It really was, literally, the thing in life I like to do the most. I live to travel and see new places, it's the favorite activity I ever engage in.

I just disagree with this whole idea that there HAS to be some "missing hole" that phones fill. These apps are addictive, that's not really a secret they are designed to be by teams of brilliant people.

It's possible that many heroin addicts have "holes" in their life that they fill, but it's also pretty much a certainty that if you take a random person and unwittingly feed them heroin for awhile telling them it's harmless, they're going to have withdrawal symptoms if they stop.

I'm aware of the Rat Park study and it's interesting but it's pretty isolated and hasn't been replicated, and either way it's just one intriguing counterpoint, not dispositive.

It's often a misconception that 12 step programs talk about getting to "root causes" first. They do, to some extent, but they always focus immediately and completely on total abstinence until that has been achieved.

Then, the "root causes" stuff is really better described as picking up the pieces of a broken life, and specifically a ton of broken relationships, since the one thing all addicts have in common is a large number of close relationships with people that they have ruined.

Sobriety in that context really isn't about getting to and fixing "root causes" to be honest. It's more about setting up a set of current habits, and social support, that are based around non addictive behaviors.

What point are you even making here? You know there's a difference between physical dependence and addiction, right? Someone who isn't a heroin addict can easily stop taking it if they are weaned off. And heroin addicts relapse all the time after physical withdrawals have subsided.

> Someone who isn't a heroin addict can easily stop taking it if they are weaned off.

That's a bit dubious as a blanket statement. Perhaps you're creating a distinction without a difference?

My point pretty much sums to "addictive things are addictive"

Yes, addiction is more nuanced than that, some people are exposed to addictive things and don't get hooked.

But it seems like people in this thread are trying to advance this idea:

addiction = addictive thing + preexisting problem

Therefore, the solution is to get rid of that preexisting problem and voila, addiction is fixed.

I'm not sure I buy that. I'm sticking with the idea that certain substances, or technologies, are inherently likely to create habits and dependency in most humans who are exposed to them.

I count social media and heroin in that category.

>Perhaps you're creating a distinction without a difference?

There is certainly a difference. Your body, physically, will be fine without heroin. But emotionally, you feel empty without it, and as soon as some emotional trauma - stress, sadness, fear or despair rears its head, you relapse. I guess you could argue that emotional need is no different than physical need, but I don't think that's quite the point you're trying to make

Fair enough.

> I just disagree with this whole idea that there HAS to be some "missing hole" that phones fill.

I don't think there is one either. I think there's a general sense of ennui growing in our society that is partly responsible here.

Or vice versa.

>I prefer regular commercial-grade pizza

Have you considered you like commercial grade food because of the possibly addictive ingredients they use, like excessive sugar and salt?

I have considered it and, seeing such pizza made many times, I discounted it. They use the same ingredients you'd buy to put in your sandwitch; the same ingredients you get in "local cousine" when you travel.

Please leave my local cousine alone, even if she is in the cuisine ;-)

I don't think you're talking about commercial grade pizza then. Do you mean something like Pizza Hut/ Papa John's or a local pizza shop?

Yes, both local and chain pizza places. From what I can tell, they do source cheapest ingredients available... which is also what every individual I know does, mostly from the same sources. And they do not seem to add any extra salt & sugar beyond what I'd expect in a homemade meal of similar quality.

I realize now that using the phrase "commercial-grade" might have implied I mean stuff like frozen pizzas in grocery stores. I did not mean that, though there are some brands of frozen pizza that taste quite good when passed through oven.

AFAIK there's a big difference between national/global chain and local pizza shop ingredients, mostly due to cost savings related to supply chain and the requirement for consistent products for the larger chains. Do you have any sources that local pizza shops and large chains use the same brand?

social media is specifically designed to provide you regular bursts of instant gratification. Of course that's going to be more attractive to your brain than natural vistas, it's engineered for maximum impact.

When comparing natural and artificial stimuli I like to refer to this comic, which lays out the issue at hand beautifully: http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/supernormal-stimuli/

The same can be said for processed food. It's designed to be hyper-sensual. Of course it tastes better than an apple, it's designed that way. But one is healthy, and the other only tastes good.

I’ve noticed after doing bursts of healthy eating that most processed food is _extremly_ sweet. Even food we think of as “salty” or “savory” is dominanted by a sugary flavor. This is because sugar is such a cheap way of making something taste “good” and since everyone is doing it your brain filters it away

It can take substantially more time than a 2 week trip to break addictive actions that you have been taking and conditioning yourself to perform over a long period of time. I agree, however, that sometimes establishing controls to limit or block your behavior initially can be helpful in breaking out of the cycle, and isn't necessarily self defeating so long as you are not depending on it entirely

You example of people going into bars and not becoming alcoholics isn't applicable because they aren't addicts... There's usually an underlying cause of addiction. But it doesn't have to be boredom like in OP's case. The steps you talk about taking towards abstinence are usually to reinforce different habits (which is done in addition to addressing the underlying cause). I do see the point you're making. I think addiction to your phone is a little unique. The behavior is so reinforced that it becomes second nature. Whereas, for example, picking up drugs is a much more deliberate/infrequent effort relative to pulling your phone out of your pocket. Which is probably why the conditioning of other habits is so important in that case. You have to deliberately rewire those deeply ingrained neural pathways.

Bakary said: "In my own experience struggling with addiction I've found that it is a symptom rather than a cause."

You said: "but there are other people who need to take affirmative steps towards abstinence, and avoid certain people places and things, as they say."

To clarify, you each are saying two different things; with Bakery addressing the disease, and you common symptoms (of failed attempts at trying to cure symptoms).

For example, let's say you're an addict of some sort and you get "treatment" (e.g., 30 day detox). But the problem is, you drink because X happen to you as a child. You "addict" (so to speak) to mask that pain. But the detox treatment never addressed that root cause. Quitting the habit doesn't eliminate the need that created that habit.

After 30 day you check out. For a moment, you're clean. In your mind, you've got it beat. However, humans are also creature of habit, as well as creatures of conformity (i.e., we "default" to the norms around us). When it comes to basic behaviors context matters. A lot.

You return to your old neighborhood, old friends (likely some are also addicts), etc., old TV shows. More of less, the same routine. Keep in mind, you're not cured, only __temporarily__ clean. In no time at all you're off the wagon. Why? Because your root problem was never cured to begin with. And being human means you assume the "norms" around you.

Sure, you can abstain from your device. But you still haven't solved The Problem (upper T upper P intentional). You simply grabbed a balloon. The root cause is now likely to pop out somewhere else.

That could be the case for some people. For many others, there probably isn't some other root cause. It's the damn phone (and the apps on the phone) that is causing the problem.

Well. Um. But... craving an unnatural amount of attention __is__ a root cause. Wanting to seek conflict __is__ a root cause. Seeking to reconfirm my confirmation bias __is__ a root cause. FOMO __is__ a root cause.

The device enables these things - take the device away and they will still exist - it does not create them.

It doesn't make sense to blame the device for what is ultimately a human behavior issue. The abuse of the device __is__ a red flag for "we have a problem here" and that problem is not the device. "Curing for the device" will not solve the root problem(s).

I am saying that these devices can cause issues for normal poeple who don't have other severe issues. Do you disagree with this statement?

For those people, the device itself, and the relationship with the device, is the place to look when trying to improve the situation.

There is also an issue of practicality here. Even for people with significant issues that need to be addressed, it may be practical to do things like adjusting how one uses the phone, as a stepping stone to actually fixing the deeper issue.

re: "I am saying that these devices can cause issues for normal poeple who don't have other severe issues."

Yes. But don't you see the irony in that statement? How "normal" can you be if a device and a few swipes "makes" you into something else? Sure, maybe without the device you could bottle it up? But for how long? And at what cost? Where does that "energy" go (to other bad habits)?

If what you said was true then EVERYONE would have this problem. As it is, that's just not true. In fact, the media often spins reports of those not on social media as being abnormal.

Don't get me wrong. We do have a collective problem. But it's bigger than just these devices, and simply blaming the devices is not going to help solve for the root.

> Yes. But don't you see the irony in that statement? How "normal" can you be if a device and a few swipes "makes" you into something else?

Your depiction doesn't match common usage of smartphones -- people check them 150+ times per day, and saying "it's just a swipe" is meaningless. But regardless, why don't we sample the population and find out? It's my understanding that the current scientific consensus is that modern media and tech is having noticeable adverse effects on individual well-being and social relationships. If this is not the case, I would like to know!

I don't see any irony. There are inherent difficulties involved in being human... I wouldn't find it surprising if regular people are susceptible to sophisticated tech that takes advantage of cognitive characteristics to maximize time in app purely for advertising dollars, and that this may have adverse affects.

> If what you said was true then EVERYONE would have this problem.

This may be true, to varying degrees. This is something we need to research and take seriously.

I think there are many amazing, good things about modern technology and even social media. But we shouldn't turn a blind eye to potential negatives or blame completely normal individuals for being affected by these massive, unprecedented changes.

> But it's bigger than just these devices, and simply blaming the devices is not going to help solve for the root.

I agree there are many factors here, and I was not saying we should ignore all the other factors.

By the way, I'm not proposing any specific remedies, if you are worried about that. That is a different conversation.

The root problem is just having been born.

There's two pieces- you replace the stimulus, but you also have to break the old habit/reflex.

When traveling, thus far I've skipped getting local service. At least where we've been, WiFi is scarce, and as a result the phone remains a valuable planning tool but becomes useless as a dopamine drip.

It's more like how I imagine a pocket computer "should" be- you can find WiFi & make a video call back home, you can look up information about the town, you can store maps and boarding passes, play music, snap reference photos of signboards, check in with your bank, etc. But 98% of the time it's slumbering in a corner of your luggage (and getting great battery life)

FWIW, this ultimately led me to a relatively low-data plan at home, 500MB/mo, both to save money as well as to slow the drip.

There are definitely nuggets of truth to what you say, but I can say first hand that often the biggest challenge (after admitting your flaws, of course) in battling addiction is determining what exactly it is that I am missing. If things are going well in my life generally (marriage, work, friends, spiritually, etc) and yet I still feel the pull to this coping mechanism, why is that?! I don’t have any latent trauma that I’m aware of either. It can be utterly demoralizing and confusing to continually fail for seemingly no reason at all.

>If things are going well in my life generally (marriage, work, friends, spiritually, etc) and yet I still feel the pull to this coping mechanism, why is that?!

dopamine receptor abuse by these giant companies with a large line item for psychological research.

The internet is the most fascinating thing in the history of humanity. Of course you're "addicted" to it, why wouldn't you be? In the old days you would have been addicted to reading books, probably. Every second you're faced with the choice "should I do nothing in particular or should I reach into my pocket for the ultimate information entertainment device?" Why wouldn't you take a look at what the internet has to offer this minute? That might be a really interesting question to try to answer. Is there something else you'd rather be "addicted" to, some kind of less salty addiction, something more challenging?

Actually I was speaking about addiction more generally, but yes actually there are lots of other things to be addicted to. Sex, drugs and alcohol immediately come to mind. The Internet, while quite interesting and addictive in its own right, does not provide quite the same physical sensations. And often the choice isn't between "nothing in particular" and your vice of choice. Part of what makes an addiction harmful is that when faced with a choice between healthy relationships and your addictive vice, you choose the vice (and ultimately isolation, which works to increase the grip of your addiction).

Having a support system, and things in your life to focus on outside of your addiction, such as marriage, work, friends, spirituality is certainly important in recovering from addiction, but it is not a cure. It's perfectly normal to experience feelings of wanting to go back to what you were addicted to, especially in times of stress, sadness, or any other emotions you have a hard time handling. Relapsing, or feeling as if you want to go back to your addiction, is not a failure. As most recovering addicts will tell you, relapse is just another part of recovery

This is absolutely my experience with alcohol.

A lot of the time, though, we have to quit dysfunctional behavior before we can identify what functional behavior looks like.

I totally agree with you that there is a chicken and egg problem. My typical advice for folks is to quit the behavior completely: you're correct in identifying how blocking tools cause their own problems and just mimic the same addictive behavior.

Then, at that point, it's going to be necessary to find some other behavior, but that's often a lot easier once you've got to do something... you just have to make sure that the things you choose to do are good.

Like, I gave up my codependent relationship with my ex wife, and that made it possible to give up drinking, but I still have to play a shit-ton of scales on guitar and piano and about an hour of yoga or I get weird.

Or I quit facebook, but now I do a a daily run of Kahn academy and working on electronics projects; that's a symptom, but it's a symptom that I enjoy.

> but I still have to play a shit-ton of scales on guitar and piano and about an hour of yoga or I get weird.

Found this very refreshing. I think 'eccentricity as medicine' may be a component missing from modern mental health treatment. Seems like the societal pressure to 'not seem weird' could exacerbate mental illness and stress. Perhaps if people with behavioral dysfunctions were encouraged not to "act normal" but "act weird in productive ways" it could be beneficial.

A lot of "tech" stuff is kind of like a bottomless bag of potato chips. If you have nothing else to eat, you can keep reaching for another potato chip and never really feel satisfied. Slapping your own hand won't really fix the problem, but Thanksgiving dinner will have you groaning at the thought of trying to eat another potato chip.

Addiction seems to fill emotional voids like unresolved trauma, depression, ennui, unfulfilled ambition and so on. I think much like a bad habit, an addiction needs to be replaced by something else that fills the gap but is positive instead (for example exercise, working, learning, or sports) otherwise the gap is still there and will exert continued pressure to return to the addiction. That or (where possible) removing the gap entirely by working through the root emotional cause.

The Buddhist perspective seems to be that we suffer from a general addiction ("craving").

Meditation is supposed to shine a light on that. Since few people ever just sit down without entertainment or work, the meditation posture becomes a way to notice (and subdue) one's constant tendency to reach for something to enjoy or accomplish.

This craving comes as part of "attachment", the way our minds are hooked up into all kinds of duties, relations, plans, hopes, fears, etc. Mental life is like swinging from branch to branch in a jungle of obligations, desires, aversions, gossip, anxieties...

In modern parlance it's the phenomenon that makes us feel constantly stressed about all kinds of stuff, in the most general sense, up to and including the end game vision that one day we're going to die, so we better get to work.

Every time I check something off my todo list, two more things appear...

Without buying into Buddhist metaphysics, I do think it points out something that's extremely palpable in these days, thus the recent (fading?) trending interest in meditation and mindfulness.

Another lucid perspective on it is McLuhan's, like in a brief essay called "The Agenbite of Outwit."

http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_...

With the telegraph Western man began a process of putting his nerves outside his body. Previous technologies had been extensions of physical organs: the wheel is a putting-outside-ourselves of the feet; the city wall is a collective outering of the skin. But electronic media are, instead, extensions of the central nervous system, an inclusive and simultaneous field. Since the telegraph we have extended the brains and nerves of man around the globe. As a result, the electronic age endures a total uneasiness, as of a man wearing his skull inside and his brain outside. We have become peculiarly vulnerable. The year of the establishment of the commercial telegraph in America, 1844, was also the year Kierkegaard published The Concept of Dread.

Mental health in the age of the internet indeed seems like a major topic.

Buddhist thinking does give people narratives/rituals/methods to detach, that are without doubt of great value in today's hyperconnected world. And hyper connection does make us all vulnerable indeed.

But on the other end of the spectrum, Sugata Mitra, the educator, likes to say humanity has just uncovered the ability to murmurate like starlings, thanks to the hyperconnectivity the internet enable. It's still early days and pretty chaotic and mad, but just like a crowd has some magical self organizing ability to synchronize their clapping, who knows whether this hyper connectivity is on the verge of producing the same. I'd like to think we will get there, and are just going through a temporary bumping into each other phase. The talk for anyone interested - https://youtu.be/upg8LlJZtas?t=3567

I sometimes wonder if we should just totally embrace our onlineness instead of always treating it as a failure, an addiction, a horrible alienation.

For example I remember when I was living at home, me and my brother and sometimes even my mom, we would chat on some instant messenger (or IRC) instead of talking...

That can be framed as some kind of dystopian nightmare, but it's also just two people talking using a textual medium, and why is that bad or unnatural?

What if we could have both meditation retreats and something like online immersion retreats?

What if a couple relationship can be improved by using social technology, what if that stuff doesn't only ruin our natural wholesome way of being but can instead really bring us closer and allow for whole new ways of understanding each other...

Good points. It feels like we are in some kind of "learning" phase, developing our ideas of what is useful and what is not. Who knows whether it will take 2 more years or 20 before the final verdict is delivered.

I totally agree. I think this constant need to be doing something is one of the voids that needs to be filled, and it seems to be largely cultural and driven by consumerism. Meditation is a great way to tackle that and many other voids, I regularly find myself feeling much more emotionally levelled out after having meditated successfully.

On the other hand, in some way I think the Buddhist rhetoric—probably especially in the West—can tend to exaggerate in making it seem like the original sin.

Which it probably is if you're striving for the kind of nirvana that Buddhist monks strive for...

But "laypeople" shouldn't get meta-anxious about it and try to achieve a mental peace that's impossible in their life situation.

Even in Zen they have the saying "no work, no eat."

But yeah, maybe we spend 98% of our waking life in attachment, when a better ratio would be, say, 80%?

And the insidious thing about "tech" is that it's constantly available. It's almost like having a schizophrenic voice in your head that interrupts every quiet moment.

I think everyone has their own little ways of getting some daily quietude, but I do also think that with the current state of advanced distraction technologies, it's not rare for someone to spend a whole day "online."

I live in a dysfunctional world in which having a smartphone is really useful. I don't think that's going to change any time soon.

So the least I can do is instruct my smartphone to limit my usage of certain things which I find reduce my quality of life but are very distracting.

> In my own experience struggling with addiction I've found that it is a symptom rather than a cause. Once you craft a life that is actually stimulating the tech loses its hold over you pretty quickly, if not instantly

I see it as elimination through substitution

In a behavior-line; action => reaction => effect you can attribute 'emotion' as a catalyst (starting, speeding up, changing or steering a chemical process) so falling into euphoria, but not being able to infer fixed coherencies - maybe insights - it may be (thesis:) fatal and momentous. Cos, 'if i lose my ability to gain insights - i can't leave that maybe fatal situation that fast and easy' (-;

>I recall the studies showing the difference between Vietnam veterans who got hooked on dope and those who didn't, as well as Bruce K. Alexander's Rat Park experiments.

Here's a well made video [0] on this exact topic from, "Kurzgesagt," a YouTube channel.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8L-0nSYzg

can confirm. at work im addicted to Twitter/Instagram (even YouTube) but while traveling for couple weeks recently I found myself not caring at all about latest news in Politics or digital entertainment. Perhaps changing ones job is the most effective cure.

Agreed. Nobody ever says "my life was so fulfilling before I got addicted to X"

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