While I agree with this framing of the problem, it feels like another expression of dysfunction in development increasing as direct interaction with clients and users decreases.
Anxiety can also be expressed as a realization that what's being worked on is useless, adds negative value, or just personally unfulfilling or unimportant. Cops firing teargas at peaceful protesters a few blocks away has cause me a good deal of that flavor of anxiety, which I don't think is necessarily a negative outcome. Do you have any insights along those lines?
I've encountered so many younger people in tech, making $200K+ in places that support lifestyles that need less than a quarter of that for comfort, who complain about their jobs and the golden handcuffs that keep them there. They seem to be locked in much stranger and fantastical anxieties than those I understand.
This habitual scroll, scroll, feed, feed, dopamine, dopamine cause the brain to be over active and thoughts hard to control. People get heightened without even being aware. Never-mind if you dont carefully curate your feed.
But that's just something Im mulling over lately.
I only did it for a couple weeks but soon found whole-room artificial lighting at night obnoxiously and needlessly bright. A candle for the room and ~2 candles per person (or equivalent from small electric lights—it's actually hard to find them this dim, though) provide entirely enough illumination to do just about whatever you want, and, crucially, let you get tired.
I strongly suspect a huge proportion of people who are "naturally" very active at night or just "can't" have a normal sleep schedule are in fact suffering from the availability and use of particular technologies.