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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

> Is a life of mindless clicking ever going to be as good as a real one, spent in the company of real people who aren’t endlessly distracted?

Is a life engaging with rich virtual worlds ever going to be good as a real one, spent in the company of bitter old farts who just want to complain about things?

> Is a sunset through a lens ever as satisfying or heart wrenching as a real one?

Is a beautiful artist driven sunset scene more satisfying than your cloudy real life nothing over a boring looking town?

It's all relative. There are definitely cases where a technological interaction is better than a natural one.

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> spent in the company of bitter old farts who just want to complain about things?

I'm sorry but this entire thread is a collection of various complaints. In fact I would argue that HN is nothing but an endless feed of people complaining about things.

The point wasnt to complain about anyones life, it was to show how OP's idea of "real world is better than virtual one" might not be as ubiquitous as he believes. For some, virtual worlds might be better than real ones.

You could say something similar about the news. Complaint can be extremely useful, if someone hears it and finds a solution.

Of course complaint can also be a really dumb waste of time, or even harmful. But few things beat the utility of the right complaint to the right audience.

This is every public forum ever

and probably some private ones too.

HN being an endless feed of people complaining about things is no more meaningful about the entirety of the digital world than a bunch of grumpy old complainers are of all humanity.

Most people here are talking about technology as mindless browsing on social media feeds designed to psychologically trap human brains. That's objectively worse compared to any real experience, largely due to the intentional cognitive trickery behind it.

The technology you seem to be talking about ("virtual worlds", "artist driven sunset") seem to obtainable only by top-tier gaming hardware & artful games that 99.9% people will never use (it actually doesn't even exist yet in the ideal form right now)

I think a good book can be more engaging than a real sunset. High fidelity renders not required.

> Is a life engaging with rich virtual worlds ever going to be good

But that's not the question, at all. It's: how does it affect mental health? One way of looking at it is: are we so social we need contact with a physical human being for certain aspects of our well being?

The question I was responding to was "Is a life of mindless clicking ever going to be as good as a real one, spent in the company of real people who aren’t endlessly distracted?". And the answer is obviously yes, because some people are shit, and some virtual content is great.

> It's: how does it affect mental health? One way of looking at it is: are we so social we need contact with a physical human being for certain aspects of our well being?

No I don't think that's a good way to look at it. By that metric anything that is not socializing with other physical human beings is equally bad. Reading a book is bad. Eating is bad. Showering is bad. The way you've phrased this question, you've assumed that digital content is so pervasive that you don't get enough physically present socializing, which isn't necessarily true to evaluate the question "does it affect our mental health?". If we're open to extreme cases, everything affects mental health. The question you really want to be asking is "does it materially affect most peoples' mental heath?". Personally, I think the answer is no not really. Obviously it becomes a vice for some.

> The question you really want to be asking is "does it materially affect most peoples' mental heath?". Personally, I think the answer is no not really. Obviously it becomes a vice for some.

The real question is how would you know if it did?

Addiction thinking sounds a lot like self reflection too: “I’m not addicted, I just like it very much. I can stop at any time I want, I just don’t want to”.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting everyone who likes something is addicted. It is just the means of finding that out is pretty tricky, especially for hyper-normal stimulus like processed food, porn, cocaine or some bits of the internet.

We can’t infer our ways out of self-deception, if we could it wouldn’t be self-deception.

Hence the requirement of proper objective tooling to measure such effects on (mental) health.

> The real question is how would you know if it did?

Rigorous statistical studies?

Always keep in mind the technology evolves faster than the human. This means we live in a completely different environment from our ancestors while our brains are largely the same as theirs. Maybe the contact we have already is too much.

Sounds like a defensive device addict to me. Relatively speaking.

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