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Comment by mydriasis | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it's the phones. This comment section feels a little better than the last few times this obvious idea has been pointed out -- generally when folks have blamed the phones in the past, dopamine fiends have come out of the woodwork to defend their devices and blame _everything else but the phones_.

This tech is _straight up bad for you_. We like to pretend like having the internet accessible at all times is strictly a marvel of human achievement. While it is indeed a marvel, it's also been contorted into a disgusting mess that's specifically designed to keep you coming back to it like an addict after a fix. An entire industry has been built around sucking you into your device.

The idea that we're giving something this poisonous to children -- and further, that it's a social norm to do so -- _really_ gives me pause.

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I think the reluctance to blame phones is not just that people have a personal, dopaminergic fixation on them.

There are a couple of other factors at play:

1. Thinking people, especially of the sort that frequent Hacker News, want there to be a more complex and multivariate reason behind the "big problems" like loneliness and alienation. It feels wrong to just say "phones bad."

2. Many of us grew up with emerging technologies, like video games and the internet itself, that were reflexively rejected by generations older than us for reasons that seem poorly thought out in retrospect. We pattern match on the type of blithe Luddism we grew up with, and are instinctively reluctant to say "phones bad" for fear of falling symptom to it.

But I agree with you, and the thesis of this article. The "phones" argument has such obvious explanatory power for a wide range of regressive social phenomena that there needs to be overwhelmingly strong evidence for some other catalyst to drop it from consideration.

Phones are not the problem. Social media is.

Just don't install twitter or Facebook or whatever, and use the phone as normal. You do not need to use Instagram or tiktok or whatever to use a phone.

The essay addresses this issue. Social media may be the more proximate cause of social isolation, but it's the phones that make social media more available.

  Phones provide a behavioral “nudge”, like a pantry stocked with junk food — 
  when your phone is right there in your pocket, it’s easier to just text a
  friend instead of going and hanging out, even if the latter would be
  less fulfilling.

(I think he meant "former", not "latter".)

The "just" in "Just don't install social media" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Yes, that can work. But the temptations offered by that powerful little computer in your pocket makes social media that much more difficult for many to ignore.

I spend 100x more time on forums than social and I'm sure I'm not alone

Forums are social media, we just didn't have the term "social media" until later.

I don't have social media on my phone. I just had to uninstall Youtube as I am addicted to watching it on my phone (don't watch nearly as much on the computer) and it is causing attention and relationship issues for me.

I get the next argument is something like "Youtube is just like those other ones", but I've also done this same cycle with plenty of other apps which were not social media related. The screen itself is addictive to look at in a way that older devices were not.

Social media predates smartphones and yet the increase was specifically when smartphones became prevalent.

This overlooks the network effect. If you are between 14 and 24 there is literally _no way_ that you are not on social media. Peer pressure is immense at that age. If you weren't, you would be a social weirdo. To be clear: I agree with your comment, but I'm old, so it's OK to be a social weirdo and avoid social media. :)

> This tech is _straight up bad for you_.

What tech? Being able to talk on the phone? Having a phone you can play on? Or is it the apps that you have on your phone and that are available to you 24/7, and are engineered so you feel the need to engage with them 24/7? Because I don't think it's useful to say "it's the phones" in that case. If it's social media, it's social media, not the device you use to access social media.

I'm not addicted to my phone, I'm one of those boring people that use like 50mb of mobile internet a month, and my phone screen is off 99% of the day, so I'm not sure how accurate your assessments are.

Lately I've been working through some mental health issues including some pretty bad OCD. It's always been there since I was diagnosed with autism as a toddler, but these last few years it was getting worse and worse.

I started doing a lot of analysis because I remembered being much happier and more present when I was around age 18-23, then slowly going downhill from there.

I realized that the decline in my mental health directly coincided with age 23, when I got my first smartphone. I didn't want to believe the solution was that simple...but turning off all my notifications and limiting my phone time/turning off my phone restored my mental health back to baseline levels within a week. It's actually astounding how toxic it was, and I didn't even use a lot of instagram or facebook type stuff...the issue was mostly work alerts, constant texts from my gf and friend groups, and reddit.

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