You Are You. We Live Here. This Is Now

Terrific piece and in many ways I'm nodding along. As a 50yo with 2 teenage kids there's lots here that resonates.

On the other: "Television, The Drug of the Nation" was released in 1991 - there's always been much angst about the impact of media to dehumanise. Not to say we're not in unprecedented times, but still - humans do largely find a way to be human.

One of the intense ironies that strikes me often is that if you look up from the web and spend time "out here" in the world, you realise that people genuinely aren't what they are online. Or - at least - this is my experience, albeit from a backwater Cornish town. People love each other, get hurt, aren't (generally) dicks, spend time being nice, read (some) books. The problems exist, sure - but they're vastly amplified if all you do is spend time with your face in a screen.

I'm often worried about my teens and I nag them accordingly - they do spend too long online and they have sucked on the crack pipes of many of these platforms. But they also - and I give them vast credit for this - have beautiful and meaningful relationships in the real world. They talk and walk and exercise and cry and drink and make mistakes and do great things and make me proud.

The difficulty of life is to be embraced, not rejected. But: I suspect it's not quite as dark as the writer suggests. Humans endure. He is right though - we've all got to keep fighting for it, fighting for the reality of life and the hard knocks that it sometimes brings.

> You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working from home driven by Adderall you got via Zoom from a pill-mill doctor, you order dinner through an app (so that you don’t have to talk to an actual person on the phone), masturbate to online porn, watch several dozen videos on YouTube, none of which you’ll remember even three days later, then take two Xanax to put yourself to sleep. That’s progress now, the steady accumulation of various tools to avoid other human beings, leaving people free to consume #content that is by design totally, existentially disposable, throw-away culture that asks nothing of us and which we don’t remember because neither creator nor audience wants to invest enough for remembering to make sense.

Maybe if you want to be engaged with other people you should understand a little bit of why they take certain medications, or consume certain media, which you don’t particularly find helpful or appealing for yourself.

Personally my meditation helps me to have and maintain capacity for better relationships with the people I want in my life. But the fact that I take medications has served as an unexpected but valuable honeypot for identifying less healthy human relationships too. It’s not that I don’t want to have real, meaningful relationships with people. It’s that explaining for the umpteenth time that my meditation helps me and isn’t whatever boogeyman you’ve imagined makes my relationship with you less healthy and meaningful. The more that reinforces the stereotype in your internal feedback loop, the more that makes me want to spend my time with people who are actually interested in my real experience.

By all means, enjoy presence in whatever aspect of reality you find enriching. Ima be over here doing the same, but away from people judging me for the things that help me function in and enjoy my own life.

Man, this shit is deep. Hit me like a wrecking ball. I feel understood. I will have to re-read this a couple times... great post, thanks for sharing.

In the meantime I'm going offline to ride a bike or something

An odd article, because it puts up a whole smorgasbord of strawmen.

It seems to conflate all of it into one big old-man-yells-at-clouds complaint: tiktok and social media addiction, chatgpt, stimulants, depression, teenagers, helicopter parenting, porn, videogames, sensory overload, being called a snowflake, stuffed animals (?) and on and on it goes. But it never actually brings anything concrete to the table, nor maybe examines how the world teenagers grow up in today might not be the world where the author grew up in 40 years ago.

For example, in that very first screenshot, the first two teenagers say they feel more connected to their friends and social online, while the latter two saying they feel more peaceful. How is that for connecting with yourself and others? It's not like the authors seems to have spent a lot of time talking to these kids to maybe form a better informed opinion. Instead, their writing veers off into nytimes op-eds and big words about the fundamental task of our lives (fundamental to who?) and throw-away culture. I don't think we inhabit the same internet. Mine is full of dedicated artists and researchers and hackers and students and youtube creators (hide the kids!) creating amazing videos. Heck, just spend one day on HN and click all the obscure stuff showing up on the frontpage.

As an autistic person, online was indeed where things where calm, peaceful, and where I could be social at my own rhythm. It's only later in life that I figured out that that's where I am grounded, that's where I can grow, instead of pretending to connect in the real world.

It's one thing to criticize a specific aspect of digital culture, and maybe come up with some facts; it's another to just put everything in a blender and pretend there is wisdom in calling it terrible.

(edit: typos)

> If I felt people could use these apps responsibly and sparingly, I wouldn’t worry. But the apps are designed to compel people to use them irresponsibly. Some of the most well-resourced and brightest tech workers in our economy have the specific and exclusive task of ensuring that people have an unhealthy addiction to social media. This is why products like cigarettes are heavily regulated by the government; the potential for addiction undermines free choice and makes sensible use far more difficult.

We should all think about that sometimes.

Emailing and talking to a restaurant worker on the phone is human connection? I can’t wait until the fake bullshit of arguing with my internet provider or the expensing department or what-have-you over email can go back to not being an “essential” part of the human experience so that I can have more time with my family. If you want to use that extra time for distraction or porn or whatever, that’s on you, but don’t take away tools that remove completely inane parts of life that didn’t used to exist 50 years ago.

I love this writing. The man is right.

Great writeup.