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Comment by thombles | Hacker News Reader

Stolen Focus is an interesting book and worth your time, but it's absolutely set on making the case that governments need to intervene on social media and I don't think it did it very well. I wrote a longish review digging into why back in June but it will probably only make complete sense if you've read the book. https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2023/06/08/book-review-stolen-f...

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Same with this article it seems. It's thought provoking. Worth the read. But the conclusion is rather underwhelming: it's an environment & societal problem. Also Big-Co is evil. That's not wrong per-say, but gee-whiz looks like we gotta add it to the growing list of how everything's terrible.

The message is good just missed an opportunity to carry over the energy into action. I'll try: since we can't change society so easily, perhaps change the environment as a microcosm? Talk to friends about it. Talk to family. Coworkers. Try intentional things like no-phone dinners. Heads down time. Maybe these things are just as silly. And it's especially hard to alter kids behavior because it's very hard to control external social influences.

One point that the article did land for me was the potential for individual change to be unhelpful. No-phone dinners only work if there isn't any sense of anxiety about not having your phone at dinner. That anxiety only goes away if you have an environment that allows you to unplug. Systemic changes like requiring workplaces to allow employees to have "off times" seem necessary to remove some of the baseline anxieties many of us have.

If you want to talk about kids specifically, then you'd need some way to alter the anxieties that affect them the most. Anecdotally, it seems like kids (teens especially) end up with lots of FOMO and loneliness. The only structural reforms I've seen suggested as solutions to those were much more drastic than the ones proposed for adults, like preventing teenagers from using social media at all.

> That anxiety only goes away if you have an environment that allows you to unplug. Systemic changes like requiring workplaces to allow employees to have "off times" seem necessary to remove some of the baseline anxieties many of us have.

Are there really so many employers requiring employees to be permanently on-call? I would only consider working in such an environment if they would be paying enough to retire in a few years.

This. And do they really expect employees to answer e-mails outside of working hours? To me e-mail is "slow" communication - if you need an answer right now, use a different channel.

I suspect yes. You may not see it in your industry, but I see it a lot in the creative space. Anecdotally, I know there’s an expectation when working for a video production company that you are constantly available to react to clients. And that since much of the work is contracted to people who work odd hours, being a producer is an always on kind of job.

As for how common it is? dunno, but there was a very funny (sad?) music video that hints that this is fairly widespread phenomena, for young office workers. Quarter Life Poetry, “Circle Back”. One of the final scenes is the narrator being unable to get away from the grind even at home.

https://youtu.be/XXt1-qEjKlE?si=ps3iSQZBVYMweN83

edit: warning slightly crass

Software developer here, also doing development support work at times. Still, in the last 20 years it never happened that I got a call from work, despite emergencies being pretty common. As it should be, in countries with strong employee rights.

When you don't pickup people stop expecting you to. Set your own expectations.

Thats an extreme example to me. I don't think I have ever had a phone dinner, unless we needed to show somebody a picture or take one (and both things are rare).

You can put your phone on a shelf and if somebody calls you, you can pick it up, or call them back later.

But that is the entire point - you alone can't do much about this. It's not an underwhelming conclusion, there is nothing else to say, really. The way to solve this is societal change, not tweaking around the edges with your behaviour.

> The way to solve this is societal change, not tweaking around the edges with your behaviour.

A single person can't change a society, but a single person can talk to 1-2 dozen people and maybe get 1-2 more people to talk to 1-2 dozen more.

The problem is that, in general, governments are also stealing your focus to non central issues and hide the core issues.

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