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Comment by anon373839 | Hacker News Reader

> I think all the social media stuff is missing the mark.

I think phones may well be responsible. Before smartphones, people regularly experienced true downtime - unstructured moments with nothing to do except be in your surroundings, feel your own boredom, experience your thoughts. Now, the moment our attention isn’t occupied by something external, we reach for our phones to have something to fill the silence.

I believe this has negatively affected everyone’s mental health, but it stands to reason that children would be worse off because they’ve never known anything different: they’ve never had the opportunity to develop the ability to just be.

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I wouldn't put phones as the responsible one so generally. I view phones as tool to 'solve' specific problems, such as communication. Apps and websites such as Outlook (email apps with notifications in general), LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, maybe also Hackernews etc. pose more of the role of ruining our downtime, as they are designed that way.

At the end it would probably be about the lack of media competency, not knowing which apps and sites want to keep you as long as possible on their sites and which sources could benefit you better mentally.

And for children, aren't we adults (& probably also young adults) responsible to teach them about what media is and how to detect the bad apples?

> I wouldn't put phones as the responsible one so generally.

From my experience, phone is an extremely common factor. If you randomly take a peek at any person in the 1st and 2nd world during their "downtime", I bet that you will 99% of the time see them on their phone. Phone have absolutely consumed everything we used to do.

I cannot remember seeing a person just sitting on chair staring blankly, they almost always are on their phone or listening to something.

Well yes, what I was trying to imply was that we usually use our phones in combination with social media, not the phone without social media. If we were to try to mindlessly scroll through the android settings app, at some point it just gets boring and we put our phones away (or open up an actual social media app).

Well... there are other things you can do besides staring blankly. Reading a book, perhaps? Having a conversation?

Granted, these are two things that pretty much have a one-to-one counterpart on phones.

> I cannot remember seeing a person just sitting on chair staring blankly

heh, i have to ask, what is so great/healthy/engaging/enlightening about staring blankly? I think anything, reading a book/newspaper, talking to a stranger, petting a dog, would have been better than "staring blankly".

Well, sitting and staring blankly has been socially unusual for decades at least. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBBQdFSvvTE

That said: I don’t pull out my phone when waiting in line, I don’t usually have a book or newspaper handy, and I often don’t feel like talking with a stranger (though I will sometimes). That leaves me alone with my thoughts. Despite the implication of descriptions like “staring blankly”, though, my mind is absolutely active during those times. Sometimes it’s calm, sometimes it’s running a mile a minute. Maybe I’m daydreaming, maybe I’m replaying a book or movie scene in my head, maybe I’m making plans for the day, maybe I’m debating with myself or thinking philosophical thoughts or trying to work out what I should say in an upcoming meeting. Thinking thoughts is active, and I don’t consider it time wasted.

Humans don’t have to be fed stimulation 24/7—the mind is a self‐stimulating organ.

I wouldn’t argue that staring blankly is helpful in itself. But having time with nothing to engage your attention almost forces you to face your own thoughts and feelings, which many people prefer to avoid. That type of avoidance is at the root of a lot of mental health problems, and people go to therapy to learn how to face their thoughts and feelings head-on.

I am not saying its useful or anything but I remember just being absolutely bored to death constantly when I was a child. I have to wait for 2-3 hours every day for my mom to come pick me up with absolutely NOTHING to do during that time. I don't have phones, all my friends already left, and I can't wonder outside of school. So I spent those time simply just sitting at the entrance gate and wander about random stuffs.

Now that might be psychopathic but being constantly poked by phones is not good either.

A person sitting on a chair alone staring blankly would be considered a sociopath these days.

I often worry about what others will think of me if I put away my phone and rest in silence.

It's funny, because I'm the opposite. I have a habit where, when I see or hear someone I know coming, I quickly put my phone away and pretend I wasn't just on my phone, unless it's obvious, in which case I just put it away without hiding anything.

…You do?

If you actually want to put your phone away but avoid doing so because you’re worried about what people would think, let me encourage you to ignore them. In my experience, one doesn’t suffer serious (or even moderate) social problems from being a phone‐skeptical person.

>I think phones may well be responsible

take a smartphone, remove its internet connection and you'll quickly discover it's the internet access thst causes all problems

You need both. Internet to connect to the global rat race. Phone to inject it into every waking moment of your existence.

Maybe. I'd suggest phones are also symbolic of the affluence of the western world. We're so wealthy, we don't need to cooperate with anyone else for survival anymore. [For now.]

You don't see this shit in El Salvador. Parents don't pay $100 a month so their kids can ignore them and get their life lessons from Reddit.

Everyone is miserable because we need each other more than we admit. The kids really do treat each other worse than NPCs in a Westworld LARP. Those who grew up "trolling" (bullying) everyone around them online never learn how to interact with actual people in non-adversarial ways. Then they get bitter, resentful, and violent.

Every school shooter that doesn't stick the gun in their mouth at the end cites alienation and loneliness as a factor. Go figure.

>> Before smartphones, people regularly experienced true downtime

Was there not a similar argument made as newspapers became commonplace? Before that the same argument had been made for books but newspapers were on another level - they were effectively limitless drugs, affordable and every single day a new one was available. Instead of talking, laughing and joking with the other workers waiting at the bus stop or in the canteen or whatever, instead you had a sea of silent men reading newspapers.

I’m not convinced phones are without potential harm, but I’m hesitant to get too worked up about them vs. What’s gone before.

The newspaper at least... stops once you've read it -- so that's what an hour (or whatever) gone of your day. That's a major difference, at least.

And you didn't carry it with you everywhere.

It blows my mind that my kids will never know what it's like to wait for a bus with nothing else to do.

I barely remember what it was like waiting for the bus with nothing else to do. But I remember vividly what it was like that the school bully was next to me waiting for the bus with nothing else to do. Hope my kids don't have to know what thats like.

My point is not that smartphones and social media are great things. But I agree with OP that they are just filling a gap created by something else. It is still possible to be bored or have time solely with your own thoughts with social media available. Why? Because even kids can (and do) understand that social media is not all that great. Of course they have to experience that on their own before they understand it. It's nothing that you can teach them.

When I see people say things like this I just think perhaps you were never taught to stand up for yourself.

bullies don't stop being bullies when you graduate high school, they just change tactics.

There comes a point where adults need to step in, but that isn't immediately because someone decided to pick on someone else. Learning to stand up for yourself is as much of a life skill as anything else.

I moved a lot as a kid and after a while I recognized a pattern. I'd move, someone would decide I was an easy target, I'd get into a fist fight, then everyone would leave me alone.

oddly enough, I just came across this youtube short that pretty succinctly describes my opinion on the matter.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lwgeqX5tKcs

Today you consider a phone to be infinitely distracting because you haven’t experienced yet the next engrossing medium, we put our phones in our pockets occasionally today but perhaps tomorrow we just won’t take our iQuest3 thingys off our faces between sunrise and bedtime.

Someone will be well placed to make your argument - well at least you put your phone away at some point!

The socially challenging bit is the difference not the magnitude I think.

That's true up to a point, but digital media really is different from analog media which cannot be updated dynamically. That's the difference, I think.

(And, yes, more and more people are putting away the phone because they realize how intrusive it is in terms of time spent doomscrolling, etc.)

No one was reading the newspaper for the entire day. Instead it was a moment of reflection through the words of someone else.

Right now phones never end, there is no final page and nothing is reflected upon a second time outside phone time.

You miss the point, before newspapers no one was this distracted from the present. It’s not the magnitude of distraction - a phone obviously offers more opportunity for longer distraction. It was the delta change vs. What distraction existed before.

Of course they were. Stars, clouds, conversations, gardening, chess, etc. These are all distracting from present towards past or future.

Both other animals and native tribes today spend significant amounts of their day doing nothing. Therefore it’s only logical this is the normal mode of operation of the human brain, with the opposite situation being unhealthy.

I'm going to say there's at least four factors, all related to bad parenting, not that bad parenting is the only cause.

The phone as a babysitter is a big one, but also parents on phones / social media.

There's also an atomisation of society (fewer extended family and friends, and institutions like church groups). And parents work longer hours.

Kids go home and suck on a digital pacifier so their parents can do the same, and those parents haven't got anything else to do. What chance does the kid have?

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