The invention of the screen probably did more than anything else to curb sex.
100 years ago, what was a couple likely doing for entertainment at 10 PM on a Saturday? What about now?
100 years ago, what was a couple likely doing for entertainment at 10 PM on a Saturday? What about now?
Instead of kids taking advantage of having vast access to knowledge, they watch low effort youtube videos. Parents let them do it because they're just as addicted to tech.
You don't have to go out of your house to go shopping, or work, or even play. We lost all local communities from church, to the office. We live in a dystopia where we spend all day connected to devices.
And now there's AI.
We ALL need to go on a tech diet. Find the good stuff, and keep it, and treat the rest like junk food.. which is fine to have once in a while, but the moderation is key.
No tech, no humans.
Modern tech is what saved us from the dour prophecies of the Malthusians.
A little bit of screentime sure does beat infant mortality, polio, hunger, and the global wars we used to have.
That's the key
Tech has been amazing for the past 100-150 millennia and couldn’t possibly be seen as detrimental in aggregate. We are in fact smarter and more connected too. The side effects are barely worth mentioning.
Agriculture and urbandwelling are only 10,000 years old. The railroad, telegraph, and electricity all are less than 200 years old.
Not enough time to evolve adaptation to it.
Maybe in a million years if we're still around we'll be well adapted to long distance instant communications, to travel faster than 10 mph, etc. But those of us who are fated to live now are stuck with dangerous technologies with scary tradeoffs.
> A little bit of screentime sure does beat infant mortality, polio, hunger, and the global wars we used to have.
Bizarre take. Don't you remember the 1990s? The technology to bring those boons was unrelated to, and preceded, the screentime boom. TV was popular of course, but it was the beer to the smartphone's gin. Quantity has a quality all its own. It was, from my own memory, far easier to be TV-less or nearly TV-less than it is to be offline today.
In fact, we've regressed a little in terms of war and disease lately, and I wonder if the cultural regression caused by addictive feeds on smartphones, which prioritize controversy above all else, has at least a little to do with it. I really don't think responding to covid in the USA would have been such a disaster if it had happened in say, 2005.
I agree with all this and yet it’s the sheer force of your prose that I can’t let go of
Not just the internet, but television as well.
I'm seeing a few signs that people are ripping themselves free of their screens and getting out more. I'll see kids on bikes any time the weather is decent, and on the bike trail more parents have their kids on bikes these days than in trailers.
> We lost all local communities from church, to the office.
If we do nothing to preserve these things, they will go away. Find a church that fits your beliefs and join. Get involved in the activities. Do you sing or play a musical instrument? Music has been a lifesaver for me.
Tech causes us to give up on self-work but increases our standards for others.
Not getting enough dates? Statistically speaking, what you need to do is probably obvious: go to the gym, go to therapy, go outside.
A dry spell doesn’t make you bad. Rejecting others doesn’t make you bad. Only sleeping with people you actually want to sleep with is okay.
People will try to shame you for rejecting others. People will try to feed your insecurity about not having enough sex. Bitter people will try to manipulate you into sex.
Work on yourself. Ignore bitter people.
I don't think we can make a blanket statement like that.
Technology does connect us, makes us smarter, give us vast access to knowledge, etc. And yes, it also enables the bad habits. There are 8 billion of us. Of course technology won't have the same effect on everyone. And would a world without technology be not detrimental to humanity, i.e., for the 8 billion of us as a whole?
Governments will need to switch off the signal on Saturday nights to ensure survival of the population (looking at World Bank fertility statistics increases the concern raised in the article).
And you raise the bar for conversations to be worthwhile. Which becomes a problem when a lot of high-quality conversations start from mindless small talk.
It's known as phubbing and is detrimental to a good conversation.
In 1924, you would not be hanging around alone as an unmarried couple all that much for example. And you fairly often lived in much more crowded housing situation. Unmarried parenthood was a big deal back then and anticonception was not exactly easy to get or trustworthy.
My own grandmother told me how she married my horrible grandfather at 19 because she was 1) Horny and 2) Was not allowed to have sex with anyone until she got married.
We were not multiplying exponentially all the time. And while in some village you would be married at around age of 16, in cities it was often much later.
With men, oftentimes after military service which could take 7 years. Or after then amassed proprties, which easily meant sometimes before 30. There was sex with prostitues, but that one was also profoundly unsafe, the likelihood of STD was not exactly small.
Most people probably went to bed earlier though.
Internet was only a thing rich kids had. Hobbies were for older people. If you were young and wanted to be entertained you would go hang out with your friends, go ride a bike, or go to the mall. All of these were fairly social activities.
A lot of my schoolmates had hobbies or things they did after work.