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Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

Harmful effects of social media notwithstanding, it's not just about the phones.

Reaching for your phone is an example of what psychologists refer to as avoidance behaviours. We look at screens so that we don't have to deal with difficult thoughts and emotions.

Sure, without a phone that person had no other choice but to face whatever they've been avoiding. But more often than not leaving someone to their own devices when they clearly can't cope with the situation by themselves makes them look for a different source of distraction that in turn will make you wish they were "just" addicted to social media.

A person doing well mentally has no need to avoid anything. The right thing to do is help them get there, not play whack-a-mole with their coping mechanisms.

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> But more often than not leaving someone to their own devices when they clearly can't cope with the situation by themselves makes them look for a different source of distraction that in turn will make you wish they were "just" addicted to social media.

A thinly veiled pro-social media post. The quote highlighted alone is very dangerous. It's almost as if people have developed a form of Stockholm syndrome to appeal to social media addictions vs the boogie man that is a "different source of distraction".

Very true. My childhood friend and I were major computer nerds from 1991 to 2002. Then I left for college and he didn't somehow. We had such matched similar personalities for those 10 years.

By 2008 when I saw him he had totally fallen off from computers and couldn't care less.

I'm engrossed in tech still and I do waste wayyy to much time on HN, blogs, reading, YouTube, Twitter and the like. No doubt I have a problem..

My friend though died last year of heroin/fentanyl overdose. He had been struggling with it for 5+ years. Same as I have with modern phones. I wish he had gotten addicted to YouTube shorts instead.

Yea, verily. Nerddom is the best path. The true tao.

Divorce, drug addiction? Sorry; addicted to code, I no longer have time for relationships nor the ability to relate to normal people nor the brain cells to spare.

COVID lockdowns? Ha; I've been living under lockdown for the last ten years; it's my optimal lifestyle.

YouTube requiring brain scans with which to inject targeted ads directly into your videos? Too bad; I've already downloaded the Warcraft 3 and StarCraft playthroughs I watch over and over locally.

Microsoft integrating an AI into Windows which will predict the exact moment you're about to be racist and brick your machine? Nice try; I've already moved to Linux years ago.

It is the gift that keeps on giving.

Wow sounds a bit like me. Didn't realize that that's a trope somehow, because I know no one else like that.

But that may be because of the low relationship effort count. Probalby hard for two people of that type to ever meet

A phone, a book, a movie, a show, hobbies, exercise… they’re all going to be parts of “avoidance behavior”.

Often though, some issues in life are not resolvable through some simple analysis and avoiding thinking about the issue might really be the best course of action.

Harmful effects of social media notwithstanding, it's not just about the phones. Reaching for your phone is an example of what psychologists refer to as avoidance behaviours

avoid what exactly?

that needs to be qualified. do they avoid talking to their friends in school? do they avoid facing the fact that they have no friends?

or are they using it because their friends are doing it as well? what are they avoiding then?

and and let's not brush aside those harmful effects. some kids may use the phone to avoid facing things that feel worse, but as others mentioned, so do people using drugs or alcohol. the problem is that the harmful effects of the phone/social media are much much less obvious, so many more kids are at risk. drugs and alcohol are so much easier to avoid.

> avoid what exactly?

I said it already: difficult thoughts and emotions. Teenagers naturally have a lot of that and little to no ability to process them on their own.

This is me with my dog. Whenever I'm stressed out from life I can always escape to my bichon

A bichon is not a dog, it is a human baby with extra floof.

Do you have any suggestions on how to help people achieve and maintain good mental health?

It's true that addiction is ultimately a psychological problem. It's true that people engage in addictive behaviors as a coping mechanism to avoid difficult emotions.

It's also true that the Internet has enabled a lot of deliberately addictive content. Phones keep that content constantly at hand. And it's difficult to avoid having a phone since they also provide utilities.

I'd like to live in a world where everyone had such great mental wellness that they were impervious to the temptations of their phones. What are some serious tactics to make that happen?

At the risk of it coming across like I’m boasting or virtue signalling (whatever that means), what keeps me going is the thought that I can use my time and money to help other people. Simple stuff like donating to charities and planting trees.

For parents, this could take the form of doubling a child’s pocket money/allowance on the condition that half of it is donated to charities - encourage the child to research charities and talk about them.

(The latter isn’t an original idea - I originally read about it in the form of tripling the pocket money with 1/3 to keep, 1/3 for charity, and 1/3 to invest. If your kid has to do some chores to get their pocket money, then this sets them up with a pattern for a good life (work, then give and save).

It’s empirically false that people would have equal problems without the phones.

> A person doing well mentally has no need to avoid anything.

True. People doing well mentally should start heroin and meth right now since they have no need to avoid anything. Why should they miss out on that experience since they can just quit.

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