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Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

And it also creates permanent adulescents, scared of responsibilities, scared of commitment, scared of exploring. I've seen it countless times with teenagers in my family, they're overgrown babies.

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What looks like fear of responsibility can also be fear of doing something wrong in a world where mistakes are heavily punished and rarely forgiven

Anxiety is the only real emotion and it is the best one because it truly protects you from evil.

Anger is real too, dammit!

I wouldn't conflate "best" with "most important". Personally I find the sappy emotions like love, happiness, and contentedness to be the best ones, generated by the best parts of life. However, I would absolutely say it is the most important feeling from a self-preservation standpoint.

There is also something to be said about today's unchecked, underutilized anxiety that one feels when sitting doing absolutely nothing. There has been an unending discussion about the causes of this, but I tend to align with the belief that since our current world doesn't provide many dangers for us to genuinely cause anxiety, our brain freaks out and finds less dire avenues to trigger it.

Only if you’re not already influential, usually coinciding with wealthy.

I'd argue their parents are similarly affected with Something - a kind of anxiety or fear that something will happen to their kids or they won't end up alright if they're left to their own devices.

"left to their own devices" has its own meaning nowadays too, and there's more and more calls to NOT let them on their own devices, because they're an attention sink.

It is called class anxiety.

The US is a place where if you don't make it into or stay in at least the middle class your life sucks. You can't get healthcare, you have to work three jobs, you're treated like shit.

If you want less helicopter parenting you have to create a more supportive society in general, one where there are chances to recover from failure, and one where failing to compete at the top is not a sentence to a life of penury.

> You can't get healthcare

Kinda thing only sheltered people say. When I was unemployed and on free gov't health insurance (medi-cal), I got all my healthcare for free and most of my appointments like MRIs were next-day. Not as good as tech company insurance, but "can't get healthcare" is not a thing in the US.

> you have to work three jobs

Plot the number of people working multiple jobs vs time and you'll see a flat line that has no correlation with the stuff mentioned in the article: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620

Medicaid is a poor substitute of a proper PPO plan. The reimbursements are low, so there are fewer providers, and it requires you to not have any assets.

Medicaid is better than most PPO plans!

Sure you’re more limited with providers, but there are plenty and out of pocket costs are near zero.

62-65% of all bankruptcies in the US are tied to medical expenses.

Your comment is a textbook example of survivorship bias.

There are people who cant buy insuline, have no insuline and their health is going down bwlecause od that.

Like common.

28 is the new 18. The problem is nobody's getting any younger on the other side of life, so that's a decade of life lost.

There's already people explicitly working on anti-aging technology. We'll see what happens over the next few decades there.

And don’t forget that fusion is just 20 years away!

wonder whats gonna happen in a decade or two when our youngest and brightest minds have all been penned by a culture disconnected from reality

There's something ironic about posting this on HN, where likely a large percentage of us practically grew up on the Internet.

while intelligence does tend to result in overfitting from my observations of smart people , nobody here grew up glued to short form content that has the same crash as cocaine

how old are you? the avg ~20 year old has indeed already grown up with addictive social media

youtube came out 20 years ago, the iphone 19 years ago, instagram 15 years ago, musical.ly 11 years ago and merged with tiktok 7 years ago...

we are so cooked frfr

old enough to have stated short form content for a very specific reason - things were absolutely not the same prior to infinite scrolling. if you're twenty and here that's cool , it's also markedly below the median HN user age from what I gather

Can confirm, although I won’t be 20 until tomorrow (:

Nothing you listed ever felt “new”, it’s always just sort of been around.

Then complain about short form video (which, I should add, is probably more culturally relevant than whatever we were consuming on the Internet growing up)

Complaining about the Internet in general and how kids are "disconnected from reality" isn't going to solve anything, and will just result in more crazy ID laws that won't actually solve anything.

I specifically mentioned a culture disconnected from reality and at no point complained about the internet in general , since you're out here commanding me I command you to consider that commanding a particular behaviour tends to encourage the opposite behaviour

> commanding a particular behaviour tends to encourage the opposite behaviour

No, it really doesn't. Look at Prohibition in America, or the "War on Drugs", or abstinence-only sex education.

What does tend to reduce harmful behavior is actual education about the risks and tackling the sources of those risks. In this case, that would look like addressing the addictiveness of these platforms, instead of, say, requiring an ID to use it. The latter will only encourage kids to go to other platforms, or bypass the ID checks, to say nothing of the privacy risks to everyone else.

Furthermore, the kids most in need of protection from those platforms, because their parents aren't protecting them, will likely just get their parents to ID them and let them on anyway.

> I specifically mentioned a culture disconnected from reality

In what way is it disconnected from reality? It seems to me that it is in fact exquisitely linked to reality by the very nature of a significant part of the population being on the Internet, as opposed to 20-30 years ago, where the culture was more of a subset of the general culture.

Also, I didn't "command" you to do anything. I suggested something. A "command" would look more like, say, a law saying you can't use certain websites because of your age. A "suggestion", on the other hand, might look like, say, schools educating kids about why certain websites are harmful to them.

saying "then complain about x" is in the imperative mood regardless as to your intentions , it seems your examples align with my statement so there is nothing to argue there , if the whole world being on the net is exquisitely real to you then we are really never going to agree so I'm gonna leave it here

You can't compare late 90s/early 2000s internet with what kids have access to today. It wasn't a weapon aimed at your attention back then, and certainly not as easily accessible. There isn't much in common between the two, neither quantitatively nor qualitatively

We were ahead of the curve in having our attention spans hijacked by infinite content. This article is from 2003 (but has been updated over time, as e.g. Spotify and Slack came out later) and was already a warning: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/

edit: ah finally; through another HN comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528944) I was able to find the original link to the article (http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2003/07/10/nadd.html) and an archived version of the first version (https://web.archive.org/web/20031008160117/http://www.randsi...). Notably, the list of activities changed:

2003 version:

> Me, I've got a terminal session open to a chat room, I'm listening to music, I've got Safari open with three tabs open where I'm watching Blogshares, tinkering with a web site, and looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I've got iChat open, ESPN.COM is downloading sports new trailers in the background, and I've got two notepads open where I'm capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to do lists. Oh yeah, I'm writing this column, as well.

Current version:

> Me, I’ve got Slack opened and logged into four different teams, I’m listening to music in Spotify, I’ve got Chrome open with three tabs where I’m watching stocks on E*TRADE, I’m tinkering with WordPress, and I’m looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I’ve got iMessage open, Tweetbot is merrily streaming the latest fortune cookies from friends, and I’ve got two Sublime windows open where I’m capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to-do lists. Oh yeah, I’m rewriting this article as well.

We were ahead of the curve in getting our attentions spans hijacked.... and yet most of us work in fields where we must maintain attention for long periods of time?

Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to integrate technology into one's life without it being detrimental?

Also those examples don't really paint the picture you think it does. Currently, I have about 200 browser tabs open, Sublime Text, several games, Docker containers, and a bunch of other stuff.

That doesn't mean I'm doing all those things at once, or within a very short period of time.

The great Fermi Filter maybe

The irony is that parents feel like their kids are safer and more sheltered when they restrict their movement, while the opposite is true.

There was never a time in history where kids would be targeted and manipulated by corporations as today. The digital phone is a marketing gadget that brainwashes us to constantly interact with it. In extreme cases, every aspect of our lives is being scored, monetized and compared. Everything has become a hyper individualized hustle.

To make it a bit tropey, a sheltered kid is much more susceptible to people luring them out of their safe space with promises of excitement and Things Their Parents Would Not Approve Of.

Of course, the data (e.g. teen pregnancies) shows that this isn't a universal / statistically provable truth, but still. It makes sense in my head.

I mean, not really. 'Unsheltered' kids that face hard reality are the ones that end up in gangs.

I read the article. And see zero evidence given that letting kids survive is a bad thing if you trade in nothing important.

Then again, this seems US centric.

But this comment just seems cruel, making people think it is their fault if they have bad feelings.

The whole discussion is US centric.

In France kids are still free to roam around, or stay alone at home at 10yo (sometimes younger).

In Japan kids start commuting to school, sometimes taking the train alone, at 6.

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