It's sort've cliche at this point but we got the worst of both Orwell and Huxley in that our super-invasive surveillance apparatus is also a super-addictive apparatus designed to hit all our evolutionary buttons like a slot machine.
This is inaccurate. The best response is medically supervised detoxification. Stopping heroin without medical supervision can cause severe dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, cardiovascular issues and aspiration pneumonia. To say nothing of the likelihood of relapse overdose.
You should never, ever tell a person addicted to heroin to "just stop doing heroin" (or, to be more charitable to the original claim, "just" tell them to "stop doing heroin") and them continuing do heroin is not the same as "refusing to help themselves."
Heroin's harms are mostly from the fact that it's illegal. Legalize it, make it cost a dollar for a week's worth of it, and the harms we see go away (to be replaced by other problems). Junkies mostly just want more heroin. Meanwhile, everyone's mainlining TikTok to all abandon right out in public, and no one bats an eye. People are losing jobs because they can't get off TikTok but because you can't film them and conclude they got fired from work because of it, it doesn't get the same kind of media attention.
Stop spreading this nonsense. You clearly don't have any idea what heroin addiction is.
Millions of people have been addicted to heroin and got off it. And I'm fairly sure about 0 of the people who got off it did so when one kind soul came up to them and said "you should stop doing heroin it's bad for you"
That’s how addiction works
"Everyone should simultaneously quit doing the harmful thing" is a "solution" to our present surveillance advertising problem in the way that advice to save money is a solution to poverty or "have you tried farming?" is a solution to world hunger.
I.e. not a solution for humans, but a description of a beeline to the desired state as performed by a hive mind.
I don't like or use Tiktok, but clearly it provides some value to the people who do. Telling people to stop using it without even attempting to address what benefit (perceived or actual) it provides is self-defeating advice.
But yeah, the solution is to not let them collect data about you.
Most of what keeps people on it isn't heroin-like dependence but convenience and habit.
My mother used it to communicate with her COPD support group and chat with in-laws in Australia. I use it to follow up on work groups and authors and developers I'm interested in. Most people's usage of social media is banal and mundane, little different than watching television in the 1990s. They use social media because it provides value for them, not because they're addicted to dopamine.
it’s also meaningfully different in structure from tv. tv was 7-10 min of content and a couple of ads in between. and you grew annoyed by the ads. only toddlers were captivated. now most content is designed like ads were. and now they grow annoyed when outside it. and toddlers and older people are captivated.
And I don't think believing social media provides some practical value for people beyond addiction is "very idealized."
edit: I remember a very different past than you do. People of all ages watched tv for hours at a time, everyone was captivated. Saturday morning cartoons (all of which were toy commercials) were a mandatory childhood ritual. And the ads when popular were often the memes of their time. Different in structure but not much different in influence.
Humanity, in person, in the context of common interests, is fulfilling for the soul.
I mean this in all seriousness... you talk to them. Don't wait for them to ask you, you ask them.
Or are you asking how you make friends?
That one's harder but I'll point out something important. You notice how you made friends in school? The reality of it is that you just spent time around the same people constantly. That's the biggest driver. Bigger than any shared belief, politics, or whatever. Join a club. Go to the gym. Spend time outside your home in public in the same location at approximately the same times. You'll meet people who also spend time outside their homes in the same locations at the same times. Repeat this until you gave gained friends.