Grandparents are glued to their phones [video]
bbc.com
bbc.com
My primary computing and web browsing device remains my laptop, with Emacs and Firefox being my main tools. One thing that does manage to distract me sometimes is YouTube recommendations. As a result I have written a little userscript for myself to disable shorts and recommendations: https://github.com/susam/userscripts/blob/main/js/ytx.user.j...
So far the userscript has been successful. As a side effect of disabling the recommendations sidebar, the video panel expands to occupy a larger part of the screen which I quite like. Here is a screenshot: https://susam.github.io/blob/img/userscripts/ytx.png
Also, I still depend heavily on physical textbooks, a rollerball pen and a stack of plain A4 paper for most of my learning and exploration activities. This routine has helped me to stay away from modern attention media too.
I'm not exactly curing cancer, but my media consumption is more moderate and mindful now.
If I want to watch a video I go on my subscribed list, check what's new and decide what to watch. Don't need some fancy algorithm to tell me what I should do.
Or if you want to get fancy use tubearchivist with the Jellyfin plug-in.
Fine-motor skills connected to memory, etc.
Doesn't take much to find the science.
Also, avoiding interruption is good for your train of thought.
If a train of thought doesn't matter, then stay online and leave your phone able to interrupt you.
It's your "choice" (tm)
Seriously, try everything including the things you don't think will work for your sense of peace, so you know, IOWA (I over-worry always)
Peace to you all.
The Creation point I completely concur, I hate typing on my phone.
for typing I use the swiping keyboard if I am typing in a language it supports, but I concur it sucks using the mobile keyboard in either horizontal or vertical orientations.
I am not a big fan of reading manga on the phone on the other hand, I much prefer doing it on the tablet. Although I used to read webtoons a lot back when I was still on iPhone 7, which feels tiny in 2026, but felt gigantic back then.
Excessive scrolling is like excessive eating, smoking, or snorting coke.
It is not healthy and not indicative of a full filling life.
Is it really ? I would say the "natural" way of things is older generation gets supported by children and they help take care of grandchildren while their children are working. The whole late retirement/both parents working situation we have these days is reliably leading to a population collapse.
This world where your boomer parents retire to a beach house to drink margaritas, smoke designer weed, and play pickleball and ignore their offspring is the real aberration here.
That arrangement is not working from both sides. Younger generation wants autonomy and expects parents to not try to run things, not to demand more contact then they want etc.
Which makes sense. But you cant have it both ways - both autonomy/independence and service.
Younger generstion has their period of low responsibilities - before they create familly. It is shifted to later years tgen it used to ... but it is weird to then get jealous over their parents having some free time after work.
Now it’s little independent atomic cells doing whatever with little to no regard for the bigger picture.
Ultimatel, it’s the Boomer me generation that broke this tradition. It’s not weird for a millennial to look back and say “How nice of them to have their cake and eat it too” as I raise children alone and deal with the dilemma of how to treat their greed and selfishness as they age and demand of us while contributing little.
Thirty or forty year olds in the past wouldn't take any orders from their fathers or mothers. Of course they would help them, as they are family. But the elderly would absolutely have to step aside, and those who were in their prime would call the shots.
It is only in the previous 100 years where young people all over the world have the power to support themselves without anyone else’s help, which is why the preference for independence was revealed.
It is only very recently that the industrialized world became completely financialized, so that the cost of life has become artificially increased for the youth. Young people have always moved away from their families for marriage, or for becoming sailors, soldiers, miners, hunters, lumber jacks, etc. It was only the oldest son who would inherit anything, so the rest of them wanted to scram as soon as they hit puberty.
Inheritance-baiting your children is the oldest scam in the book, but people weren't complete fools in the past, and wouldn't stick around if the old folks went too far. A lot of head-butting between generations and in-family as you mention.
You do not know much about history, do you?
> Young people have always moved away from their families for marriage, or for becoming sailors, soldiers, miners, hunters, lumber jacks, etc.
Eh, for a bulk of history, people stayed in village where they were born. Women moved to husbands house, rarely other way round, but that is basically it. Miners and hungers and lumber jacks did not moved away from village.
And soldiers and sailors were tiny minority.
Of course young adults have always been able to support themselves. If people in their prime can't support themselves, then nobody can. Young adults have always supported themselves + other people.
Take any time period of history and any place, and there is a mobility which will surprise you. Evidence for this is for example the colonization of the New World.
And as I have mentioned: Only the oldest son would inherit the village farm, so the other sons and daughters were often anxious to get moving.
Maybe pre-property rights when an individual's ability to inflict violence was more correlated with their status, but not post-property rights when first mover's had an advantage in gaining ownership to be able to collect rent and have a group of able bodied young to enforce it (e.g. police). Once that dynamic is established, the game favors those who can benefit from previous generations.
After that, the option for a young person to support themselves is mostly based on expanding to unclaimed or lower priced land, which is a big gamble because it is usually unclaimed or lower priced for a reason (hard to reach, no infrastructure, enemies, climate, clean water, etc).
>Take any time period of history and any place, and there is a mobility which will surprise you. Evidence for this is for example the colonization of the New World.
The internet might have been the most recent world that was available to be colonized, but it is not clear to me that these worlds will always be available.
That would mean very old. They kept main decision power as long as they could. By the time they gave it away, they were not helping with childcare much. Instead, they were cared for. And even with that arrangement, you are ignoring younger sons, daughters and wife's. Because childcare part is not something that concerned men - it was women's area.
> Thirty or forty year olds in the past wouldn't take any orders from their fathers
Yes they did. The dad was 50, that is not nearly old enough to give up power even in your arrangement. And yes, they were frequently pissed about it.
> or mothers.
They were taking orders from mother in law. And if you look at less individualistic societies now, that is the source of large friction - mother in law vs sons wife. Where mother in law expect her to be, basically, a maid and she does not like that at all. A woman marrying into the husbands multigenerational family is the lowest person in the hierarchy of adults, basically.
Now many people I know are waiting until their 30s to have children, meaning that the grandparents are already 50-60s.
There are cultures where it is usual for grandparents to help where people are having kids in their mid twenties or later.
I know and have known lots of people who are perfectly capable of looking after kids (maybe not full time permanently), but for holidays or during the day, in their 70s or 80s.
In fact standard retirement age (insofar as it still exists) here in the UK is 67 so most people will still be working in their 50s and most of their 60s. It really is not that old.
Both grandparents divorced means you go from two family units involved to four-which in itself adds logistical complexity-and new partners doubles the opportunities for interpersonal conflicts
my (divorced) parents (5+ and 2.5+ hours away by car) didn't help us with kids at all (wife's parents are 7500 km away), but they can't expect I will be taking care of them when they will be really old, after all my father and his sister put their own mother to retirement home, when she could not live alone by herself, so they should kinda expect the same treatment (although I was against it and wanted grandma rather die alone in her house earlier than suffer slightly longer in retirement home without her garden/animals), actually my mother put her mother to retirement home as well, though I think she wanted to go there, it was pretty great facility, it was very small house (studio), each separated part had one occupant with minigarden with meals minutes away + it was also <1km from her old big house, so not much change and not much difference for her since she lived in front of the living room TV anyway
It's an ideal. Structuring society to require it falls down often because:
- people have kids later, making them too old to help
- disease and addiction can make grandparents unfit
- young families often must move to where work is, even if far away
- deeply in debted grandparents may be unable to afford to help
- grandparent's own care needs compete with those of their grandchildren, i.e. sandwich situations
- cultural expectations unfairly burden some over others, usually women
The rest all comes down to solvable social and economic problems, mostly as a result of putting short term GDP growth over all else.
This is at best extremely cultural. It is certainly not a global norm and not really viewed as desirable, just necessary.
Average American doesn't move very far at all from their parents and America is where the idea of time limited parenting is most prevalent.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...
I live in Texas now, and think I’d ultimately prefer Chicago too. Don’t have to drive as much to find stimulation, and the cold preserves.
If it were simply that they weee living their own lives, I don’t think anybody would take issue with that.
But they aren’t - they are spending their lives on their phones, doomscrolling, which is much more likely to cause accelerated aging.
No, I don’t have a study for this, but it is not a secret that being active and not on your phone improves health outcomes.
- funny cat video
- superfluid helium document from 60s
- people jumping on a roof and falling through
- abba sos song (in Swedish, or Esperanto, idk)
- kid saving bus driver with stroke
Analyze them with LLM, generate positive comments and you're good to go.
It’s strange to hear a 60-something rant about how evil Facebook is and then go on to regurgitate countless conspiracy theories they picked up from whatever websites they’re reading this month.
The parents who scroll Instagram and Facebook feel downright tame in comparison.
There's fueling political and social rage with "news", casting doubts on family relations with "true life stories" (daughter-in-law threw me out of my house), religious "coaching" (dead since end of 60s Padre Pio gives you life lessons and "secret" prophecies), worthless tips and tricks (don't eat this nut if you're 50yo woman or your hair will fell off), lewd promotion with twist on history (sexual violence in every thumbnail) or tourism (women in country of x are "ready" all the time). So on and so on.
So I'd say it's not that much strange if you look closely what kind of the content older people can walk onto. And this is just youtube.
When I was in high school, flip phones could let you text friends, as long as you didn't mind your parents later using your soul to pay the phone bill.
When I was in college, the most addictive thing the internet could offer was foul bachelor frogs and rage comics.
Along the way, I learned how dangerous even those unrefined sugars were. It was like chewing coca leaves or sugarcane. Enough t get you a buzz, but not enough to ruin your life. So I know not to touch the algorithmic fentanyl feeds of TikTok and the like.
But good god, nobody younger or older had any protection from this. My parents and spouses parents, and my zoomer cousins both basically got handed giant bags of refined gigasugar without even the vaguest warnings. I'll refrain from likening it to opiates against because they are on a whole different level, but good god it does seem more dangerous than even refined sugar.
Whereas genX and Xennials had the privilege of wading into a pre-social media internet during their formative years which served as a vaccine of sorts. We are by no means immune to tech addiction and disinformation, but we seem much better equipped for spotting trolls/ragebait and giving the side-eye to addictive dark patterns in apps
Of course, I also wonder if non-digital natives also just have less of a thick skin for this sort of thing.
Old people get captured by new dopamine hits moreso than their younger counterparts.
On several occasions during college I ran into kids that weren’t allowed to play video games as kids. The first time they got their hands on a game, it was all over. They were hooked and it was a problem. They’d skip classes, meals… and just play. If someone tried to intervene, they would throw a tantrum. It was the weirdest thing, but I saw it enough that it seemed like a pattern.
Others of the same age who had games as a kid seemed more able to put it down and not get so emotionally reactive if something came between them and the game.
The problem with social media is precisely the platform, it ranks what keeps people addicted, seeing more ads. Creators conform to the Algorithm and produce slop to capture some of that scarce attention. Nobody cares about users. Same shit happens on Google Search, YouTube, Amazon Search, Google Store, App Store... all platforms produce shitty feeds and search results. And before them we had TV and newspapers as slop making platforms.
The difference now is ANYONE can become a TV station. A newspaper. A radio talk show. While I’m all for allowing anyone to do anything, I’m also a fan of curation and quality over quantity. Social media has no value. Because it values nothing.
social media that has been gamified into an infinite scroll loop with the express intent to destroy attention spans and rebuild them around an advertising/behavioural structure of mark zuckerberg's ("they trust me ... dumb fucks") choosing? now yes that is cancer. but thats not really social media. theres nothing social about it.
i like the way someone put it here a few weeks back. we used to call these things social networks. then they became social media. so in that sense i do agree with you on a literal basis, although im not sure that was your intended point.
When I go to family gatherings I make it a point to keep my phone in my pocket and not scroll. I don’t want the kids to see that as an example of how to act when getting together with family. Meanwhile, my mom (their grandmother), is glued to Facebook the whole time.
Beyond the bad example, it makes her frustrating to interact with. She’ll mention a news story that came up in her feed. Occasionally it’s one I’m familiar with and I engage, thinking we’re about to have a conversation about this topic… but no. As I’m replying, she mentions the next thing in her feed, she’s already moved on.
Ironically, my dad is probably the most connected person in the family, yet doesn’t do any of that stuff when getting together with family. There are all sorts of loud notifications going off, because he never has anything on silent, but he glances at his watch and carries on with the conversation. But to a point in the video, he maintains a lot of in-person connections and has a really rich social life in his 70s, which I think is rare. So he isn’t looking to fill holes in his life with doomscrolling.
The decline is accelerated by muscle weakness which is accelerated by sitting around all day looking at screens.
Anyway, the oldest over 80-something man was given some older Samsung phone by his great-grandson with instruction to launch tiktok whenever he feels bored. And bloody hell, that thing looped so much content with every launch but this man still tried hard to find something remotely interesting. I wouldn't say he was glued but that's a random guy who liked to attend his orchard and bees, going fishing etc. - he had something to do in the real world.
I'm witnessing more elderly people around me actually struggling using touch-capable devices - it's like they're smacking fingers in frustration that there's no tactile sensation. They were told that there are buttons to press/tap but there's no feedback they'd expect. For them smartphone screen is no different than tv.
A couple days later she sent me the video. It was obviously AI, but even said in the video description (if expanded) that it was AI.
I keep thinking if I tell her enough stuff is AI she’ll start to get more skeptical about this stuff or be turned off the platform feeding her all of it, but it doesn’t seem like it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/do-your-paren...
* Lei et al 2024 metaanalysis, generally positive associations but no causal evidence for psychosocial effects, especially when the social media use is family-directed - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-psycho...
* Balki et al 2022, metaanalysis, same thing: good for reinforcing existing real-human social connections, overcoming barriers to/increasing regularity and frequency of contact, acquiring access to resources; isolating to use outside that context; regular and frequent contact much more effective than occasional or episodic: https://aging.jmir.org/2022/4/e40125/
My overall impression seems to be what common sense tells us: to the extent it lets you overcome aging-related obstacles to interacting with real people, great; to the extent it’s brain rot, it’s isolating.
This whole thing is beyond ironic.
On a serious note YT shorts are on my radar for "things I spend too much time on that deliver minimal value."
If there's a hole you need to fit and you do nothing with it, social media is the easy way out, and given that it does have addictive tendencies, we end up where we are.
Not only that but they then go on to spread this false news among there whatsapp friends
Take advertising as an example. Before Google Ads and the so-called democratization of advertising, it was expensive, and you didn't get an ad on a TV program or a national publication without some level of quality and/or trust behind your product.
Similarly, content was not easy to produce and certainly not cheap to get in front of eyeballs in the limited medium that was television. People were selective in what they watched so in order to be watched it needed to meet a minimum threshold for quality.
These days however, the barrier to entry for advertising and content are so low that any implicit trust should be ridiculous. Unfortunately for our parents and grandparents however, that is what they know - and old habits die hard.
But he's addicted to shorts. Doomscrolls endlessly in his downtime. Doesn't question whether obvious GenAI is real or not, and having looked over his shoulder a few times, most of it is horribly fake. Loves showing my kids what he finds.
I'd rather he have this than boredom, but also it does mean he doesn't need to socialise outside the family. If I worry about anything, it's not knowing and addressing any extreme or views he's lapping up. I know first hand how insular interests can be once you express one on YouTube and it can get pretty shitty pretty quick.
As others have said, this is exactly the same worries we have for our children except I feel we have some control. No devices or screen time and content limits. It's all very easy. It's harder to address that with your parents' parents.
False dichotomies can either be the worst thing that happened to humankind or a pathway to a new way of understanding each other.
Well... who's fault is that.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/chao...
It is truly the most egoistic generation ever.
Deferred spending is quite unnatural. That I can work 1 hour today and buy youghurt in 2 years is an artifact of our system.
But this also relies on someone making that youghurt in 2 years from now.
It is that key dogma that will likely be under pressure for future pensioners.
Germany is an outlier in that there is no capital backing for that generation whatsover. The problem has been known for 30 years, they just chose to ignore it.
edit: typo
There's a reason youth migrate away to live with roommates in overpriced big metro areas. That's where all the white collar jobs are created for college educated people. And everyone in the last 20+ years has been groomed to go to college and take white collar jobs, plus deindustrialization and offshoring of manufacturing jobs meaning there's not much in-between well paying white collar jobs and dead-end neo-slavery food delivery jobs. Maybe I'll be a plumber one day and move back to my grandparent place if Claude takes my job, who knows.
They need something physical and social. Like softball or something. But compatible with their decripitude.
I hook them up with each other. There are parties.
Still working on the softball part.
Ideas are welcome
OnlyGrandparents.com?
(I looked it up, the domain name was registered six days ago!)
Don’t set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.
Luckily she doesn't fall for right wing propaganda all over the Internet, but she sure does fall for every single piece of Trump rage bait out there.
It's as gross as 2 knuckles deep in your nose.