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The default human condition is to be slightly bored much of the day. This is true now, this was true in hunter-gatherer societies. These kind of traps are add

The default human condition is to be slightly bored much of the day. This is true now, this was true in hunter-gatherer societies. These kind of traps are addictive to even otherwise happy and well-connected people; there are basically no subcultures on earth that has produced individuals who voluntarily abstain from social media (only cultures where such technology is banned entirely, like the Amish).

ErikVandeWater 5y ago
It's not about abstaining completely. There's nothing wrong spending some time catching up with what your friends are doing using social media. It's when you spend more time than you'd like to that it becomes a problem.
01acheru 5y ago
I find your two concepts of boredom incredibly different one from the other. When you have dopamine tablets as low hanging fruit you use them as much as you can so to keep your mind busy, in a simple society you don’t have those tablets all around 24/7. People are praying on our boredom in our contemporary society, it wasn’t like that in the past. Plus, I don’t think the default to be being slightly bored but being slightly mentally inactive, boredom is a modern concept of our very complex modernity.
brbrodude 5y ago
I'm never bored when I'm outside and moving and with people, I could spend my whole life this way and get inside just to rest and I'm pretty sure I'd be perfectly fine, I think its so much different to be "bored" in real life than it is to be bored locked to cyberspace and screens. Maybe there's a distinction to be made between boredom and alienation? Because These are two very different things to me. I'm not so sure about your hunter-gatherer societies take really. Man has not been alienated forever, or is by default, or is condemned to being, this just isnt true. A lot of this stuff are modernity issues and modernity could very well have developed differently, even though technology would keep on its course just as it has always done. Politics itself if implemented well, uncorrupted, could very much take care of it. The problem to me is political institutions and other human institutions became too weak and lost to capitalism so now that money has the final say in everything we became paralyzed because we can't imagine things being an inch different, which to me just doesn't make sense. I mean why the f*ck would unhealthy stuff be impossible to control? Why can't food be healthier? Tech be healthier? Work be healthier? Why can't ignorance be fought and won? There are fallacies buried deep in the arguments people use defending that this specific configuration of stuff we have now is inevitable. All I know is History is deffo not done yet, things do change, one way or another, sooner or later.

ErikVandeWater 5y ago

It's not about abstaining completely. There's nothing wrong spending some time catching up with what your friends are doing using social media. It's when you spend more time than you'd like to that it becomes a problem.

01acheru 5y ago

I find your two concepts of boredom incredibly different one from the other. When you have dopamine tablets as low hanging fruit you use them as much as you can so to keep your mind busy, in a simple society you don’t have those tablets all around 24/7. People are praying on our boredom in our contemporary society, it wasn’t like that in the past. Plus, I don’t think the default to be being slightly bored but being slightly mentally inactive, boredom is a modern concept of our very complex modernity.

brbrodude 5y ago

I'm never bored when I'm outside and moving and with people, I could spend my whole life this way and get inside just to rest and I'm pretty sure I'd be perfectly fine, I think its so much different to be "bored" in real life than it is to be bored locked to cyberspace and screens. Maybe there's a distinction to be made between boredom and alienation? Because These are two very different things to me. I'm not so sure about your hunter-gatherer societies take really. Man has not been alienated forever, or is by default, or is condemned to being, this just isnt true. A lot of this stuff are modernity issues and modernity could very well have developed differently, even though technology would keep on its course just as it has always done. Politics itself if implemented well, uncorrupted, could very much take care of it. The problem to me is political institutions and other human institutions became too weak and lost to capitalism so now that money has the final say in everything we became paralyzed because we can't imagine things being an inch different, which to me just doesn't make sense. I mean why the f*ck would unhealthy stuff be impossible to control? Why can't food be healthier? Tech be healthier? Work be healthier? Why can't ignorance be fought and won? There are fallacies buried deep in the arguments people use defending that this specific configuration of stuff we have now is inevitable. All I know is History is deffo not done yet, things do change, one way or another, sooner or later.