6 ms·

72% of U.S. Teens Feel Peaceful Without Smartphones.

46 points by sarimkx 3y ago

Havoc 3y ago
Phone or the apps on said phone? Phrasing it as phone I think conflates different effects. eg I get anxious without mine because I rely on it for say navigation and calling for help. Yet I get less anxious with out it because I don’t get depressed by people’s perfect lives on insta. This poll seems to be a blend of those resulting in largely meaningless stats
- financltravsty 3y ago
  Can they really be separated from one another, for practical purposes? iMessage/SMS is baked-in. The rest you can easily acquire within a few seconds (and when does the inclination to "catch-up" via. Insta/Twitter/Snap/etc. come up, if not primarily when on one's phone? Or rather when a friend off-handedly mentions you're not on $APP, and being the impressionable -- and perhaps feeling "left out" -- teenager that you are, you experience FOMO and become inclined to (re)-download). Yes, a separate study can be done to try to tease out this confounder, but who is kidding themselves into thinking that the majority of time spent on a phone is not within apps? Turning on parental controls that limit app usage and installation has, in my experience, resulted in the phone barely being used at all except for convenience purposes (navigation and such). Though, you may have a point, in that case.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Not every phone is a smartphone. You can walk around with the safety of a phone without the temptation of Snap etc. And/or just turn a phone off. What cured my addiction was a slowly dying battery which I intentionally didn’t replace.
    - eesmith 3y ago
      Havok said "I rely on it for say navigation". While I think there are feature phones with GPS/mapping support, they are harder to find than a regular feature phone. For navigation, it looks like TomTom sells a dedicated car GPS. If getting around town by walking is important, I wonder if a bike GPS would be a good substitute. While paper maps are an option for some, I know there are people who have a very poor sense of direction. GPS-based maps made it possible to go places without dreading getting lost all the time.
      - Retric 3y ago
        I was thinking of a Nokia 6300 as I wrote it, which has GPS. It may to to close to a smartphone for some people, but it's missing most of the apps people complain about. There's really a lot of options out there if you go looking.
        eesmith 3y ago
        Sure. "While I think there are feature phones with GPS/mapping support, they are harder to find than a regular feature phone." just means I don't know of a modern system, while I do know of feature phones w/o GPS (haven't looked for a couple years though). What modern options were you thinking of?
        Retric 3y ago
        A modern smartphone has advantages, but for dumb phone I don't think it makes much of a difference. The Nokia 6300 15+ years old, but it's still being sold.
      - Havoc 3y ago
        >Havok said "I rely on it for say navigation". Yes - the distinction I had in mind was avoiding the AI driven feeds/reel apps like tiktok and insta. Rather than drawing the line at smart/dumb phone...though yes that would achieve the same I suppose. Bit of a hot take perhaps but I don't feel smartphones are inherently problematic.
  - Havoc 3y ago
    >Can they really be separated from one another, for practical purposes? Partially I guess - depending on willpower. I think it is possible to get the benefits of a smartphone without the bulk of the downsides. And I don't even think you need to go all the way to dumb phone. Just skipping the social media feeds is I suspect enough to tilt the balance. So facebook messenger yes, facebook main app no. >iMessage/SMS is baked-in. I personally wouldn't consider messenger apps harmful in the same sense as say insta/tiktok but that is based on opinion alone. > feeling "left out" -- teenager that you are Yeah that's true - easy for me to talk about willpower but peer pressure at teen level must be insane these days.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
Eventually we will look back at kids under 18 having phones and be shocked like how we are shocked now at the fact that kids were allowed to smoke.
- infotainment 3y ago
  It really needs to be banned on a national level, just like underage drinking and smoking.
- throwaway74432 3y ago
  It's not the medium (the phone) that's the problem, it's the apps. I don't have kids, so I don't know exactly kinds of parental controls are in place, but from what I've seen, there aren't nearly enough to give parents guarantees about what their kids consume.
  - galdosdi 3y ago
    I agree it's more the apps than the medium, but it's still ALSO about the medium. The medium enables the apps because of (1) being in your pocket (2) having notifications (3) this one isn't talked about enough -- the wonderful tactile feedback feeling of seemingly zero latency when scrolling, pinching, etc on the touch screen Of course, the addictive apps work on a chromebook too, but at least they're less portable and less pleasingly tactile, clunkier
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  We said the same thing about books, and radio, and TV, and music (ahh Tipper), and the internet (dont give strangers your name, or get in their cars, but you know, uber). Kids today cant be out of their parents sight, and when they are they are under the eye of Sauron aka someone's phone camera. And it's not like you can let your kids roam like when I was a kid. Some of the nonsense I did as a teen would have the FBI at my door today.
- MichaelMoser123 3y ago
  i hope you are right. Things like TikTok are very unhealthy - and now every social media is trying to emulate them with their version of 'shorts'. But i am not sure if we will have the guts to stop this madness, new media and ad-tech are a very powerful force in politics. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/tiktok-mental-health-social-media https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/tiktok-me...
ryandrake 3y ago
> Distracted parenting: Nearly half of teens (46%) say their parent is at least sometimes distracted by their phone when they’re trying to talk to them. This is heartbreaking. How can parents guide their kids to not become addicted to smartphones when they themselves are addicted? We really need a taboo-reset. Sitting there zombied-out, neck crooked and hunched over your smartphone, dopamine-loading, should be considered as disgusting as sitting there with a heroin needle hanging out of your arm. Society needs to set a better example for the next generation.
- frankbreetz 3y ago
  Maybe they were taking a day off work made only possible by being available. Maybe they were reading a book. Maybe they were planning dinners for the week. Maybe they were scheduling a play date for their kids. We do everything on our phones. I think 46% of parents being distracted sometimes by any of those things is not at all problematic. Maybe kids can learn to wait 2 minutes.
  - jjulius 3y ago
    >Maybe they were taking a day off work made only possible by being available. That's not a day off work, then. >I think 46% of parents being distracted sometimes by any of those things is not at all problematic. Maybe kids can learn to wait 2 minutes. If you read the article and not just the HN quote, the full sentence is, "teens who say their parent is distracted by their phone while having a conversation with them." This isn't a child approaching their parent and the waiting for them to stop reading or working on a grocery list before they start chatting, this is a parent losing focus in the middle of a conversation because of whatever is on their screen. I think we're all pretty aware, and have seen, this behavior firsthand and how distracted people are by their phones in such a scenario. You don't stop listening to your kid mid-convo just to read a sentence in a book, do you? No, you take that moment (the "two minutes" you alluded to) to come to a nice spot to pause and then give them your attention. Doesn't sound like that's what's happening here. >We do everything on our phones. We don't have to.
    - 3y ago
xyst 3y ago
I’m not a teen but have configured “focus” mode on my phone to silence all unnecessary notifications. Only notifications from Message (iMessage, SMS), Phone (only known callers), and Mail for my personal e-mail. Set this up for a majority of the day. Leave 30 minutes open to view non critical notifications. Then turn it back on.
- ivanjermakov 3y ago
  I found a better way. Hard disable all app notifications except messenger, calendar and personal email (with aggressive "skip inbox" filters. And I found that literally nothing else require my immediate attention.
- nicbou 3y ago
  My phone is permanently in that state. I only get notified if I need to be.
- safety1st 3y ago
  Increasingly unless I'm on the go or I need it on to receive a delivery or something, I just turn the damn thing off. Most OTPs I have sent to a Google Voice number so I don't need my phone for those. I lived without a smartphone back before they were invented, it was fine. Life was better in many ways. 4.5 hours of daily phone time is down to less than 90 minutes a day now and life is better in every way because of it.
nntwozz 3y ago
I wonder if we'll be asking the same questions in 10-20 years with kids wearing slim AR/VR-glasses everywhere 24/7. It seems for every generation there is a subgroup that falls between the cracks.
GuB-42 3y ago
Small nitpick: 72% of U.S. teens say they sometimes feel peaceful without smartphones. This study carries all sorts of biases if the idea is to gauge how teens really feel without their smartphones. What it tells however is that teens have this idea that they spend too much time on their smartphones. It would be interesting to conduct a proper experiment. For example, have a randomly selected group of teens do some activity where they are allowed to keep their phones, and another group where they are not. And then ask general questions about well being without telling them it is about smartphones, and then, see the differences. A weaker measurement could be by finding correlation between mood and whether or not a place allows smartphones or has network. And now see if the results match the questionnaires. So see if teens really feel more peaceful (or anxious) when they don't have their smartphone, or if that's just what they want to believe (or want you to believe).
- lebean 3y ago
  We'll have to get them to promise to be honest before they fill out the questionnaire to maximize the chance they we'll get honest data. I think I read that somewhere.
  - throwaway0665 3y ago
    That was likely based on a popular study that has been disproved[1] because it doesn't work and it used fake data. [1]: https://bigthink.com/the-present/honesty-pledge-study-fraud-dan-ariely/ https://bigthink.com/the-present/honesty-pledge-study-fraud-...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jimjimjim 3y ago
It's the doom scrolling. When I deleted my twitter account I found life was much better, more relaxing, more positive, more empowering. Before deleting I was worried that I would lose touch with people I followed and not know what was going on but to be honest I didn't miss 99% if it. In fact why was I following it in the first place? Why was I concerned about these things. secret: You don't need to care. you really don't.
- bilekas 3y ago
  > secret: You don't need to care. you really don't. Instagram and Reddit were my time sinks and I felt it getting progressively worse, leaving "cold Turkey" after a week this was the exact sentiment I felt, "I really don't care". The FOMO is manufactured by the apps by design but it really is such a ridiculous thing in hindsight.
O1111OOO 3y ago
Just tossing this out there... A few years ago, I felt so completely at peace when power went out for a couple of days. We used candles at night. I spent some great quality time reading paper books. My mind felt focused, free and interestingly... it felt like I had ownership of it again. So much of the content we're exposed to is opinionated - meant to persuade and sometimes to manipulate. It was nice to be free of that. I make sure to unplug regularly now.
- eesmith 3y ago
  That sounds lovely! I used to read a lot. Now I just skim pointless internet things. I need to break that bad habit. I've a pile of book "to read some day". I think I'll start tonight. (I hope.)
  - eesmith 3y ago
    I started reading a book last evening. It wasn't as easy as it used to be. Perhaps I was too tired. More likely I'm used to grazing, not reading. I'll keep on trying.
ErigmolCt 3y ago
I personally feel peaceful without smartphones. And trying not to use it before bedtime

46 points by sarimkx 3y ago

Phone or the apps on said phone? Phrasing it as phone I think conflates different effects. eg I get anxious without mine because I rely on it for say navigation and calling for help. Yet I get less anxious with out it because I don’t get depressed by people’s perfect lives on insta. This poll seems to be a blend of those resulting in largely meaningless stats

financltravsty 3y ago
Can they really be separated from one another, for practical purposes? iMessage/SMS is baked-in. The rest you can easily acquire within a few seconds (and when does the inclination to "catch-up" via. Insta/Twitter/Snap/etc. come up, if not primarily when on one's phone? Or rather when a friend off-handedly mentions you're not on $APP, and being the impressionable -- and perhaps feeling "left out" -- teenager that you are, you experience FOMO and become inclined to (re)-download). Yes, a separate study can be done to try to tease out this confounder, but who is kidding themselves into thinking that the majority of time spent on a phone is not within apps? Turning on parental controls that limit app usage and installation has, in my experience, resulted in the phone barely being used at all except for convenience purposes (navigation and such). Though, you may have a point, in that case.
- Retric 3y ago
  Not every phone is a smartphone. You can walk around with the safety of a phone without the temptation of Snap etc. And/or just turn a phone off. What cured my addiction was a slowly dying battery which I intentionally didn’t replace.
  - eesmith 3y ago
    Havok said "I rely on it for say navigation". While I think there are feature phones with GPS/mapping support, they are harder to find than a regular feature phone. For navigation, it looks like TomTom sells a dedicated car GPS. If getting around town by walking is important, I wonder if a bike GPS would be a good substitute. While paper maps are an option for some, I know there are people who have a very poor sense of direction. GPS-based maps made it possible to go places without dreading getting lost all the time.
    - Retric 3y ago
      I was thinking of a Nokia 6300 as I wrote it, which has GPS. It may to to close to a smartphone for some people, but it's missing most of the apps people complain about. There's really a lot of options out there if you go looking.
      - eesmith 3y ago
        Sure. "While I think there are feature phones with GPS/mapping support, they are harder to find than a regular feature phone." just means I don't know of a modern system, while I do know of feature phones w/o GPS (haven't looked for a couple years though). What modern options were you thinking of?
        Retric 3y ago
        A modern smartphone has advantages, but for dumb phone I don't think it makes much of a difference. The Nokia 6300 15+ years old, but it's still being sold.
    - Havoc 3y ago
      >Havok said "I rely on it for say navigation". Yes - the distinction I had in mind was avoiding the AI driven feeds/reel apps like tiktok and insta. Rather than drawing the line at smart/dumb phone...though yes that would achieve the same I suppose. Bit of a hot take perhaps but I don't feel smartphones are inherently problematic.
- Havoc 3y ago
  >Can they really be separated from one another, for practical purposes? Partially I guess - depending on willpower. I think it is possible to get the benefits of a smartphone without the bulk of the downsides. And I don't even think you need to go all the way to dumb phone. Just skipping the social media feeds is I suspect enough to tilt the balance. So facebook messenger yes, facebook main app no. >iMessage/SMS is baked-in. I personally wouldn't consider messenger apps harmful in the same sense as say insta/tiktok but that is based on opinion alone. > feeling "left out" -- teenager that you are Yeah that's true - easy for me to talk about willpower but peer pressure at teen level must be insane these days.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

Eventually we will look back at kids under 18 having phones and be shocked like how we are shocked now at the fact that kids were allowed to smoke.

infotainment 3y ago
It really needs to be banned on a national level, just like underage drinking and smoking.
throwaway74432 3y ago
It's not the medium (the phone) that's the problem, it's the apps. I don't have kids, so I don't know exactly kinds of parental controls are in place, but from what I've seen, there aren't nearly enough to give parents guarantees about what their kids consume.
- galdosdi 3y ago
  I agree it's more the apps than the medium, but it's still ALSO about the medium. The medium enables the apps because of (1) being in your pocket (2) having notifications (3) this one isn't talked about enough -- the wonderful tactile feedback feeling of seemingly zero latency when scrolling, pinching, etc on the touch screen Of course, the addictive apps work on a chromebook too, but at least they're less portable and less pleasingly tactile, clunkier
zer00eyz 3y ago
We said the same thing about books, and radio, and TV, and music (ahh Tipper), and the internet (dont give strangers your name, or get in their cars, but you know, uber). Kids today cant be out of their parents sight, and when they are they are under the eye of Sauron aka someone's phone camera. And it's not like you can let your kids roam like when I was a kid. Some of the nonsense I did as a teen would have the FBI at my door today.
MichaelMoser123 3y ago
i hope you are right. Things like TikTok are very unhealthy - and now every social media is trying to emulate them with their version of 'shorts'. But i am not sure if we will have the guts to stop this madness, new media and ad-tech are a very powerful force in politics. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/tiktok-mental-health-social-media https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/tiktok-me...

ryandrake 3y ago

> Distracted parenting: Nearly half of teens (46%) say their parent is at least sometimes distracted by their phone when they’re trying to talk to them. This is heartbreaking. How can parents guide their kids to not become addicted to smartphones when they themselves are addicted? We really need a taboo-reset. Sitting there zombied-out, neck crooked and hunched over your smartphone, dopamine-loading, should be considered as disgusting as sitting there with a heroin needle hanging out of your arm. Society needs to set a better example for the next generation.

frankbreetz 3y ago
Maybe they were taking a day off work made only possible by being available. Maybe they were reading a book. Maybe they were planning dinners for the week. Maybe they were scheduling a play date for their kids. We do everything on our phones. I think 46% of parents being distracted sometimes by any of those things is not at all problematic. Maybe kids can learn to wait 2 minutes.
- jjulius 3y ago
  >Maybe they were taking a day off work made only possible by being available. That's not a day off work, then. >I think 46% of parents being distracted sometimes by any of those things is not at all problematic. Maybe kids can learn to wait 2 minutes. If you read the article and not just the HN quote, the full sentence is, "teens who say their parent is distracted by their phone while having a conversation with them." This isn't a child approaching their parent and the waiting for them to stop reading or working on a grocery list before they start chatting, this is a parent losing focus in the middle of a conversation because of whatever is on their screen. I think we're all pretty aware, and have seen, this behavior firsthand and how distracted people are by their phones in such a scenario. You don't stop listening to your kid mid-convo just to read a sentence in a book, do you? No, you take that moment (the "two minutes" you alluded to) to come to a nice spot to pause and then give them your attention. Doesn't sound like that's what's happening here. >We do everything on our phones. We don't have to.
  - 3y ago

xyst 3y ago

I’m not a teen but have configured “focus” mode on my phone to silence all unnecessary notifications. Only notifications from Message (iMessage, SMS), Phone (only known callers), and Mail for my personal e-mail. Set this up for a majority of the day. Leave 30 minutes open to view non critical notifications. Then turn it back on.

ivanjermakov 3y ago
I found a better way. Hard disable all app notifications except messenger, calendar and personal email (with aggressive "skip inbox" filters. And I found that literally nothing else require my immediate attention.
nicbou 3y ago
My phone is permanently in that state. I only get notified if I need to be.
safety1st 3y ago
Increasingly unless I'm on the go or I need it on to receive a delivery or something, I just turn the damn thing off. Most OTPs I have sent to a Google Voice number so I don't need my phone for those. I lived without a smartphone back before they were invented, it was fine. Life was better in many ways. 4.5 hours of daily phone time is down to less than 90 minutes a day now and life is better in every way because of it.

nntwozz 3y ago

I wonder if we'll be asking the same questions in 10-20 years with kids wearing slim AR/VR-glasses everywhere 24/7. It seems for every generation there is a subgroup that falls between the cracks.

GuB-42 3y ago

Small nitpick: 72% of U.S. teens say they sometimes feel peaceful without smartphones. This study carries all sorts of biases if the idea is to gauge how teens really feel without their smartphones. What it tells however is that teens have this idea that they spend too much time on their smartphones. It would be interesting to conduct a proper experiment. For example, have a randomly selected group of teens do some activity where they are allowed to keep their phones, and another group where they are not. And then ask general questions about well being without telling them it is about smartphones, and then, see the differences. A weaker measurement could be by finding correlation between mood and whether or not a place allows smartphones or has network. And now see if the results match the questionnaires. So see if teens really feel more peaceful (or anxious) when they don't have their smartphone, or if that's just what they want to believe (or want you to believe).

lebean 3y ago
We'll have to get them to promise to be honest before they fill out the questionnaire to maximize the chance they we'll get honest data. I think I read that somewhere.
- throwaway0665 3y ago
  That was likely based on a popular study that has been disproved[1] because it doesn't work and it used fake data. [1]: https://bigthink.com/the-present/honesty-pledge-study-fraud-dan-ariely/ https://bigthink.com/the-present/honesty-pledge-study-fraud-...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jimjimjim 3y ago

It's the doom scrolling. When I deleted my twitter account I found life was much better, more relaxing, more positive, more empowering. Before deleting I was worried that I would lose touch with people I followed and not know what was going on but to be honest I didn't miss 99% if it. In fact why was I following it in the first place? Why was I concerned about these things. secret: You don't need to care. you really don't.

bilekas 3y ago
> secret: You don't need to care. you really don't. Instagram and Reddit were my time sinks and I felt it getting progressively worse, leaving "cold Turkey" after a week this was the exact sentiment I felt, "I really don't care". The FOMO is manufactured by the apps by design but it really is such a ridiculous thing in hindsight.

O1111OOO 3y ago

Just tossing this out there... A few years ago, I felt so completely at peace when power went out for a couple of days. We used candles at night. I spent some great quality time reading paper books. My mind felt focused, free and interestingly... it felt like I had ownership of it again. So much of the content we're exposed to is opinionated - meant to persuade and sometimes to manipulate. It was nice to be free of that. I make sure to unplug regularly now.

eesmith 3y ago
That sounds lovely! I used to read a lot. Now I just skim pointless internet things. I need to break that bad habit. I've a pile of book "to read some day". I think I'll start tonight. (I hope.)
- eesmith 3y ago
  I started reading a book last evening. It wasn't as easy as it used to be. Perhaps I was too tired. More likely I'm used to grazing, not reading. I'll keep on trying.

ErigmolCt 3y ago

I personally feel peaceful without smartphones. And trying not to use it before bedtime