8 ms·

The elderly, the kids, the teenagers, the adults. Screen addiction is a pandemic. The biggest one humanity has ever seen. The richest, most powerful organizati

by ceronman 11mo ago

The elderly, the kids, the teenagers, the adults. Screen addiction is a pandemic. The biggest one humanity has ever seen. The richest, most powerful organizations are spending billions every month to make it more addictive, to reach more people.

zwnow 11mo ago
[flagged]
- dns_snek 11mo ago
  This is an incredibly ignorant take on addiction. It's never a choice - by definition. > Its incredibly easy to quit too, people just lack discipline. Hey, do you want to chat about how when I tried to quit nicotine, I went through 2 weeks of physical and mental hell, how exhausted I felt not being able to sleep more than an hour without waking up, still feeling exhausted, with mental fog so severe that made quitting feel impossible?
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - FlameRobot 11mo ago
    > This is an incredibly ignorant take on addiction. It's never a choice - by definition. It isn't that clear cut either way IME. I had a big drinking problem. I was the one that choose to start drinking. I was the one chose to stop drinking. Nobody forced me to go to the bar or the off-licence. I accept for other people it isn't that simple. > Hey, do you want to chat about how when I tried to quit nicotine, I went through 2 weeks of physical and mental hell, how exhausted I felt not being able to sleep more than an hour without waking up, still feeling exhausted, with mental fog so severe that made quitting feel impossible? I had similar issues when I quit drink. Sleep was irregular, I went hot and cold for the first month. I had this like weird wave feeling go through me one night (it the only way I can describe it). I think that took like a month or two.
    - dns_snek 11mo ago
      > Nobody forced me to go to the bar or the off-licence. Of course, but that doesn't mean that you had a real choice. What would've happened if you didn't go - physically, psychologically, emotionally? I'm not looking for an answer, it's just worth thinking about. Are you being forced to eat, drink, breathe? Can you choose not to, and for how long before you can't take it anymore and relent? It's so easy for people to cast swift moral judgement over other people's "choices", simply because they happen to enjoy a mixture of brain chemicals that is more conducive to behavior that they see as morally righteous, and they assume that everyone else has it as easy as they do - physiologically speaking. You should be careful not to internalize that.
      - FlameRobot 11mo ago
        > Of course, but that doesn't mean that you had a real choice. Yes I did. I actually find it very insulting that you would deny me my own agency. I cured my addiction by simply not buying alcohol and abstaining. That was a choice I could have made at any point in the past. There are people that can drink responsibly. I am not one of those people. I made the responsible choice as an adult, to abstain from it. I don't miss it either BTW. I feel actually free. > What would've happened if you didn't go - physically, psychologically, emotionally? I'm not looking for an answer, it's just worth thinking about. I would have a lot more money, I wouldn't have got into stupid situations, some which I almost got myself killed, I wouldn't have had to spend 5 years rebuilding my career. > Are you being forced to eat, drink, breathe? Can you choose not to, and for how long before you can't take it anymore and relent? The comparison you are making here is asinine. > It's so easy for people to cast swift moral judgement over other people's "choices", simply because they happen to enjoy a mixture of brain chemicals that is more conducive to behavior that they see as morally righteous, and they assume that everyone else has it as easy as they do - physiologically speaking. You should be careful not to internalize that. The moral judgement is often painted by some as subjective. A lot of the times it can be, but very often it simply isn't. There are good reasons it is correct for people to judge someone poorly because they abuse drugs or alcohol. It isn't just the fact that they are making different choice that they disapprove of, it is the behaviour and consequences of that behaviour. This behaviour is frequently at best makes the person difficult to deal with, and at worst anti-social and dangerous and can often have dire consequences. That is simply a fact. Those people are correct to judge those people poorly. I am certainty not dyed in the wool conservative either. You just don't know what you are talking about tbh.
- itsalwaysgood 11mo ago
  Smoking addiction and screen addiction are two very different things. It's everyone's own problem of course. But it becomes society's problem when everyone is affected.
  - zwnow 11mo ago
    In both cases the whole society is affected. I have to pay into my countries health system for people who got sick by choice. Thankfully this isnt the case for people addicted to screens.
    - itsalwaysgood 11mo ago
      You can completely abstain from smoking for health reasons and there's no downside. Screentime is a part of life. You can abstain but you fall behind in some ways. Screen time is also linked to the pace of technology, advancement, etc. It's unavoidably pushed into our lives. These seem like two very different issues to me.
      - ileonichwiesz 11mo ago
        Smoking used to be an unavoidably pushed part of life, too. It was linked to strength, manliness (or femininity actually, depending on the target market), independence, etc. Tobacco company mascots loomed over us from billboards, and told us on TV that cigarettes make a person cool. Untold billions of dollars were spent on marketing literal poison, using every trick in the book, and it worked. People smoked all the time, everywhere - at the dinner table, on planes, at their desk at work. People burned their houses down because they went to sleep with a cigarette still in their mouth. Just because something feels like an unavoidable part of life, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true - it could just mean that that giant advertising companies convinced you that it is. I wonder if in a couple decades we’ll look back at screen addiction the same way we look at tobacco now.
        itsalwaysgood 11mo ago
        I understand how cigarettes were advertised and pushed, and seemingly unavoidable. Is technology the same? Yes and no...we can totally abstain from tech and live that lifestyle. But then we wouldn't be here discussing this issue at all, or ever. So while they are both pushed: if you cut out smoking today you can still live a 'normal' life. Cutting out tech is a drastically different life. I'd rather not discuss what is meant by 'normal' -- I hope you get where I'm coming from.
- palata 11mo ago
  The one thing to know about addiction is that everyone is different. If you think that it's easy not to be an addict, you may just lack empathy. It's easy for you to quit smoking? Good for you. But it's very clearly not the case for most people. Feels to me a bit like saying "it's easy to be rich, you just have to be born in a rich family like me".
  - zwnow 11mo ago
    I lack empathy and they lack discipline. Its not a black or white situation. People act like quitting smoking is like quitting opiates.
    - dns_snek 11mo ago
      Circular logic. What do you think "discipline" is? It's just a word people use to describe people with strong rational, goal-oriented behavior, with ability to follow through over long periods of time. This is also called "executive functioning" and it's wholly dependent on your brain chemistry, i.e. the thing that is malfunctioning in addiction. So yes, they lack "discipline" because discipline is also physiological, it's not just (and maybe not even primarily) a reflection of the person's character. By treating them as separate you're engaging in mind-body dualism.
      - zwnow 11mo ago
        Its a direct reflection of a persons own weakness.
        dns_snek 11mo ago
        And the earth is flat.
    - pajamasam 11mo ago
      The impression I get is that it’s even harder than quitting opiates on average, given that many addicts who’ve quit other substances still smoke.
- Broken_Hippo 11mo ago
  > If people dont know what to do with themselves its kinda their own issue. That "kinda" is important. I didn't have the freedom to just do what I wanted to when I was a young teen. 14-year old me couldn't just take a walk. I'm in my late 40s now - my mother was particularly strict for the time period. People have children. Some folks really are stuck at home, taking care of someone, with a life peppered with boredom. You know, like parents. Screens have a way of decorating those bits of time and lessening the monotony of it all. Not to mention the effects of being poor - I'm not even talking outright poverty here. Just a point that you simply have to budget somewhat carefully and don't have a lot of extra money. One of the great things about the internet is the entertainment built right in. You pay for the communication access society and businesses expect from you, you get entertainment as well. Societal expectations might also keep you in. If you need an app to make sure that your child isn't left out, it might mean that you don't have the same options to simply quit something without harming innocent folks along the way. Other folks have touched on the addiction bit, so no need to repeat here.
- rixed 11mo ago
  > Same reason as to why a lot of people smoke, they cant bear being bored for 5 minutes. Its incredibly easy to quit too For you information, nicotine is generally considered a highly addictive substance (see for instance: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/drugs-a-to-z https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/drugs-a-to-z) Although various people do seem to experience it very differently, and some indeed have reported to me that they feel almost no addiction. From others, I've heard such things as "I've quit smoking 30 years ago, and for 30 years I've been craving for a cigaret". My personnal experience is that it takes a good, dedicated several weeks long effort to quit; I haven't had a lot of addictions in my life but this one was by far the hardest to get rid of. But the effect of nicotine, or lack thereof, are benign, maybe that's why it gives you the impression that it's not very addictive. Turns out, the most addictive substances are not necessarily the ones with the strongest effects. As to who is lacking discipline, well I guess we would all be better off with more discipline. Including you, who lack the discipline to do the mental work to research a topic you know little about before you comment on it, and most importantly the mental work needed to see things from other's perspective. ;)
  - zwnow 11mo ago
    [flagged]
- JKCalhoun 11mo ago
  Wow, did you actually smoke for a decade or more? I did and kicking the smoking habit was the hardest thing I have done in my life. Even after I quit I wanted a cigarette every day for a year—the battle was each day, for hundreds of days. At the time I would often dream too that I was smoking — and continued to for another few years. Even now I think if I were told I had a year to live, I would be tempted to light up again.
palata 11mo ago
> The biggest one humanity has ever seen. Sugar, anyone?
- badgersnake 11mo ago
  Breathing
  - palata 11mo ago
    Not sure I would call that an addiction. Sugar is one: almost everybody consumes way too much sugar and would be incapable of reducing that to a healthy amount. I am including myself, pretty sure you're part of the club. I wouldn't say that we breath "too much".
    - menzoic 11mo ago
      Studies on rats have shown significant similarities between sugar consumption and drug-like effects, including bingeing, craving, tolerance, withdrawal, dependence, and reward. Some researchers argue that sugar alters mood and induces pleasure in a way that mimics drug effects such as cocaine. In certain experiments, rats even preferred sugar over cocaine, reinforcing the idea that sugar can strongly activate the brain’s reward system
      - djtango 11mo ago
        This is somewhat intuitive when you think that sugar is almost pure energy and in a food-scarce existence that we evolved for, energy is synonymous with survival. So alongside reproducing, consuming energy is probably one of the most basic of desires we are hardwired to seek out in more ways than one
    - djtango 11mo ago
      Sugar is very difficult to unplug from if you don't cook for yourself. Here in Singapore almost every restaurant and hawker is obsessed with jacking their food up with sugar. Worse though is that if they don't the local Singaporean "foodie" hitmen will annihilate the restaurant with poor reviews on Google Maps for being "bland". So eating out is a no go. Cooking again unless you're obsessed with reading packaging or make everything from scratch yourself you're instantly adding more sugar than you know. I have a suspicion that now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter because apples are way way sweeter than I remember growing up and a lot of the oranges my mother in law buys for me also are blindingly sweet. And yet I feel there's a certain fragrance missing from these sweet fruits...
blfr 11mo ago
This explains too much. I remember the Internet before corporate dominance and it was just as, if not more, magical then. There's just something about having a beautiful OLED screen, the tablet-like shape, touch interface, and access to all of human knowledge/news/entertainment. I remember when people used to have a tv on when they lounged around the house, or cooked, or cleaned. My parents even had a little special splash proof CRT TV in the kitchen. The modern screens are just that, except also much more convenient and with million times more content, and personalized, and wireless ANC headphones if you like. This is it, this is peak human information environment. It's not a conspiracy of corporations. Much like obesity is primarily driven by abundance of calories, another fight we won with our natural environment. The highly processed foods and marketing are just barely making a dent at the edge, and are largely a zero-sum game between food manufacturers.
- torben-friis 11mo ago
  I have noticed that better devices just lead me to more time spent in apps I don’t really enjoy, just because I like the device itself. I’ve had success consciously worsening my experience, doing stuff like reducing color intensity with accessibility options or using the web version of an app for added friction, which is ridiculous but here we are.
  - myaccountonhn 11mo ago
    It's a good idea. Companies try really hard to optimize and make everything they want you to do as easy and smooth as possible (and vice versa). Personally I avoid things like Apple Pay for this reason, it's there to remove friction from purchasing stuff, which results in us doing more of it.
  - aziaziazi 11mo ago
    I had a similar experience rebooting my 9yo iPhone [0] after a more recent one went out of service. Hours of screen procrastination got replaced with IRL activities/thinking. I decided to not repair the fancy LCD and keep the little friend. It’s been two years and I don’t feel going back soon. Reducing color intensity is a great idea to worsen the experience, I’ll give it a go. Yet first thing I do after wake up is checking Hacker News and the design is probably not at fault. Still some self improvement to do. 0 still security updated! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45270108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45270108
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
noduerme 11mo ago
Can we stop redefining-down the word "pandemic" please? I think enough people are already going to stick their fingers in their ears and go "na na na" when the next actual pandemic virus comes along. Maybe just skip the comparison and say screen addiction is the most dangerous addiction humanity's ever seen. Then it just sounds like a normal hyperbole. Or try these: "Screen addiction is an apocalypse" "Screen addiction is a genocide" ...
- JKCalhoun 11mo ago
  It will interesting to see what term historians use. I suppose it depends on how disastrous they see our societal fetish for technology.
  - noduerme 11mo ago
    Historians attribute the decline of the Roman Empire to lead in the water, but that doesn't make it a pandemic, it's something else. The Plague of Justinian was a pandemic. I'm arguing that it serves no purpose to conflate terms describing endemic social problems with those describing acute disease. In this case, language is important, and frequently weaponized.
- everdrive 11mo ago
  >Can we stop No, that's not possible. Your comment will be seen by a tiny minority of people on the internet and is a drop in the ocean. The impulse to persuade social change works in small groups, and the frustration you're feeling is completely feckless on the internet. (ie, if you were saying "can we stop [thing] in a small workplace you might actually have success. Out here on the internet this is really impossible, and is a mismatch between our intuitions and reality.)
- crossbody 11mo ago
  Redefining "pandemic" is basically word violence! /s Fully agree with you comment. I am shocked that the hyperbole with the classic "greedy corporations are eating us alive" empty narrative got so many upvotes here
SoftTalker 11mo ago
I'm not sure I agree. We had all these complaints about TV going back to the 1970s (the earliest clear memories I have). It was called "the plug in drug" and "the boob tube." Homebound and housewives used to watch hours of game shows and soap operas all day. If a kid liked to read, some parents would tell them to "get your head out of that book and go outside." It's just something to do to fill the boredom.
- bogdanoff_2 11mo ago
  What exactly do you not agree with?
  - pasteldream 11mo ago
    Perhaps they disagree with the idea that it’s an addiction or that it’s a problem with screens in particular, rather than a problem with people not being able to or not knowing how to spend their free time in other ways.
    - array_key_first 11mo ago
      I can see that, but IMO the main difference is that this feels like it's intentionally trying to be an active detriment to your life. TV et. al are fairly neutral generally. Even with the ads. But with targeted advertisement, it feels a lot more like they're trying to get inside your mind to steal your money. And with content on social media, it feels specifically engineered to make your life as bad as possible. More fear, more anger, more racism, more sexism. Here's some big boobies, now look at this disgusting immigrant. Isnt Earth awful? Aren't these guys ruining everything?
      - financetechbro 11mo ago
        This. Targeted adds + bespoke algorithms make our current tech incomparable to the previous boogeyman of TV et al. We have devices that are designed to keep and farm our attention at all costs
    - 11mo ago
nytesky 11mo ago
There maybe something more than that. Maybe modern life and the great financial crisis have put us all into more stress, more work, so that we don’t have time for real relationships. It’s part of why politics have shifted the way they do. I am VERY online, but I don’t usual traditional social media. I mostly read Hackers News and a DC parenting forum which is pretty no-holds bar, but is a website out of the 90s so not really capable of infinite scroll or dark patterns (other than the addictive and open ended topics). I also read a lot of news like NYT and watch TV like Apple TV, but it’s hardly the dopamine drip of TikTok or Instagram. Yet I am ashamed of my 8 hours of screen time despite my best efforts. I used to reach out to friends more but as I get older it feels intrusive and hard to make conversations.

zwnow 11mo ago

[flagged]

dns_snek 11mo ago
This is an incredibly ignorant take on addiction. It's never a choice - by definition. > Its incredibly easy to quit too, people just lack discipline. Hey, do you want to chat about how when I tried to quit nicotine, I went through 2 weeks of physical and mental hell, how exhausted I felt not being able to sleep more than an hour without waking up, still feeling exhausted, with mental fog so severe that made quitting feel impossible?
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- FlameRobot 11mo ago
  > This is an incredibly ignorant take on addiction. It's never a choice - by definition. It isn't that clear cut either way IME. I had a big drinking problem. I was the one that choose to start drinking. I was the one chose to stop drinking. Nobody forced me to go to the bar or the off-licence. I accept for other people it isn't that simple. > Hey, do you want to chat about how when I tried to quit nicotine, I went through 2 weeks of physical and mental hell, how exhausted I felt not being able to sleep more than an hour without waking up, still feeling exhausted, with mental fog so severe that made quitting feel impossible? I had similar issues when I quit drink. Sleep was irregular, I went hot and cold for the first month. I had this like weird wave feeling go through me one night (it the only way I can describe it). I think that took like a month or two.
  - dns_snek 11mo ago
    > Nobody forced me to go to the bar or the off-licence. Of course, but that doesn't mean that you had a real choice. What would've happened if you didn't go - physically, psychologically, emotionally? I'm not looking for an answer, it's just worth thinking about. Are you being forced to eat, drink, breathe? Can you choose not to, and for how long before you can't take it anymore and relent? It's so easy for people to cast swift moral judgement over other people's "choices", simply because they happen to enjoy a mixture of brain chemicals that is more conducive to behavior that they see as morally righteous, and they assume that everyone else has it as easy as they do - physiologically speaking. You should be careful not to internalize that.
    - FlameRobot 11mo ago
      > Of course, but that doesn't mean that you had a real choice. Yes I did. I actually find it very insulting that you would deny me my own agency. I cured my addiction by simply not buying alcohol and abstaining. That was a choice I could have made at any point in the past. There are people that can drink responsibly. I am not one of those people. I made the responsible choice as an adult, to abstain from it. I don't miss it either BTW. I feel actually free. > What would've happened if you didn't go - physically, psychologically, emotionally? I'm not looking for an answer, it's just worth thinking about. I would have a lot more money, I wouldn't have got into stupid situations, some which I almost got myself killed, I wouldn't have had to spend 5 years rebuilding my career. > Are you being forced to eat, drink, breathe? Can you choose not to, and for how long before you can't take it anymore and relent? The comparison you are making here is asinine. > It's so easy for people to cast swift moral judgement over other people's "choices", simply because they happen to enjoy a mixture of brain chemicals that is more conducive to behavior that they see as morally righteous, and they assume that everyone else has it as easy as they do - physiologically speaking. You should be careful not to internalize that. The moral judgement is often painted by some as subjective. A lot of the times it can be, but very often it simply isn't. There are good reasons it is correct for people to judge someone poorly because they abuse drugs or alcohol. It isn't just the fact that they are making different choice that they disapprove of, it is the behaviour and consequences of that behaviour. This behaviour is frequently at best makes the person difficult to deal with, and at worst anti-social and dangerous and can often have dire consequences. That is simply a fact. Those people are correct to judge those people poorly. I am certainty not dyed in the wool conservative either. You just don't know what you are talking about tbh.
itsalwaysgood 11mo ago
Smoking addiction and screen addiction are two very different things. It's everyone's own problem of course. But it becomes society's problem when everyone is affected.
- zwnow 11mo ago
  In both cases the whole society is affected. I have to pay into my countries health system for people who got sick by choice. Thankfully this isnt the case for people addicted to screens.
  - itsalwaysgood 11mo ago
    You can completely abstain from smoking for health reasons and there's no downside. Screentime is a part of life. You can abstain but you fall behind in some ways. Screen time is also linked to the pace of technology, advancement, etc. It's unavoidably pushed into our lives. These seem like two very different issues to me.
    - ileonichwiesz 11mo ago
      Smoking used to be an unavoidably pushed part of life, too. It was linked to strength, manliness (or femininity actually, depending on the target market), independence, etc. Tobacco company mascots loomed over us from billboards, and told us on TV that cigarettes make a person cool. Untold billions of dollars were spent on marketing literal poison, using every trick in the book, and it worked. People smoked all the time, everywhere - at the dinner table, on planes, at their desk at work. People burned their houses down because they went to sleep with a cigarette still in their mouth. Just because something feels like an unavoidable part of life, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true - it could just mean that that giant advertising companies convinced you that it is. I wonder if in a couple decades we’ll look back at screen addiction the same way we look at tobacco now.
      - itsalwaysgood 11mo ago
        I understand how cigarettes were advertised and pushed, and seemingly unavoidable. Is technology the same? Yes and no...we can totally abstain from tech and live that lifestyle. But then we wouldn't be here discussing this issue at all, or ever. So while they are both pushed: if you cut out smoking today you can still live a 'normal' life. Cutting out tech is a drastically different life. I'd rather not discuss what is meant by 'normal' -- I hope you get where I'm coming from.
palata 11mo ago
The one thing to know about addiction is that everyone is different. If you think that it's easy not to be an addict, you may just lack empathy. It's easy for you to quit smoking? Good for you. But it's very clearly not the case for most people. Feels to me a bit like saying "it's easy to be rich, you just have to be born in a rich family like me".
- zwnow 11mo ago
  I lack empathy and they lack discipline. Its not a black or white situation. People act like quitting smoking is like quitting opiates.
  - dns_snek 11mo ago
    Circular logic. What do you think "discipline" is? It's just a word people use to describe people with strong rational, goal-oriented behavior, with ability to follow through over long periods of time. This is also called "executive functioning" and it's wholly dependent on your brain chemistry, i.e. the thing that is malfunctioning in addiction. So yes, they lack "discipline" because discipline is also physiological, it's not just (and maybe not even primarily) a reflection of the person's character. By treating them as separate you're engaging in mind-body dualism.
    - zwnow 11mo ago
      Its a direct reflection of a persons own weakness.
      - dns_snek 11mo ago
        And the earth is flat.
  - pajamasam 11mo ago
    The impression I get is that it’s even harder than quitting opiates on average, given that many addicts who’ve quit other substances still smoke.
Broken_Hippo 11mo ago
> If people dont know what to do with themselves its kinda their own issue. That "kinda" is important. I didn't have the freedom to just do what I wanted to when I was a young teen. 14-year old me couldn't just take a walk. I'm in my late 40s now - my mother was particularly strict for the time period. People have children. Some folks really are stuck at home, taking care of someone, with a life peppered with boredom. You know, like parents. Screens have a way of decorating those bits of time and lessening the monotony of it all. Not to mention the effects of being poor - I'm not even talking outright poverty here. Just a point that you simply have to budget somewhat carefully and don't have a lot of extra money. One of the great things about the internet is the entertainment built right in. You pay for the communication access society and businesses expect from you, you get entertainment as well. Societal expectations might also keep you in. If you need an app to make sure that your child isn't left out, it might mean that you don't have the same options to simply quit something without harming innocent folks along the way. Other folks have touched on the addiction bit, so no need to repeat here.
rixed 11mo ago
> Same reason as to why a lot of people smoke, they cant bear being bored for 5 minutes. Its incredibly easy to quit too For you information, nicotine is generally considered a highly addictive substance (see for instance: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/drugs-a-to-z https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/drugs-a-to-z) Although various people do seem to experience it very differently, and some indeed have reported to me that they feel almost no addiction. From others, I've heard such things as "I've quit smoking 30 years ago, and for 30 years I've been craving for a cigaret". My personnal experience is that it takes a good, dedicated several weeks long effort to quit; I haven't had a lot of addictions in my life but this one was by far the hardest to get rid of. But the effect of nicotine, or lack thereof, are benign, maybe that's why it gives you the impression that it's not very addictive. Turns out, the most addictive substances are not necessarily the ones with the strongest effects. As to who is lacking discipline, well I guess we would all be better off with more discipline. Including you, who lack the discipline to do the mental work to research a topic you know little about before you comment on it, and most importantly the mental work needed to see things from other's perspective. ;)
- zwnow 11mo ago
  [flagged]
JKCalhoun 11mo ago
Wow, did you actually smoke for a decade or more? I did and kicking the smoking habit was the hardest thing I have done in my life. Even after I quit I wanted a cigarette every day for a year—the battle was each day, for hundreds of days. At the time I would often dream too that I was smoking — and continued to for another few years. Even now I think if I were told I had a year to live, I would be tempted to light up again.

palata 11mo ago

> The biggest one humanity has ever seen. Sugar, anyone?

badgersnake 11mo ago
Breathing
- palata 11mo ago
  Not sure I would call that an addiction. Sugar is one: almost everybody consumes way too much sugar and would be incapable of reducing that to a healthy amount. I am including myself, pretty sure you're part of the club. I wouldn't say that we breath "too much".
  - menzoic 11mo ago
    Studies on rats have shown significant similarities between sugar consumption and drug-like effects, including bingeing, craving, tolerance, withdrawal, dependence, and reward. Some researchers argue that sugar alters mood and induces pleasure in a way that mimics drug effects such as cocaine. In certain experiments, rats even preferred sugar over cocaine, reinforcing the idea that sugar can strongly activate the brain’s reward system
    - djtango 11mo ago
      This is somewhat intuitive when you think that sugar is almost pure energy and in a food-scarce existence that we evolved for, energy is synonymous with survival. So alongside reproducing, consuming energy is probably one of the most basic of desires we are hardwired to seek out in more ways than one
  - djtango 11mo ago
    Sugar is very difficult to unplug from if you don't cook for yourself. Here in Singapore almost every restaurant and hawker is obsessed with jacking their food up with sugar. Worse though is that if they don't the local Singaporean "foodie" hitmen will annihilate the restaurant with poor reviews on Google Maps for being "bland". So eating out is a no go. Cooking again unless you're obsessed with reading packaging or make everything from scratch yourself you're instantly adding more sugar than you know. I have a suspicion that now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter because apples are way way sweeter than I remember growing up and a lot of the oranges my mother in law buys for me also are blindingly sweet. And yet I feel there's a certain fragrance missing from these sweet fruits...

blfr 11mo ago

This explains too much. I remember the Internet before corporate dominance and it was just as, if not more, magical then. There's just something about having a beautiful OLED screen, the tablet-like shape, touch interface, and access to all of human knowledge/news/entertainment. I remember when people used to have a tv on when they lounged around the house, or cooked, or cleaned. My parents even had a little special splash proof CRT TV in the kitchen. The modern screens are just that, except also much more convenient and with million times more content, and personalized, and wireless ANC headphones if you like. This is it, this is peak human information environment. It's not a conspiracy of corporations. Much like obesity is primarily driven by abundance of calories, another fight we won with our natural environment. The highly processed foods and marketing are just barely making a dent at the edge, and are largely a zero-sum game between food manufacturers.

torben-friis 11mo ago
I have noticed that better devices just lead me to more time spent in apps I don’t really enjoy, just because I like the device itself. I’ve had success consciously worsening my experience, doing stuff like reducing color intensity with accessibility options or using the web version of an app for added friction, which is ridiculous but here we are.
- myaccountonhn 11mo ago
  It's a good idea. Companies try really hard to optimize and make everything they want you to do as easy and smooth as possible (and vice versa). Personally I avoid things like Apple Pay for this reason, it's there to remove friction from purchasing stuff, which results in us doing more of it.
- aziaziazi 11mo ago
  I had a similar experience rebooting my 9yo iPhone [0] after a more recent one went out of service. Hours of screen procrastination got replaced with IRL activities/thinking. I decided to not repair the fancy LCD and keep the little friend. It’s been two years and I don’t feel going back soon. Reducing color intensity is a great idea to worsen the experience, I’ll give it a go. Yet first thing I do after wake up is checking Hacker News and the design is probably not at fault. Still some self improvement to do. 0 still security updated! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45270108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45270108

deleted 11mo ago

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noduerme 11mo ago

Can we stop redefining-down the word "pandemic" please? I think enough people are already going to stick their fingers in their ears and go "na na na" when the next actual pandemic virus comes along. Maybe just skip the comparison and say screen addiction is the most dangerous addiction humanity's ever seen. Then it just sounds like a normal hyperbole. Or try these: "Screen addiction is an apocalypse" "Screen addiction is a genocide" ...

JKCalhoun 11mo ago
It will interesting to see what term historians use. I suppose it depends on how disastrous they see our societal fetish for technology.
- noduerme 11mo ago
  Historians attribute the decline of the Roman Empire to lead in the water, but that doesn't make it a pandemic, it's something else. The Plague of Justinian was a pandemic. I'm arguing that it serves no purpose to conflate terms describing endemic social problems with those describing acute disease. In this case, language is important, and frequently weaponized.
everdrive 11mo ago
>Can we stop No, that's not possible. Your comment will be seen by a tiny minority of people on the internet and is a drop in the ocean. The impulse to persuade social change works in small groups, and the frustration you're feeling is completely feckless on the internet. (ie, if you were saying "can we stop [thing] in a small workplace you might actually have success. Out here on the internet this is really impossible, and is a mismatch between our intuitions and reality.)
crossbody 11mo ago
Redefining "pandemic" is basically word violence! /s Fully agree with you comment. I am shocked that the hyperbole with the classic "greedy corporations are eating us alive" empty narrative got so many upvotes here

SoftTalker 11mo ago

I'm not sure I agree. We had all these complaints about TV going back to the 1970s (the earliest clear memories I have). It was called "the plug in drug" and "the boob tube." Homebound and housewives used to watch hours of game shows and soap operas all day. If a kid liked to read, some parents would tell them to "get your head out of that book and go outside." It's just something to do to fill the boredom.

bogdanoff_2 11mo ago
What exactly do you not agree with?
- pasteldream 11mo ago
  Perhaps they disagree with the idea that it’s an addiction or that it’s a problem with screens in particular, rather than a problem with people not being able to or not knowing how to spend their free time in other ways.
  - array_key_first 11mo ago
    I can see that, but IMO the main difference is that this feels like it's intentionally trying to be an active detriment to your life. TV et. al are fairly neutral generally. Even with the ads. But with targeted advertisement, it feels a lot more like they're trying to get inside your mind to steal your money. And with content on social media, it feels specifically engineered to make your life as bad as possible. More fear, more anger, more racism, more sexism. Here's some big boobies, now look at this disgusting immigrant. Isnt Earth awful? Aren't these guys ruining everything?
    - financetechbro 11mo ago
      This. Targeted adds + bespoke algorithms make our current tech incomparable to the previous boogeyman of TV et al. We have devices that are designed to keep and farm our attention at all costs
  - 11mo ago

nytesky 11mo ago

There maybe something more than that. Maybe modern life and the great financial crisis have put us all into more stress, more work, so that we don’t have time for real relationships. It’s part of why politics have shifted the way they do. I am VERY online, but I don’t usual traditional social media. I mostly read Hackers News and a DC parenting forum which is pretty no-holds bar, but is a website out of the 90s so not really capable of infinite scroll or dark patterns (other than the addictive and open ended topics). I also read a lot of news like NYT and watch TV like Apple TV, but it’s hardly the dopamine drip of TikTok or Instagram. Yet I am ashamed of my 8 hours of screen time despite my best efforts. I used to reach out to friends more but as I get older it feels intrusive and hard to make conversations.