243 Comments
Mar 2, 2023Liked by Noah Smith

Adding to your point re: computer to phone social media shift, Instagram seems to be a big culprit in that, the desktop UI was always garbage and it was the first major platform I can remember that either hard forced or otherwise coerced you to access it on the phone.

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Reading discourse on this topic is so interesting as someone who is 23 and basically grew up online from roughly 2011 onwards. It's painfully obvious to me (and probably a lot of other people my age) that phones were always the reason for us being less happy. Even when I was 15-16 I remember my other online friends talking about feeling "touch starved" or needing to takes breaks from our accounts - only at 15!

The only addition I'd make to this is that I think wireless headphones/earbuds are probably making things worse. You don't even have to actually open or touch your phone to be constantly plugged in. You hear every notification and can have a constant stream of audio content (podcasts, streamers, etc.). So much so that probably a solid 40-60% of people I know my age fall.asleep with their earbuds in listening to something. They feel really understimulated, stressed, or anxious when they don't have some kind of audio content playing, especially content with human voices. Not inherently harmless, but it's a pretty major barrier to feeling truly connected to the world.

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I suspect that increasing secularization plays a role as well. Unfortunately, the US has long relied on religion for it's community interaction and to hold ppl together. We don't have anything like the British pub tradition.

I'm sure that phones are a big factor but to fix this we need to find something to replace the role religion used to play in us life. I don't know what it can be.

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I think the world is changing and that's alright. This has both positive and negative consequences. We must take into account the fact that there are many people who use this or that situation for their personal benefit (COVID for example). The speed of development is also gaining momentum, and there will be even more negative and larger-scale consequences. We can only keep up with the development of this world. The use of various AI for work in different aspects of life personally seems very convenient and makes life easier, but the amount of potential negative consequences it will bring for the whole world (the first thing that immediately comes to mind is unemployment and at least 20% of the population around the world losing their jobs soon)

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"TV was despised by whole generations of educated Americans — an “idiot box” that would shorten your attention span and rot your brain."

To be a Luddite for a second: Weren't they right? TV became very popular and now the average American spends several hours a day watching over-the-air, cable, or streaming TV. The world obviously didn't end, but that's time you can't spend being with your friends, being active in any kind of community, club, political group, whatever, and it's coincided with a general fraying of the social fabric. ("Bowling alone" and all that.)

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Comparison is the thief of joy.

I also feel that Matt Y is biased. I find the messaging I hear from the Republican Party is much more angry and negative. From wanting a national divorce to carnage, the Red State use of government to punish those that don't fall in line with them, crime and the war on whatever they deem "woke." It seems like they want to roll back the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment to freedom of expression. Whereas the Left (or today's Democrats) are focused on positive changes to deal with climate change, bringing back good paying jobs and the "let's work together" message we get from the President... well, I guess I probably have a bias as well.

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I am not an expert on neuroscience but in my opinion, two reasons are responsible for this trend and can be chosen as a basis for the study to prove the link between unhappiness and smartphones(but mainly I would suggest social media as I don't find smartphones problematic here).

1. Quick access to dopamine: this could be the main reason behind unhappiness. Compared to the previous generation, we now can access these hormonal thrills easily that were hard to get previously. Social media allows our brains to access dopamine quickly without having to work hard. A short action or habit is so fulfilling for it that it doesn't bother about the bigger goals in life that actually make our lives fulfilling and happy. After a cycle of this habit, we find our lives not going anywhere and we feel sad about it.

2. The way we borrow desires: Humans always try to imagine their lives with the kind of information they consume. We borrow desires from others. Someone who never heard of or seen iPhones or smartphones won't desire them until this information reaches their brain. Desiring doesn't need to be compared with an individual's ability to afford it. We borrow desires from others, we imagine the lives other people are living and we tend to compare our lives to theirs. Social media has overexposed us to the standard of living, success, beauty, and money on multiple levels. We are constantly bombarded and confronted with individuals who are living a life far better than we can ever have. This allows us to blame everything in our lives. We start to see all the negatives in our lives and go into depressive mode. This is the main reason behind teen unhappiness because teenagers have always lacked the logical ability and rationality to figure out how the world works. This trend was absent previously.

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So, I guess a study should be conducted on these points maybe, the way we borrow desires and our inability to keep aside our short-term happiness for long-term glory. To be honest, my life improved significantly when I stopped watching the news and broadcasting on social media. I only use social media for business purposes and it has brought me some money and satisfaction too. The thing that has always been wrong with people is their inability to understand how to use new technologies. Apart from that, social media recommendation engines are also the real culprits in spreading hate, creating polarization, and shaping worldviews. Maybe governments can regulate these companies' algorithms to shape the information environment, especially for teenage groups. Individuals can also optimize their feeds by interacting with positive posts like cats, dogs or memes, etc but we don't do that. Maybe we are intrinsically inclined towards negativity.

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At the beginning of the article, you dismiss the effect of doomerism by pointing at your earlier article which shows that things are going well. But I think this misses the point -- people get depressed, not necessarily because the world is an objectively worse place to live, especially when many of these issues don't directly affect them in a day-to-day basis, but because it is _perceived_ as a worse place to live -- which in turn matches Yglesias' point mentioned later.

(As a progressive, I wouldn't consider "progressives have a more negative outlook on the world than conservatives" to be a remotely controversial statement -- it's inherently what causes the desire for change that defines the political position)

It's the phones -- but more specifically, it's what we read in the phones, and it's the lack of meaningful societal alternatives to being glued to our devices all day. Glowing screens are not inherently evil. The issue is with what those glowing screens put in our brain, their addictive nature, and the loss of all the things we would do if we weren't staying at screens all day.

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I'm pretty far from a teenager at this point, but I'm inclined to agree that smartphones are a problematic technology. I deleted my Twitter account a few months back when I got tired of Elon Musk's constant mental diarrhea soiling my timeline, and I barely use Facebook or Instagram these days. As a consequence, I'm on my phone much less, and when I am it's for things that edify like language study or things I genuinely enjoy like playing vintage video games. I have consequentially noticed myself being both happier and more productive.

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I just visited a kibbutz in Israel today which was founded around WWI. Our tour guide told us that it was founded around communal activities but once everyone had a TV they stayed home and watched it rather than interacting with their fellow kibbutzniks.

My grandparents lived in a small Southern town. I remember visiting them and sitting on the front porch on hot summer evenings drinking iced tea or lemonade. Neighbors out for a walk would stop by and chat. Air conditioning did away with that ritual.

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I always find it a bit unnerving when articles about mental health of our youth ignore 50% of the people who make up that population. Why not try to focus on both sexes?

Our boys are arguably doing much worse when it comes to serious mental health issues: Suicide is still 3-4 times more common among young men than young women. Why is so little attention paid to this disturbing fact when it comes to adolescent mental health?

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I wonder if there's a connection between smartphones and the explosion of wokeness that started around 2011/2012 (as evidenced by n-gram counts in newspapers and books). It seems often the case that this stuff is more driven by women than men, and it's so clearly oriented around signaling and trying to collect likes of various kinds that 'virtue signaling' is the insult given to that behavior. Many people who underestimated wokeness express surprise at how just a handful of tweets seem able to bring giant corporations to their knees, far out of proportion to the number of people who really care. It all feels very connected.

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Completely anecdotal, but I quit Twitter two weeks ago and I'm already significantly better off mentally. I still use my phone to procrastinate, but it's now a combo of games and actually reading all the substack newsletters in my inbox. I sometimes go for days without despairing at some random stranger's stupidity.

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What about the fact that teens have to regularly think about how they could die at school, or their Gen X parents may be parenting in a style very different from boomers? The pressure to succeed feels more pronounced in these later generations. I think it's a huge consideration.

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The obvious regulation is to forbid phones in public schools. Period.

This is such low hanging fruit.

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I noticed a big drop in my social media use, and an increase in my "useful time", when I switched from Twitter to Mastodon because of you-know-who buying it and losing his mind. That left me on none of the commercial social media platforms. (I have never been active on any of the others like Facebook or Instagram for a variety of reasons. ) I'm still concerned about politics but it's not an everyday thing anymore. It is really noticeable how much freer I feel when I'm not paying attention to something trying to hook me in.

So I don't think it's entirely the phones per se. I think much, perhaps of the problem is the manipulative algorithms. Mastodon is still very much social media and I've still got my phone 24/7, but I'm experiencing a lot less of the negatives. On those occasions I log into Twitter I really notice how it's trying to rile me up and hook me in. I don't miss it.

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