Not to be pedantic, but smoking is actually the new smoking. Its just now being normalized through weed (which is rationalized as healthy or cool) and vaping (which is seen as less harmful than smoking cigarettes). The sheer number of smoke shops has exploded.

Many, many people point this out but most of them don't seem to have much insight beyond the symptoms.

I've thought about the apparent paradox that I keep distracting myself with a phone/computer while also not getting any fulfillment out of it. Right now I think it is about self-loathing and hating my own company. I hated being undistracted since that meant more attention for my thoughts. Those nagging, awful thoughts.

I've also had some experience with meditation. I was never succesful. But I did manage to have the mini-insight that I am not my thoughts. So I didn't pick up meditation again but I did try to carve out some 10 minutes here and there where I just sat with myself, focused on the moment, and didn't look at my phone. I used to get super-annoyed at myself when I did this because my mind would always start to wander. But that mini-insight might have actually had some lasting effect, since now I was able to not get annoyed when I noticed myself -- um, I mean my thoughts -- just blahblahblahing. Because chatty mind is fine as long as you can observe it with detachment. At least at my level.

I don't know if it did anything, but it has correlated with a change in attitude towards these distractions. I now have better impulse control, am more optimistic, have more initiative, less irritable. And I have a better attitude and partial control over those nagging thoughts—I can either let them play out in the background or pivot them. Sometime. Total mastery of the chatty mind is a long ways off.

So how do I resolve this paradox? Before I hated myself and my mind—which I identified with myself—so much that I instantly reached for distractions whenever nothing was happening. Was past me an idiot for doing that? No. He simply didn't know any better; he was knee-deep in the ramblings of the chatty mind, either reacting to it or arguing with it.

Writing periods like this down feels like I am a leaving a note to my future, possibly confused self. From my now-lucid self.

If you like this article, I would suggest reading these too:

I Don’t Want to Be an Internet Person: https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/11/04/i-dont-want-to-be-an...

The Internet is Made of Demons: https://www.damagemag.com/2022/04/21/the-internet-is-made-of...

When traveling, I carry a dumb phone, specifically a Nokia feature phone that doesn't even connect to The Internet. The only distraction on it is the Tetris app which kills time waiting for the bus, or waiting to be seen by a doctor, etc

I dedicate a small window of time (1 hour at most) to social media, and trained all my feeds to be high signal, so I come out of scrolling educated and informed.

I don't engage in phubbing[0] which is a portmanteau of 'phone snubbing'.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phubbing

I miss smoking (well, not really; I'm not a smoker). But all the rituals around it were very important for modulating the cadence and even nature of conversation, offering shared rituals, give-and-take, and, by convention, forced but acceptable pauses.

All true. It’s not free of government involvement however... Notable is the mention of TikTok, which supplies CCP-curated content that differs by country.

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/tiktok-in-china-versus-the-uni...

I mean he's right. At some point if we're just robots playing candy crush or watching tiktok after tiktok - what's the real downside of just matrixing our society. I mean yes there are people that still skateboard or ski or hike, but if the population that finds meaning in activities disappears in the next 100 years, there's no reason to have physical anything. Might as well call it or fight back.

A new-to-me term I learned recently which I feel quite nicely relates to this post is Consumer neuroscience.

Wikipedia clinically describes the field as "The goal of the field is to find neural explanations for consumer behaviors in individuals both with or without disease." Personally I have a less favourable description of it. How to make people addicted to your product, and spend more money than they should.

> This extends to video games, usually of the free-to-play type.

Free games are mostly hot garbage, with a couple of rare exceptions. Many of these are also pay-to-win games which strike me as the most preposterous use of time imaginable.

I've never smoked but I used to date someone who did.

Part of what makes it so addictive is that it's a social activity. With smoking having been marginalized to zones ever further away from buildings - for example, not even on hospital grounds any more, never mind the buildings - the smoker areas tend to be little social hubs. Quit, and you lose that cameraderie. You can get over the nicotine dependency in less than one (unpleasant) week but what is harder to quit is the ritual.

If you don't count the smartphone interaction itself as cameraderie, then the problem with these things is actually the opposite! Instead of marginalized people engaging in real social interaction, you now have social interaction banished e.g. even from restaurant tables as everyone is busy with their little addicto-gadget.

I’m reminded of the moral panic my parents generation had around televisions.

And their parents generation had over serialized plays on the radio.

And several generations removed, the panic over the printing press.

Tangent, but I never understood the cargo-cult anti-smoking culture in the US; it was a perfect reflection of their media hypnotization. The people that would do a thousand different rebellious, risky, or damaging stuff would recoil in horror if you ask if they ever had a cigarette, as if one puff will char and shrivel your lungs or something.

Something that’s helped in a “high leverage” way is interrupting the impulse to open an app that takes me into glazed eyes territory, or “licking the phone” as I describe it to my kids. :)

None of the kids actually want to waste time on social media… but we all still struggle with it. I ran across an (iOS) app that they've come to accept and even appreciate. Rather than blocking apps completely, it adds a pause of maybe 8 seconds; enough time to take a breath and maybe your higher self gets a word in edgewise. It’s free (though I think you pay for more apps) and it’s called “One Sec”. Installing it requires a few steps, but I found myself opening Youtube much less so the next day was “ok kids, bring me your phone.”

The funny thing is in our recent thread about stuff you've built that you regret, only one FB employee admitted so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33676995

Social media and its consequences (adtech) have been a disaster for the human race. We're still largely oblivious to it though, and mostly see the benefits. Similar to smoking and before that, fossil fuels, we just see it as something that improves our lives at little cost. In 50 years we will wonder how we were so naive.

Surprised not to see Cal Newport's "Digital Minimalism" on the list - though the author may just not know about it.

I finished the audiobook yesterday, and highly recommend it. When framed against the active, intentional social media strategies suggested in the book, the argument that "normal, every-day" social media usage is just like smoking becomes very persuasive.

EDIT: Also recommend "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman. It's about television, but every salient point applies directly to modern social media as well.

In the past, if you wanted to smoke, you’d have to take out a cigarette and light it. There was a physical barrier to you smoking, and you were aware of the act of smoking. Nowadays, it’s so much easier to smoke: you just pull out your phone and have a cigarette. The problem is that you don’t realize you’re smoking. You don’t realize the time you’re wasting by looking at your phone. When you’re scrolling through social media, you’re not aware of the time you’re wasting. You’re not aware of the mental health damage you’re doing.

I’ve been spending too much time on my phone and it’s been affecting my mental health. The more I use social media, the more I get sucked into the algorithm and the more I get depressed. Social media is designed to keep you hooked, and it’s been affecting my mental health. That is why I’m quitting social media. I’m not saying you should never use social media, but be aware of how much time you spend on it and whether it’s really worth your time. If you’re not careful, social media will take over your life.

The way social media platforms were designed is a big part of the problem. I’ve been on social media for a long time and I’ve seen how social media has changed in the past few years. Social media used to be fun, but now it’s a lot more serious. It’s become a place where people are constantly arguing with each other and it’s become stressful.

The way social media companies have changed their algorithms is the main reason why social media has become so toxic. The new algorithms reward you for posting controversial things that get a lot of engagement. The more engagement you get, the more the algorithms will show you content that’s similar to yours. That’s why people are constantly posting things that are controversial and the algorithms keep showing you more of the same. It’s a vicious cycle.

Social media companies are using the same techniques that casinos use to keep people hooked on gambling. They’re using the same techniques that slot machines use to keep people hooked on gambling.

Every time you open your phone, you are opening a slot machine. You don’t know what you’re going to get. You could get a like, a comment, a message, or nothing at all. That’s what keeps you hooked. The more we understand how these products are designed to keep us hooked, the better we can manage our own use of them.

(gpt-3 on the same topic as the OP)

Same feeling. Mostly when I see that I unlock my phone two hundred times in last 24 hours. The habit to must have been somehow occupied is just toxic.

This resonates with me for some things, but there are two very unrelatable parts.

I play video games with acquaintances and friends who I've known for years. They're fulfilling in the same way a zoom chat or phone call is, and they're much better than watching alone. Video games aren't a substitute for in-person contact, but what is? Some of the malaise from games seems to come from the ephemeral nature of matchmaking, where you're not playing with or against people you know and there's no community, but this is a solvable problem.

When I'm head-down on a train staring at my phone, I'm either messaging the people I'm about to meet up with, or I'm reading a book. Conor's problem seems as much aesthetic as behavioural: he doesn't like the cold sterile white rectangle, but at a guess he'd be happier if I was holding a warm off-yellow-beige paper slab and turning the pages.

The real question for me is how do we fix it? Both at the societal level but especially at the personal level for me I’ve been aware of this habit but unable to kick it for years now.

> ’m starting to believe a lot of the technology we engage with on a daily basis is doing us more harm than good

Who is "us" here? The users of the technology? Absolutely, it's terrible for your mental health. Or so you mean the owners of the technology who deploy it? In which case it's great, it super profitable and barely regulated.

But I expect you mean society as a whole where we have to integrate the above. Good question.

"When each round of League of Legends or Warzone finishes, I’m just left wondering what the hell the point in all that was and feeling very unsatisfied in a similar way one feels after eating fast food."

I don't think free to play has anything to do with it. People used to say that World of Warcraft was way too addictive and that's pay to play.

Self-promo: I recently wrote a book critiquing gamification of this kind, examining it across health and fitness and lifestyle apps, video games, workplaces, finance, and more. It’s called You’ve Been Played and you can find a bunch of excerpts and reviews and discussions here: https://www.metafilter.com/197065/Youve-Been-Played

I think I have a unique perspective on the topic as CEO of a games company (Six to Start), designer of a fitness game with 10 million players (Zombies, Run!), and being a former neuroscientist.

This feels like a long form rant that anybody with a modicum of self reflection already had concluded on an individual basis.

This is why China released comprehensive regulations governing algorithms that are aimed at companies which use dark patterns and ranked newsfeeds to fuel addiction and also exploit hourly workers, like delivery drivers, whose livelihood is determined entirely by an app. Interesting that they are ahead on this problem, of all things.

I quit looking at Facebook/etc and Twitter in 2016. I still smoke.

it won’t be the “new smoking “ until it’s stigmatized and taxed out of existence

For me I can’t even say I’m using it to escape negative thoughts, it’s just a compulsion. I pull my phone out and scroll when I pee. Yep, apparently I can’t even have 1 minute of downtime without my hand automatically reaching for my pocket.

> I did try to carve out some 10 minutes here and there where I just sat with myself, focused on the moment, and didn't look at my phone

You say you didn't pick up meditation again but what you describe sounds like meditation to me :p

The meditation guide I use always assumes that my mind will be wondering off and gently reminds me to come back to focus, just like you've been doing by yourself!

How is killing time on Tetris on Nokia any different than Candy crush or browsing hackernews on iPhone?

At least with iPhone I can load up hundreds of ebooks to read and choose how I spend my time.

Serious question and not snarky (despite appearances): How come you comment on HN? It looks like it falls in addictive experiences, albeit maybe necessary to keep on top of IT news. If the theory of “quitting” was right, we wouldn’t see anyone commenting about quitting while still online. I’m asking because I wonder how to keep on top of things / what part should news-reading take in my less-dopamine life.

That's interesting because it does seem like despite how unhealthy it is, it was very much a social activity. And I think the indoor smoking bans only reinforced that social ritual as smokers were forced to gather outside bars and restaurant to smoke. "Do you have a light" has probably been one of the biggest conversation starters in history. What I see now is mostly people having a cigarette in one hand and the smart phone in the other. The chatting with fellow smokers seems to have been replaced by scrolling. A smoke break used to literally be taking a break from whatever it was you were doing. Now it looks like more of an opportunity to satisfy two addictions at the same time. It seems kind of depressing.

Lots of people use coffee (cafe culture) for that here in Australia, which has the benefit of actually slightly reducing all-cause mortality.

I pop out at least once a day for a coffee break away from our work building, often with a coworker or two. I try to basically never get a takeaway, it’s so much better to pause and have a real worm break sitting at the cafe.

Someone's gotta invent a cigarette that's actually good for your health!

(Oddly enough this might actually work. My understanding is that nicotine is not actually that unhealthy; it's mostly the other stuff in cigarette's that's bad for you. Additionally, based on an old coworker of mine who quite smoking successfully, a big part of the addiction is just having something to put in your mouth.)

Interesting point, re the pauses to take a drag on a cigarette. The only thing I can think of like that now in a workplace or chance social encounter is taking a drink of water or coffee, but I suppose it hasn't really replaced smoking. Maybe carrying a small water flask to give ourselves moments to pause meaningfully in a conversation!

Digital and real world hobbies are not mutually exclusive. If you have an outdoor hobby, you've probably noticed it being busier than ever over the last few years. Hiking trails, beaches, surf breaks, running paths, etc have all been the busier than they ever were before COVID. People may be spending more time than ever online, but people are also spending lots of time in nature.

I recently read How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. In it she advocates we "wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm". Chapter 4 in particular covers being outdoors, in physical public spaces.

Not disagreeing with you, but what determines that skiing or hiking is more 'valuable' or more worthy of spending time on than candy crush or tiktok?

I'd imagine there's a lot less motivation to build new physical recreation spaces like skateboards etc if almost everyone is starting at a screen every waking minute.

I think this is a somewhat self-manifested societal dichotomy requiring debate. One route leads to, as you say, a "matrix" society, which may or may not be a good thing. But we as humans need to make the decision if it's correct, because ultimately the humans profiting from the setup will end up irrelevant, and I don't think that's understood (ironic).

The people who spend all day sitting and staring at screens will end up with lower reproductive fitness due to obesity, weakness, and various endocrine system disorders. So over a long enough time scale, evolution will sort us out.

BJ Fogg [1] is someone who could have contributed to our recent "Things you built and regret" thread. His "Persuasive Computers" paper gets blamed (for example by Tristan Harris) for the explosion of attention economics. That's perhaps unfair as his Tiny Habits work seemed geared toward wellbeing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._J._Fogg

Having worked in related industries, I've always referred to this as the "dopamine / reward loop" (I think this is fairly well accepted?). Some people are predisposed to hardcore exploitation (e.g. gambling addicts), but from what I understand, and generally speaking, we're all capable of falling victim to some degree (we're all susceptible to some level of superfluous dopamine response). Not helping, industry shaping our society to modulate where the average falls on this spectrum. A normal child having a cellphone is very similar to a normal child taking amphetamines, both yielding unnatural amounts of dopamine. Both can very well cause ADD-like symptoms after being taken away. There's also a parallel here to sugar and Type 2 diabetes, and other disorders.

I think there may be a balance, but whatever is happening today is totally exploitative and should be regulated in some way, at least up until a certain age.

If there is one thing that I took from my marketing classes, it is that marketing basically starts with trying to understand people as they actually are. You cannot sell stuff well if you do not understand how people work. For example, as annoyed as I was to discover it, it is genuinely hard to argue with Patzer's looks[1] and how perception can alter my disposition towards buying something.

I genuinely hate the ads-tech, ad-ridden web, and ads in general, but I cannot help but to admire it for starting from a very simple 'this is how things really are'.

[1]https://gordonpatzer.com/

You may also find this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captology

I bought all my kids their own 3DS' long ago.

the other added benefit is no "micro-transactions" or other ways of "monetizing the user".

With the 3DS you pay for the game upfront, and for the most part that is the end of things.

Was there actually a moral panic about TV in general? There was one about TV violence specifically. The general concerns about TV like reduced physical activity are still a concern and aren’t imaginary.

Early usage of TVs consisted in living the tv set turned on constantly, which in the hindsight was insane. With time, we learned to « master » the technology that was put in our hands. Much along the lines of what this article points out.

If the current attention economy was merely a linear, or even quadratic, step from TV, that would be one thing. We are seeing, however, an exponential increase in the scale, scope, and methods of persuasion. In the same way computers made mathematical calculation not just faster, but completely different, so too persuasive computing makes risks to society completely different.

See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (book: <https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/printing-press-as-an-ag...>) and the similarly titled article (<http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877720>).

The printing press (~1440), and subsequently cheap pulp-based paper (despite its rapid decay due to high-acid content), and increasingly-capable powered presses, and greatly-expanded literacy (19th century) did revolutionise the world, splitting the Christian faith, launching first the 100 Years War then the Long 19th Century (1789--1914 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_nineteenth_century), including the Revolutions of 1848 in which over 50 nations saw some form of political ferment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848).

Radio played a huge role in the rise of fascism in Italy (Mussolini), Germany (Hitler), and the US (Father Coughlan, McCarthyism). Television revolutionised US politics, particularly at the presidential level (Kennedy-Nixon debates), as did cable television, talk radio, and the nascent Internet.

In The Matrix (1990), John S. Quartermann's introduction details the influence of then-nascent computer and fax networks on the Tienanmen Square protests in China. Even early in the 1990s, the role of Usenet and BBSes in conflicts in Yugoslavia and Turkey was noted (see especially Serdar Argic: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic>).

McLuhan (who influenced Eisenstein), Harold Innis (who influenced McLuhan), Neil Postman (another McLuhan protege) Edward S. Herman, Jerry Mander, Noam Chomsky, Robert W. McChesney, Andrew Shapiro, and many others have made similar observations (bibliography here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...).

If you change how information flows through a system, you change that system. This applies directly to media and its influence on culture, politics, business, and more.

The reason that the fears seem so quaint is because we live in the landscape that emerged. We are the consequence. The Time Before seems so difficult to conceive of and understand because it was all but entirely supersceded.

We face a similar situation in all likelihood with further algorithmic-driven media and GD ML AI ourselves.

Fuck this got me.

I thought it was a rather vapid comment but it just slid right past my relevance filter, easily ignored in a stream of people sharing their opinions as a weak form of anecdata.

Until that last footnote. And the dawning realization that this is my opinion of 98%+ of comments and yet I read them anyway.

And even here now as I respond with yet more drivel and unsolicited anecdotal opinion vaguely attempting to contribute to an already obsolete comment thread. I question everything.

Nice. Nitpick but the writing sounded off to me. Too much use of the word "social media" where a person would have used "it" or some other language construct.