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Notes -
Realized I have so many thoughts on this that I can't really condense them to a mere comment.
I think superstimuli are a frightening problem for raising kids because there's now far more 'irretrievable' pitfalls a young person can fall into during their developmental stages that may screw up the rest of their lives. Getting into hard drugs, falling into a porn addiction, or gambling all your spare funds away (and then the rest of your funds) in a fit of passion because there's almost no friction in the system to slow you down from making that life-altering choice.
Kids don't even get the chance to develop higher reasoning/self control before they're getting pwned by egregores that are built specifically to suck them in and extract resources. And thus they think this is just 'normal' and don't even notice the alternate path they could have taken.
Likewise, I think that removing too much hardship from children's development is having the effect of leaving them completely unprepared for regulating their own behavior because they don't get the feedback loop of making bad decisions => suffer painful consequences => adjust behavior and learn to avoid the things that burned them in the future.
So simultaneously kids are being spit out into a world that is aggressively attempting to get them addicted to products and services that are not necessarily healthy for them, and the kids are unable to exercise their agency to forgo pleasure or accept temporary pain to get themselves onto a better path.
And this model seems to be reflected in the current path of civilization, as well.
How do you rip a whole population away from a stimulus that it has become psychologically dependent upon?
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