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Its funny, I'm an elder millennial, so I can remember a childhood without phones (and, barely, one without computers or internet), so I actually balk from blaming 'the phones' in the abstract. I was able to adapt from the old nokias to the slick flipphones to several different form factors for 'smartphones' and I think this gave me a practical view of the phone as a tool for organizing IRL activities and keeping in touch with distant friends. That's what we used it for originally.
BUT, I work with 20-21 year old Zoomers, and holy COW they treat their phones like an inseparable appendage, and you can catch them doomscrolling constantly. I can SEE that growing up with this influence leads to a qualitatively different relationship to/dependence on the gadget, which could be source of the other observable problems. Oh, and now they're used to having a semi-reliable AI assistant in their pocket at all times, so now they can use this machine to do a lot of their literal thinking.
And now there's been a couple decades of engineering and testing to optimize the apps for taking your money and sucking up your attention and otherwise making you dependent on various digital services that we previously lived without.
Tiktok being banned won't solve much, there are 50 other apps ready to jump in and replace it, but maybe, just maybe someone will produce reliable research to measure the impact of these apps and finally get towards some policy proposals aimed at cutting out the most harmful elements while retaining the benefits. I can dream, right?
Seen this issue a lot. You can't build a community without a core of dedicated people constantly showing up and doing the work to put together events, and that core of people will get frustrated and burn out or give up if there's too much turnover in membership or members are extremely flaky and unreliable. So hard to even get one off the ground.
My martial arts gym, which HAS an extremely dedicated core tries to hold social events every so often, with plenty of advance notice, and it still a crapshoot as to who will show up outside of that core group.
I've spent the past two years holding regular social gatherings at my house, which is cheap, low-pressure, and I can control the environment to 'guarantee' a pleasant experience. Wrangling adults to hang out together is HARD. Some can't find a babysitter, this one's busy with work or school, that one's just tired and wants to go to bed at 9. So you invite people on the assumption that there'll be a number of last minute dropouts.
Everyone has like 15 different commitments going on at any one time, so getting them to TRULY prioritize a commitment to one group over the other is nigh-impossible. And this also seems to have shifted how humans value individual relationships. There's billions of humans you can potential interact with, and if you aren't satisfied with the ones in your circle of friends, discarding them for new ones is easy. Even if you can't find local friends, your phone offers the potential to make 'infinite' friends! Parasocial relationships! You can spend all day chatting with an AI version of Hitler or Tony the Tiger if it strikes your fancy! Why value real-life relationships at all?
This becomes especially stark on the dating apps. Human connection is immensely devalued.
As somebody whose preferred method of making friends is to identify good people and then forge a deep, long-lasting bond with them (my best friend, whom I still talk to regularly, has been in my life since Kindergarden, literally 30 years), this world of ephemeral connections where people flit in and out of your life on a whim is a bit of a waking nightmare.
I can say for myself, I used to attend the soup kitchens, food pantries, and service to shut-in elderly folks to mow their lawns and such. It was fulfilling in its way.
But what I concluded is that this was basically burning up the manhours of competent people to provide modest benefits to people who simply aren't able to produce value on their own. It is literally more efficient to donate money to some professional org that will pay to provide these services than for me to go out and spend hours on a weekend mowing a lawn myself, and I could do something more enjoyable, to boot. I guess I was engaging in prototype effective altruist logic.
But I do think that engaging in activities that constantly expose you to the 'dregs' of humanity, and seeing that no matter how much money and effort is poured into these folks, at best you're basically just raising their standard of living by 2-3% temporarily, not dragging them permanently out of destitution and fixing the problems that put them there. If you're not a certain type of person, the futility of it probably burns you out. I even tried volunteering at a dog shelter, but that burned me out EVEN QUICKER because holy cow the problem of stray and abandoned dogs is intractable, and there will never be enough funds to shelter all those poor animals, just the few that we can locate, rehabilitate, and get adopted. Volunteering your time for such a sisysphean endeavor seems irrational unless you honestly do have a deep and abiding love for animals. Which some do.
Now, I'm not denying that engaging in acts of service is enriching, and exposing yourself to that side of humanity probably makes you a better-informed person. But its also easy to do it just for the virtue-signal points.
That might be another part of the equation. Sympathy for strangers seems to be on the wane, and this has pushed us ever deeper into our chosen ingroups, and built up a wall of suspicion against all outsiders who might want to forge a connection with us.
Jonathan Haidt is trying. But he’s getting the entire academy screaming at him for it. There’s certain forces deeply invested in ensuring teens stay addicted to their phones, and to my eyes it appears to be leftists primarily who desire to keep the status quo, who will try to argue you that it’s “alarmist” to be concerned at all about the massive societal rot and atomization occurring all around you. Phone addiction is politics addiction and a massive opportunity for political brainwashing of young impressionable kids. It’s done wonders for their movement. The moment people stop being addicted to their phones is the moment the trans movement and other adjacent movements wither and die. So it’s not just capital set against you - it’s woke capital.
Reasonable hypothesis.
It gels with my general model that scared/anxious citizens are more conformist and easier to sway by simply telling them what to be afraid of and how they can alleviate their anxiety by voting the 'right' way come election time. It failed to produce the desired outcome in 2024 but there are plenty of folks who still think we're about to collapse into a fascist dictatorship.
Phone use and anxiety and similar disorders is very strongly correlated in the research, so that's one way to 'produce' your loyal voters.
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For about four years now, my thing has been trivia night. It helps that I enjoy it, so I’m almost always there. It’s super low-pressure, and I don’t have to overthink it. Meet a couple at a coffee shop who seem cool? No need to try setting something up, “I’m at the same place the same time every week. If you want to hang out, that’s where I’ll be.” You work through the chaff and start finding a core group of consistent people. Really this is what church was but that's just too much for most people to bite off.
Another key, though, is that if you want to develop a social circle, oneself has to show up when others put on events.
Whoah now buddy, that could turn me into some kind of... extrovert?
More seriously, the type of friends I make tend to be introverted nerds so generally speaking they don't like planning and holding events, so I do most of the heavy lifting there. But when somebody is putting in the effort to coordinate something, be it trivia or just hanging out at a park and tossing a frisbee, I want to recognize that effort and show up for it.
I'll be honest, its a good way to sort high agency people from low agency ones. The sort who actually plan events and put out the word and do the legwork to 'make things happen' are generally high functioning and reliable, which is a signal correlated with other good traits, generally. That is the signal I'm trying to send.
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