The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I don't share what seem to be your firm beliefs here. I think the jury, so to speak, is still out on the effects of smartphones on attention spans or the brain generally. I think it's going to take a longer time than we've had to know. No matter how thrilling and convenient they become.
I was filling out the ACX survey the other day and I ticked the boxes to indicate "I didn't have the internet growing up." I was in my mid-thirties when I got my first smartphone. I have read your views elsewhere that the good old days weren't so good, and perhaps from the perspective of current comfort that has a certain ring of truth ("They had no refrigeration or antibiotics or even sanitation, etc etc") but I also believe you personally are rather an extremist when it comes to modernism (I use that word idiosyncratically {my phone is telling me that is not a word} to mean something like futurism and a love for technology). I could be reading you wrong, of course. (That's probably a pun.)
I sometimes long for the idle days of youth, not so much for me because I have memories. But that my boys don't have this. Ranging up and down pecan groves with the shells crackling under my sneakers, just wandering in the woods looking for arrowheads or sitting still up in a tree hoping to see wildlife. I'm sure this sounds maudlin (it does even to me as I type it) but my teenagers might well never have these experiences of stillness and just observing the world. Of course you may counter "What's stopping them?" and you'd be right on the surface, but I often ask them on weekends if they'd like to go for a walk with me (we live in a very walkable, pretty interesting area near a massive forested park) but the tune of their electronics (YouTube, whatever's on Prime, their PS5) is inevitably far more attractive. Just teens being teens? I'm sure that's part of it; that certainly must be part of it. And of course old man's gonna old man.
I feel the same about drugs like Ozempic in that their long-term effects are not yet known. One always pays the piper eventually, at least in my experience.
Neither did I. My parents were luddites about things like giving their kids phones or internet access, I was probably past 16 when I first got a decent smartphone and a broadband connection. It's too long ago for me to resent them for it, but it was a stupid decision then and remains that way.
So I certainly am not so young that I don't remember a time when television and books were your best bet for entertainment, I happen to remember being rather dissatisfied with that state of affairs, and even more when it was artificially prolonged. I certainly didn't enjoy nature much at that time, but maybe it's all the mosquitoes that sour me on them.
As you correctly state, I think modernity is the best things have ever been, though I can happily acknowledge that people can have different tastes and there are certainly normal people who still pine for the uh, pines, and love being outdoors and on the trail. It just isn't my cup of caffeinated beverage. The majority of people do have that option, like your kids, and find other things more attractive. I understand that can be painful for you, given how dear that experience is to your own heart.
This kind of belief always confuses me. Many people seem to have an adversarial relationship with the universe, as if there's some ironclad law of Equivalent Exchange, and that because a simple pill has had so many positive benefits, there must be a catch somewhere, maybe it causes brain tumors fifty years down the line or something.
Thankfully, that isn't how things work. Semaglutide/Ozempic was known to be safe when it was first approved for diabetes a good while back. Then said diabetics began to lose an incredible amount of weight. Some drugs for diabetes cause weight loss, but not nearly as much, some even cause weight gain. This was so surprising they looked into it further and then were so blown away they decided to apply to the FDA for another trial to treat just obesity alone.
And then, after it was approved for that purpose, doctors noticed it was suddenly curing alcoholism and gambling addictions. It's basically an anti-superstimulus drug to a degree.
It is also extremely safe, the only negative consequence of note is occasional constipation in some people, and loss of muscle with the fat, which is a common issue for any treatment that causes rapid weight loss, be it gastric bypass surgery or fasting. The benefits still outweigh the risk enormously.
Your suspicion is highly unwarranted, all the more because other people with the same kind of suspicion have done their best to find something horribly wrong with it and failed to turn anything up.
The universe is apathetic, not evil. We can occasionally find ourselves a good thing, ozempic seems to be one of them.
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