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.
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.
So, as a Relatively Old Guy (I'm 38) might I make a couple of suggestions?
-You mention notifications, something that comes up a lot in these kinds of discussions - "you get a notification for every like and comment!" But you can turn notifications off! I don't have very many apps on my phone, but whenever I download one I go through the settings with a fine-tooth comb, turn off notifications, most geolocation functions (unless it's critical to the functioning of the app, and even then there's usually a setting that's like "only use my location when the app is in use") and other data-sharing and privacy stuff. I get notifications - and they're not always push notifications - for text messages, phone calls, and WhatsApp chats. That's it.
-I'm not sure if this is practical for Instagram and TikTok (I don't think I've ever actually seen TikTok the app), but for older social media like Twitter and Facebook I just...never downloaded the app. I access them 95% through my laptop, and on the rare occasions I want to look at them on my phone, I go into the browser and log in.
I imagine you and your friends have already thought through these options so I'm probably just being a curmudgeon or something, but just wanted throw this out there!
Yeah, no, those are definitely good suggestions, and I've implemented many of them myself! I think one addition I might add is that, for the most "online" teenager, turning notifications off can have much higher costs. If, for example, most of your social circle is in a group chat or Discord server, turning off those notifications might mean missing out on a core part of your socializing for the day. Still, I think they're worth implementing, but for the most lonely, online teenager, it's not an easy switch.
I'm almost as ancient as VJV (37), but I can confirm that turning notifications off for Discord has definitely resulted in me missing out on various games with my friends.
Of course, we used to do just fine with settling on a set time when we would get online and be ready for games...but the easy of using Discord seems to have made it more organic and spontaneous.
Assuming you have the app installed and notifications on.
That's what non-push notifications (or whatever they call it when you get the notification that's the little bubble on the upper left-hand corner of the app icon when you open your phone, but you don't get a vibration or whatever) are for! I don't use Discord but my group chats in SMS and WhatsApp all use this setting. I see the notifications frequently enough that I don't meaningfully miss anything, but I'm not distracted by buzzes and/or rings all the time.
I became progressively less "online" in college, so it's been a few years, but a lot of us were aware of it. Among my friend group we discussed how off putting it was to see parents hand toddlers iPads and vowing to never be those parents when we were older. We also tried to turn our online connections into in-person connections when possible because we all knew we were insanely lonely/depressed and our online friendships weren't cutting it.
I think there's a nuance to it though that we either explicitly or implicitly recognized. The people most chronically online self-selected for socially awkward kids who already struggled to make friends offline. Just shutting off the phone or deactivating the account wasn't enough because you didn't just automatically become an engaged/more connected person. We also often sought out online spaces because of some other external factor, so when we did go offline for periods of time we were still stuck with the negative external issue, just with no distraction to make it slightly better. It's why any attempt at going offline was usually pretty temporary unless there was some major life change (in my case, going to college, but for others it was getting jobs or being in relationships).
I grew up in 70s, it was so different. Bored kids roaming around, drinking, harassing were big issue. All we did was hangout, even kids who did sports, parents didn't attend games hardly ever, parents were very hands off and if hung out with right types, could avoid so much bad for mental health stuff. Parents did chide for us to watch less TV and stop playing Pong.
I grew up in the same period. A key thing is that bullying was largely just something during the school day. Leaving school at the end of the day gave a break. and holidays meant it usually disappeared altogether for a week or months at a time. Much better from a juvenile mental health state.
One of our kids was getting bullied mercilessly by classmates when texting on mobile phones was starting to be a thing (@2008-9). Texting in groups meant bullying could go on after school hours etc. We were so concerned about mental health that we switched that child into a different school system for the last few years of high school. We changed the mobile phone number. The bullying stopped instantly and the child is now a successful adult.
I cannot conceive of what it would be like today to be a teen-aged bullying target in this age of social media or how to survive it. There would not be any simple solutions like we had just a decade ago. I think mental health issues are going to continue to grow in teenagers until we figure out a solution. Simultaneous exponential increase of gun access for teenagers and young adults is going to make potential outcomes even worse.
Increased access to deadly drugs is also a major challenge. In the 1970s, high school and university self-medication was largely just alcohol and marijuana. A handful of people had access to cocaine, LSD, or mescaline. I didn't know anybody who thought about doing opiates. Nowadays, some very nasty and dangerous drugs appear to be run-of-the-mill. Even alcohol now has gotten to be much more binged with alcohol poisoning a real danger.
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.
Many Britons also blame the smoking ban for the decline of pubs, but I suspect another factor may have been the increasing use of loud music in pubs. That's an example of enshittification in the offline world, as loud music is good for pubs financially (as it leads to higher alcohol sales) but destroys their utility for socializing.
Yeah Noah and Matt have touched on people trying to replace religion with politics but it seems to just make politics worse rather then give any sense of fulfillment. People love to note that religious institutions have done bad things and aren't perfect but honestly, to me, they still seem better then pseudo religions or abandoning it altogether for loneliness.
It's not a strict either or but the point is there isn't anything else that's going to give people the same sense of community and weekly interaction so taking that away is going to be more lonely.
NFL, MLB, NASCAR, PGA Tour, MMA, WWW, NCAAM football, March Madness, MLS, EPL, LaLiga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Serie 1, Concerts, movie going is being undercut by streaming — as 15-plex theaters are showing 3 movies in five theaters each, not fifteen different movies attracting a wider community of patrons … who needs the risk of a clergyman abusing your child or harassing your spouse and the ensuing guilt from somehow believing you’re at fault for not performing the ritual superstitions precisely so … when you know the kicker missed the last second field goal because you didn’t paint your face correctly.
I wouldn't equate religion with community, but I do think we're living, or we've lived, through the abolition of community and society, in any non-transactional sense of the word.
However, I believe this has more to do with the ever-increasing encroaching of capitalism in our lives and minds, which reflects particularly for this issue in increased suburbanization and car-dependence (which particularly limits young people's options) and reduced access to public services (including those of a religious nature)
That said, neither secularization nor the abolition of society had a big uptick in the early 2010s -- they're both decades-long processes.
This *also* is a decades long trend, but I have long been fascinated with the challenges of maintaining a community and institutions in a migratory civilization. The institutions of my youth that gave a sense of community, from church to the county fair, were made up of people who had lived in the area for generations, and been trained in the rituals of running a fair or a sausage supper since their youth. You participated as a child, and carried on as an adult.
How do you maintain this when many - most? - people move multiple times throughout their life, chasing work, opportunity, and love?
Fascinating. As I was commenting above, to me it's a delight how modern society enables us to escape those burdens of the past. Ugh, the small-town families where people had grudges based on things that happened twenty years ago - I hated rural America.
That's not true for America where people used to move more in the past, as far as I can tell the difference is so much stuff has moved online makes it harder for new members to join the community and older members can't stay in touch as easily.
I was much less happy when I was an ideologue who used socialism as a totalist critique of everything and wrongly saw history as a deathly struggle between overlords and victims. Since embracing critical thinking and skepticism, I’ve found a new freedom. True, I lost a few friends along the way, but I have more friends over all now because I listen and don’t judge.
It's precisely the kids of the suburban people with kids that I'm worried about. Eventually they do grow into young people, and indeed, they usually either move to an urban core or die of a fentanyl overdose.
But even those urban young people are increasingly lonely, too -- not least because they need to uproot their lives, severing their life-long social connections in the process, in order to escape the endless planes of infinite boredom that they were raised in.
As for transactionality, I agree it's not inherently impossible to build community out of transactional relationships, as we've done ever since markets -- except we've now decided it is. Work friends are not real friends, you're not supposed to talk to the cashier who's just trying to get through her job and go home, and so on. We increasingly see the social aspect of a transactional relationship as a burden imposed on ourselves and on those we transact with.
possibly a tangent, but I was thinking about how much this is something I LOVE about modern society. High achievers leave their local communities and cluster in like-minded groups at universities, then exit those schools for the high-opportunity "winner cities" where they meet people through their careers.
It's a beautiful system for untethering our best & brightest from boring parochial concerns and static local social structures, and really brining them into a global point of view.
I'm sure Josh Hawley would want to punch me right now, but I think this is a Great Thing.
This is great for the high achievers, but I have to ask, who is it all for? Do you really think "boring parochial concerns" don't have any importance for the vast majority of people whose interests and opportunities contra Zuckerberg are locally, not globally? And that "static local social structures" are incapable of innovative cultural or economic production?
I'm a native of a "winner city" with grandparents from some of the poorest and most quickly depopulating white sections of the US. I'm grateful for the opportunities they gave me by getting out. I'm glad I'm not chronically unemployed, bored out of my mind, poor, or drug addicted like some of my cousins. I understand my grandparents' bitterness towards the parochial backwardness of their home communities. I also understand my great-uncle's bitterness that my granddad looked down on him for becoming "just a mail carrier" despite the fact they had roughly the same high grades in their rural high school. People have reasons for wanting to stay in and preserve their communities. And speaking as a resident of a "winner city" the new monopoly entrenched here has squeezed out a lot of local culture while bringing a lot of people who aren't particularly happy living here despite the insane salaries they earn.
The best and brightest who end up in these environments frequently end up seduced by the idea that applying the global point of view to markets and getting rich are basically the same thing, and this is bad. Josh Hawley is a dangerous ideologue and none of his ideas are worth implementing, but I'm not sure where your "beautiful system" leads.
I’m a native of a winner city who went to a winner college and then moved to another winner city to start my career. I know sooooo many people from similar backgrounds who are profoundly unhappy. I have a banker friend who started getting ulcers from stress at age 24; two Harvard grad friends who ended up in rehab before 30; several former classmates who dropped out of their winner careers to do things like work on organic farms in exchange for room and board; and myriad friends and acquaintances who are functional alcoholics who use drugs like coke and ketamine and weed on a daily basis (not to mention the rampant abuse of prescription drugs like adderall and xanax, which I myself have participated in). Virtually everyone I know in my winner demographic is on at least one psychiatric medication and expresses either loneliness, a deep dissatisfaction with their life, or both.
All of that to say: I question the idea that the winners are happier than the losers. I question the idea that anything about our current system leads to human happiness. You’re either poor, depressed, isolated and on opioids or meth in rural America, or you’re wealthy, depressed, isolated and on coke or ketamine in the big cities. Doesn’t seem like anybody is really winning here.
I think we could all use stronger social networks, more community spaces that bring people from different walks of life together on a regular basis, and a society that’s less competitive and career-driven.
Some of those concerns get downright philosophical, and may be beyond what I can answer in a comment thread... I'll say, I favor efficiency over culture, so my views might be different from what others choose.
1. Well-implemented, there's a meritocratic aspect to this that lets everyone rise to the best of their abilities.
2. The dynamism of the system can help overcome old "-isms" that have held some people back in static structures. You get out and meet people from different places and realize all kinds of people are awesome.
3. I personally favor higher top tax rates, to reduce incentives to just get rich
4. I personally favor strong social safety nets, which will help bind the winners and losers together. In fact it's great - to get there, the losers have to accept they are losers and need the help of the winners. This has been an annoying sticking point where the losers keep looking for someone to blame rather than asking for help, but I am hopeful it can be overcome. Though if not, I dunno, they just keep losing?
5. There's a lot of free choice going on, which is generally Good. As you say, some people do choose to stay in their communities. As early as sixth grade I can remember talking to a smart friend who already planned to stay behind, while I was already itching to get away from that town.
But some of the deeper questions about why anyone is happy - those are hard to answer. I think more resources and a more dynamic environment increase the options for addressing that challenge though, and I think the current system beats the old one at providing resources and dynamism.
Yes, I think that's great but as an academic there is still limited social opportunities on campuses and the like for adults. Don't get me wrong, I like the same things you like but we also need social activities other than work that bring ppl together (not just places for those who already have a community to hang out).
There are liberal religious communities that are more focused on serving others and building community than dogmatic commitments. Of course, people might still think they are spouting fairy tales every weekend, but at least they are trying to help folks to live more fulfilling lives.
If Jesus were to come back today, the first ones to go to hell would be the so called 'evangelicals' and charlatan preachers who only talk about hate and discrimination!
I agree that the change since 2000 is probably mostly explained by phones. But the fact that we don't have good social structures that allow/encourage in person interaction is a risk factor.
It's like losing your job because your opiate addiction gets out of control. Yes, the proximate cause might be that you hurt your back and got an oxy script but, at the same time, ppl with strong social support structures, friends to hand out w/ etc are way less likely to ruin their lives because they got some pain killers.
US religion has historically been a bonding element within a specific community. There have been times when it has transcended community and done real good (abolitionists, suffragette, civil rights movements all had strong religious Christian cores).
Unfortunately, US Christian institutions are often a mechanism to proliferate anti-Semitism, anti-Islam, anti-LGBTQ hate speech. In turn, other religions are often used as the basis to "other" Christians. Martin Luther King, Jr. is said to have pointed out that 11 am on Sunday is the most segregated hour in America. I don't think that has changed much in religious community in the past 60 years, although it is probably declining overall just because fewer people are attending church in many areas.
As I alluded tk in the original comment European countries have developed other institutions to deal with these issues. The issue isn't being secular or not. It's moving from a society that relied very heavily on religion to one that is much more secular.
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)
Artificial intelligence could potentially have one in five lose their job
The introduction of artificial intelligence will accelerate technological progress, but will also lead to the obsolescence of many professions. Here are some of the jobs most likely to become obsolete due to AI:
1️⃣ Accountants
2️⃣ Bank cashiers:
3️⃣ Telemarketers:
4️⃣ Translators:
5️⃣ Lawyers, insurance agents, underwriters
In the long term, the two most popular professions may also be at risk: drivers and salespeople, a total of 13.5% of employed citizens. The main competitors in the labor market for them may be unmanned vehicles and self-service cash desks. Unlike people, they do not need rest, they do not need to paid for sick leave, vacation and contributions to the pension fund.
The figure of 20% is certainly an assumption, and these professions are the first thing I thought of and of course, someone will be able to adapt to new living conditions, new professions will appear, such as:
-AI and machine learning specialists
- Cyber security specialists
-Artificial intelligence ethics experts
-Robotics engineers
Machines do not have self-awareness, they aren’t capable of understanding what functions they must perform in order to benefit a person, and they do not know how to reproduce. Therefore, people who are able to design, assemble, configure and repair a robot will be in demand for a long time. So the number of robotics engineers will only grow.
Something is fashionable, something is out of fashion, and something is forever ...
It can be assumed that creative professions will remain relevant. There will definitely be those who, regardless of the level of technology development, will prefer human creations to machine content. It’s not just that nowadays you can still find people who cherish live performance and vinyl records when streaming services seem to be everywhere.
Most likely, there will be a division of creativity into AI-created and human-created.
As with all other technologies that improve productivity, there is unlikely to be a 20% reduction in employment. Unemployment is low and doesn’t seem to be increasing, the layoffs in the tech industry are a direct result of over optimistic hiring after the pandemic ended.
"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.)
I think an important distinction is that while smartphones ostensibly enable socializing by connecting people online, watching TV in the pre-smartphone era was most often something you did with friends and family in person. It was much more of a social activity than scrolling on your phone or watching Youtube videos on your iPad in bed. Before streaming and handheld electronic devices it was pretty rare to watch TV alone - you'd have to share the one in the living room with your family or roommates unless you were rich and had a bunch of TVs or you got lucky and had the house to yourself for an evening. I remember being SO excited to start babysitting as a teenager in the early 2000s because it meant I could have unfettered access to my very own TV after the kids went to bed, and that was something I almost never got to experience at home.
Even if you had multiple TVs it was pretty normal to watch together just because you wanted to. You'd talk during commercials and the whole thing was as much a casual social activity as it was screen time. Smartphones just enable people to get sucked into their own individual world even when they're physically sitting right next to one another. They're conversation killers whereas TV could be a conversation starter or a reason to get a group of friends together at the same time every week.
I don't know about you, but I share a lot of the stuff I find online with my friends, sometimes while we're spending time together! Sharing memes, music, and even the occasional article. What you're talking about with TV can still be accomplished with phones, it just looks a little different.
Also, what do you think people said about TVs and "family time" compared to the radio?
I share online content with friends through group chats and stuff but I personally really don't like hanging out with a group of people who are all on separate phones looking for stuff to share with one another. It doesn't feel like people are really present. There are always notifications and social media apps and texts from other people waiting to pull your attention away from the people you're with. To me it's a faux-social activity. I don't have any idea what people said about TVs and family time compared to the radio. TV and radio seem pretty similar to me in that regard.
You might be interested in this: https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/town-without-television-1-notel/. Basically, in the mid 1970s some academics at UBC figured out there was one sizable settlement left in Canada that didn't have TVs for purely accidental reasons and ran a natural experiment on the resulting changes once TV was introduced. I watch TV, and I think there are some TV shows that are great works of art, but the medium has been genuinely awful for the social development of communities wherever it has been introduced.
There is a mistake a lot of people will make that without a specific "detrimental" hobby, people would instead fill that time with productive and healthy activities. I promise you, people were not reading classical literature and having high-minded philosophical discussions before television. Without it, people would fill the time with practically the same garbage, like listening to a radio show that's an adaptation of CSI Miami.
You're right, people definitely weren't reading Great Literature all the time before TV. But the point of this column (and my comment) is that while you don't need highflown intellectual hobbies to be happy, you do need a social life. There are only 24 hours in the day, and the more of them you spend watching TV, the fewer you have for cookouts, meeting your neighbors, visiting family, etc etc.
Now on the current margin, if TV disappeared, would people revert to 19th century patterns of community-building? Lolllll, no, of course not. We're not going back. But I do suspect TV helped cause the changes between then and now.
You're suggesting that people can't find ways to satisfy their social needs, which I just disagree with. People are really good at meeting their immediate needs whatever way is necessary. I don't think TV was all that disruptive to people's abilities to meet those needs because those needs are not as large as people make them out to be. Most people do not need several hours of social interactions a day.
What people need, socially, is a regular place where they feel they belong, are accepted, and are acknowledged. TV doesn't undermine any of that.
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.
I have a feeling the only exposure you get to the right is from left-wing sources. It's called nut picking. I find it annoying that every time I open the Atlantic, MTG, Santos, Gaetz, or some state level wacko is given prominent coverage, and that's when they aren't running near constant Trump coverage.
I live in California, I work for the local government. My city is going to shit, poverty everywhere, parks into homeless camps, and I have been burglarized twice in three years. And rather than pointing this out, I haven't been able to have an honest conversation in close to 5 years with anyone at work about how we're clearly failing. Every time I even inch close it's the same thought terminating clichés thrown at me.
I have been DougAz at The Dispatch for 3 years to understand conservative thinking. David French I like 70%. I disagree with him as I'm Pro Choice as well as I disagree over "Federalism" and the contrived fraudulent veil called "Originalism". I read Jonah Goldberg and the usually arrogant and sometimes bully Kevin Williamson.
I lived in Socal 15 yrs. Recently traveled to LA and Portland and live in Tucson. I see your pain about the homeless. What are the possible actions?
A. Can't deport the homeless because so few are immigrants (illegal, alien...they work get paid live in apartments or houses)
Respectfully, I think that your own biases are showing as well.
As angry as conservatives are about the state of things, they also tend to have (and support) the various 'natural communities' of neighbors, religion, kin, etc.
And, of course, they are less heavily online and thus less poisoned by it.
Whereas progressives generally seem to disdain those 'natural communities' in favor of more shallow and limited online communities.
Obviously there are many exceptions. I am speaking in generalizations.
I just don't see any reason to think this is true? Do conservatives in cities actually have better communities? Progressives don't disdain "natural communities", half of us spend all our time talking about mutual aid groups. We deride the close knit conservative communities that exist because we think that their values are bad, not because we think the concept is bad.
The word tribalism has a negative connotation, but the fact of the matter is that humans have evolved very elaborate coalitional behaviors that are adaptive. You may despise the catholic or evangelical tribe (which is also a tribal behavior), but the people inside those tribes are happy.
Let me expanded a little bit by suggesting that progressives seem to actively deny themselves access to these natural communities, in favor of some more universal replacements.
But the universal-ish replacements just -dont work as well- and so don't provide the same social benefits.
Which contributes to greater reported unhappiness/depression/etc among progressives.
The thoughtful conservative response would probably be that ‘tribalism,’ in the sense of ‘connection with the givenness of one’s concrete surroundings,’ is a natural state of human nature, and that we should try to manage it productively rather than exterminate it. Trying to socially engineer a completely non-tribal society is impossible- you can’t really be devoted to an abstract community like humanity- and the result is simply a society of lonely, miserable, and mentally-ill people.
I made this point on the thread on Matt Y's post, but I think right-wing negativity is:
a) more geared towards older people.
b) not as closely linked with a sort of performative helplessness - and feeling helpless is a big component of depression.
I do think Noah is correct to point out that our Bayesian priors should point pretty strongly towards smartphones being the main culprit here, but I also think Matt Y raised some valid points.
Matt Y is very very wrong. He utterly ignores what I just posted. The drive and rise of conservative hate..hateRadio and HateTV. Rush, Hannity et al making enemies of the Progressive Liberal lefts..
Kids see that adults allow, authenticate, endorse and perform bullying. So it hate and bullying are allowed and encouraged.
He is biased, but you are even more so. Progressives are positive about climate change? They are the ones saying we will be extinct if we don’t eliminate all CO2 in 12 years. Doom. Progressives hate the first amendment more than others and say words are violence. Bringing back good paying jobs? This doesn’t affect teenagers, who if employed mostly have minimum wage jobs which in many places is higher. Biden says “let’s work together “ but calls Republicans ultra-maga and accuses them of cutting social security instead of trying to fix the coming default.
Umm.. the doomer and gloomers are really by intrinsic self definition, conservative. Fear of the future but a bigger fear to do something.
Take Social Security and Medicare. Wailing, whining, crying, doom and gloom for 60 years. Never came. Chicken littles. Fixable by obvious means. Tax the untaxed.
Not a conservative, but Social Security will default unless changes are made. Obvious fix to me is to limit it to poor seniors, but your guys are against that. And the untaxed are right now the 50% of households below median income, which Biden promises to never tax. It’s also not doom and gloom, easy solutions but none that politicians on either side can get behind.
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.
____
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.
That, and what I rememeber from Psychology 101 - operant conditioning says that random rewards are more powerful in shaping behavior than predicted ones. So we keep returning to that source of the original dopamine hit, over and over again, to try to replicate it. Addictive behavior.
I believe this is why the 'Like' buttons are so effective.
Imho, your arguments support Noah's thesis when you combine the two. Getting quick access to dopamine via social media is happening 'quickly' because of near-instantaneous and constant access to media through smartphones.
Early days social media that could only be accessed through a desktop had a different cadence to it. Even FB was chiller and happier before smartphones. People could only get updates on it when sitting in front of a computer. There was also something exciting about getting online to check out your messages and friend requests, and responding to them.
Once smartphones came out, people could share themselves in real-time and all the time. This gave rise to the influencer classes that curated idealistic and materialistic lifestyles with pictures, usually taken with smartphones.
This created a negative feedback loop among people who felt they hadn't risen to that level of wealth and success, and were therefore failing at something
Imo, it took the pandemic to expose the often staged and fake nature of most people's Instagram lives. I think this is why we're seeing new social media concepts like BeReal and Gas taking off; one alerts people randomly during the day to take a selfie and of what they're doing at that moment, and the other promotes complimenting one's peers (or crushes ^_^)
Those seem to be creating positive feedback loops.
This also leads to the other point made: just because smartphones may have had a large hand in causing these issues, it doesn't mean we can't adapt and use them to be a part of the solutions.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I think the explosion of "wokeness" as such was a reaction to birtherism and sudden awareness among white liberals that US society was way, way less post-racial than they'd grown to believe over the 90s and 00s.
Reversing cause and effect, I think. They interpreted it as to do with race because they interpret everything that way. An equally valid way to interpret birtherism is that people who didn't want a left wing president looked for reasons why he might not be legit and ran with them, just like the left looked for reasons Trump wasn't legit after his victory, and just like people looked for reasons Bush wasn't legit after *his* victory and so on. Any reasons would have done, they didn't pick birth certificates because of racism but simply because of what the rules for being a president are.
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.
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.
It would be interesting to see a series of very large, coordinated RCTs where school districts across the country either ban or don’t ban phones in school for a period of time. Say 3 months. And just see what happens. If the bans could actually be enforced, would anyone be surprised if the results showed all kinds of positive effects in those schools?
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.
Sensible and it seems you have simply slowed down your thought and managed to adapt to our current conditions. Things change, all we need do is adapt and not embrace every phantom thought entering our head regardless of its peripheral source.
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.
It's weird that he burned all of this ink and didn't even mention the Google Doc that Haidt's putting together:
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic
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.
So, as a Relatively Old Guy (I'm 38) might I make a couple of suggestions?
-You mention notifications, something that comes up a lot in these kinds of discussions - "you get a notification for every like and comment!" But you can turn notifications off! I don't have very many apps on my phone, but whenever I download one I go through the settings with a fine-tooth comb, turn off notifications, most geolocation functions (unless it's critical to the functioning of the app, and even then there's usually a setting that's like "only use my location when the app is in use") and other data-sharing and privacy stuff. I get notifications - and they're not always push notifications - for text messages, phone calls, and WhatsApp chats. That's it.
-I'm not sure if this is practical for Instagram and TikTok (I don't think I've ever actually seen TikTok the app), but for older social media like Twitter and Facebook I just...never downloaded the app. I access them 95% through my laptop, and on the rare occasions I want to look at them on my phone, I go into the browser and log in.
I imagine you and your friends have already thought through these options so I'm probably just being a curmudgeon or something, but just wanted throw this out there!
Yeah, no, those are definitely good suggestions, and I've implemented many of them myself! I think one addition I might add is that, for the most "online" teenager, turning notifications off can have much higher costs. If, for example, most of your social circle is in a group chat or Discord server, turning off those notifications might mean missing out on a core part of your socializing for the day. Still, I think they're worth implementing, but for the most lonely, online teenager, it's not an easy switch.
I'm almost as ancient as VJV (37), but I can confirm that turning notifications off for Discord has definitely resulted in me missing out on various games with my friends.
Of course, we used to do just fine with settling on a set time when we would get online and be ready for games...but the easy of using Discord seems to have made it more organic and spontaneous.
Assuming you have the app installed and notifications on.
That's what non-push notifications (or whatever they call it when you get the notification that's the little bubble on the upper left-hand corner of the app icon when you open your phone, but you don't get a vibration or whatever) are for! I don't use Discord but my group chats in SMS and WhatsApp all use this setting. I see the notifications frequently enough that I don't meaningfully miss anything, but I'm not distracted by buzzes and/or rings all the time.
From one relatively old guy to another, well said.
Turn Off Notifications. Seriously. Those constant beeps (or whatever) don't let you focus on or get immersed in *anything*.
As I am discovering this morning...
Are you seeing among your peers 1) any recognition of what you describe and 2) any efforts to disconnect from constantly being plugged in?
I became progressively less "online" in college, so it's been a few years, but a lot of us were aware of it. Among my friend group we discussed how off putting it was to see parents hand toddlers iPads and vowing to never be those parents when we were older. We also tried to turn our online connections into in-person connections when possible because we all knew we were insanely lonely/depressed and our online friendships weren't cutting it.
I think there's a nuance to it though that we either explicitly or implicitly recognized. The people most chronically online self-selected for socially awkward kids who already struggled to make friends offline. Just shutting off the phone or deactivating the account wasn't enough because you didn't just automatically become an engaged/more connected person. We also often sought out online spaces because of some other external factor, so when we did go offline for periods of time we were still stuck with the negative external issue, just with no distraction to make it slightly better. It's why any attempt at going offline was usually pretty temporary unless there was some major life change (in my case, going to college, but for others it was getting jobs or being in relationships).
I grew up in 70s, it was so different. Bored kids roaming around, drinking, harassing were big issue. All we did was hangout, even kids who did sports, parents didn't attend games hardly ever, parents were very hands off and if hung out with right types, could avoid so much bad for mental health stuff. Parents did chide for us to watch less TV and stop playing Pong.
I grew up in the same period. A key thing is that bullying was largely just something during the school day. Leaving school at the end of the day gave a break. and holidays meant it usually disappeared altogether for a week or months at a time. Much better from a juvenile mental health state.
One of our kids was getting bullied mercilessly by classmates when texting on mobile phones was starting to be a thing (@2008-9). Texting in groups meant bullying could go on after school hours etc. We were so concerned about mental health that we switched that child into a different school system for the last few years of high school. We changed the mobile phone number. The bullying stopped instantly and the child is now a successful adult.
I cannot conceive of what it would be like today to be a teen-aged bullying target in this age of social media or how to survive it. There would not be any simple solutions like we had just a decade ago. I think mental health issues are going to continue to grow in teenagers until we figure out a solution. Simultaneous exponential increase of gun access for teenagers and young adults is going to make potential outcomes even worse.
Increased access to deadly drugs is also a major challenge. In the 1970s, high school and university self-medication was largely just alcohol and marijuana. A handful of people had access to cocaine, LSD, or mescaline. I didn't know anybody who thought about doing opiates. Nowadays, some very nasty and dangerous drugs appear to be run-of-the-mill. Even alcohol now has gotten to be much more binged with alcohol poisoning a real danger.
i feel for your generation, Elijah 🙏🏼
i'd like to put my recent post (re: digital heroin) on your radar. https://opentochange.substack.com/p/growing-up-before-digital-heroin
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.
Afraid the pub-as-a-community-thing has been declining for decades. Probably in line with religion, visiting people unannounced etc
True enough. I blame the drink driving laws.
Depends where you live I suppose
Many Britons also blame the smoking ban for the decline of pubs, but I suspect another factor may have been the increasing use of loud music in pubs. That's an example of enshittification in the offline world, as loud music is good for pubs financially (as it leads to higher alcohol sales) but destroys their utility for socializing.
Yeah Noah and Matt have touched on people trying to replace religion with politics but it seems to just make politics worse rather then give any sense of fulfillment. People love to note that religious institutions have done bad things and aren't perfect but honestly, to me, they still seem better then pseudo religions or abandoning it altogether for loneliness.
I doubt the only choices are "religion" and "loneliness".
It's not a strict either or but the point is there isn't anything else that's going to give people the same sense of community and weekly interaction so taking that away is going to be more lonely.
I'd just note that "isn't" is not the same as "can't be".
(Not that I necessarily agree that there "isn't")
NFL, MLB, NASCAR, PGA Tour, MMA, WWW, NCAAM football, March Madness, MLS, EPL, LaLiga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Serie 1, Concerts, movie going is being undercut by streaming — as 15-plex theaters are showing 3 movies in five theaters each, not fifteen different movies attracting a wider community of patrons … who needs the risk of a clergyman abusing your child or harassing your spouse and the ensuing guilt from somehow believing you’re at fault for not performing the ritual superstitions precisely so … when you know the kicker missed the last second field goal because you didn’t paint your face correctly.
I wouldn't equate religion with community, but I do think we're living, or we've lived, through the abolition of community and society, in any non-transactional sense of the word.
However, I believe this has more to do with the ever-increasing encroaching of capitalism in our lives and minds, which reflects particularly for this issue in increased suburbanization and car-dependence (which particularly limits young people's options) and reduced access to public services (including those of a religious nature)
That said, neither secularization nor the abolition of society had a big uptick in the early 2010s -- they're both decades-long processes.
This *also* is a decades long trend, but I have long been fascinated with the challenges of maintaining a community and institutions in a migratory civilization. The institutions of my youth that gave a sense of community, from church to the county fair, were made up of people who had lived in the area for generations, and been trained in the rituals of running a fair or a sausage supper since their youth. You participated as a child, and carried on as an adult.
How do you maintain this when many - most? - people move multiple times throughout their life, chasing work, opportunity, and love?
Fascinating. As I was commenting above, to me it's a delight how modern society enables us to escape those burdens of the past. Ugh, the small-town families where people had grudges based on things that happened twenty years ago - I hated rural America.
Ironically a rather parochial point of view
That's not true for America where people used to move more in the past, as far as I can tell the difference is so much stuff has moved online makes it harder for new members to join the community and older members can't stay in touch as easily.
I was much less happy when I was an ideologue who used socialism as a totalist critique of everything and wrongly saw history as a deathly struggle between overlords and victims. Since embracing critical thinking and skepticism, I’ve found a new freedom. True, I lost a few friends along the way, but I have more friends over all now because I listen and don’t judge.
It's precisely the kids of the suburban people with kids that I'm worried about. Eventually they do grow into young people, and indeed, they usually either move to an urban core or die of a fentanyl overdose.
But even those urban young people are increasingly lonely, too -- not least because they need to uproot their lives, severing their life-long social connections in the process, in order to escape the endless planes of infinite boredom that they were raised in.
As for transactionality, I agree it's not inherently impossible to build community out of transactional relationships, as we've done ever since markets -- except we've now decided it is. Work friends are not real friends, you're not supposed to talk to the cashier who's just trying to get through her job and go home, and so on. We increasingly see the social aspect of a transactional relationship as a burden imposed on ourselves and on those we transact with.
possibly a tangent, but I was thinking about how much this is something I LOVE about modern society. High achievers leave their local communities and cluster in like-minded groups at universities, then exit those schools for the high-opportunity "winner cities" where they meet people through their careers.
It's a beautiful system for untethering our best & brightest from boring parochial concerns and static local social structures, and really brining them into a global point of view.
I'm sure Josh Hawley would want to punch me right now, but I think this is a Great Thing.
This is great for the high achievers, but I have to ask, who is it all for? Do you really think "boring parochial concerns" don't have any importance for the vast majority of people whose interests and opportunities contra Zuckerberg are locally, not globally? And that "static local social structures" are incapable of innovative cultural or economic production?
I'm a native of a "winner city" with grandparents from some of the poorest and most quickly depopulating white sections of the US. I'm grateful for the opportunities they gave me by getting out. I'm glad I'm not chronically unemployed, bored out of my mind, poor, or drug addicted like some of my cousins. I understand my grandparents' bitterness towards the parochial backwardness of their home communities. I also understand my great-uncle's bitterness that my granddad looked down on him for becoming "just a mail carrier" despite the fact they had roughly the same high grades in their rural high school. People have reasons for wanting to stay in and preserve their communities. And speaking as a resident of a "winner city" the new monopoly entrenched here has squeezed out a lot of local culture while bringing a lot of people who aren't particularly happy living here despite the insane salaries they earn.
The best and brightest who end up in these environments frequently end up seduced by the idea that applying the global point of view to markets and getting rich are basically the same thing, and this is bad. Josh Hawley is a dangerous ideologue and none of his ideas are worth implementing, but I'm not sure where your "beautiful system" leads.
I’m a native of a winner city who went to a winner college and then moved to another winner city to start my career. I know sooooo many people from similar backgrounds who are profoundly unhappy. I have a banker friend who started getting ulcers from stress at age 24; two Harvard grad friends who ended up in rehab before 30; several former classmates who dropped out of their winner careers to do things like work on organic farms in exchange for room and board; and myriad friends and acquaintances who are functional alcoholics who use drugs like coke and ketamine and weed on a daily basis (not to mention the rampant abuse of prescription drugs like adderall and xanax, which I myself have participated in). Virtually everyone I know in my winner demographic is on at least one psychiatric medication and expresses either loneliness, a deep dissatisfaction with their life, or both.
All of that to say: I question the idea that the winners are happier than the losers. I question the idea that anything about our current system leads to human happiness. You’re either poor, depressed, isolated and on opioids or meth in rural America, or you’re wealthy, depressed, isolated and on coke or ketamine in the big cities. Doesn’t seem like anybody is really winning here.
I think we could all use stronger social networks, more community spaces that bring people from different walks of life together on a regular basis, and a society that’s less competitive and career-driven.
Some of those concerns get downright philosophical, and may be beyond what I can answer in a comment thread... I'll say, I favor efficiency over culture, so my views might be different from what others choose.
1. Well-implemented, there's a meritocratic aspect to this that lets everyone rise to the best of their abilities.
2. The dynamism of the system can help overcome old "-isms" that have held some people back in static structures. You get out and meet people from different places and realize all kinds of people are awesome.
3. I personally favor higher top tax rates, to reduce incentives to just get rich
4. I personally favor strong social safety nets, which will help bind the winners and losers together. In fact it's great - to get there, the losers have to accept they are losers and need the help of the winners. This has been an annoying sticking point where the losers keep looking for someone to blame rather than asking for help, but I am hopeful it can be overcome. Though if not, I dunno, they just keep losing?
5. There's a lot of free choice going on, which is generally Good. As you say, some people do choose to stay in their communities. As early as sixth grade I can remember talking to a smart friend who already planned to stay behind, while I was already itching to get away from that town.
But some of the deeper questions about why anyone is happy - those are hard to answer. I think more resources and a more dynamic environment increase the options for addressing that challenge though, and I think the current system beats the old one at providing resources and dynamism.
Yes, I think that's great but as an academic there is still limited social opportunities on campuses and the like for adults. Don't get me wrong, I like the same things you like but we also need social activities other than work that bring ppl together (not just places for those who already have a community to hang out).
Religion doesn’t appear to be a good answer to me. Just look at what the evangelicals and the Catholics are doing! Reprehensible and repulsive!
There are liberal religious communities that are more focused on serving others and building community than dogmatic commitments. Of course, people might still think they are spouting fairy tales every weekend, but at least they are trying to help folks to live more fulfilling lives.
If Jesus were to come back today, the first ones to go to hell would be the so called 'evangelicals' and charlatan preachers who only talk about hate and discrimination!
Why would it play a role?
Look at the chart. It's flat from 2001 to 2011. Did secularism not increase during that period?
Then it increased dramatically in a 2 year period. Did secularism suddenly change over those 24 months?
Not everything needs to be multicausal.
I agree that the change since 2000 is probably mostly explained by phones. But the fact that we don't have good social structures that allow/encourage in person interaction is a risk factor.
It's like losing your job because your opiate addiction gets out of control. Yes, the proximate cause might be that you hurt your back and got an oxy script but, at the same time, ppl with strong social support structures, friends to hand out w/ etc are way less likely to ruin their lives because they got some pain killers.
US religion has historically been a bonding element within a specific community. There have been times when it has transcended community and done real good (abolitionists, suffragette, civil rights movements all had strong religious Christian cores).
Unfortunately, US Christian institutions are often a mechanism to proliferate anti-Semitism, anti-Islam, anti-LGBTQ hate speech. In turn, other religions are often used as the basis to "other" Christians. Martin Luther King, Jr. is said to have pointed out that 11 am on Sunday is the most segregated hour in America. I don't think that has changed much in religious community in the past 60 years, although it is probably declining overall just because fewer people are attending church in many areas.
As I alluded tk in the original comment European countries have developed other institutions to deal with these issues. The issue isn't being secular or not. It's moving from a society that relied very heavily on religion to one that is much more secular.
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)
To quote Klaus Schwab:
"They can still become robot polishers".
You seem very confident about that 20%. Where does that number come from?
Artificial intelligence could potentially have one in five lose their job
The introduction of artificial intelligence will accelerate technological progress, but will also lead to the obsolescence of many professions. Here are some of the jobs most likely to become obsolete due to AI:
1️⃣ Accountants
2️⃣ Bank cashiers:
3️⃣ Telemarketers:
4️⃣ Translators:
5️⃣ Lawyers, insurance agents, underwriters
In the long term, the two most popular professions may also be at risk: drivers and salespeople, a total of 13.5% of employed citizens. The main competitors in the labor market for them may be unmanned vehicles and self-service cash desks. Unlike people, they do not need rest, they do not need to paid for sick leave, vacation and contributions to the pension fund.
The figure of 20% is certainly an assumption, and these professions are the first thing I thought of and of course, someone will be able to adapt to new living conditions, new professions will appear, such as:
-AI and machine learning specialists
- Cyber security specialists
-Artificial intelligence ethics experts
-Robotics engineers
Machines do not have self-awareness, they aren’t capable of understanding what functions they must perform in order to benefit a person, and they do not know how to reproduce. Therefore, people who are able to design, assemble, configure and repair a robot will be in demand for a long time. So the number of robotics engineers will only grow.
Something is fashionable, something is out of fashion, and something is forever ...
It can be assumed that creative professions will remain relevant. There will definitely be those who, regardless of the level of technology development, will prefer human creations to machine content. It’s not just that nowadays you can still find people who cherish live performance and vinyl records when streaming services seem to be everywhere.
Most likely, there will be a division of creativity into AI-created and human-created.
In short, just a guess, and not netted by new jobs created.
As with all other technologies that improve productivity, there is unlikely to be a 20% reduction in employment. Unemployment is low and doesn’t seem to be increasing, the layoffs in the tech industry are a direct result of over optimistic hiring after the pandemic ended.
"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.)
I think an important distinction is that while smartphones ostensibly enable socializing by connecting people online, watching TV in the pre-smartphone era was most often something you did with friends and family in person. It was much more of a social activity than scrolling on your phone or watching Youtube videos on your iPad in bed. Before streaming and handheld electronic devices it was pretty rare to watch TV alone - you'd have to share the one in the living room with your family or roommates unless you were rich and had a bunch of TVs or you got lucky and had the house to yourself for an evening. I remember being SO excited to start babysitting as a teenager in the early 2000s because it meant I could have unfettered access to my very own TV after the kids went to bed, and that was something I almost never got to experience at home.
Even if you had multiple TVs it was pretty normal to watch together just because you wanted to. You'd talk during commercials and the whole thing was as much a casual social activity as it was screen time. Smartphones just enable people to get sucked into their own individual world even when they're physically sitting right next to one another. They're conversation killers whereas TV could be a conversation starter or a reason to get a group of friends together at the same time every week.
I don't know about you, but I share a lot of the stuff I find online with my friends, sometimes while we're spending time together! Sharing memes, music, and even the occasional article. What you're talking about with TV can still be accomplished with phones, it just looks a little different.
Also, what do you think people said about TVs and "family time" compared to the radio?
I share online content with friends through group chats and stuff but I personally really don't like hanging out with a group of people who are all on separate phones looking for stuff to share with one another. It doesn't feel like people are really present. There are always notifications and social media apps and texts from other people waiting to pull your attention away from the people you're with. To me it's a faux-social activity. I don't have any idea what people said about TVs and family time compared to the radio. TV and radio seem pretty similar to me in that regard.
You might be interested in this: https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/town-without-television-1-notel/. Basically, in the mid 1970s some academics at UBC figured out there was one sizable settlement left in Canada that didn't have TVs for purely accidental reasons and ran a natural experiment on the resulting changes once TV was introduced. I watch TV, and I think there are some TV shows that are great works of art, but the medium has been genuinely awful for the social development of communities wherever it has been introduced.
There is a mistake a lot of people will make that without a specific "detrimental" hobby, people would instead fill that time with productive and healthy activities. I promise you, people were not reading classical literature and having high-minded philosophical discussions before television. Without it, people would fill the time with practically the same garbage, like listening to a radio show that's an adaptation of CSI Miami.
You're right, people definitely weren't reading Great Literature all the time before TV. But the point of this column (and my comment) is that while you don't need highflown intellectual hobbies to be happy, you do need a social life. There are only 24 hours in the day, and the more of them you spend watching TV, the fewer you have for cookouts, meeting your neighbors, visiting family, etc etc.
Now on the current margin, if TV disappeared, would people revert to 19th century patterns of community-building? Lolllll, no, of course not. We're not going back. But I do suspect TV helped cause the changes between then and now.
You're suggesting that people can't find ways to satisfy their social needs, which I just disagree with. People are really good at meeting their immediate needs whatever way is necessary. I don't think TV was all that disruptive to people's abilities to meet those needs because those needs are not as large as people make them out to be. Most people do not need several hours of social interactions a day.
What people need, socially, is a regular place where they feel they belong, are accepted, and are acknowledged. TV doesn't undermine any of that.
The data in fact suggest otherwise
Many were just going to the pub after work.
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.
I have a feeling the only exposure you get to the right is from left-wing sources. It's called nut picking. I find it annoying that every time I open the Atlantic, MTG, Santos, Gaetz, or some state level wacko is given prominent coverage, and that's when they aren't running near constant Trump coverage.
I live in California, I work for the local government. My city is going to shit, poverty everywhere, parks into homeless camps, and I have been burglarized twice in three years. And rather than pointing this out, I haven't been able to have an honest conversation in close to 5 years with anyone at work about how we're clearly failing. Every time I even inch close it's the same thought terminating clichés thrown at me.
I have been DougAz at The Dispatch for 3 years to understand conservative thinking. David French I like 70%. I disagree with him as I'm Pro Choice as well as I disagree over "Federalism" and the contrived fraudulent veil called "Originalism". I read Jonah Goldberg and the usually arrogant and sometimes bully Kevin Williamson.
I lived in Socal 15 yrs. Recently traveled to LA and Portland and live in Tucson. I see your pain about the homeless. What are the possible actions?
A. Can't deport the homeless because so few are immigrants (illegal, alien...they work get paid live in apartments or houses)
B. Build housing somewhere not downtown
C. Ideas?
I would suggest bringing back asylums for the mentally incompetent, and building housing for the rest.
Respectfully, I think that your own biases are showing as well.
As angry as conservatives are about the state of things, they also tend to have (and support) the various 'natural communities' of neighbors, religion, kin, etc.
And, of course, they are less heavily online and thus less poisoned by it.
Whereas progressives generally seem to disdain those 'natural communities' in favor of more shallow and limited online communities.
Obviously there are many exceptions. I am speaking in generalizations.
I just don't see any reason to think this is true? Do conservatives in cities actually have better communities? Progressives don't disdain "natural communities", half of us spend all our time talking about mutual aid groups. We deride the close knit conservative communities that exist because we think that their values are bad, not because we think the concept is bad.
'natural communities' sounds like a catch word for tribalism.
The word tribalism has a negative connotation, but the fact of the matter is that humans have evolved very elaborate coalitional behaviors that are adaptive. You may despise the catholic or evangelical tribe (which is also a tribal behavior), but the people inside those tribes are happy.
Is that why they are trying to shove their religious and moralistic views on the rest of us? Check out the Thomas Moore society for an example.
Let me expanded a little bit by suggesting that progressives seem to actively deny themselves access to these natural communities, in favor of some more universal replacements.
But the universal-ish replacements just -dont work as well- and so don't provide the same social benefits.
Which contributes to greater reported unhappiness/depression/etc among progressives.
The thoughtful conservative response would probably be that ‘tribalism,’ in the sense of ‘connection with the givenness of one’s concrete surroundings,’ is a natural state of human nature, and that we should try to manage it productively rather than exterminate it. Trying to socially engineer a completely non-tribal society is impossible- you can’t really be devoted to an abstract community like humanity- and the result is simply a society of lonely, miserable, and mentally-ill people.
That's certainly one type of natural community, but it isn't the only kind.
I made this point on the thread on Matt Y's post, but I think right-wing negativity is:
a) more geared towards older people.
b) not as closely linked with a sort of performative helplessness - and feeling helpless is a big component of depression.
I do think Noah is correct to point out that our Bayesian priors should point pretty strongly towards smartphones being the main culprit here, but I also think Matt Y raised some valid points.
I'd say that the smart phones enabled (and then exacerbated) the issues MY talked about.
Matt Y is very very wrong. He utterly ignores what I just posted. The drive and rise of conservative hate..hateRadio and HateTV. Rush, Hannity et al making enemies of the Progressive Liberal lefts..
Kids see that adults allow, authenticate, endorse and perform bullying. So it hate and bullying are allowed and encouraged.
Come on, man...could you be more one-sided here?
He's not being any more one-sided than the media hate, which comes entirely from the right wing.
Matt Y is objective? Seriously not.
Where am I wrong please?
Have you spent anytime listening to NPR lately?
Who compares to Limbaugh, Beck, Savage, Hannity, Tucker?
I'll wait for specific comparisons. Thanks
He is biased, but you are even more so. Progressives are positive about climate change? They are the ones saying we will be extinct if we don’t eliminate all CO2 in 12 years. Doom. Progressives hate the first amendment more than others and say words are violence. Bringing back good paying jobs? This doesn’t affect teenagers, who if employed mostly have minimum wage jobs which in many places is higher. Biden says “let’s work together “ but calls Republicans ultra-maga and accuses them of cutting social security instead of trying to fix the coming default.
Umm.. the doomer and gloomers are really by intrinsic self definition, conservative. Fear of the future but a bigger fear to do something.
Take Social Security and Medicare. Wailing, whining, crying, doom and gloom for 60 years. Never came. Chicken littles. Fixable by obvious means. Tax the untaxed.
Not a conservative, but Social Security will default unless changes are made. Obvious fix to me is to limit it to poor seniors, but your guys are against that. And the untaxed are right now the 50% of households below median income, which Biden promises to never tax. It’s also not doom and gloom, easy solutions but none that politicians on either side can get behind.
A. Uncap and tax FICA on all wage income
B. As Krugman pointed out, Healthcare costs are coming down.
C. Tax all short and long term capital gains over $xxx.
D. Tax all ISON compensation tests not W2
Easy
Alternatively, tax land value at Georgist rates.
Powerful. Love that first sentence.
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.
____
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.
That, and what I rememeber from Psychology 101 - operant conditioning says that random rewards are more powerful in shaping behavior than predicted ones. So we keep returning to that source of the original dopamine hit, over and over again, to try to replicate it. Addictive behavior.
I believe this is why the 'Like' buttons are so effective.
Imho, your arguments support Noah's thesis when you combine the two. Getting quick access to dopamine via social media is happening 'quickly' because of near-instantaneous and constant access to media through smartphones.
Early days social media that could only be accessed through a desktop had a different cadence to it. Even FB was chiller and happier before smartphones. People could only get updates on it when sitting in front of a computer. There was also something exciting about getting online to check out your messages and friend requests, and responding to them.
Once smartphones came out, people could share themselves in real-time and all the time. This gave rise to the influencer classes that curated idealistic and materialistic lifestyles with pictures, usually taken with smartphones.
This created a negative feedback loop among people who felt they hadn't risen to that level of wealth and success, and were therefore failing at something
Imo, it took the pandemic to expose the often staged and fake nature of most people's Instagram lives. I think this is why we're seeing new social media concepts like BeReal and Gas taking off; one alerts people randomly during the day to take a selfie and of what they're doing at that moment, and the other promotes complimenting one's peers (or crushes ^_^)
Those seem to be creating positive feedback loops.
This also leads to the other point made: just because smartphones may have had a large hand in causing these issues, it doesn't mean we can't adapt and use them to be a part of the solutions.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I think the explosion of "wokeness" as such was a reaction to birtherism and sudden awareness among white liberals that US society was way, way less post-racial than they'd grown to believe over the 90s and 00s.
Reversing cause and effect, I think. They interpreted it as to do with race because they interpret everything that way. An equally valid way to interpret birtherism is that people who didn't want a left wing president looked for reasons why he might not be legit and ran with them, just like the left looked for reasons Trump wasn't legit after his victory, and just like people looked for reasons Bush wasn't legit after *his* victory and so on. Any reasons would have done, they didn't pick birth certificates because of racism but simply because of what the rules for being a president are.
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.
So that confirms it. You really are butthurt that I insulted your way of life.
My "way of life" is using my phone on the shitter instead of bringing a newspaper like I used to in the 90s?
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.
The obvious regulation is to forbid phones in public schools. Period.
This is such low hanging fruit.
It would be interesting to see a series of very large, coordinated RCTs where school districts across the country either ban or don’t ban phones in school for a period of time. Say 3 months. And just see what happens. If the bans could actually be enforced, would anyone be surprised if the results showed all kinds of positive effects in those schools?
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.
Sensible and it seems you have simply slowed down your thought and managed to adapt to our current conditions. Things change, all we need do is adapt and not embrace every phantom thought entering our head regardless of its peripheral source.