You are downvoted, but you are totally right. Humans are not meant to cry daily over stuff that happens half a world away, or be exposed to a thousand new strangers every day. But thanks to internet, your mom and aunt can have an endless fuel to their various anxieties and your daughter can have eating disorders comparing herself to celebrities.
Bring a pre-internet pre-24/7 TV person to present day and they’ll spot the problem straight away. Amusing Ourselves To Death was written in reaction to the societal changes brought by the TV. What about the impact of Internet news, and Facebook, and Tiktok?
We live in houses, with artificial light, heating and air conditioning, having sex without risk of pregnancy or "god-forbid" sex with people who are not capable of being pregnant. So, what exactly are we not meant to do?
There's a certain natural human nature but it's expressed through abtract virtue like justice, knowledge, safety, connection - this is the only acceptable and reasonable expression of what humans are "meant to" do.
This makes me angry because fundamentally this is an attack on average person's intelligence and capabilities. We are not beasts that need to be hearded by some illuminated masters who deem what is and what isn't human nature.
> that the things that generally make humans unhappier are not things we are meant to do
citation needed. Also there are plenty of things that make humans "generally unhappy" but we all agree are good like exercise or cleaning up your home. Even if happiness was a valid metric for human condition then blanket banning "social media for <15" - whatever that means - is not a reasonable approach in any way.
The only sound argument here is purely utilitarian "we suck at governing so let's do something easy and maybe it'll work". It has nothing to do with human nature other than that we naturally suck at organizing policy.
No, governments are not meant to be able to fund atrocities half a world away. Just as your body is not meant to sit at a chair and your eyes are not meant to look at a distance of 50cm for 8 hours a day.
The entire current human existence right now is at odds with human biology and psychology. One has to swim against the current just to be physically, mentally and spiritually healthy.
It's the 'reputable' news sources that have often pushed misinformation and half-truths, often in subtle ways.
Just do a review of BBC headlines for it's coverage on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Many headlines where Israel was the aggressor were passive, never naming Israel as the aggressor, but whenever it was aggression from the Palestinian side, it was highlighted.
Even the death toll in Gaza, where for the last few years the headlines, when reorting on the death toll, often stated 'unconfirmed', or 'Hamas-provided', to cause doubt in the numbers, when historically, the numbers provided by Hamas were relatively accurate, and just the other day the IDF admits that the ~70k death toll is realistic.
Social media is not designed to keep you informed. Its designed to keep you engaged because that helps them sell ads. And the best way to keep you engaged is to keep you enraged. I've seen in the US how social media has been used push false narratives, hate and other falsehoods. Its toxic.
If you really want to stay informed, there are plenty of newspapers, NGOs and other organizations out there reporting the truth.
>I've seen in the US how social media has been used push false narratives, hate and other falsehoods. Its toxic.
And for decades before that mainstream media was used to push false narratives with absolutely no alternatives. Or have you forgotten about the Iraq War?
People will comment all day on the ethics and legality of advertising yet they never seem to stop and think how ads even work. Ads work primarily through increasing the subconscious familiarity over a competitor product’s subconscious familiarity. The vast majority of ads are meant to influence you through completely unconscious processes. The “get to know a product you didn’t know about before” part likely doesn’t even account for %1 of advertising. If the reverse was true, you would never see a single ad of Coca-Cola since everybody on the planet knows about it already.
Rather, lack of. Melatonin is over-the-counter, generic, badly understood by the people taking it and dosed according to personal preference which means marketing it is all abouy big numbers. Bigger number on package = more sales.
The help aiding sleep is only one function for melatonin. The reason for higher suggested doses is due to its anti-oxident function. From personal experience melatonin needs to be paired with vitamin e to really clear out over night. I take vitamin e as I get into bed right before I take a melatonin sublingual. Another benefit of melatonin is that it upregulates our insulin receptors.
Even funnier is that often 0.25mg or 0.5mg is closer to the correct dose, and those sizes tend to be hard to find.
There actually is a condition that calls for extremely high (100mg+ doses), but it is a very rare thing, no one should ever consider that much without instruction from a doctor. But you'll find it right next to the normal <=5mg doses without any explanation.
The Natrol liquid isn't usually too hard to track down. They advertise it as 1 mg or 2.5 mg, but it's the same stuff, the bottle just direct you to take 4 or 10 mL respectively.
I believed that for years, I did CBT, changing beliefs, "just do it" et cetera and I was helpless still, went from one addiction to another. Turns out I had ADHD. My life was totally changed after medication.
You don't have infinite willpower. If humans had infinite willpower humanity would have worked itself to death long ago. There is a natural balance of willpower in your brain, it's called the dopaminergic system. If you have ADHD, you have much, much less willpower than a normal person because you literally lack the dopamine hormone in your prefrontal cortex. No amount of belief will magically create dopamine in your brain out of thin air.
Congratulations! You have apparently won in life by successfully developing internal regulation during childhood and also won the genetic lottery by not having a disorder of the dopaminergic system like ADHD. Now please leave be the significant fraction of the population who don't have those privileges, thank you.
I've missed critical final exams and flights literally scrolling Instagram. Mental health disorders exist, alas.
You don't need to leave behind the conveniences of a smartphone to have a phone that is smart but without the dopamine traps. There are solutions out there like TechLockdown which allow you to make a dumbphone out of your smartphone using MDMs, while still keeping critical things like messenger apps, a predefined list of websites, navigation apps, etc.
Yea, I know, but smart phones are getting bigger and bigger. I'd rather a much nicer camera, and a small dumb phone which texts and calls. As opposed to a smart phone with a much worse camera, that also texts and calls and does maps.
I can just ask people if I need directions. I'm already don't use location services on maps, and usually look things up before I leave anyways.
Just leaving the phone at home is really the nicest thing, and I'll probably continue doing that a fair amount as well.
That talking point - that rapid-form media creates attention deficit problems is honestly overdone and there's no evidence that it's true at all (that I know of). ADHD exists and is a mostly genetic condition, you can't catch it without something serious like cPTSD. Amusing Ourselves To Death emphasized way more the angle of densensitization.
I used to think doomscrolling broke my brain before I was diagnosed. Later I realized I was "doomscrolling" way before I got my first digital device, rereading the same fiction books late into the night.
I can buy the argument that rapid-form media consumption acutely creates symptoms like ADHD (for at most a few hours after exposure) because I see it even in NT people.
I have ADHD myself, so you're not telling me anything I didn't know. Rapid-fire media consumption cannot create the genetic condition, but as you said it can create the symptoms. And that's the important part anyway: a generation that has trouble paying attention to important things because they're getting habituated to rapid-fire video formats. Even if the symptoms (chasing the next dopamine hit) are only acute and not chronic, as long as people are addicted (behaviorally, not chemically) to phone screens, those acute symptoms will occur so often that they might as well be chronic for all practical purposes, because more often than not, people will be in that slightly-dazed state caused by coming off the addictive behavior. (I used to have that myself after a multi-hour gaming session, before I realized that I was displaying all the signs of addiction and quit computer games cold turkey. So I know what it feels like.)
Got it, very good point. Hope somebody studies this soon, I can imagine the title: "Creation of ADHD-like symptoms in neurotypical individuals after exposure to superstimuli/digital content".
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