Yes
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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I keep saying it's not the smartphone. It's the social media people are constantly using on their smartphone.
Reading a book all day? Great!
Reading all celebrity gossip, and what your "friends" say they're doing? Not great.
Reading stuff like this all day isn't great.
Yeah, I don't use any other social media except lemmy, and in honestly thinking about replacing it's location on my home screen with something to read that's better for my mind.
Well it's definitely not the late capitalistic hellscape we endure and are forced to participate in every day while helplessly careening towards inevitable environmental destruction that's doing it. Nope! It's the phones, y'all.
Why can't it be both?
Yeah...
I say as I scroll on my smartphone
Weeeellll... They're probably not helping.
It's just a tool. If there is someone who destroys your mental health it's you or sometimes other people.
Heroin is just a painkiller. A slotmachine is just a game. Guns don't kill people. A cigarette is just a plant leaf in a piece of paper.
While all true, there are clear merits to regulate them.
Are smartphones bad? I don't know. But I wouldn't reject the idea on the spot. I don't think it's the device perse, it's how we use them. There are assholes among us.
Exactly.
The libertarian paradise of Somalia has never really appealed to me.
As for smartphones, it's no secret that App designers pull every trick they can to increase engagement a.k.a. addiction.
I can definitely see a future where some of the more sinister tricks have mandatory opt-out or opt-in options.
What does "regulate them" look like? It's not phones doing it. It's the social media apps doing it, as far as phones are concerned.
it's an awfully convenient and accessible tool though.
It's a tool that opens up a lot of dangers (bullying/misinformation/addiction loops created by companies). Oddly, we don't seem to educate kids on how to handle the tool properly.
Industrialization and capitalism have figured largely in an intergenerational mental health crisis. But it's so ubiquitous we think dysfunctional behavior is normal and accepable like vodka addiction in Russia.
Social media and dysfunctional smartphone behavior is yet another cope, yet another way to tolerate a stressful live forced upon us. And it's probably less harmful than other coping methods such as drinking or domestic violence.
So giving phones to kids and not parenting them enough to ensure they learn how to interact with people IRL is bad?
I thought we had kinda already come to that conclusion some years ago tbh
(Not your fault OP) Clickbaity headline
Unfortunately it is very difficult to be good parents when both parents have to stay out over 10 hrs per day to work. This is the part that is always overlooked in these news. Problem is not the smartphones. It's modern society
Really good point tbh, and really just adds to my point, not just bad parenting through negligence, but also an unfortunate lack of presence from otherwise good parents even being possible due to both needing full time jobs.
I'm not gonna bang the 4dww drum in this thread, but reduced-day-same-pay working weeks need to happen yesterday, so many tangible improvements to society are just hanging there.
Absolutely agree. We should have gone from single income households to "2 part time incomes" households
Eh. Wasn't much there to destroy anyways. At least i got memes and cat pics out of the deal.
I'm becoming increasingly skeptical of the "destroying our mental health" framework that we've become obsessed with as a society. "Mental health" is so all-encompassing in its breadth (It's basically our entire subjective experience with the world) but at the same time, it's actually quite limiting in the solutions it implies, as if there's specific ailments or exercises or medications.
We're miserable because our world is bad. The mental health crisis is probably better understood as all of us being sad as we collectively and simultaneously burn the world and fill it with trash, seemingly on purpose, and we're not even having fun. The mental health framework, by converting our anger, loneliness, grief, and sadness into medicalized pathologies, stops us from understanding these feelings as valid and actionable. It leads us to seek clinical or technical fixes, like whether we should limit smart phones or whatever.
Maybe smart phones are bad for our mental health, but I think reducing our entire experience with the world into mental health is the worst thing for our mental health.
🥇
Lemmy Gold for this comment
Sometimes I dream of a flip phone or regressing to using a Treo but the core services like Facetime, etc. are quite handy. I’m thinking when I get much older it’ll be easier. Still got a Palm PDA that runs on AAA’s sitting in a box waiting… but of course the year 2038(?) problem is a thing and there’s a capacitor I’ll have to replace on the board eventually. But syncing things locally sounds neat since I’m back down to one phone and one computer now.