Spent a morning out on the town on my day off, and everyone is just fucking buried in their phones 24/7. This realization was so absurd to me
Of course I’m not exempt from this shit, but no wonder people are having so much trouble making friends and creating meaningful relationships in this day and age. So fucking bleak
I firmly maintain that phones are a symptom and not a cause. The cost of going outside is much. Many third places have collapsed under the crushing weight of austerity. Our time is ruthlessly regulated. Transport is expensive. Everyone is tired and sick.
Phones, social media, are what’s left.
This 100%. I also maintain that heavy social media usage is a coping mechanism just as much as it is a cause of mental health problems. You wanna talk about an opiate of the masses? I watched my parents exhaustedly zone out in front of the tv to deal with their shitty fucking jobs for decades. Now I’m doing the same thing except with my phone.
The cost of going outside is much.
I literally can’t afford to get a haircut right now
Been cutting my own hair for 5 years gang. :bad-haircut:
It gets better. I’ve got 10 years experience and I do almost as good a job as any hairdresser ever did.
that’s cool. do you just shave with electric trimmers?
That’s how I started (dog grooming clippers). Now I use scissors most of the time and sometimes touch up with clippers. (when I remember to charge the battery)
I resorted to not cutting my hair and asking my wife to trim my bangs. So many split & dead ends
This seems like the most correct take.
yeah you can get a phone and internet cheap compared to ]anything else you might want. it’s no surprise people spend all their time online given the material conditions we’re forced to live in
This is my stance too as someone who has been trapped in an american suburbs for most of my life. My parents stopped actually “parenting” more or less when I was like 10 so I just turned to xbox and runescape, nothing to do outside beyond my yard since it was just made for cars. When I realized it was a problem there wasn’t anything I could do, everything was still car dependent and my parents pretty much just argued and zoned out in front of the tv. I think my nephew is going through the same thing, except he has an ipad now and pretty much every time I see him he’s coughing.
Newspapers and what became before them weren’t addictive, dynamic skinner boxes with millions of dollars in machine learning behind them trying to map out and manipulate every aspect of your behavior. It was just good old fashioned one way propaganda.
that’s the individual analysis, i’d argue newpapers could occupy a similar function in public spaces of a tentative ‘do not disturb’ sign that phones do. the OP is talking about people in public and it’s a pretty valid observation that people used to have ways to avoid talking to others and making relationships too.
Oh, yeah, fair enough.
Eh at least it wasn’t so easy. The generation of “meet people or practice socializing in lines” is gone due to phones imo, bit harder to do that with a newspaper at every ‘empty’ moment
yeah paper’s a bit less conveinient and vulnerable to people seeing what you’re reading & inquiring about it. phones have definitely improved upon the “don’t talk to me” meta, especially with headphones
Fuckin headphones. Everyone has them on. How do people feel safe biking in the city with headphones on?!
Also with a newspaper, you didn’t have a real time comment section and if you are all sitting around reading a paper you’re probably all reading the same few papers and it could even foster in person social interaction and discussion. I remember a time where I would come to work and eat lunch in the break room while reading the paper and talking about whatever was in the news that day with my coworkers for example.
If this is what it sounds like, why isn’t my phone more entertaining? Do a better job, manipulators!
Something being addictive doesn’t necessarily mean it feels good; often it’s just the cessation of the withdrawal symptoms.
This is part of why it’s called “doomscrolling”, because it doesn’t feel good but you feel compelled to do it (implicitly because not doing it agitates you or something)
The extension of that take is smugly quoting that one ancient Greek guy that said the children of his time were unruly and disrespectful.
kids these days can’t memorize anything, they just write things down and read them back later
In the contemporary attention economy, I doubt most people of any age actually remember phone numbers or the like without electronic assistance. I sure don’t. There’s so much else going on and it takes up headspace.
I remember having like 30 phone numbers in my head. What a fucking waste of space. Some of them are still in there even though I haven’t used them in decades.
lol still remember the landline number from my childhood home.
Actually I still probably remember about 30 numbers now that I think of it.
I think the non-thought-terminating way to interpret these datapoints is that the modern version is an amplification of whatever you want to call this, just like the 24-hour news cycles have been compounded by minute-by-minute updates from news delivered by social media pages and now Telegram groups and such. It’s not the same because there are (real and substantive) parallels with what came before, that’s a crass simplification.
Absolutely everything is literally and exactly the same with no material or sociopolitical differences. The most leftist position is to say this a lot with the implication that nothing can or will ever meaningfully change for better or for worse.
Jesus Christ I genuinely don’t know what your problem is. I try to never respond to you because your posting energy really rubs me the wrong way and your 100% commitment to get the last word in no matter what is exhausting, but…
Is this really how you had to respond? You had so many choices. Did you have to assume so many negative things about what I think despite not having any evidence I think those things? Do you really need to choose such a combative tone with a comrade? Did you need to even respond at all?
W/e I’m going back to work fuck this
Agreed. One of my least favorite aspects of this site being so small is the amount of power posters and the debate energy they have.
I also find it ironic that so many users here are going off on smartphones because algorithms and skinner boxes or whatever while having ridiculously active post histories on this platform, which has no profit motive, skinner box behavior, etc, presumably also from a smartphone or some other device.
EDIT: I misread who posted this, so I’m rewriting this reply.
I stand by my position that dismissing ebbs and flows and ups and downs in how society changes with a picture implying “look things were exactly the same” is an extraordinary claim that glaringly lacks extraordinary evidence.
you just made this up, they didn’t say any of that
They posted a picture that contextually implied “this is the same thing as contemporary phone usage.”
To some extent, yes, newspapers were “do not disturb” gestures of their day, but they also lacked the technologically sophisticated engagement maximization strategies used by contemporary devices, among other differences.
they didn’t say it was good or bad, they didn’t imply nothing has ever changed or can ever change?
“people are buried in phones” was met by “people used to be buried in newspapers” then you just assumed the only way to arrive at that observation is through all those ideological offenses, which is a pretty silly assumption to make on a leftist forum. people here criticize more traditional media all the time.
they didn’t say it was good or bad, they didn’t imply nothing has ever changed or can ever change?
So what was the intention of the picture since you have privileged access to that knowledge and are apparently also aware how wrong I am?
“people are buried in phones” was met by “people used to be buried in newspapers” then you just assumed the only way to arrive at that observation is through all those ideological offenses
Considering how often quotes these below have been posted in the past to dismiss peoples’ concerns about worsening material and personal conditions in ways large and small, from online dating to employment precarity, by way of saying “people were unhappy before about things so being unhappy now is exactly the same:”
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” ― Socrates
“Our Earth is (removed) in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.” From an Assyrian clay tablet, circa 2800 BC.
It did look like more of the same to me, and without additional text, the further implication was a sort of “case closed” message.
what was the intention of the picture
i’m simply reticent to make a sweeping generalizations about someone’s whole ideological outlook from a single datapoint. its justified to call into question the comparison being made, but the distance from there to a fundamental disbelief in societal change is wholly unsupported, which is why you have to bring in all this vaguely related stuff that’s superficially similar. but assyrian old men yelling at the sky don’t have anything to say about newspapers vs. phones in capitalist socialization
It may be at an impasse anyway; the person who posted the picture didn’t clarify the original intent in their one reply so far and to be fair to them I came on pretty hard, as you said.
I appreciate that you acknowledged that posting the picture on its own had dubious intentions, but this particular well may have already been poisoned because I came on too hard and I think I now regret that.
That quotation from “Socrates” is made-up by some 19th or 20th-century moralist.
I didn’t think highly of it to begin with.
Destroy that buggo dipshit.
Urging someone to acknowledge that material and sociopolitical conditions can, have, and will continually improve or worsen somewhat is not “destroying” someone, nor is it calling or even implying that that someone is a “buggo.”
I know irony poisoning is your thing, but come on. Save it.
Nah, you destroyed them. No need to be humble.
It’s in bad taste, especially here.
Absolutely everything is literally irony with no contextual or humorous differences. The most good-faith position is to say this a lot with the implication that posts can or will ever not be ironic.
When most of what you post is stuff like this
You also don’t get beat up when handing them a Popeye candy cigarette anymore though. So maybe one thing’s improved in this painful, candy-hating world.
I’m going to read your posts as even more irony.
And even if it isn’t, no, I don’t see that other poster as a “buggo dipshit” and my goal wasn’t to “destroy” them.
This is the most boomer ass post I’ve seen in a while. “Society is not headed in the right direction” “oh wow maybe he’ll talk about housing or education or pollution or walkable cities or third places” “everybodys on their gosh dang phones!” I fucking cant anymore
i agree with OP, my socialist utopia is gonna ban phones to like a 4 hour window everyday
Hey man if you solve all the other stuff ill throw my phone away
Have you read most of the comments in this thread, or did you come in pre-loaded to be mad at what you expected to see?
If you’re accusing people of making “boomer ass posting” here, you’re fair game for being called out for knee-jerk consoomer defensiveness posting.
the boomer is calling from inside the millennial
deleted by creator
People werent chatting up strangers before smartphones. In the 2000s it was exactly as awkward as it is now to start a conversation with a stranger unprompted. Unless you were both smoking.
The only sad thing about people not smoking cigs anymore is you don’t get the great chats that come from people asking to bum a smoke/you bumming a smoke off a stranger. Cigarette chat is easily the best part of being a smoker.
Cigarettes were an easy way to tell people “I don’t give a shit about the things that you’re supposed to give a shit about.” When you saw someone smoking a cigarette, you knew you could talk politics or religion or any number of contentious topics with them. It didn’t mean it would be a good conversation, but the invitation was always there.
Wow, I just realized I hate vaping.
“Can I have a cig?” “yeah sure”
“Can I have some of your vape?” “get the fuck away from me.”
Also, disposable vapes are more addictive than cigs. They give WAY more nicotine per hit. Actually used them to push through opiate withdrawal because the nicotine in those was so powerful it’d push through the withdrawal in its entirety. You can realistically only smoke 4-5 cigs a day. You can’t take 4-5 hits off a vape in a dag
Are you still on the vapes? I picked up smoking again a few years back due to work stress and I made the switch pretty quickly, but I really want to just be done with these things.
I’m not. I actually went backwards, from vapes to cigarettes. If you’re going to vape, pick up your own system, tank and juice. The shitty disposable vapes will make you a nic fiend like nothing else. I can’t stand how bad they make the cravings. I can run out of money for smokes and go a day or two without smoking. But when I was on those disposable vapes, it was like hard drug cravings, it was so bad.
You also don’t get beat up when handing them a Popeye candy cigarette anymore though. So maybe one thing’s improved in this painful, candy-hating world.
real, we need to bring it back somehow
Move to Bay Area/LA/Vancouver and it’s the exact same with joints except you have to offer to share instead of bumming off others
Weed is like that anywhere it’s legal. But stoned chats are far less grounded than cig buzzed chats. The unpleasant weed chats I’ve had are far more unpleasant than the worst cig chats I’ve had. Smoke cigs, you talk about family and what brings you to whatever area you’re at. Maybe a few minor work stresses, but nothing crazy. Weed will make people too comfortable in a strangers company
more trauma dump slop for me
jk all my weed chats have been fairly normal like you’ve described with cig chats
The main problem with weed chats is that you get stoned and start to worry about when it’s okay to leave the conversation. With a cigarette, the conversation ends in five minutes or you light up another one. It’s a nice little snack versus a Sunday dinner.
Not quite what I meant. I dislike smoking because of the lung cancer, not because of the nicotine :(
the last cig chat I got was a drunk cis liberal interrogating me about my gender and refusing to take the hint that I wouldn’t go home with them, that I was going to finish my smoke and go back into my apartment to be with my partner
shit sucked
Drugs (alcohol is a drug) make people like cigarettes more, sometimes you’ll have do deal with someone too drunk or geeked for their own good
Was just thinking this.
- loitering is illegal
- skateboarding (except in designated zones) is illegal
- crossing the road (except in designated zones) is illegal
- being loud is illegal
- going anywhere costs money
- going nowhere costs money (and having a job barely covers it)
- hyperindividualism makes relating to other people hard
- communal living practices are heavily discouraged
- militarized police make any even slightly risky activity potentially lethal
most of these are government policies, so it kinda sounds like the oligarchs in the US are forcing society in a specific direction. not that its “just happening” or some shit
I don’t think most americans realize this is weird. We’re told we’re the freest™ and learn next to nothing about anywhere else. Some of the biggest culture shock for me came from Brits describing their childhoods. Like, I just assumed we inherited a lot of this from them.
I find it much more worrying to see kids constantly on ipads and shit. Like how it’s much more concerning to see a child smoking than an adult smoking.
I don’t blame the parents btw. Everyone is tired, child care is unaffordable. Society atomizes us and keeps us away from our extended families that would have provided childcare in the past. A one-income family is basically impossible for most people.
I might get shit for it, but I’ll bring it up anyway: I do feel sad when I see very small children visually locked into a tablet and just zoning out on it instead of taking in the world around them or the people in it, including at playgrounds or other places where such small children could and should be experiencing new things.
One of the most distressing moments I’ve seen of that was when one such kid’s mom tried to take away the tablet with some soft words and an urging for them to go play on the swings instead and the kid threw a violent tantrum on the spot, kicking and thrashing and red in the face screaming.
Holy shit. My kids love playing games and watching things on devices, but it always takes at least 30 minutes to get them anywhere near willing to leave the playground.
I grew up playing games all the time, and I still spend a lot of free time playing games. But the whole family ALSO uses these devices for creative endeavors. They started doing animations, mini-movies, digital art, music, etc. When they show an interest in new things we try to encourage them to pursue it at least to see if they find enjoyment and fulfilment.
I used to comfort myself by saying that I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid and I grew up okay, but TV wasn’t available anywhere on demand.
Also, at least TV tends to have a narrative that’s supposed to hold a kid’s attention and might be educational. YouTube is just nonsense lights and sounds for 60 seconds at a time.
I know the usual take is “they said the same thing about radio before TV, too,” as if there’s no material or for that matter consequential difference between tuning in for something and doing something else until that something is on and having curating algorithms constantly shoveling targeted slop the consumer’s way.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that screen time and internet access restrictions on minors like China is imposing are probably the way forward, but they’ll never happen in the West because the social media oligarchs control the government.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that screen time and internet access restrictions on minors like China is imposing are probably the way forward, but they’ll never happen in the West because the social media oligarchs control the government.
Some of it is ground level “DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DOOOOOOOOOOOO”
from Burgerlander parents too. Another example of that in action was when even mild social distancing and mask requests made a lot of Burgerlanders storm government buildings and blockade hospitals.IMO this kind of reflexive and unconditional individualism is one of the core causes of Western social rot.
Yup turns out having a majority of your population think “it’s me verses society” isn’t great for that society.
Extra hilarious how Americans will tell you about how it’s a part of Chinese culture to fuck other people over to get ahead as they raise millions of people out of poverty every year.
Meanwhile in America people don’t support universal Healthcare because other people might benefit from it.
I think so too, and judging by the “no veggies at dinner, no bedtimes” outbursts that blow up around here sometimes, Hexbear isn’t immune to it either.
Unfortunately there’s no established rule book on how kids should deal with devices and denying them entirely often alienates them from their peers. I push my kids to use creative apps. Educational apps are nice but those have always had a knack for seeming like adult propaganda to trick you into learning in your downtime. But drawing, animation, video editing, writing, etc? All full of great free apps that will occupy their attention for hours and are still way easier to disengage from than, say, Roblox. It feels less like a vice to yank them away from and more like a cultivation of hobbies to balance out their activities. My oldest is extremely physically active and loves playing outside on their own despite having intense ADHD that would stereotypically have them glued to a device. They also create fan fiction, write original comics, and draw constantly. A lot of that is on the iPad.
100% agree on the creative apps thing, similarly whenever I meet a kid at work (I like to treat kids with respect and if they talk to me about their interests I try to engage them like I would a peer) I always try to recommend games like Kerbal Space Program, or Space Engineers if they bring up videogames for example. Kids want to do what they want to do and what we can do is at least guide them to the sort of stuff we wish we had as a kid that might also be healthy activities in a sea of unhealthy and predatory options.
KSP is spyware https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/ksp
One of the most distressing moments I’ve seen of that was when one such kid’s mom tried to take away the tablet with some soft words and an urging for them to go play on the swings instead and the kid threw a violent tantrum on the spot, kicking and thrashing and red in the face screaming.
One of mine was like this for a while. Self regulation is a hard skill to learn, especially that young, with ADHD, and in the face of this magic dopamine box. They’re doing a lot better now. Healthy habits and some new coping strategies have done wonders and done so on their terms.
My nephew was like that for a bit but the thing that stuck with me was when his parents joked about him having “ipad withdrawal.”
I barely use my phone for anything other than “being a phone”, and I still never leave my apartment.
yeah, I’m gonna need a hospitable world before I bother going outside. that includes:
- places to actually fucking go (third spaces)
- people I’d actually enjoy hanging out with also being there
- convenient for me to actually transport myself there (do not design the whole fucking world around cars you pieces of shit, try 15 minute cities)
until then, I can’t be bothered and there’s fuck all to do in this place anyways.
I just don’t want to bother anyone.
Are you bothered every single time someone speaks with you?
Depends on the person, doesn’t it?
I just assume I’m bothersome by default🙃
I understand that feeling, but not everyone feels that way. Most people likely feel neutral about it, and some even enjoy being talked to! 🙂
I can’t know if someone would enjoy being talked to before talking to them. Even worse, I can’t know if someone is just being polite when I bother them. They might be bothered and I’d never know! I’d much rather never talk to anyone.
I think when talking about phones, the issue is not so much people are on them but what they’re doing on them. Many people in this thread have pointed out other things that have occupied peoples’ times in prior eras, and phones sort of serve that purpose now. But what is on the phone is so bleak. Social media is horrible for us and pretty much designed to get us addicted. Everything is either an ad or a grift or some sort of astroturfed propaganda. And you have children being exposed to this shit also, extremely young kids with easily molded minds with unfettered access to the most mind numbing and in many cases dangerous content. I think that’s the issue.
That’s my concern, too: sure, people wanted distractions and entertainment since before recorded time and they had “do not disturb” ways of signaling that, but they didn’t have handheld slop receiving devices that were algorithmically curated to hook them as deeply and profitably as possible.
I brought a book everywhere I went before smart phones.
Had to put something in my khaki cargo shorts pockets
I still bring a lil notebook/sketch pad everywhere
Alternatively, most people probably weren’t just making friends walking around, doing their shopping, etc anyway. Those are kind of weird ways to make friends outside of pretty specific circumstances. Who knows, maybe they were texting their actual friends
I mean, my parents met in a retail store lol
my parents met in a retail store lol
I wonder what % of people met someone like that
I’m not talking making friends, I’m talking direct action
This seems to be an issue in more developed countries or richer parts of developed nations. I don’t see this as much in my area. Smartphones do exist and there are a few who become attached to them but the majority still get out and talk with each other. If anything, phones are a great way of knowing when it’s time to leave. You can tell people are ready to go when the majority start looking at their phones. It used to be that people just wouldn’t leave until late at night because nobody wanted to be the first to go and I was never a fan of that.
Another thing is that the previous generations were just as attached to TV’s. The same kids you see glued to their smartphones and throwing fits over them getting taken away probably had parents who were the same way with the TV and their videogames. Doesn’t make it okay but it always bothers me when people assume it’s exclusively a Gen Z/Alpha problem.
TV had some massive problems too. The primary difference was that the programming (yes, it was called programming pretty much from the start) wasn’t individually targeted because the technology wasn’t there yet to do that, so there were still gaps and windows for people watching it to do something else rather than get more deeply sucked in.
I don’t see this as much in my area. Smartphones do exist and there are a few who become attached to them but the majority still get out and talk with each other.
where is that? (country)
spent a morning out on the town on my day off and everyone is just fucking buried in their newspapers 24/7
no wonder people are having so much trouble making friends and creating meaningful relationships in this day and edge. so fucking bleak
went to the town market on my yearly day off and everyone is just fucking buried in their tablets, stylus in hand, carving away.
no wonder people are having so much trouble making friends and perpetuating meaningful oral legends in this day and age. so fucking bleak
LMFAOO
what the devil?
This was my go-to argument for a while. I think it’s probably worse that phones have so much brain- rotting content on them, but then again people were probably easier to control when there were only a few papers anyone actually read and got news from. Idk.
You can’t just declare your opinion to be non-boomer, that’s not how it works
“I mean this in a very non boomer way but we drank out of the hose, rode our bike without a helmet, and played all day without a water bottle and we were all fine”
I mean this in a very non-silent way, but these damn whippersnappers and their rock music will be our downfall
not gonna lie, i was hoping this post would be about genocide, climate change, and looming WW3, which are the reasons I think society is headed in a bad direction. Not like… people buried in their phones, which is a total boomer trope.
Wait, is this post bait?
