I can tell you that for me (early Gen X) it got bad when my wife was out of town for an extended period of weeks for work. Ours kids have moved out, we have no family in the region, all of my oldest friends live across the country and I'm 20 years older than most of my coworkers. I found myself getting home from work, making dinner and then having absolutely nothing to do for several hours. That's when I got sucked in. Next thing you know I would wake up on a rainy Saturday and just reach for the phone and then it was lunch time and suddenly dinner time. It feels pretty shitty, too.

Recently I've had to find things for myself to do in order to make sure my time is better filled otherwise I will "fill" it with doom scrolling. I don't know that my brain is more susceptible (hard to self determine something like that) but my time is certainly more open than it ever was in my life previously.

yep. in my parents case, it might be that they've always thought I was the young, addicted zoomer, and it could never happen to them. it happened to them and now there's no self awareness.

Distractions aren't new; but they are more 24/7

24 hour "news" is a great example; we leave it on in the background, as Radio or TV, but we're not listening to gain information, we're listening to be entertained - amygdala activated.

With AM radio and broadcast TV, low efforts were mostly limited to 2 hour segments from the 80s-90s; then in the late 90s, cable tv became standard, then in the 2000s the internet (chats, reddit, hacker news), and then the smartphone...