I have a personal bias but suspect this is more prevalent than it's made out to be since I've both lived through it and have not had much opportunity throughout my life to recognize how the two issues were connected until many years later.
I think always-on Internet devices both exposed latent difficulties in home/working life that already existed for many and amplified those same vulnerabilities. You can observe a single person on their phone for 8 hours a day and call it "problematic usage", but this alone does not give enough information about what underlying forces drive so much usage. If it's boredom, then why are they bored all the time? If it's stress, then where does so much stress originate from?
The introduction of smartphones has raised the stakes since a huge number of people are now confronted with the same problem in a highly talked-about way, some of which could have been activated by latent mental vulnerability that may not have been brought to light in a past age. And sometimes this does result in a discussion of sometimes completely unrelated personal issues, but by their nature I would imagine not many would be willing to open up about them in public, compared to complaints about social media. Problems related to tech get a lot of social advocacy, but I find it hard to imagine a national "organization for adults abused by <type of guardian>". What is there to advocate for when the issue at hand already opened and shut itself decades ago and the people involved are either dead or incapable of admitting fault? Not to mention that the causes for each trauma are wildly diverse, and sometimes there is not enough information to be able to find a concrete meaning in the events at all?
Sadly, even regulation of technology seems to be a workable issue compared to that of preventing future abuse. Each upbringing is distinct, and most effort seems to be put towards recovering from abuse long in the past knowing that (when dealing with certain personality types) there will never be hope for reconciliation. Knowing how intractable a problem intergenerational trauma is is enough to make me lean antinatalist at times, even though I say I am recovering.
I've talked about how intergenerational trauma has affected my family before, although I didn't mention it started in 1918 when my great great grandfather killed my great great grandmother in a murder suicide, leaving my great grandmother an orphan who would one day abuse my grandma. [1]
I think there are patterns to abuse regardless of the cause. Abuse is essentially addiction to control or anger (the seven deadly sins are all forms of addiction). The patterns I can see give me hope that it is entirely possible to stop the cycle.
We’ve got a rescue dog like that, reflections off watches or whatever (including kitchen baking sheets). It genuinely distresses him. Dog was seven years old when we got him, probably no fixing it now, but we do try to mitigate things as best we can.
In his particular case, his hunting instinct doesn’t help, I’m sure. He’s a pit bull, but that speckled neck and feet tells me that there’s some Spaniel in there somewhere.
I can unfortunately think of some fairly recent counterexamples to "why not reach out." They didn't justify keeping imaginary fences up, rather they justified cutting those people out of my life entirely, because they just don't fit into the overly tidy script of "might as well try."
Just as it is important to not deny yourself positive social experiences with people you trust, it is just as important not to hold out too much hope for change and be generous when it is not merited, as the consequences can lead straight back to maladaptive coping patterns.
In my opinion "we need mandatory age verification" is an admission that we can't really address the overarching issue of parents that can't/won't parent at a good enough level. Narcissistic parenting without any added access to questionable content on a smartphone is still... narcissistic parenting. The definition of "parent better" differs between people and is often non-negotiable, even way before anything involving CPS occurs. Not to mention, the content being withheld will become available at adulthood anyway, and can still be harmful if the person has not been given the tools to navigate it well.
Admittedly the bar is far higher with ubiquitous social media and smartphones. I'm not sure a parenting license system would ever work out in practice. Yet a lot of issues stemming from upbringing can cause irreversible harm and I don't feel like those root causes are brought up that much in the broader discussion about mental health symptoms.
It pains me to think that some amount of debilitating childhood trauma is unavoidable, but content restriction at least sounds like an actionable problem that doesn't require uprooting the fabric of society to correct.
Yeah, I consider myself lucky I avoided drinking decades ago. I say "lucky" I because I was able to view alcohol consumption as a risk-reward tradeoff and guessed (correctly) that I was abnormally vulnerable to addiction due to upbringing. I sometimes feel smart for figuring it out, but honestly if I had just been invited to more parties early on I might still be going to AA meetings by now.
So I do not at all blame the newer generations for following in my footsteps, regardless of the reason. This stuff can be life-ruining with the correct combination of nature and nurture.
I think for some backgrounds like mine, the only way to avoid the worst outcomes of addiction is to declare that such a background precludes any consumption of [substance], full stop. It's not something people want to hear, but I believe there really was no other choice for me in hindsight.
I'm wondering how these changes in behavior compare to the "video games don't cause actual violence" result, seeing as the output of games are far more lifelike than a mere chat log.
Maybe it's because fictional media up to this point has never been deeply personalized to the level AI permits. A story where you play as a ruthless gangster that millions of other people also play as is divorced from one's personal affairs through the boundary of made-up characters. Now imagine a rival gangster bangs on the door and one realizes it's the likeness of their actual long-incarcerated brother in real life that an AI generated. It would be more invasive and affecting to the psyche than anything a AAA studio could come up with in a vacuum.
When it gets personal, people have more reason to get up and take action. See: the Baby Reindeer lawsuit, the taboo around real person fanfiction, etc. AI has achieved never-before-seen levels of "getting personal" with the player in interactive media.
Black Mirror was prescient in this regard with the episode "Playtest" exploring the nature of AI-personalized horror.
Another thing I'd guess is if a game studio publishes a work of fiction that encourages the player to commit suicide, the studio would be sued out of existence. So game studios have been incentivized throughout history to never publish games with specific attitudes towards topics like those if they wanted any chance to keep selling copies. It was never that video games as a medium were incapable of inducing suicide or psychosis, but the nature of game publishing and being an artist meant no game developer that wanted to keep their reputation was going to be such a sociopathic asshole as to write a game framing suicide as a positive thing, much less a game singling out one specific person with fine-tuned personal anecdotes twisting the knife in every possible emotional vulnerability. AI is able to bypass that unspoken social contract with enough personalized context.
And the causality is the opposite in my experience. I view my smartphone as a maladaptive way of self-soothing. Locking away my phone just means I'm left with unchecked anxiety I can't think myself out of, and I've only deprived myself of one more method of addressing it (nonoptimally).
People without constant stress have less temptation. In times where my anxiety is the lowest due to sheer circumstance, any reason I have to doomscroll vanishes and I can then occupy my time with a hobby. But it's not because I chose to do away with my phone that I'm able to do so, it's because I didn't have to spend all my time and effort fighting stress. The less stress, the closer the "choice" gets to being a no-brainer, entirely automatic.
In econometrical terms it would be "double causality", as it forms a vicious cycle. Using your phone to self-soothe leads to not developing real hobbies, which leads to more isolation, which leads to more phone usage.
Say you decide you're now a chess person. Instead of doomscrolling before bed you find relaxation in the meditative study of chess games for an hour a day before going to bed and now you use your phone only as an alarm. You join your local chess club to play IRL during weekends and attend some classes too. What were the effects? Well, there are the proven long-term cognitive benefits of learning and practicing chess, there's the immediate cognitive and emotional benefit of a larger social circle and a community, and medium term you'll feel good about yourself for achieving milestones (getting to 1000 ELO, winning the weekly tournament, etc.)
None of that would have happened if you had stayed on your phone. You probably already invest just as much time on it as you would in chess in this scenario, but it has no ROI, it is designed to suck you in.
For a long time I tried to start an exercise habit, but it didn't stick. I could jog 15 minutes every day for a month and instantly be sick of it a few days after.
I was only able to gain an exercise habit by addressing my mood and anxiety first. First, with my mental improvements I became actively motivated to exercise and didn't hate it anymore. I kept at it for several weeks, only stopping every so often due to fatigue. Eventually I did earn the habit of exercise. This wasn't intuitive to me, but the typical causality was backwards. Exercise was not what directly made me healthier, but being healthier (mentally) from the start allowed me to initiate and keep exercising, from which I earned even more health benefits.
A mental deficit in being able to form habits is arguably even worse than a lack of exercise, since you would try to apply the "exercise cure" advice and just burn out after a while like I did. It's not like you didn't exercise, but you could not internalize what all those people typically say must be the case if you just exercise a lot.
Even as my mood fluctuates I am now able to still go for a jog once in a while. These days I understand that if I had started off exercising in a state of low mood, I would have no chance of making it stick. The habit carried over from when I persisted at it in my limited window of improved mood.
I guess it matters what "shitty" parent means. You can give all the financial/material support in the world to a child and still cause irreversible lifelong damage with the wrong parenting style. You don't need to be a "perfect" parent, but at the same time you do need to be a "good enough" parent, or the consequences are dire.
Knowing what I've been through, I'd much, much rather those people spend an extra 5 or more years working through those problems instead of having children that will grow up to regret being born.
And reality is, some people should never become parents, because they carry mental issues they will forever lack the self-perception to acknowledge and attempt to change. But they will become parents anyway, and the outcome is all but certain.
I owned one and the build quality was pretty bad. The plastic tab holding the door to the dust holder snapped off with barely any force. The exact same thing happened to someone else I knew.
I think always-on Internet devices both exposed latent difficulties in home/working life that already existed for many and amplified those same vulnerabilities. You can observe a single person on their phone for 8 hours a day and call it "problematic usage", but this alone does not give enough information about what underlying forces drive so much usage. If it's boredom, then why are they bored all the time? If it's stress, then where does so much stress originate from?
The introduction of smartphones has raised the stakes since a huge number of people are now confronted with the same problem in a highly talked-about way, some of which could have been activated by latent mental vulnerability that may not have been brought to light in a past age. And sometimes this does result in a discussion of sometimes completely unrelated personal issues, but by their nature I would imagine not many would be willing to open up about them in public, compared to complaints about social media. Problems related to tech get a lot of social advocacy, but I find it hard to imagine a national "organization for adults abused by <type of guardian>". What is there to advocate for when the issue at hand already opened and shut itself decades ago and the people involved are either dead or incapable of admitting fault? Not to mention that the causes for each trauma are wildly diverse, and sometimes there is not enough information to be able to find a concrete meaning in the events at all?
Sadly, even regulation of technology seems to be a workable issue compared to that of preventing future abuse. Each upbringing is distinct, and most effort seems to be put towards recovering from abuse long in the past knowing that (when dealing with certain personality types) there will never be hope for reconciliation. Knowing how intractable a problem intergenerational trauma is is enough to make me lean antinatalist at times, even though I say I am recovering.
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