I have one 50 year old friend with very little tech know how and his kids set him up with a good smartphone. I saw his family about a year ago and his kids noted that their dad often sits up until about 2 or 3 in the morning at the kitchen table just scrolling through tiktok videos. He sent them to me about once a day until I had to block him and tell him directly to stop sending me this stuff. He’s since become ‘aware’ of his addiction and stops sending out videos as often as he did before. He still scrolls through thousands and thousands of videos a day.
It would all be funny if it wasn’t so frightening at the same time.
50 is still too young. Endless scrolling should only be for old people who literally can’t do anything. Kids need to do physically stimulating things like playing outside, adults need to do mentally stimulating things like playing video games. Old people don’t need to do anything, they can veg out to short form.
Legitimately, when I was quitting nicotine, I would scroll on my phone when I was getting withdrawal pangs, and it helped.
Nowadays I have to watch myself, or else I’ll potentially lose hours. I know exactly what addiction feels like: going without and satisfying what feels like a need - it feels right. And these apps are definitely addictive. I didn’t really notice until I tried to stop.
