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
It gets better. I’ve got 10 years experience and I do almost as good a job as any hairdresser ever did.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
- 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
