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I mean define “better”, because I’m generally social media negative and I don’t see it making life better in any sense that I can consider “the good life” as it existed in the before times. Kids don’t seem to spend as much time really socializing offline, playing pickup games, having healthy hobbies, and so on. Even adults, a lot of times they don’t spend time talking to other adults in work downtime, they are generally in their phones doing some form of social media or games. How is that a better life? How is a loneliness epidemic good for American society? How is it good for kids or adults to get less exercise, spend less time socializing, etc?
To me the good life is one that’s fairly simple and balanced. A person should be spending time with others, spend time being active, have creative hobbies, and have a good enough job to live on. The phone seems to eat most of the non-working hours for a good number of people around me.
I agree with everything you said
The ideal solution is we RETVRN and tech is a side enabler of what you described, and screen time is much lower across the board.
But that requires collective action and minimal defection (especially in the context of kids and teens).
100 teenagers with no social media all doing 1990s activities (spraypainting the train tracks? Whatever) are clearly all better off
100 teenagers all addicted to social media? Clearly worse off than the above group.
95 teenagers addicted to social media, and 5 teenagers who aren't allowed on social media and are thus cut out from participating in many shared experiences with their peers? Of all three scenarios, those 5 teens are by far the worst off.
I can look for it later, but teenagers literally say this. They wish they could leave social media but because the supermajority of their friends and peers do not, they are stuck participating, lest they be left behind socially.
I think this is true, and honestly I think the best thing is to simply pick a level of technology use that fits. I mean honestly other than this place and I’m trying to learn to blog, I mostly limit my internet to radio and podcasts. It’s actually an improvement over indiscriminate of the internet. And it started from reading about live in the 1940s and following a few video blogs about people trying to live life for a week or a month as if it were 1942 (in Britain). I tried it out because I thought I was using the internet too much, and tbh it is an interesting experiment because it has improved my life in ways I didn’t expect.
If you don’t want that, I suppose you could go more modern. But even simple things like having one TV and one tower style computer where you do all the internet stuff and keep it in a public place in the home would probably work. It’s what happened in 1990. It was pretty good.
If anyone here wants the complete story I’d be willing to do an effort post on the experience and the things that it changed.
I remember hearing about this!
I read and enjoy basically every effort post on this site. So very interested
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Yes, please!
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