The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I hate seeing iPad kids in public, and think giving a minor a smartphone is only marginally better than buying them a box of fags. I saw a note on Substack the other day that pointed out that lots of parents (or prospective parents) are concerned about their children becoming addicted to their phones, but this is blatantly hypocritical when the parents themselves are addicted to their phones. Children are imitative: if they see their parents staring at their phones all day, they're going to want to do the same.
I take this seriously, and it's indisputable that my fiancée and I spend far too much time looking at our phones. Rather than trying to address it after having children, we want to get ahead of the problem. To that end, I ordered this phone lock box from Amazon, which arrived yesterday. You simply pop your phone inside and set a timer, at the end of which it will open. We have pre-committed to not looking at screens of any kind for at least one hour (preferably more) every evening: no phones, no laptops, no TV. (Obviously our laptops don't fit inside the lock box, but for that we have each other to keep ourselves honest.)
The box arrived yesterday evening, and as soon as I returned from the gym I put both our phones inside and set the timer for an hour. It also occurred to me that I could leave our phones inside overnight, so that our phones wouldn't be the first thing we see when we wake up in the morning. This turned out to be a fortuitous decision, as last night I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep, but had no choice but to read my book for an hour rather than looking at my phone. It's only been one day, but so far I think this was a wise purchase.
I still consider people obsessed about minimizing their screen time to have a minor to major skill issue.
A computer, especially a handheld one, is a convenient portal to the sum of human knowledge. Some of my friends live in there. Like, do something useful with it.
I have had days of 12-14 hour screen-on times, and I managed 8 hours 45 minutes today, as of the time of writing before bed. That represents a less than maximally busy day at work followed by a lazy evening. Apparently I used my phone while walking for 1 hour and 44 minutes.
I do not consider this wasted time. Were there things I could have done instead that could, theoretically, have benefited me more? Yes. But I wasn't going to do them just because I didn't have a phone. You try preparing case based discussions and reading NICE guidelines all day. I wrote important emails, used AI to make my life easier, used AI to make other people's lives harder, entertained myself, and got things done, in general.
Nobody in 1995 would have looked at a person spending two hours reading, an hour writing letters, an hour listening to music, an hour navigating around town, an hour talking to friends and three hours using a computer and concluded: nine hours of device time, catastrophic. The figure sounds alarming only because we've collapsed a dozen activities into one dogshit metric based on the substrate they happen on. By the same logic you could work yourself into a panic about somebody's "paper time".
I also have strong doubts about the nominal harmfulness of "screen time" for children. I spent my childhood reading like my life depended on it, because I was bored to fuck. I spend my adulthood reading because I'm often bored to fuck too, except it's on my phone. I also write essays on the bus and in the loo, put on tunes, do useful work, and maintain social relationships with it. The only reason your kids won't end up doing the same is because we might end up with something better.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0506-1
My recommendation:
Don't optimise children's screen minutes. Optimise what they're doing, what they're not doing because of it, and whether they can disengage from it.
I'd say that phones have made my life considerably better. Getting absolutely bored in the year of someone's lord 2026 is the biggest skill issue there is. And God knows I do a lot more IRL than I often used to. They're not mutually exclusive.
Well, yes, I'm not terribly concerned about my hypothetical future child staring at his laptop for hours because he's hard at work studying for his Leaving Cert.
I am concerned about him spending so much of his formative years consuming short-form brainrot and meaningless slop that his literacy, ability to socialise with his peers, executive function etc. are permanently compromised.
The purpose of the lock box is to prevent my fiancée and I doing things which look more like the latter than the former, so we can set a good example for our hypothetical future children. Endless scrolling on Instagram is an example of the latter. Neither of us claim that it's an edifying way to spend our time. It doesn't even make us feel happier in the short-term (never mind in the long-term), which is almost the textbook definition of an addiction.
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"Here's the weights. Do something useful! Better yourself! Why are you complaining that they're right next to this table full of drugs, porn and video games? Just git gud and ignore the temptation, scrub."
Willpower likely follows a similar distribution to IQ (albeit, much more trainable). Most people here are also high willpower people, who don't grok that there's a difference. Personally, I plan around my probably-sub-par-for-the-motte Will stat by paying for an app that lockdowns, limits and blocks my biggest time wasters on my phone.
I am perfectly aware of the difference, courtesy of ADHD and varying degrees of depression.
I'd say my willpower is as spiky as a porcupine. Herculean levels when it comes to work and professional advancement, if you know what I've had to suffer through, you'd get it. Ridiculously low in other places. I have that iron in me, I've survived things that would make many people quit or die. It just happens to be pig-iron.
The majority of people here would do better than me in the domains where I confess weakness, and those domains are the ones relevant here.
If you have a stash of superstimuli you can't resist staring you in the face, close your eyes, or get them out of the way. Installing an app that specifically gates the usage of the other apps of concern. Block websites. Locking your phone away is like locking yourself in the shitter so you don't go for the fridge.
More importantly, people consistently mythologize what they'd do without the all consuming specter of "phones." Yeah, I'm sure you're going to learn Latin, take up gardening and run that half marathon. Or call their mom, oh wait, no phone. Grand projects of self-improvement aside, even the marginal effect is likely minimal. I'd say it's both easier and less ridiculous to simply figure out better ways to spend the time on the phone doing better things on the phone.
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Well, about that.
But hey, if programmers can't figure out the benefits of async/await communication patterns, and they're supposed to be smart, what hope does anyone else have? (Technically books and TV are like that too, they're just one-way.)
Yes, but if you're not smarter than the tool (which tends to be co-morbid with not being smarter than your kid) you won't be able to think like that, and many people are not smarter than their tools. The simplest way to do that- the one any idiot can understand- is to flatly reject those tools and to urge others (perhaps at gunpoint) to do the same. You can even claim you're helping keep the underclass from vice when you do it (re: test scores and child molesters), which is the standard prohibitionist playbook, and as such opposing these things will require an approach focused on human dignity.
I can't cure stupidity, susceptibility to hyper-stimuli, and the CEO of someone's executive function jumping out a window. Those are the most innate of skill issues.
But I do not think @FtttG is dumb. I don't think he has executive dysfunction to that degree either, and if I have ADHD and manage professionally and personally, so can he. I dare say that his current approach is proof of high neuroticism and conscientiousness, but a failure of framing/perspective. Particularly in light of objective evidence accrued in a systematic manner.
This applies to most people on this forum, to varying degrees. I'm not going to tell my typical patient to spend more time on their phone, and I won't tell the average teenager to put in a few more hours of TikTok. I do expect the population here to be selected for the ability to read things at length, which correlates with intelligence. There are exceptions. We won't be naming them.
Something I've genuinely believed for a long time: half the fucking point of being intelligent is getting to do things that would wreck someone dumber than you. And if you're intelligent enough, you become acutely aware of how far that extends, which is why I advise everyone, myself very much included, against being too smart for their own good. Is this elitist? Possibly. It's also true, and I've made my peace with the combination.
So the advice is aimed squarely at the people who'd benefit from it, and it amounts to this: stop generating angst over a benign practice, and if you can't manage that, at least decouple the dozen different activities that have been reduced into one number on a settings screen.
There are of course people here genuinely wasting their time on their phones, or using them in ways they'd regret on any sober reflection. That fraction is much smaller than the fraction who believe it of themselves. The gap between those two numbers is doing more damage than the phones are.
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