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
Been cutting my own hair for 5 years gang. :bad-haircut:
It gets better. I’ve got 10 years experience and I do almost as good a job as any hairdresser ever did.
that’s cool. do you just shave with electric trimmers?
That’s how I started (dog grooming clippers). Now I use scissors most of the time and sometimes touch up with clippers. (when I remember to charge the battery)
I resorted to not cutting my hair and asking my wife to trim my bangs. So many split & dead ends
yeah you can get a phone and internet cheap compared to ]anything else you might want. it’s no surprise people spend all their time online given the material conditions we’re forced to live in
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.
Oh, yeah, fair enough.
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
yeah paper’s a bit less conveinient and vulnerable to people seeing what you’re reading & inquiring about it. phones have definitely improved upon the “don’t talk to me” meta, especially with headphones
Fuckin headphones. Everyone has them on. How do people feel safe biking in the city with headphones on?!
Also with a newspaper, you didn’t have a real time comment section and if you are all sitting around reading a paper you’re probably all reading the same few papers and it could even foster in person social interaction and discussion. I remember a time where I would come to work and eat lunch in the break room while reading the paper and talking about whatever was in the news that day with my coworkers for example.
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.
This is part of why it’s called “doomscrolling”, because it doesn’t feel good but you feel compelled to do it (implicitly because not doing it agitates you or something)
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
Hey man if you solve all the other stuff ill throw my phone away
the boomer is calling from inside the millennial
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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.
“Can I have a cig?” “yeah sure”
“Can I have some of your vape?” “get the fuck away from me.”
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
Are you still on the vapes? I picked up smoking again a few years back due to work stress and I made the switch pretty quickly, but I really want to just be done with these things.
I’m not. I actually went backwards, from vapes to cigarettes. If you’re going to vape, pick up your own system, tank and juice. The shitty disposable vapes will make you a nic fiend like nothing else. I can’t stand how bad they make the cravings. I can run out of money for smokes and go a day or two without smoking. But when I was on those disposable vapes, it was like hard drug cravings, it was so bad.
You also don’t get beat up when handing them a Popeye candy cigarette anymore though. So maybe one thing’s improved in this painful, candy-hating world.
real, we need to bring it back somehow
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
Weed is like that anywhere it’s legal. But stoned chats are far less grounded than cig buzzed chats. The unpleasant weed chats I’ve had are far more unpleasant than the worst cig chats I’ve had. Smoke cigs, you talk about family and what brings you to whatever area you’re at. Maybe a few minor work stresses, but nothing crazy. Weed will make people too comfortable in a strangers company
more trauma dump slop for me
jk all my weed chats have been fairly normal like you’ve described with cig chats
The main problem with weed chats is that you get stoned and start to worry about when it’s okay to leave the conversation. With a cigarette, the conversation ends in five minutes or you light up another one. It’s a nice little snack versus a Sunday dinner.
Not quite what I meant. I dislike smoking because of the lung cancer, not because of the nicotine :(
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
Drugs (alcohol is a drug) make people like cigarettes more, sometimes you’ll have do deal with someone too drunk or geeked for their own good
Was just thinking this.
- 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
I don’t think most americans realize this is weird. We’re told we’re the freest™ and learn next to nothing about anywhere else. Some of the biggest culture shock for me came from Brits describing their childhoods. Like, I just assumed we inherited a lot of this from them.
I find it much more worrying to see kids constantly on ipads and shit. Like how it’s much more concerning to see a child smoking than an adult smoking.
I don’t blame the parents btw. Everyone is tired, child care is unaffordable. Society atomizes us and keeps us away from our extended families that would have provided childcare in the past. A one-income family is basically impossible for most people.
I barely use my phone for anything other than “being a phone”, and I still never leave my apartment.
yeah, I’m gonna need a hospitable world before I bother going outside. that includes:
- places to actually fucking go (third spaces)
- people I’d actually enjoy hanging out with also being there
- convenient for me to actually transport myself there (do not design the whole fucking world around cars you pieces of shit, try 15 minute cities)
until then, I can’t be bothered and there’s fuck all to do in this place anyways.
I just don’t want to bother anyone.
Are you bothered every single time someone speaks with you?
Depends on the person, doesn’t it?
I just assume I’m bothersome by default🙃
I understand that feeling, but not everyone feels that way. Most people likely feel neutral about it, and some even enjoy being talked to! 🙂
I can’t know if someone would enjoy being talked to before talking to them. Even worse, I can’t know if someone is just being polite when I bother them. They might be bothered and I’d never know! I’d much rather never talk to anyone.
I think when talking about phones, the issue is not so much people are on them but what they’re doing on them. Many people in this thread have pointed out other things that have occupied peoples’ times in prior eras, and phones sort of serve that purpose now. But what is on the phone is so bleak. Social media is horrible for us and pretty much designed to get us addicted. Everything is either an ad or a grift or some sort of astroturfed propaganda. And you have children being exposed to this shit also, extremely young kids with easily molded minds with unfettered access to the most mind numbing and in many cases dangerous content. I think that’s the issue.
I brought a book everywhere I went before smart phones.
Had to put something in my khaki cargo shorts pockets
I still bring a lil notebook/sketch pad everywhere
This seems to be an issue in more developed countries or richer parts of developed nations. I don’t see this as much in my area. Smartphones do exist and there are a few who become attached to them but the majority still get out and talk with each other. If anything, phones are a great way of knowing when it’s time to leave. You can tell people are ready to go when the majority start looking at their phones. It used to be that people just wouldn’t leave until late at night because nobody wanted to be the first to go and I was never a fan of that.
Another thing is that the previous generations were just as attached to TV’s. The same kids you see glued to their smartphones and throwing fits over them getting taken away probably had parents who were the same way with the TV and their videogames. Doesn’t make it okay but it always bothers me when people assume it’s exclusively a Gen Z/Alpha problem.
I don’t see this as much in my area. Smartphones do exist and there are a few who become attached to them but the majority still get out and talk with each other.
where is that? (country)
Alternatively, most people probably weren’t just making friends walking around, doing their shopping, etc anyway. Those are kind of weird ways to make friends outside of pretty specific circumstances. Who knows, maybe they were texting their actual friends
I mean, my parents met in a retail store lol
my parents met in a retail store lol
I wonder what % of people met someone like that
I’m not talking making friends, I’m talking direct action
spent a morning out on the town on my day off and everyone is just fucking buried in their newspapers 24/7
no wonder people are having so much trouble making friends and creating meaningful relationships in this day and edge. so fucking bleak
went to the town market on my yearly day off and everyone is just fucking buried in their tablets, stylus in hand, carving away.
no wonder people are having so much trouble making friends and perpetuating meaningful oral legends in this day and age. so fucking bleak
LMFAOO
what the devil?
This was my go-to argument for a while. I think it’s probably worse that phones have so much brain- rotting content on them, but then again people were probably easier to control when there were only a few papers anyone actually read and got news from. Idk.
not gonna lie, i was hoping this post would be about genocide, climate change, and looming WW3, which are the reasons I think society is headed in a bad direction. Not like… people buried in their phones, which is a total boomer trope.
Wait, is this post bait?
Would you say the West has fallen? How many billions must die to correct it?
Civility has fallen. 1.7 billion pell grant applicants who open small businesses in overserved neighborhoods must die, in a tax-deductable PPP program to create an estimated 700k jobs 
Kamala is that you?
😔
