@twipped

YES.

I am getting so sick of all the "advice" on how you can be potentially slightly less miserable in this hellscape. I used to think it was mostly benign, but now I see it to be propaganda.

It may be true that less screentime can sometimes be good for mental health, but that's so insufficient that it's not even a drop in a bucket.

There's no self care that can make all this bearable & suggesting that we can individually tweak our lives until they're great is an insidious lie.

@twipped

Agreed, with the caveat that peer pressure sucked as a teen even pre-internet & social media-- and drove me to the brink not once but several times. :/

Because it's always sucked and we don't socialize kids to be decent to one another. If you're any kind of square peg in any way, you learn that fast. :(

I thank my lucky stars that I didn't have modern tech to make that road 10 times as tough to hoe.

@twipped

They should check the services that these teen phones connect to the #MLTimelnes and see why #TheSocialDilemma was made. idk

@twipped "The world is melting, infrastructure is crumbling, facist regimes are on the rise, continuing education is more expensive than ever, there’s very few jobs that pay enough to even rent an apartment after college, let alone buy a home, and the queerest generation ever is seeing their identities legislated away by an increasingly out of touch oligarchy."

Maybe I'm too obsessed with Star Wars, but this reads like an Opening Dialog to a Star Wars Movie

@twipped

In my opinion, traumas are not necessarily caused by terrible events, but when, for some reason or another, our capacity to fight back those terrible events is taken away.

Mobile phone are addictive. That's their business model. This addiction is taking agency away from an whole generation of kids. It removes their capacity to fight back.

@twipped I'm honestly jealous of Noah Smith. He is relentlessly stupid; in any other life he'd be barely usable as a human sandbag diverting floodwater, yet somehow he has managed to turn being incorrect on almost every subject into a very lucrative career without turning to Fox news so still has a thin layer of respectability about him.

I'd be tempted to try it myself if I thought I could stoop to his level, thankfully I cannot.

@twipped @bigzaphod yes, the article seems to me to say “they can’t be unhappy about these other things - average wealth is up!” And I can only wonder… have they looked at the mean?!? :(

There is a good point that phone use is correlated with the same curve, but you can explain that by realising it also then correlates to people having access to more information, not just MSM :(

@twipped I mean to be fair more time spend looking at a phone is less time spend doing better things.

But yeah phones are probably not the major cause.

@twipped

I agree with you🙏😞

@twipped

That guy? Blocked me on Twitter when I asked him if he was OK with Hillary Clinton's then stated position of the democrat party throwing trans people under the bus (or not fighting for them which is looking like the position adopted anyway.)

@twipped This guy once wrote about how an entire city (SF) sucked because people don’t smile at *him*

Totally missing the other ways this city sucks. It tracks

@twipped When I was a teenager in the 80s and early 90s, I had no idea how fucked up the world was and I was, by those standards, pretty well connected (BBSes, Delphi, Usenet) but the mass connectivity isn't the problem, it's a catalyst to see how bad things are and that is depressing for everybody not just teens.

A thing I've noticed about the generation or two behind me (I'm almost 50) is they tend to have radical empathy more often than not, which gives me hope.