HN Reader

The elderly, the kids, the teenagers, the adults. Screen addiction is a pandemic. The biggest one humanity has ever seen.

The richest, most powerful organizations are spending billions every month to make it more addictive, to reach more people.

Absolutely, because they have the time for it and fewer alternatives. I got my mom a tablet, set her up with ReVanced YouTube & Twitter plus VLC, and now she is by far the heaviest user of our NAS, last Kindle user on our Amazon account, and reachable on Signal pretty much always.

Would it be better if she sat at home with the TV on and a paper book? No, I don't think so.

This is also where the leisure time went. Keynes predicted 15 hour workweek, we decided to just have kids and the elderly not work at all.

My dad used to tie up the Ethernet cable on our family's home router and hide it in a closet. The knots were to prevent us from reconnecting the router and putting it back before he got back home. He'd be able to tell if we tried since he was the only one able to tie that special knot :)

All to prevent my siblings and I from wasting our summers on Runescape or Miniclip or something. Looking back, the hours we were playing each day is nothing compared to the hours he spends scrolling through crap these days. My dad worked in such an intellectually stimulating job before, so it's baffling to see that he chooses to do this all day. I imagine most older parents are in the same boat these days. It has made me hate social media, YouTube, short videos, et al. even more

This got both of my parents. What's interesting is that neither of them really used a computer or smartphone much, but both got addicted to iPads in their late 60s.

What they do in their free time is their business, but it often even messes with human interaction. I've been midsentence with them in person when they'd just pull out their iPad for a quick scroll, completely oblivious that I was even there or talking to them. What's weird is that it almost reminds me of a person taking a quick vape or smoke... I'm not even sure they realize why they're doing it.

I see this every day, elderly brain rotting watching fake ai generated videos on youtube.

Youtube and big tech will have to answer for this eventually.

I have noticed the same trend with my parents. The people that were insisting that I was spending too much time as a child in front of the computer and should get out, are now retired and permanently glued to their phones.

Just got back from Reno, and I can confirm that there are hundreds of old ladies there addicted to playing video games all day. (But I grew up in Vegas, and this ain't news... The Economist should check their local slot parlor, or fruit machines or whatever they call it there).

This reminds me of elderly people addicted to cable news. Once separated from TV they can only talk about politics, but it’s weirdly up to the minute and yet still so poorly informed.

I am elderly and I am an addict. But my screen addiction is only a small part of my lifelong problem. The real, root cause, my major malfunction, is an ongoing aversion to reality, a constant urge and willfulness to escape, an addiction to fantasy and an increasing willingness to indulge myself.

I am not alone in this.

Yes, my first screen addiction was probably the NTSC broadcasts from a black & white childhood, but all those paperbacks counted too, Heinlein and Fleming and MacDonald et al.

Even my early career as a software engineer was motivated by a self-indulgent escape from reality. I preferred the small world of intense coding in 6510 cycle shaving loops, to the expansive reality that surrounded my basement. The outside world went on without me as my screen addiction grew all the way to 640x400.

Now people enjoy an escape into the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). I've been living there since the print versions were only 12 cents each.

Nowadaze everybody I know have become as addicted as I've always been. But is it a problem for society? Or is shared fantasy the actual basis on which our society is built?

To its credit, the article avoids mention of various "generations," which are a pretty unscientific prism through which to view the world. Yet there is still something to be learned from looking at a particular age cohort and its cultural zeitgeist. The people reaching retirement age today are the oldest members of Generation X. People born in 1965 are turning 60 this year. These people first had access to gaming consoles and personal computers cheap enough for general consumers when they were in their teens. They were 18 in 1983 when Atari crashed, and 28 during Eternal September in 1993. So it's no wonder the numbers are increasing in older people. People have a tendency to think a demographic like "older people" is static, when it's really a sliding window. Digitally-savvy people are simply aging into it. And you will too.

Sometimes I think… What if this is just human evolution at play? After hunter-gatherers, humans became sedentary farmers and herders. Imagine if psychology was a thing back then. There would have been so many papers on how this shift was changing the very core of what we were.

What if technology is just evolving us into something else? I can imagine in 1000 years from now our cyborg versions would be walking around with screens inside their brains not thinking twice about it.

I don’t think I’d like that world at all. And I hate what screens have done to my current world. But shit, maybe there’s no stopping it.

The problem of algorithmic feeds gets a modest amount of attention, but I still think its not nearly enough. Addicting feeds are evil. If we ever manage to make it beyond them, we'll reflect on them with the same regret as slavery.

A quote from an author I like, Matthew Crawford: "Attention is the thing that is most one’s own: in the normal course of things, we choose what to pay attention to, and in a very real sense this determines what is real for us; what is actually present to our consciousness. Appropriations of our attention are then an especially intimate matter."

I can't really envision a solution, frankly. On a personal level, I have tried dozens of strategies to use my phone less, including deleting many of my social media accounts, and regrettably, its still an issue. My best guess is legislation that bans machine-learning algorithms on newsfeeds. But there are billions of dollars and a dysfunctional government (speaking U.S. here) motivated against that outcome.

My mom fell for an SMS scam and can‘t recognize obvious AI videos where cats on two legs dance with human babies.

Old people can‘t be left alone with internet devices and online banking.

I wonder if I will ever become that dumb too when I am old…

If your mobility is limited physically, what else is there to do other than computer/screen based activities?

Hopefully full dive VR will be ready by the time I'm that old.

It gives a feeling of Screen addiction is when people are looking at things I don't approve of.

Many older people I work with would love to have more required interactions move away from the phone screen.

Meh. I see this in my own mom, now. But 20 years ago before phones were huge, she already spent an absurd amount of time each day watching soap operas on TV.

It's a pity that they are missing a hugely troubled audience - elderly hooked on YouTube, specifically.

It's an ugly addiction that mirrors what we've seen with alcoholics and schizophrenics, whereby they point a finger at anything but the actual problem, and any remedy that the have, or are given, they adamantly avoid and refuse.

YouTube, like other social media, is driven by pushing and pulling on the right emotions in the right way to get you hooked. Sexy, funny, happy, cute, sensational, sad, scary, angry. Enough Sophia Vergara, cat videos, UFOs, doom and gloom, bias-confirming politics, etc, and you'll have someone watching all day long. It's not like what it was when an elderly person watched daytime soap operas and gameshows, this is a dopamine-fueled additive binge. We've seen several really bad cases where it's almost everything that the lonely elderly person does. There's no more "journey" or "investment" when you can simply flick to the next video that tickles your fancy in that moment.

These are the people I'm sincerely concerned about, and they have zero reason to go seek help. It's not an issue to them. In fact, they'll fight tooth and nail to claim anything else is their problem except this.

It's almost as though the first generations to enjoy television weren't ready for something this addictive.

Personally, I despise YouTube, despite growing up in the heart of the Silicon Valley. That platform serves a handful of purposes for me, such as helpful tutorials the rare time that I need them and epic Mongolian folk metal music videos.

Mirrored at Business Times.

https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/opinion-features/meet-real-...

Archive today and even archive.org are not working with safari on this iphone. I'll have to debug.

FWIW, I'm senior, and when you're not 100%, you just sit and read or listen to the radio (preferably classical music). Being a techie and infovore, Hacker News fills the bill. Where else do you get links to WWII proximity fuses (schematic included) or high tech gambling cheat devices. And programming languages, something of interest to me since "Computer Lib: Dream Machines"?

I felt great yesterday and hiked a lot, but some days, the connected screen replaces the ipad over the piano and the camera screen. Screens all over. Grabbed a sunrise this morning before just chillin most of the day.

This is true. But it’s also hard to hold against many of them. Because they are often isolated, slow or immobile, and in cognitive decline. I saw this happen to my grandmother in an assisted living home.

Is this new? My grandparents spent a ton of time in front of the tv, most of the day probably. By the time some of them were near 90 they couldn't do much more anyway, but I think it started decades before that, especially in winter time after they were retired

Doctors who're legally entrusted to handle addiction care...aren"t. It's a total scandal.

People criticize children not realizing they are equally afflicted

I hope more awareness is made about this

I have a lot of elderly friends, from folk music jams. They’re in their 60-80 phase, plenty of money and energy, decent health, minds still in tact. They’re learning new tunes, arresting the decline of technique, interacting in person regularly with others. If every older person did this, their minds would stay a lot sharper for longer. Every day you’re minutely deliberately improving and learning new tunes.

Grab a bodhran or banjo and head to a local folk jam everyone!

Well it helps replace the Young that don't visit.

We need a screenaholics anonymous

Maybe it's not bad. In post soviet countries elderly already watching government endorsed man-hating gibberish on tv all day long.

So I would better prefer them playing three-in-row. I think after some time it even would be possible easier to "sell" to them playing some kind of minecraft with grandchildren.

Also, I vividly remember parks in Georgia (country!) crowded with elderly loudly playing chess and domino, instead of watching "who deserved to die by our god-chosen almighty army today" crap.

It's fascinating how tech has become a vital part of the elderly's lives, helping them stay connected and informed.

I support a couple of retired people on the side, and they are totally addicted to the lowest quality slop on Facebook/Instagram imaginable.

It's so bad that they'll click on a link to see the latest slop, and ostensibly get one of those webpages that says they have 47 viruses and call the number. I politely told them that they shouldn't click on those links anymore.

To which they said, well, if I shut my phone off when that happens, can I keep on doing it?

It's like that Star Trek the Next Generation episode where they all get addicted to that game. It's creepy and sad.

This is also what I think is a driving factor behind American politics today:

> Alarming and misleading news may be a particular threat to the elderly, who are twice as likely as under-25s to use news apps or websites.

Millions of people are addicted to watching Fox News paint a picture of the urban US as a war zone that rural and suburban residents should avoid at all costs. That doesn't even include the right wing AI slop on social media sending similar messages. One could argue that this is affecting Trump himself, whereby domestic policy is shaped around what he sees on TV and social media (where was he seeing videos of "bombed out" Portland, anyway?).

This goes hand in hand with the resurgence of fascism.