Since giving up my cell phone entirely over 5 years ago, my productivity, memory, and overall happiness are at the highest levels they have ever been, in my late 30s. I no longer apologize to anyone for this lifestyle choice anymore since the benefits are something everyone deserves, but almost all opt out of today for made up reasons.
I take photos with a pocket mirrorless, and take notes with a notebook. I tell time with a self winding mechanical watch. I pay for things at stores with cash instead of tap to pay. Like a cave man, I know.
I am reachable by internet when I am at my desk, and by landline when I am at home. In an actual emergency dial 911, not me. Otherwise it can probably wait until I am at my desktop or a laptop.
I was already sold on raising kids without smartphones on intuition and lived experience, but study after study point at us having access to all humans, all knowledge, and all entertainment at all times as leading to generally bad mental health and cognitive function outcomes. Our brains were simply not evolved for it.
Whenever I see parents scrolling, and handing a kid a phone as well to pacify them, I wish I could report them for child abuse. I feel like I am watching them be given whiskey or cigarettes, except it is socially acceptable and no one cares.
Last Monday in a fit of exasperation I turned my phone into airplane mode. And that's where I left it, for an entire week. I swear this was the most productive week of work I've ever had in my professional career. It's astonishing. On the weekend I wanted to call my mom and yet I dreaded taking it off airplane mode. I'm going to try doing this for the foreseeable future.
You can do wifi calling in airplane mode. Left ours in this mode by default for months at first and then realized we could just cancel the cell phone plan entirely to save money. Wifi is everywhere when you need it.
> Whenever I see parents scrolling, and handing a kid a phone as well to pacify them, I wish I could report them for child abuse.
Consider that you might not have everything figured out for everyone. I'm glad you found something that works, but the will to impose your way on others isn't benevolent.
Many parents used to drink while pregnant and put whiskey in the baby bottle to make kid shut up. We should make decisions based on research, not by emulating other badly informed parents, even if they are the majority.
The study does not point to a cause. The comment I'm responding to is drawing conclusions based on a sensationalist blog post and then wishing they could report other parents for abuse. I think the study is well done, but we can't scientifically draw the conclusions from it that the author (and folks in this thread) are drawing.
This is just one study, that echos dozens and dozens of other studies all pointing at the same things: being reachable and able to reach everything and everyone everywhere all at once is making us all sadder and less productive, and kids are getting the worst of it having been handed this tech from their parents shortly after birth.
Your reply was next to meaningless as it doesn't offer anything above a "well, that's just how YOU feel about it!".
Yes, that's true. That /is/ how the OP feels about it. But at least they were able to articulate their point and get a message across, along with an implied (albeit weak) "call to action", not meant to be taken literally. Although I'm sure, if polled, the majority of folks in this thread would agree with the OP sentiment. I know I do.
“I wish I could have CPS take away their children and put them in foster homes” is a pretty messed up thought to have in response to seeing a kid looking at a phone. It seems pretty reasonable to call that out.
> Your reply was next to meaningless
We’re on a discussion forum. “Here’s how I feel about what said” is basically the point.
The purpose of my comment was to point out that just because you've found a solution that works for you does not mean it is generalizable and should be turned into a rule for the entire population.
1. I am entirely convinced minors should not have smartphones and every study supports this being a net negative.
2. I feel most adults are better off without them too, but it is an adult choice. For most I suggest deleting a frequently used app ever month until you stop seeing benefits.
The study we're discussing drew no such conclusion. There's a very disturbing pattern of studies coming out and being summarized by people with an agenda that choose to draw conclusions that are not supported by the study they're discussing. This is definitely true of social media studies, and I suspect it's true of mobile phone studies as well, although maybe you can provide a couple that you think are airtight and I can take a look.
ALL studies I have seen seem to support the idea that constant connectivity leads to worse mental health outcomes on average.
To get to specific proof though, clinically in the way we could with other addictions like smoking, we would need to look at how individual applications that allow us to outsource various cognitive functions specifically impact our brains.
GPS is a well studied example. Humans that rely on GPS instead of their own brains end up with provably weaker hippocampus.
It is not hard to form a hypothesis from this how letting targeted content algorithms decide what you see instead of making decisions on your own could weaken the portions of your brain that make decisions in a similar way, and all studies we have seen so far seem to support this hypothesis.
I would of course like to see more brain scan research but when all data points to the negative on something only available to humans very recently, and your own lived experience of forgoing that something has had major benefits for your personally, it becomes easy to be a strong advocate for people trying out a reduction of that something.
You seem to be arguing about avoiding constant connectivity. This is very different than not owning a smartphone. I think the conversation has gone off the rails, as I was critiquing your desire to impose a no smartphone lifestyle on others.
I can't reply to you anymore, but the study you cited is at least a couple of steps removed from the discussion.
First, it's about offloading navigation to a computer, and observing that humans use less of their navigation skills when doing so. This is very far removed from "smartphone use causes mental health problems".
Second, you claim it shows a "provably weaker hippocampus". But the study doesn't show that at all. It shows less activity in the hippocampus, which would be entirely expected, much like if we offloaded translation to a computer, we wouldn't see the same level of activity in the language centers of the brain.
The researchers themselves only conclude this from their study:
> These results help shape models of how hippocampal and prefrontal regions support navigation, planning and future simulation.
The data supports exactly the claim I am making: That indeed, offloading basic tasks we could do for ourselves, like navigation, decision making etc, is robbing our brains of mental exercise that would otherwise make them stronger and less dependent on technology.
The study's authors did not even attempt to draw any conclusions about long-term impact on brain health or mental health from their study. You're free to do so, but I don't find it compelling.
You asked for a study supporting our over-use of phones in general is a net negative.
I gave a specific example that is well studied that could allow us to make pretty good guesses about other apps that do our thinking for us, which could explain the types of results we get in these studies.
This is inspiring. I definitely need to look into getting a landline and reducing my cellphone dependence. We’ve been talking about it lately for our daughter to be able to talk to her friends outside of school. Recently another parent had suggested face time calls which we are strongly against (not so much against video calls but rather against child tablet usage).
I started by deleting an app a month until my phone was so boring I kept forgetting it at home, and ultimately abandoned it entirely.
It took a couple years to recalibrate my dopamine reward system gradually until I could enjoy just existing in my own thoughts and brain again while away from the internet, learn to navigate for myself, etc.
For "landlines" I just ported my families cell phone numbers (with their total consent and support) to a voip service, then got VOIP ATA boxes which allows plugging traditional landline phones, including an actual payphone for fun, via ethernet or wifi. Costs a couple dollars a month.
Pro Tip: Other parents sometimes need to be told NO, especially when it comes to matters of tech.
I believe their heart is in the right place but most of them don't know the first thing about the dangers of social media, gps tracking, cellphone addiction, frequent video calls, etc. If enough pressure is applied, then it will be the norm for your local community of kids to spend time in real life together vs. 100% online in a digital scaremongered world. Can there be a balance? Sure. But that balance usually comes only after saying NO to unnecessary tech. NO, kids in elementary school don't need a phone (they really don't). NO, we don't need to digitally track our child's movements down to the meter (we really don't).
But don't take my word for it. In 2025, we now havea sea of well documented research that proves the extremely high cost we all pay (as a society) for damaging our kids this way.
The irony of posting scaremongering about video calls being dangerous on a digital forum while claiming to be offline to avoid scaremongering.
> If enough pressure is applied
You cannot force the rest if your community to align with your personal viewpoints. There is no amount of “pressure” that is going to bend society to your will.
I was perhaps ambiguous. I am not saying societal change is not possible. I’m saying you, personally, will not change your local community as you imagine by simply telling other parents no.
Nowhere in your comment is there any indication you are running some sort of community initiative or anything else that might lead to actual change. Campaigning for a spot on the school board to advocate for banning cell phones in schools might be a useful strategy, for example. Telling parents who ask about FaceTime between friends that tablets are evil seems as effective as telling random smokers on the street that it’s going to kill them.
> Telling parents who ask about FaceTime between friends that tablets are evil seems as effective as telling random smokers on the street that it’s going to kill them.
I would just simply say it is against our lifestyle and suggest alternatives just as a vegan family might suggest alternatives to a BBQ birthday party.
Facetime is not going to happen as my kids will never be be allowed Google or Apple accounts or smartphones, so friends parents will need to explore those alternatives if their kid wants to talk to my kid.
That is how change happens. One social graph node at a time.
Also I did in fact found a security, privacy, and digital sovereignty advocacy community called #! which has been operating for more than 20 years now, and has mentored hundreds of people looking to make healthier technology choices.
You should of course do what you feel is best for your children.
> Also I did in fact found a security, privacy, and digital sovereignty advocacy community called #! which has been operating for more than 20 years now, and has mentored hundreds of people looking to make healthier technology choices.
That’s awesome. I think we do need better choices (not just abstinence from the tech).
I abstain from surveillance capitalism tech which is designed to track and distract. Google, Apple, and Qualcomm controlled devices are a non starter for me. I would rather be 20 years behind in tech and have sovereignty and reasonable privacy.
I am not at all opposed to useful tools in our pockets. Meshtastic messengers and the Precursor are the best candidates right now that might get tech back in my own pocket or that of kids, but they are not mature enough to daily drive just yet IMO.
I co-run two tech companies and am reachable during office hours which are mostly spent at my desk, and when I am not working I am not reachable by work, and I trust my team.
If you modify your preferred lifestyle in any way for work during personal time, you are still working.
If a company wants you to be reachable 24/7 then they need to give you a pager and a salary based on a 168 hour work week, not a 40 hour work week.
Just because everyone else lets themselves be exploited does not mean you need to. Make the ~40 hours count and work circles around everyone else, then disconnect.
I use the app screenzen. It rations distracting apps and retrains you to use your phone as a functional device again. I now only use my phone for messaging, emails, maps and spotify, but can still access Chrome when I need. A perfect balance.
I am near a landline 90% of the time, am reachable by internet during working hours on weekdays, and go to my desk to check emails and chats multiple times a day on weekends. It turns out you do not need to be reachable or online every second of every day to do virtually anything in the modern world including raising kids.
Oh, this sounds like you work from home and can just substitute your landline and PC for 90% of contact, this wouldn't nearly work like this for most people.
I had this lifestyle when I worked from an office, and at home, in both individual contributor and leadership engineering roles. I also travel quite a bit.
Just set expectations with others and it works just fine either way. Only thing in the way is cognitive dissonance for most people.
In my case people absolutely forgive not being able to reach me every second of every day because I am a productivity machine due to being able to actually focus.
Back them, they did called you to work and it was customary to rely message by two other people. There is no such desk anymore and they dont want to be handling your life.
And if your kid needed to go home and sleep in bed, you had to take the day off instead of home office. There was price to that.
Oh, and back then school did not expected parents and kids to have phones, now it does. Information about schedule changes, homework, what needs to be paid and such is broadcasted with the assumption that everyone has a phone.
If you have an unusual lifestyle choice, you simply need to communicate that to all involved. Any that do not respect it, you can seek out alternatives for.
One clinic denied me for not having a Google or Apple account, so I took my business to one that would accommodate me.
Rolling over and doing what the majority of people want you do to is not how change happens.
And to be honest, that reaction is part of the reason I keep doing it.
When people ask for my number and I say I don’t have a phone, 99% of all people say very passionately “omg, I wish I could get rid of this thing”.
Most people don’t like their phone, which confirms my belief it won’t make my life better.
If you wanted to be vegan as a personal choice and everyone in your life wanted you to eat meat anyway, who cares? No one gets to decide your lifestyle but you.
Make them adapt.
You can get landlines (via a VOIP conversion box or otherwise), and beyond that what do you really need if you are honest?
> it’s not manageable to be offline all the time here
> it is if you’re all offline together
> but everyone doesn’t want to be offline with me
> just be offline by yourself; what’s the big deal? <— you
The big deal is all the stuff called out above. My kids school, child care, my work, pizza delivery, everyone has built up infrastructure that assumes virtually always online.
If it works for you to just not be online anymore, cool. But it’s not trivial for many people to make this change.
This is still not an answer to the comment chain. The real answer is “if you want to live this way, you give up a bunch of conveniences and have to deal with it.” It’s less convenient with schools, with childcare, with work, and everything else that assumes always online.
> No one gets to decide your lifestyle but you. Make them adapt.
Make them adapt is some nonsense. You’ve made multiple comments that through sheer force of will you can make other people align with your choices. You’ve posted zero evidence, or even claimed, that you have succeeded in doing this yourself.
Everything I "give up" gives me so much more back.
Now on the outside looking in, it feels like everyone criticizing me for not letting robots lift weights for me at the gym, because everyone else does it that way. I choose what to think about most of the time instead of letting a pocket rectangle decide for me. Plenty of evidence suggests this is good for our brains. Everyone else seems as absurd to me as I probably seem to them. If anything I feel like I am having to constantly accommodate phone addicts that have incredibly short attention spans.
Few in my social or professional life can keep up with my productivity, which I largely attribute to having the ability to focus and think without distraction for hours at a time which most people struggle to do these days without reaching for a phone. I can never even get through a meal with most friends without them checking social media several times.
With more than a few world firsts in engineering under my belt in the years since I gave up my phone, people tend to accept my "unusual" lifestyle choice of not being reachable every second of every day.
Not everyone aligns, and that is fine, just as not every restaurant provides vegan options.
Sometimes I have to go to a different restaurant that has paper menus and accepts cash, or a different clinic because I lack a Google or Apple account, but their loss of business and not a big deal for me given all the major privacy and productivity gains I get.
There are -always- alternatives and I have never been unable to accomplish a goal or do something I wanted to do because of not having a smartphone.
By all means give me a gotcha. I have heard them all and navigated around them without too much trouble.
> The real answer is “if you want to live this way, you give up a bunch of conveniences and have to deal with it.” It’s less convenient with schools, with childcare, with work, and everything else that assumes always online
Without a doubt, there are times where having a phone would be more convenient.
But I don’t want a more convenient life. I want a richer, happier, more rewarding and more fulfilling life. A phone won’t get me those things, and based on how often people tell me they wish they could throw away their phone and how much happier they’d be without it, I’m pretty sure a phone would make my life worse.
> “if you want to live this way, you give up a bunch of conveniences and have to deal with it.”
You would give up conveniences, but you'd be giving up inconveniences as well. It's a trade off that works extremely well for some people who are often surprised by how little effort it takes and how much happier and healthier they are. I doubt it's for everybody, but even then there are a lot of half-measures people can take to reduce the amount harm their cell phones are causing them and improve their lives.
> My kids school, child care, my work, pizza delivery, everyone has built up infrastructure that assumes virtually always online.
Is there actually a pizza place that refuses to bring a pizza to someone without a cell phone app being involved? Like they have no phone number you can call from a landline or a website where you could place an order? Odds are good that you could get by just fine letting your kids school/daycare know your email address/landline phone number. Some people's work is much less flexible, but everything else should be accommodating people without cell phones.
You can surely get pizza delivered, though certainly I’ve had pizza delivery people text me because they couldn’t find my house. So having a cell phone is valuable even then.
Part of my problem with the claims that cell phones are the problem is that the answer often seems to be a landline that you’re still available on. If you replace one phone with another, what’s the difference? This isn’t a sarcastic question, either. The differences are key.
No one worried about the impact of dumb cell phones on our kids. Maybe the texting was a bit annoying but that’s all. What really changed is smart phones, the Internet in your hand all the time. The doomscrolling Instagram or TikTok and completely disconnecting from the real world most of the time. The Facebook-type sites that enable anonymous bullying.
It’s important to understand what the actual problems are because abstaining from phones entirely is just not realistic. Possible? Yes. Realistic? No.
> though certainly I’ve had pizza delivery people text me because they couldn’t find my house.
When you have a landline that still happens, but they call you instead of texting. It works great!
> the answer often seems to be a landline that you’re still available on. If you replace one phone with another, what’s the difference?
There are huge differences. Most of the problems with smart phones aren't "You can call people or get calls". A landline still allows you to make and take calls but avoids every other evil cell phones introduce into our lives. When you're available on a landline it's on your own terms, in a very specific place. Even having both a desktop PC/laptop and a landline, meaning you can take calls and look something up on the internet, is vastly less abusive and harmful than a smart phone.
What changed with the smart phone wasn't that you could go online, it's that the device itself is designed to collect every scrap of personal information it can and then funnel it to other people. It's designed to be as addictive, intrusive, and demanding of your attention as possible. It follows you everywhere, all of the time. It cuts us off from the places we are and the people we are with. Being away from a smartphone fills people with a level of anxiety that never existed with laptops and landlines and that isn't by accident.
abstaining from phones entirely or even setting boundaries and limits to reduce the harms they cause is realistic as evidenced by the people who do it successfully in reality. That doesn't make it easy, or even ideal in some situations, but it might be worth trying just to see where the pain points are and how they can be managed. You might be surprised at how much more capable you are at functioning without one than you thought.
So let’s agree that removing smartphones from one’s life is beneficial.
Why not a dumb (mobile) phone, then? Why the passion for a landline? You can still exercise full control over when/where you answer it, but you gain a lot of useful convenience as well.
A dumb phone seems like a pretty good compromise to me. Especially in situations where you're traveling. You'll get tracked and still have to deal with interruptions from texts, but you can always turn it off and that should keep it from disrupting you when you want to be focused on where you are/what you're doing/who you're with.
Any device connected to cell towers is constantly having its location tracked via triangulation, which is sold to endless surveillance capitalism organizations and governments to monitor where we shop, and where we protest, to optimally manipulate us.
I am specifically opting out of cellular networks for this reason, though open hardware/software wifi and meshtastic solutions I am always open to.
Also whenever possible I do not want to be reachable or distracted, say when having dinner out with my family, at a concert, or just standing in line in the post office. I make the decision when to open a laptop, it cannot summon me, and it takes more intention to use.
Most VOIP services will route SMS to email or a messenger of your choice. I get SMS just fine on my wifi devices, which I monitor when I am expecting a delivery.
I don't think anyone said it's trivial, but they are saying it is 1. possible, and 2. overall a positive change. But merely that has upset people in this thread.
I've also posted in the past about the joys and benefits of either leaving your phone uncharged in your drawer, or at least turning on DND mode 24/7 and turning off all calls and notifications, and for whatever reason, a lot of people here have this visceral reaction to the mere suggestion that it's possible and enjoyable to operate this way. People throw all the predictable excuses up as reasons why it's unmanageable: Kids, daycare, school, the office... all things they imagine are totally unworkable offline.
I think if you toss off the shackles and just try it for a week, you might find that things kind of take care of themselves, the world still turns and life finds a way. Nobody REALLY expects you to be online and reachable 24/7--we just have this weird phone FOMO that makes us think there is this expectation.
It saddens me that this is a real thought of yours. You just need a bit of creativity and trust, my friend. Something it seems people are lacking these days... likely due to the very thing we are discussing now: smartphone addiction!
As has already been pointed out to you here before, these social moves you fear are awkward or impossible were EASILY handled by generations before you... and all without cellphones. Go figure.
I live in silicon valley, have an active social life, travel frequently, have a family I spend time with every day, and am co-running two tech companies.
People did all of these things before smartphones and all those methods still work just fine today.
Any device connected to cell towers is constantly having its location tracked via triangulation, which is sold to endless surveillance capitalism organizations and governments to monitor where we shop, and where we protest, to optimally manipulate us.
I am specifically opting out of cellular networks for this reason, though open hardware/software wifi and meshtastic solutions I am always open to.
You can top-up Oyster with cash at machines and counters. Oyster cards are better as they are ~500ms quicker when tapping !
Cash is still pretty viable in the UK. I can't think of a single place the past decade where they've not taken cash and I've been sad about it or massively inconvenienced - but then again I don't get out much ;)
If a restaurant thinks it can get away with just tiny text on a menu informing that it's cashless, you could give them a lesson in the law.
The article is already fairly sensationalist in its conclusions and language, but avoiding tap-to-pay because you don't have a phone is a non-sequitur; debit and credit cards support tap to pay just fine. Similarly with folks saying they don't carry a phone so they ask others for the time. One option is to wear a watch.
When you use tap to pay, you are sending information about your purchases and location to dozens of ad tech companies, and are still participating in the very surveillance capitalism that makes everyone stupider for money.
I also pay with cash for privacy, and to use my privilege to constantly demand it as an option so the unbanked who cannot advocate for themselves can still participate in society.
Somewhat privacy. When you take cash out of an ATM, surely the serial numbers will be recorded as being dispensed to you. And when the shop pays those notes into the bank, they will be connected to the shop's account. "lrvick took this note out November 4th on Main Street, Pretend Grocery Store on West Street paid it in on November 7th". Maybe the note will be given in change and pass through a few places, but over months and years, you and Pretend Groceries will be more and more strongly connected.
"Yesterday Dad went out to buy a hardcover novel. He said he wanted to read something long, rich and thought provoking for a change. He also said he was going to buy the book with cash, so nobody could trace the purchase to him and exploit his interests for commercial purposes" - Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson, December 1993.
> Somewhat privacy. When you take cash out of an ATM, surely the serial numbers will be recorded as being dispensed to you.
For large bills that is true to some extent, but having worked closely with secret service in the past at multiple points, they have confirmed my suspicion that $20s and below are virtually impossible to track and they do not bother unless they are specifically giving you marked bills because you are already suspected of a crime.
Also avoiding tracking by a governments and tracking by surveillance capitalism are very different threat models.
Getting down to 0 tracking is of course impossible, but the less data we leak the less clear of a picture third parties get on how to predict and manipulate our behavior. Why help them?
A bank knowing what bills were issued at an ATM is not the same thing as someone being able to tell which vending machine I put it into with good cross indexing to know which bill purchased which thing, as is the case with centralized credit card networks.
> I also pay with cash for privacy, and to use my privilege to constantly demand it as an option so the unbanked who cannot advocate for themselves can still participate in society.
Good for you! I so wish more people would think and act this way. Most people don't realize that in a world without cash, government and large businesses can shutdown your entire with the push of a button without any sort of due process.
I think it is totally related. The more information you give surveillance capitalists about what you buy at the drug store, or liqueur store, or movie theater, when you leave home, etc. the more power you give them to manipulate you and keep you addicted to their platforms.
As a former professional magician with a background in studying mentalism, I can assure you ALL of us can be manipulated and distracted by entities that have enough seemingly small and insignificant bits of information about our daily routines in their widely sold and cross-indexed databases.
The less data you give these entities, the more boring targeted content and ads become, and the more attention you will have left for things that matter.
I use cash all the time all over the world. I do sometimes have to walk out of a restaurant that refuses cash to find one that accepts it, but that sort of thing is memorable and often changes behavior in those businesses. Companies hate losing customers for easily fixable things like that.
> Those 4.5 million survey responses were gathered over a decade
I'd feel more confident about the results of this research if it didn't entirely depend on self-reported data from a survey. At least in this case it was a phone survey and not just an internet questionnaire posted to social media sites. I'd put more faith in a much smaller sample of young people being professionally evaluated for memory problems.
The survey asks the question:
"Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, do you have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions?"
It doesn't ask what physical/mental/emotional condition they have, or even if they were diagnosed with it by a professional (although it does at one point ask if a doctor has told them they have a depressive disorder).
Some years the survey included optional questions (which people may or may not have been asked) that asked if they were taking medicine or receiving treatment from a doctor or other health professional for any type of mental health condition or emotional problem, but again, didn't ask what that condition was.
If you told me that there has been a surge in young people over the last ~10 years who self-identify as having a mental or emotional problem that they themselves suspect has caused difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions I wouldn't be at all surprised.
I'd be more curious to know if there were a surging number of young people who were being diagnosed and treated for serious memory disorders recently.
With rising ADHD awareness and corresponding academic waivers and medications used to enhance academic performance, I'm surprised the results are not much higher among students. I'm disappointed the paper failed to address the limitations of the study.
Note that the effect was stronger with wealth, as expected for performance- and excuse-seeking behaviors in high-achieving households.
I'm starting to think ADHD is isn't a disorder at all. It's like obesity, if something afflicts 2% of the population, it's an individual disorder or issue. If it afflicts 20%+ of the population, it's either a systems/societal issue, or even more likely, a common personality trait that just happens to be very undesirable at this particular moment in time.
ADHD is in part an adaptation to being bombarded with information in the Internet era.
I'm sure it's a legitimate disorder in the most severe cases as well, but like most psych quackery, there are way too many doctors and patients (80%+) too eager to self-diagnose and put people on a prescription and call it a day.
Doctors get money from pharma and people get to use their "disorder" as a convenient excuse for everything. That's what we call incentive alignment in economics.
Honestly, I wouldn't be sure how to answer some of the questions.
In a 15 minute doctor's appointment I was "diagnosed" and medicated for bipolar. In another 15 minute appointment with a psychiatrist, we added OCD and general anxiety as well.
We stopped medications shortly after and it has been 20 years.
There has been a lot of discussion about self diagnosis, but I have the opposite problem. How can you decide a diagnosis with 10 questions and some pills?
Modern medicine has no incentive to diagnose you. Their incentives are to get you in and out as quickly as possible, get you on a recurring prescription, and schedule the next followup visit. And to do this for as many people as possible. As long as they don't accidentally kill you, they profit.
I think so, but that hasn't stopped it from being a popular way to gather data, or from often being the only source of data used in a paper. I get that internet surveys are dirt cheap and it's easy to get large number of responses, but you have to take the results with a such a massive boulder of salt that it seems more like a convenient way to churn out papers (or even an easy way to get a desired result) than a way to conduct actual worthwhile research.
Quite a while back (I think 10+ years), I began to realize that I was too dependent on Phones for even the basic info. So, I’ve gotten back to writing a lot more and use Notebook + pen. It helps. I still use Phones but I like the idea of being able to know numbers, and details without pulling out the phone for everything.
Using the dialpad instead of the Saved/Favorite Name in the phones is an interesting habit I built up even for most used numbers such as my wife, sister, and even the neighbors. I remember quite a few numbers; even if I cannot say it, I can look at a keypad and the muscle memory kicks in.
This is the same for some key Passwords, I quite often just type them out. Again, I might not remember but my fingers just glides through the keyboard. I remember it being handy at a hospital making some large payment saving my brother’s family from malaria in a Hospital in Bombay.
Btw, it is also fun to no look at Map on the phone for most journey that I already have an idea or traveling for the 2nd time and henceforth.
I recently participated in a research study, and at one point, the researcher told me I was going to be given 3 minutes with a list of 20 words. I was to memorize as many of the words as possible. I would then be asked to perform a specific task, and then repeat back as many of the words as I could.
When I was given these instructions, I realized it's been many years since I had to memorize anything of meaningful length. I spent the first 20 seconds trying to remember as much as I could about how to memorize things, and the rest of the time actually memorizing. It truly is a muscle, and I was very out of practice.
Since "A variety of memory systems are regulated by dopamine in the brain." [1], being force feed stimulation after stimulation will affect memory due to the diminishing release of dopamine of less stimulating events.
Being from the first year of Gen X I lived both of these lives. I remember reading newspapers on the subway going to work in Manhattan, having to focus to scan the small stock market print. Yes the news was stimulating, but comparatively slow and limited. I could never read the news at work, but in my later years, working in tech, it was a constant thing throughout the day.
Dopamine if the fuel of capitalism, even illegal capitalism, like the drug trade. This is not dismissive of capitalism, it is just a truth. The only thing that changed is that humanity has found a newer, stronger way to milk dopamine out of the human brain.
I'm not sure it's entirely similar to what you mentioned, but I too remember the sensation of focus, that I'm struggling to get these days. I started to realize this after the web2.0 era.. thinking that ajax infused web apps would allow for better communication and thinking but it mostly unleashed noise, and whenever I run into old, limited forms of communication, i get the sense of value and focus back. Only the things that matter gets to your attention, and it reaches deeper and faster.
Maybe we're memorising different things. On this site it will be remembering where different settings are found in different software tools, or the map of languages to libraries to functions.
I think it has little or nothing to do with screens. Young people are just adapting to a society that thinks of people who remember things as annoying at best and troublemakers or terrorists at worst. We've become a say the words society, not a have something to say society. You don't have to remember for very long in order to repeat something, in fact it can become a problem because you'll remember back when you were told to repeat the opposite.
It's also very difficult to claim to be a victim if everyone still remembers what you did.
These are survey results, not actual memory test results. They answered positively to having "serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions”.
I'd bet $1000 bucks that these people don't have actual memory problems.
Its the low quality food, my memory improved a lot, after I stopped eating sugar and most refined foods.
Theres even some research that Alzheimer starts from bad bacteria in the gut, that loves sugar.
Shitty food has been around for a long time. Some virus known for causing long-term effects in non-negligible parts of the population has been around since 2019.
> The increase in disability prevalence from 2016 to 2022 is likely attributable in part to the long-term effects of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
Wild to me that the first mention of COVID is this far down the page.
Most people have been infected at least a couple of times may this point, and at this point it’s very well documented to cause lasting cognitive decline.
This thesis contradicts the chart though. Why would older people be much less affected and the generation 70+ even show a negative trend if these people were far more likely to experience a more severe disease progression? You would expect them to be hit at least as hard (if not harder) as young people from those long term memory effects. The trend for the youngest age group also starts well before 2019.
First when you have combination of factors, this can happen.
Second, old people were more likely to die on covid. Kids were getting covid too, just not dying and long term covid consequences were observed in then. It can easily be that where old person died, young ended up with long term consequence.
There is no reason to assume the effect would be uniform accross generations.
-----
Either way, cell phone obsession and "rewiring of biology" claims are wven further from anything shown in the article. They are both purely what HN and the blogger want it to be.
I don't see your argument. Are you suggesting that covid pruned old people with weak memory to the point that it improved their memory on average? Because that is the only conclusion of your argument combined with the data. And that's not just completely unfounded, it's a pretty wild violation of Occam's razor.
I was just talking with my wife yesterday about how readily people assume they have superior competence to or greater insight than experts in a given field. I'm not picking on you in particular, but your comment jumped out at me.
Substantially:
We've been eating "low quality" food of one type -- ultra-processed food -- since at least the '60s, so what's your explanation for the recency of the effect?
And some time earlier than that -- very roughly the 1920s and earlier -- we were eating "low quality" foods of a different type: spoiled, adulterated, and questionably-sourced food products, so do you claim that we started with poor concentration then, got better/had a heyday in the mid-20th century, and now we're declining again?
In short: what's your evidence to support your claim?
It's reasoned conjecture on an internet message board. Yes, it is over-stated. But if one treats quality of diet as one variable among many in cognitive capacity, which is the only sane approach, then trying to match the diet of a population to trendlines in society-wide cognitive performance is not going to tell you anything.
Could be multiple factors. In my N=1 experience fiddling with various things in my life.
* Improving diet (primarily avoiding refined foods and sugar) generally improves my energy levels.
* Cutting out social media mostly improves concentration.
* Trying to avoid rumination such as problem solving or rehearsing arguments through meditative practices reduces stress levels, makes it easier to be present and react to things in front of you.
* Sleep is also pretty big for cognitive clarity. Having a consistent sleep schedule and not drinking coffee past noon helps with sleep.
But really, all of these seem to tie into each other. If you want to improve your diet, it's much harder if you are tired from lack of sleep or overstimulation. If you want to improve your sleep, you can't be scrolling social media all day. Mental exhaustion also makes awareness/meditation harder.
As someone who has eaten way too much sugary food I think my gut-brain coupling may have had enough of this. A few weeks ago I had a sugar binge one night and the cognitive effects were impossible to ignore the next day. Fortunately after 2-3 days I was back to normal but of my sample size of one, and in my condition (which is pre-diabetic) I observed a clear link.
It was a good experience as it's prompted me to get more serious about cutting back sugar, implemented as long term, achievable habit change.
Bacteria (and your body) like sugar because it’s an easy to use fuel source. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having reasonable amounts of sugar in your diet.
The catch is that the body likes lots of things that are awful for it. For instance drug abuse isn't limited to humans - some bears have gotten addicted to huffing gas to get high. [1] Quite cute if it wasn't so awful! The big issue is that in modern times a whole bunch of things are going wrong - testosterone levels (adjusted for health/bmi/age) are declining, IQ is declining [2], basically every single psychological disorder is skyrocketing, and much more.
And the reason why isn't clear. So the most likely reason is that we're doing what humanity has done repeatedly and endlessly throughout history and likely accidentally poisoning ourselves with some thing or things -- things that we believe to be completely safe. So a precautionary principle approach to consumption is to consider what we evolved with and sugar definitely wasn't that. Sugar only really took off in the 19th century. And various further refined sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup and other such things only took off in the late 20th century.
> So a precautionary principle approach to consumption is to consider what we evolved with and sugar definitely wasn't that. Sugar only really took off in the 19th century.
We have evidence that apiculture has been a thing for well over 8,000 years.
Our bodies literally love to burn glucose as fuel and we perform better physically (and mentally I assume) when glucose is readily available.
We have literally evolved to be sugar burning machines.
You completely missed the point GP was making. Yes, sugar is an easy fuel source. The point is we have NOT evolved to consume massive amounts every day without breaks (i.e. daily) and without lots of fiber to buffer it.
I think you might be the one that’s missing the point. I’m saying some sugar is absolutely fine as part of a balanced diet, this isn’t a controversial point. Excessive calories are bad, whether they’re sugar or anything else.
As a European visitong the US, I am constantly amazed at how there is masses of sugar added to 'normal' food over there. You take a bite expecting a certain flavour, and go wtf did someone glace this with caramel or drop some candy in the flour mix?
Not a major proportion of your daily caloric intake and not in excess of your daily caloric burn (unless you’re actively trying to gain weight). More if you’re doing a lot of aerobic exercise.
Apparently very popular content - a parent at my kid’s kindergarten wanted to make cake for their kids birthday, said they’d only use 1 tsp of honey in the whole thing.
Cue universal freak out in the parents’ WhatsApp group.
Apparently, sugar:
- causes cancer
- causes autism
- causes hyperactivity
- causes blindness
- makes children indolent and lazy
- will permanently ruin a child if they even look at it
It’s weird, IMO. I let my kiddo have sugar within reason, and somehow she’s leaner than any of the other kids in her class, who even already have rotten teeth at two, despite their sugar free diets. They feed them simple carbs almost exclusively, and are oblivious to amylase.
Perhaps it’s because she’s physically active - the rest of her cohort are pretty much forbidden from walking or running as those pose risks, and children must be sheltered from all conceivable risk so that they grow up into independent and capable adults.
I would argue that that - physical activity - is far more important than what you shove in your face.
There have been repeatedly, credibly and demonstrably shown to be significant benefits to not spending your entire life sitting on your ass - but I guess it’s harder to get off your ass than to proselytise about sugar being an evil and artificial harmful chemical that has no place in the human body - despite it literally being what we run off of.
"I would argue that that - physical activity - is far more important than what you shove in your face."
No, it bloody is not.
I used to drive a bicycle for 6 - 12 hours ever day while working in the delivery. I also didn't watch what I was eating.
I ended up getting fat and with haemorrhoids. So I had to quit cycling.
Then I spend some time (years actually) researching and slowly improving my diet.
Result? I lost weight, my haemorrhoids (and several other health issues) stopped acting up, and I am overall much healthier despite most of my physical activity being walking.
Yes, exercise is important. But it won't help you if you eat massive amounts of garbage food.
So stop talking stuff you have no clue about.
Also, we do not "run off of" sugar. Human body can run off sugar, or fat, or a combination of these. And argument could be made that running off fat is actually healthier. Body can in fact produce all sugar it needs with absolutely zero need for dietary sugar (note that doesn't mean you should go zero carb, just that carbs / sugars are not a metabolic necessity).
As for this:
"who even already have rotten teeth at two, despite their sugar free diets. They feed them simple carbs almost exclusively, and are oblivious to amylase."
Uhh... carbs ARE sugars. It literally doesn't matter that you are avoiding "sugar" if you end up eating bread instead.
Moderate exercising is conaistently shown to improve peoples health results. Study after study, it has positive impact.
It may or may not affect peoples weight (which is aesthetic issue on itself), but in terms of health improvements it is one intervention that consistently works.
They are not saying kids should be 8 hours on bikes whether they feel like or not. They are saying they should run around with other kids which something entirely different.
Long before RFK Jr said it recently, Dr Robert Lustig, paediatric endocrinologist, went viral about 15 years ago with a video "Sugar: The bitter truth"[1] and book and talk slots following on from it.
Gary Taubes, who became widely known for researching tons of studies on diet and coining the saying "eat food, not too much, mostly plants". Food meaning unprocessed stuff your (great great) grandma would recognise as food, wrote an NY Times article agreeing with it.
I agree. Over the last 10 years, I've been growing in awareness of how in general people, developers, and their managers, and their company owners are incapable of the communications necessary for basic cooperation in project teams, in their own self planning, and forget about their ability dealing with more complex issues like market & social-political manipulation of the public. Far too many people appear to only be capable of 1-step forward planning. Seriously. My career has become a consultant that can see multiple steps forward and when explaining this insight I get everything from angry refusals to daunting obedience, but never a competing insight, only 1 step past their present situation. People are way to quick to enter into short sighted conflict, and then completely ignore their real responsibilities.
I was ready to dismiss the article on the basis of its sensationalist writing, but I wanted to dig into the study as well. After reading through it, I asked my wife, who's a sociologist and researcher, what she thought about these conclusions based on the survey data. She said that collecting survey results in this kind of longitudinal study is considered a valid source of data about trends like this, but she said the obvious caveat is that you can't determine causation or what the practical impact is. The article does not hesitate to state hypothesis as fact, which is probably where the dismissals are coming from.
this is real.
the cognitive environment has changed, where the the things that are retained in order to survive and thrive, one, have been removed and comodified, and are no longer absolutly personal and private, and two, there is a never ending merry-go-round of changing passwords, apps, submissions,sign ins, acciunt verifications, two factor authentications, to get at, what was once absolute, personal, and private.
What has been created is compliance and a lack of personal agency, and any motive to give a damn....whats the point of remembering something that you have zero chance of holding onto and building from?
A population stuck in that mid stage of grief , always letting go......
My big issue with this study is it points to a cause. How can they know the issue is social media, and not, say, the climbing atmospheric CO2 or other long-COVID related issues?
The root cause is likely to the surge of dopamine in the brain related to activities like scrolling social media, fast-paced tik-tok videos, porn, etc. This means that the brain is so much addicted to this dopamine that normal level are no longer enough to be functional.
There can be many causes. Aside from social media, games, porn and AI, it can also be caused by the decline of the living standards or increase of stress in the West due to shift from social-democratic to neoliberal economic policies.
Feels like a lot of jumping to conclusion in the article. It just assumes the causation like it's been proven.
It also assumes the finding is negative, which is more subtle but similarly problematic. Decline in memory might just mean that our brain is reallocating capacity for something else. It could also mean that the nature of what we're trying to remember has changed and it's now more difficult (e.g. There's more entropy in the data, or the data is changing more often).
We're told not to feed the wildlife at parks and beaches because of the dangers when they become dependent on visitors for their food source. It changes their natural behavior to the extent that it becomes difficult to revert to natural food sources in the absence of visitors.
(there are other behavioral and disease-related dangers but they're not as appropriate to this metaphor)
I think the more alarmed voices in this comment thread are not reacting to the change or "exponential progress" but are instead concerned about the impact of becoming reliant on something else to do our remembering.
This last part is anecdata (but no worse than the survey data in TFA), I think smartphone users have not really lost the ability to memorize, in general, but that the things being memorized are different. If the memory test (mentioned in a cousin-comment) had a set of 20 memes instead of 20 words, I expect most study participants would be a lot better at recall.
I suppose the question of "is this like junk food, though?" may be relevant.
But of course something introduced between 2013 and 2023 that gets your cells to manufacture spike protein, with no way of regulating the spike dose, couldn't possibly be connected with memory decline.
If you approximate the youngest age group's data points as a linear trend, it starts well before 2019. After all, they originally were at the same level as the next two higher age groups. So even if you assume that the entire rise after 2020 was due to this cause, it would only explain ~50% of the total effect. And it would not explain at all how older people who were most likely to experience a severe disease (particularly before vaccines) actually show a slight inverse trend, while the age groups in between show barely any statistically significant effect. If you really want to blame covid, I would assume closing schools and mass remote-schooling to protect old people is a much more likely explanation for the trend among the youngest people post 2020. This is the one thing that truly sets them apart from all the other age groups.
That is a good point. Injection rates were higher with older population. I would say that younger immune systems are more robust, potentially leading to exaggerated inflammatory responses to spike protein, which could heighten neuro-inflammation and cognitive impacts.
Since giving up my cell phone entirely over 5 years ago, my productivity, memory, and overall happiness are at the highest levels they have ever been, in my late 30s. I no longer apologize to anyone for this lifestyle choice anymore since the benefits are something everyone deserves, but almost all opt out of today for made up reasons.
I take photos with a pocket mirrorless, and take notes with a notebook. I tell time with a self winding mechanical watch. I pay for things at stores with cash instead of tap to pay. Like a cave man, I know.
I am reachable by internet when I am at my desk, and by landline when I am at home. In an actual emergency dial 911, not me. Otherwise it can probably wait until I am at my desktop or a laptop.
I was already sold on raising kids without smartphones on intuition and lived experience, but study after study point at us having access to all humans, all knowledge, and all entertainment at all times as leading to generally bad mental health and cognitive function outcomes. Our brains were simply not evolved for it.
Whenever I see parents scrolling, and handing a kid a phone as well to pacify them, I wish I could report them for child abuse. I feel like I am watching them be given whiskey or cigarettes, except it is socially acceptable and no one cares.
Last Monday in a fit of exasperation I turned my phone into airplane mode. And that's where I left it, for an entire week. I swear this was the most productive week of work I've ever had in my professional career. It's astonishing. On the weekend I wanted to call my mom and yet I dreaded taking it off airplane mode. I'm going to try doing this for the foreseeable future.
You can do wifi calling in airplane mode. Left ours in this mode by default for months at first and then realized we could just cancel the cell phone plan entirely to save money. Wifi is everywhere when you need it.
What about using your phone for navigation?
I personally just look up directions online before I leave and take a few notes. Usually commits it to memory.
Regularly relying on a GPS in general provably makes your brain weaker:
https://newatlas.com/gps-spatial-direction-ucl/48529/
You can buy standalone GPS systems or use the one built into your car. Maps also exist
It’s easy to save map regions that work offline. GPS is passive and doesn’t need an internet connection to function.
Yes, it's worth noting that your GPS is still active even in airplane mode.
Curious, did you have all notifications turned off prior to that? ie was it that you responded to notifications?
> Whenever I see parents scrolling, and handing a kid a phone as well to pacify them, I wish I could report them for child abuse.
Consider that you might not have everything figured out for everyone. I'm glad you found something that works, but the will to impose your way on others isn't benevolent.
Many parents used to drink while pregnant and put whiskey in the baby bottle to make kid shut up. We should make decisions based on research, not by emulating other badly informed parents, even if they are the majority.
The study does not point to a cause. The comment I'm responding to is drawing conclusions based on a sensationalist blog post and then wishing they could report other parents for abuse. I think the study is well done, but we can't scientifically draw the conclusions from it that the author (and folks in this thread) are drawing.
This is just one study, that echos dozens and dozens of other studies all pointing at the same things: being reachable and able to reach everything and everyone everywhere all at once is making us all sadder and less productive, and kids are getting the worst of it having been handed this tech from their parents shortly after birth.
Your reply was next to meaningless as it doesn't offer anything above a "well, that's just how YOU feel about it!".
Yes, that's true. That /is/ how the OP feels about it. But at least they were able to articulate their point and get a message across, along with an implied (albeit weak) "call to action", not meant to be taken literally. Although I'm sure, if polled, the majority of folks in this thread would agree with the OP sentiment. I know I do.
“I wish I could have CPS take away their children and put them in foster homes” is a pretty messed up thought to have in response to seeing a kid looking at a phone. It seems pretty reasonable to call that out.
> Your reply was next to meaningless
We’re on a discussion forum. “Here’s how I feel about what said” is basically the point.
The purpose of my comment was to point out that just because you've found a solution that works for you does not mean it is generalizable and should be turned into a rule for the entire population.
To be clear on my views.
1. I am entirely convinced minors should not have smartphones and every study supports this being a net negative.
2. I feel most adults are better off without them too, but it is an adult choice. For most I suggest deleting a frequently used app ever month until you stop seeing benefits.
The study we're discussing drew no such conclusion. There's a very disturbing pattern of studies coming out and being summarized by people with an agenda that choose to draw conclusions that are not supported by the study they're discussing. This is definitely true of social media studies, and I suspect it's true of mobile phone studies as well, although maybe you can provide a couple that you think are airtight and I can take a look.
ALL studies I have seen seem to support the idea that constant connectivity leads to worse mental health outcomes on average.
To get to specific proof though, clinically in the way we could with other addictions like smoking, we would need to look at how individual applications that allow us to outsource various cognitive functions specifically impact our brains.
GPS is a well studied example. Humans that rely on GPS instead of their own brains end up with provably weaker hippocampus.
https://newatlas.com/gps-spatial-direction-ucl/48529/
It is not hard to form a hypothesis from this how letting targeted content algorithms decide what you see instead of making decisions on your own could weaken the portions of your brain that make decisions in a similar way, and all studies we have seen so far seem to support this hypothesis.
I would of course like to see more brain scan research but when all data points to the negative on something only available to humans very recently, and your own lived experience of forgoing that something has had major benefits for your personally, it becomes easy to be a strong advocate for people trying out a reduction of that something.
You seem to be arguing about avoiding constant connectivity. This is very different than not owning a smartphone. I think the conversation has gone off the rails, as I was critiquing your desire to impose a no smartphone lifestyle on others.
I can't reply to you anymore, but the study you cited is at least a couple of steps removed from the discussion. First, it's about offloading navigation to a computer, and observing that humans use less of their navigation skills when doing so. This is very far removed from "smartphone use causes mental health problems".
Second, you claim it shows a "provably weaker hippocampus". But the study doesn't show that at all. It shows less activity in the hippocampus, which would be entirely expected, much like if we offloaded translation to a computer, we wouldn't see the same level of activity in the language centers of the brain.
The researchers themselves only conclude this from their study:
> These results help shape models of how hippocampal and prefrontal regions support navigation, planning and future simulation.
That's it.
The data supports exactly the claim I am making: That indeed, offloading basic tasks we could do for ourselves, like navigation, decision making etc, is robbing our brains of mental exercise that would otherwise make them stronger and less dependent on technology.
The study's authors did not even attempt to draw any conclusions about long-term impact on brain health or mental health from their study. You're free to do so, but I don't find it compelling.
You asked for a study supporting our over-use of phones in general is a net negative.
I gave a specific example that is well studied that could allow us to make pretty good guesses about other apps that do our thinking for us, which could explain the types of results we get in these studies.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
"It takes a village to raise a child"
Oh my god that's so true!
<village opens its mouth>
Actually, screw the village
This is inspiring. I definitely need to look into getting a landline and reducing my cellphone dependence. We’ve been talking about it lately for our daughter to be able to talk to her friends outside of school. Recently another parent had suggested face time calls which we are strongly against (not so much against video calls but rather against child tablet usage).
I started by deleting an app a month until my phone was so boring I kept forgetting it at home, and ultimately abandoned it entirely.
It took a couple years to recalibrate my dopamine reward system gradually until I could enjoy just existing in my own thoughts and brain again while away from the internet, learn to navigate for myself, etc.
For "landlines" I just ported my families cell phone numbers (with their total consent and support) to a voip service, then got VOIP ATA boxes which allows plugging traditional landline phones, including an actual payphone for fun, via ethernet or wifi. Costs a couple dollars a month.
Pro Tip: Other parents sometimes need to be told NO, especially when it comes to matters of tech. I believe their heart is in the right place but most of them don't know the first thing about the dangers of social media, gps tracking, cellphone addiction, frequent video calls, etc. If enough pressure is applied, then it will be the norm for your local community of kids to spend time in real life together vs. 100% online in a digital scaremongered world. Can there be a balance? Sure. But that balance usually comes only after saying NO to unnecessary tech. NO, kids in elementary school don't need a phone (they really don't). NO, we don't need to digitally track our child's movements down to the meter (we really don't).
But don't take my word for it. In 2025, we now havea sea of well documented research that proves the extremely high cost we all pay (as a society) for damaging our kids this way.
> 100% online in a digital scaremongered world
The irony of posting scaremongering about video calls being dangerous on a digital forum while claiming to be offline to avoid scaremongering.
> If enough pressure is applied
You cannot force the rest if your community to align with your personal viewpoints. There is no amount of “pressure” that is going to bend society to your will.
Smoking is dropping like a brick as a result of science, education, and social pressure. Just takes a while.
I was perhaps ambiguous. I am not saying societal change is not possible. I’m saying you, personally, will not change your local community as you imagine by simply telling other parents no.
Nowhere in your comment is there any indication you are running some sort of community initiative or anything else that might lead to actual change. Campaigning for a spot on the school board to advocate for banning cell phones in schools might be a useful strategy, for example. Telling parents who ask about FaceTime between friends that tablets are evil seems as effective as telling random smokers on the street that it’s going to kill them.
> Telling parents who ask about FaceTime between friends that tablets are evil seems as effective as telling random smokers on the street that it’s going to kill them.
I would just simply say it is against our lifestyle and suggest alternatives just as a vegan family might suggest alternatives to a BBQ birthday party.
Facetime is not going to happen as my kids will never be be allowed Google or Apple accounts or smartphones, so friends parents will need to explore those alternatives if their kid wants to talk to my kid.
That is how change happens. One social graph node at a time.
Also I did in fact found a security, privacy, and digital sovereignty advocacy community called #! which has been operating for more than 20 years now, and has mentored hundreds of people looking to make healthier technology choices.
You should of course do what you feel is best for your children.
> Also I did in fact found a security, privacy, and digital sovereignty advocacy community called #! which has been operating for more than 20 years now, and has mentored hundreds of people looking to make healthier technology choices.
That’s awesome. I think we do need better choices (not just abstinence from the tech).
I abstain from surveillance capitalism tech which is designed to track and distract. Google, Apple, and Qualcomm controlled devices are a non starter for me. I would rather be 20 years behind in tech and have sovereignty and reasonable privacy.
I am not at all opposed to useful tools in our pockets. Meshtastic messengers and the Precursor are the best candidates right now that might get tech back in my own pocket or that of kids, but they are not mature enough to daily drive just yet IMO.
I love the sentiment, but some of us need to be reachable for work. I wonder if PagerDuty could be rigged up to work with actual pagers?
I co-run two tech companies and am reachable during office hours which are mostly spent at my desk, and when I am not working I am not reachable by work, and I trust my team.
If you modify your preferred lifestyle in any way for work during personal time, you are still working.
If a company wants you to be reachable 24/7 then they need to give you a pager and a salary based on a 168 hour work week, not a 40 hour work week.
Just because everyone else lets themselves be exploited does not mean you need to. Make the ~40 hours count and work circles around everyone else, then disconnect.
Android profiles with just the the pager stuff installed/enabled would probably work?
And a long/annoying password for the "main" profile, with banking and all the other stuff maybe
I use the app screenzen. It rations distracting apps and retrains you to use your phone as a functional device again. I now only use my phone for messaging, emails, maps and spotify, but can still access Chrome when I need. A perfect balance.
Pagers take SMS. The problem is finding modern pager service.
PagerDuty can send you an SMS or call you, so wouldn't that work with a dumb-phone?
So you not have extended family or friends in your daily social setting?
Like this sounds awesome but being offline for 23 hours in the day is unmanageable here, unless you live a very solitary life.
I also have no phone.
I have tons of friends and a very active social life - in person.
I bump into friends in town, at the ski hill, at the bar and grocery store.
I ask people for the time, directions and how their day is going. I’ll never have a phone.
Okay but what if daycare needs you to pick up your kid?
People expect to be able to reach you…
I am near a landline 90% of the time, am reachable by internet during working hours on weekdays, and go to my desk to check emails and chats multiple times a day on weekends. It turns out you do not need to be reachable or online every second of every day to do virtually anything in the modern world including raising kids.
Oh, this sounds like you work from home and can just substitute your landline and PC for 90% of contact, this wouldn't nearly work like this for most people.
Envy you a bit, though.
I had this lifestyle when I worked from an office, and at home, in both individual contributor and leadership engineering roles. I also travel quite a bit.
Just set expectations with others and it works just fine either way. Only thing in the way is cognitive dissonance for most people.
In my case people absolutely forgive not being able to reach me every second of every day because I am a productivity machine due to being able to actually focus.
We managed these problems before everyone had a mobile phone.
Back them, they did called you to work and it was customary to rely message by two other people. There is no such desk anymore and they dont want to be handling your life.
And if your kid needed to go home and sleep in bed, you had to take the day off instead of home office. There was price to that.
Oh, and back then school did not expected parents and kids to have phones, now it does. Information about schedule changes, homework, what needs to be paid and such is broadcasted with the assumption that everyone has a phone.
If you have an unusual lifestyle choice, you simply need to communicate that to all involved. Any that do not respect it, you can seek out alternatives for.
One clinic denied me for not having a Google or Apple account, so I took my business to one that would accommodate me.
Rolling over and doing what the majority of people want you do to is not how change happens.
"What if you get an infection?"
SoftTalker: "We managed healthcare before antibiotics, antiseptics, germ theory, sterilisation. Hah, gotcha."
That's why I make sure my kid is chained to my side 24/7, you never know what could happen. This contact-ability panic is fucking ridiculous.
Yes but back then people also didn't expect you to have one. Society wasn't built around it.
Who cares what others expect? Say it is your religion, or digital dietary preference.
When they see you working circles around everyone else because your brain can finally focus, they will generally back off.
Email.
If it’s a real emergency Call 911. They’re better trained than me.
Have your wife stay home with the kids, then you don't need daycare.
I very rarely find myself being sincerely jealous of others, but man does your life sound amazing.
And to be honest, that reaction is part of the reason I keep doing it.
When people ask for my number and I say I don’t have a phone, 99% of all people say very passionately “omg, I wish I could get rid of this thing”. Most people don’t like their phone, which confirms my belief it won’t make my life better.
> Like this sounds awesome but being offline for 23 hours in the day is unmanageable here, unless you live a very solitary life
Except when you are offline together.
Yes, but unfortunately my kids’ daycare, school, other parents, my job don’t want to.
If you wanted to be vegan as a personal choice and everyone in your life wanted you to eat meat anyway, who cares? No one gets to decide your lifestyle but you. Make them adapt.
You can get landlines (via a VOIP conversion box or otherwise), and beyond that what do you really need if you are honest?
This is just circular arguing.
> it’s not manageable to be offline all the time here
> it is if you’re all offline together
> but everyone doesn’t want to be offline with me
> just be offline by yourself; what’s the big deal? <— you
The big deal is all the stuff called out above. My kids school, child care, my work, pizza delivery, everyone has built up infrastructure that assumes virtually always online.
If it works for you to just not be online anymore, cool. But it’s not trivial for many people to make this change.
I have an active social life, spent years as a sysadmin, co-run two tech companies, have a family, all without a phone.
This is not some crazy sci-fi lifestyle experiment I am running for the first time. I just live mostly like all industrialized humans did before 2009.
This is still not an answer to the comment chain. The real answer is “if you want to live this way, you give up a bunch of conveniences and have to deal with it.” It’s less convenient with schools, with childcare, with work, and everything else that assumes always online.
> No one gets to decide your lifestyle but you. Make them adapt.
Make them adapt is some nonsense. You’ve made multiple comments that through sheer force of will you can make other people align with your choices. You’ve posted zero evidence, or even claimed, that you have succeeded in doing this yourself.
Everything I "give up" gives me so much more back.
Now on the outside looking in, it feels like everyone criticizing me for not letting robots lift weights for me at the gym, because everyone else does it that way. I choose what to think about most of the time instead of letting a pocket rectangle decide for me. Plenty of evidence suggests this is good for our brains. Everyone else seems as absurd to me as I probably seem to them. If anything I feel like I am having to constantly accommodate phone addicts that have incredibly short attention spans.
Few in my social or professional life can keep up with my productivity, which I largely attribute to having the ability to focus and think without distraction for hours at a time which most people struggle to do these days without reaching for a phone. I can never even get through a meal with most friends without them checking social media several times.
With more than a few world firsts in engineering under my belt in the years since I gave up my phone, people tend to accept my "unusual" lifestyle choice of not being reachable every second of every day.
Not everyone aligns, and that is fine, just as not every restaurant provides vegan options.
Sometimes I have to go to a different restaurant that has paper menus and accepts cash, or a different clinic because I lack a Google or Apple account, but their loss of business and not a big deal for me given all the major privacy and productivity gains I get.
There are -always- alternatives and I have never been unable to accomplish a goal or do something I wanted to do because of not having a smartphone.
By all means give me a gotcha. I have heard them all and navigated around them without too much trouble.
For context I also have no phone.
> The real answer is “if you want to live this way, you give up a bunch of conveniences and have to deal with it.” It’s less convenient with schools, with childcare, with work, and everything else that assumes always online
Without a doubt, there are times where having a phone would be more convenient.
But I don’t want a more convenient life. I want a richer, happier, more rewarding and more fulfilling life. A phone won’t get me those things, and based on how often people tell me they wish they could throw away their phone and how much happier they’d be without it, I’m pretty sure a phone would make my life worse.
> “if you want to live this way, you give up a bunch of conveniences and have to deal with it.”
You would give up conveniences, but you'd be giving up inconveniences as well. It's a trade off that works extremely well for some people who are often surprised by how little effort it takes and how much happier and healthier they are. I doubt it's for everybody, but even then there are a lot of half-measures people can take to reduce the amount harm their cell phones are causing them and improve their lives.
> My kids school, child care, my work, pizza delivery, everyone has built up infrastructure that assumes virtually always online.
Is there actually a pizza place that refuses to bring a pizza to someone without a cell phone app being involved? Like they have no phone number you can call from a landline or a website where you could place an order? Odds are good that you could get by just fine letting your kids school/daycare know your email address/landline phone number. Some people's work is much less flexible, but everything else should be accommodating people without cell phones.
You can surely get pizza delivered, though certainly I’ve had pizza delivery people text me because they couldn’t find my house. So having a cell phone is valuable even then.
Part of my problem with the claims that cell phones are the problem is that the answer often seems to be a landline that you’re still available on. If you replace one phone with another, what’s the difference? This isn’t a sarcastic question, either. The differences are key.
No one worried about the impact of dumb cell phones on our kids. Maybe the texting was a bit annoying but that’s all. What really changed is smart phones, the Internet in your hand all the time. The doomscrolling Instagram or TikTok and completely disconnecting from the real world most of the time. The Facebook-type sites that enable anonymous bullying.
It’s important to understand what the actual problems are because abstaining from phones entirely is just not realistic. Possible? Yes. Realistic? No.
> though certainly I’ve had pizza delivery people text me because they couldn’t find my house.
When you have a landline that still happens, but they call you instead of texting. It works great!
> the answer often seems to be a landline that you’re still available on. If you replace one phone with another, what’s the difference?
There are huge differences. Most of the problems with smart phones aren't "You can call people or get calls". A landline still allows you to make and take calls but avoids every other evil cell phones introduce into our lives. When you're available on a landline it's on your own terms, in a very specific place. Even having both a desktop PC/laptop and a landline, meaning you can take calls and look something up on the internet, is vastly less abusive and harmful than a smart phone.
What changed with the smart phone wasn't that you could go online, it's that the device itself is designed to collect every scrap of personal information it can and then funnel it to other people. It's designed to be as addictive, intrusive, and demanding of your attention as possible. It follows you everywhere, all of the time. It cuts us off from the places we are and the people we are with. Being away from a smartphone fills people with a level of anxiety that never existed with laptops and landlines and that isn't by accident.
abstaining from phones entirely or even setting boundaries and limits to reduce the harms they cause is realistic as evidenced by the people who do it successfully in reality. That doesn't make it easy, or even ideal in some situations, but it might be worth trying just to see where the pain points are and how they can be managed. You might be surprised at how much more capable you are at functioning without one than you thought.
So let’s agree that removing smartphones from one’s life is beneficial.
Why not a dumb (mobile) phone, then? Why the passion for a landline? You can still exercise full control over when/where you answer it, but you gain a lot of useful convenience as well.
A dumb phone seems like a pretty good compromise to me. Especially in situations where you're traveling. You'll get tracked and still have to deal with interruptions from texts, but you can always turn it off and that should keep it from disrupting you when you want to be focused on where you are/what you're doing/who you're with.
Any device connected to cell towers is constantly having its location tracked via triangulation, which is sold to endless surveillance capitalism organizations and governments to monitor where we shop, and where we protest, to optimally manipulate us.
I am specifically opting out of cellular networks for this reason, though open hardware/software wifi and meshtastic solutions I am always open to.
Also whenever possible I do not want to be reachable or distracted, say when having dinner out with my family, at a concert, or just standing in line in the post office. I make the decision when to open a laptop, it cannot summon me, and it takes more intention to use.
Most VOIP services will route SMS to email or a messenger of your choice. I get SMS just fine on my wifi devices, which I monitor when I am expecting a delivery.
I don't think anyone said it's trivial, but they are saying it is 1. possible, and 2. overall a positive change. But merely that has upset people in this thread.
No one is actually upset by this. “oMG why are you so triggered?!”
My point was that the person I replied to ignored the entire chain to reply as if they were actually answering the question, which they were not.
I agree this is not actually impossible. Is it an overall positive change? That’s debatable.
I've also posted in the past about the joys and benefits of either leaving your phone uncharged in your drawer, or at least turning on DND mode 24/7 and turning off all calls and notifications, and for whatever reason, a lot of people here have this visceral reaction to the mere suggestion that it's possible and enjoyable to operate this way. People throw all the predictable excuses up as reasons why it's unmanageable: Kids, daycare, school, the office... all things they imagine are totally unworkable offline.
I think if you toss off the shackles and just try it for a week, you might find that things kind of take care of themselves, the world still turns and life finds a way. Nobody REALLY expects you to be online and reachable 24/7--we just have this weird phone FOMO that makes us think there is this expectation.
It saddens me that this is a real thought of yours. You just need a bit of creativity and trust, my friend. Something it seems people are lacking these days... likely due to the very thing we are discussing now: smartphone addiction!
As has already been pointed out to you here before, these social moves you fear are awkward or impossible were EASILY handled by generations before you... and all without cellphones. Go figure.
I live in silicon valley, have an active social life, travel frequently, have a family I spend time with every day, and am co-running two tech companies.
People did all of these things before smartphones and all those methods still work just fine today.
Get a flip phone. Being reachable and able to reach is good, and you'll still get all the other benefits.
Any device connected to cell towers is constantly having its location tracked via triangulation, which is sold to endless surveillance capitalism organizations and governments to monitor where we shop, and where we protest, to optimally manipulate us.
I am specifically opting out of cellular networks for this reason, though open hardware/software wifi and meshtastic solutions I am always open to.
> I pay for things at stores with cash instead of tap to pay
Good luck living in London with cash. I guess a plastic credit cards is allowed
What particular issues are you referring to?
You can top-up Oyster with cash at machines and counters. Oyster cards are better as they are ~500ms quicker when tapping !
Cash is still pretty viable in the UK. I can't think of a single place the past decade where they've not taken cash and I've been sad about it or massively inconvenienced - but then again I don't get out much ;)
If a restaurant thinks it can get away with just tiny text on a menu informing that it's cashless, you could give them a lesson in the law.
The article is already fairly sensationalist in its conclusions and language, but avoiding tap-to-pay because you don't have a phone is a non-sequitur; debit and credit cards support tap to pay just fine. Similarly with folks saying they don't carry a phone so they ask others for the time. One option is to wear a watch.
When you use tap to pay, you are sending information about your purchases and location to dozens of ad tech companies, and are still participating in the very surveillance capitalism that makes everyone stupider for money.
I also pay with cash for privacy, and to use my privilege to constantly demand it as an option so the unbanked who cannot advocate for themselves can still participate in society.
> I also pay with cash for privacy
Somewhat privacy. When you take cash out of an ATM, surely the serial numbers will be recorded as being dispensed to you. And when the shop pays those notes into the bank, they will be connected to the shop's account. "lrvick took this note out November 4th on Main Street, Pretend Grocery Store on West Street paid it in on November 7th". Maybe the note will be given in change and pass through a few places, but over months and years, you and Pretend Groceries will be more and more strongly connected.
"Yesterday Dad went out to buy a hardcover novel. He said he wanted to read something long, rich and thought provoking for a change. He also said he was going to buy the book with cash, so nobody could trace the purchase to him and exploit his interests for commercial purposes" - Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson, December 1993.
https://featureassets.gocomics.com/assets/d0f4d450df96013172...
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/12/07
> Somewhat privacy. When you take cash out of an ATM, surely the serial numbers will be recorded as being dispensed to you.
For large bills that is true to some extent, but having worked closely with secret service in the past at multiple points, they have confirmed my suspicion that $20s and below are virtually impossible to track and they do not bother unless they are specifically giving you marked bills because you are already suspected of a crime.
Also avoiding tracking by a governments and tracking by surveillance capitalism are very different threat models.
Getting down to 0 tracking is of course impossible, but the less data we leak the less clear of a picture third parties get on how to predict and manipulate our behavior. Why help them?
Why would it be virtually impossible for a bank to put an OCR camera on a bill counting machine?
I didn’t mean the state tracking you, I meant the bank doing it so they can sell the data behind the scenes for the usual marketing reasons.
A bank knowing what bills were issued at an ATM is not the same thing as someone being able to tell which vending machine I put it into with good cross indexing to know which bill purchased which thing, as is the case with centralized credit card networks.
> I also pay with cash for privacy, and to use my privilege to constantly demand it as an option so the unbanked who cannot advocate for themselves can still participate in society.
Good for you! I so wish more people would think and act this way. Most people don't realize that in a world without cash, government and large businesses can shutdown your entire with the push of a button without any sort of due process.
Absolutely agree. It just has nothing to do with self-reported memory and cognitive decline, which is the subject of the article.
I think it is totally related. The more information you give surveillance capitalists about what you buy at the drug store, or liqueur store, or movie theater, when you leave home, etc. the more power you give them to manipulate you and keep you addicted to their platforms.
As a former professional magician with a background in studying mentalism, I can assure you ALL of us can be manipulated and distracted by entities that have enough seemingly small and insignificant bits of information about our daily routines in their widely sold and cross-indexed databases.
The less data you give these entities, the more boring targeted content and ads become, and the more attention you will have left for things that matter.
Sounds like you'd expect a study on this to show that use of tap to pay leads to mental health decline.
I think we've strayed too far from the original study.
I live in London and always pay cash; there are a few places which are card-only, I don't shop there.
I use cash all the time all over the world. I do sometimes have to walk out of a restaurant that refuses cash to find one that accepts it, but that sort of thing is memorable and often changes behavior in those businesses. Companies hate losing customers for easily fixable things like that.
> Those 4.5 million survey responses were gathered over a decade
I'd feel more confident about the results of this research if it didn't entirely depend on self-reported data from a survey. At least in this case it was a phone survey and not just an internet questionnaire posted to social media sites. I'd put more faith in a much smaller sample of young people being professionally evaluated for memory problems.
The survey asks the question: "Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, do you have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions?"
It doesn't ask what physical/mental/emotional condition they have, or even if they were diagnosed with it by a professional (although it does at one point ask if a doctor has told them they have a depressive disorder).
Some years the survey included optional questions (which people may or may not have been asked) that asked if they were taking medicine or receiving treatment from a doctor or other health professional for any type of mental health condition or emotional problem, but again, didn't ask what that condition was.
If you told me that there has been a surge in young people over the last ~10 years who self-identify as having a mental or emotional problem that they themselves suspect has caused difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions I wouldn't be at all surprised.
I'd be more curious to know if there were a surging number of young people who were being diagnosed and treated for serious memory disorders recently.
With rising ADHD awareness and corresponding academic waivers and medications used to enhance academic performance, I'm surprised the results are not much higher among students. I'm disappointed the paper failed to address the limitations of the study.
Note that the effect was stronger with wealth, as expected for performance- and excuse-seeking behaviors in high-achieving households.
I'm starting to think ADHD is isn't a disorder at all. It's like obesity, if something afflicts 2% of the population, it's an individual disorder or issue. If it afflicts 20%+ of the population, it's either a systems/societal issue, or even more likely, a common personality trait that just happens to be very undesirable at this particular moment in time.
ADHD is in part an adaptation to being bombarded with information in the Internet era.
I'm sure it's a legitimate disorder in the most severe cases as well, but like most psych quackery, there are way too many doctors and patients (80%+) too eager to self-diagnose and put people on a prescription and call it a day.
Doctors get money from pharma and people get to use their "disorder" as a convenient excuse for everything. That's what we call incentive alignment in economics.
How is it an adaptation? My understanding is that the internet era disrupts ADHD people the most.
[dead]
> diagnosed with it by a professional
Honestly, I wouldn't be sure how to answer some of the questions.
In a 15 minute doctor's appointment I was "diagnosed" and medicated for bipolar. In another 15 minute appointment with a psychiatrist, we added OCD and general anxiety as well.
We stopped medications shortly after and it has been 20 years.
There has been a lot of discussion about self diagnosis, but I have the opposite problem. How can you decide a diagnosis with 10 questions and some pills?
Modern medicine has no incentive to diagnose you. Their incentives are to get you in and out as quickly as possible, get you on a recurring prescription, and schedule the next followup visit. And to do this for as many people as possible. As long as they don't accidentally kill you, they profit.
> internet questionnaire posted to social media sites
This has got to have a strong selection effect.
I think so, but that hasn't stopped it from being a popular way to gather data, or from often being the only source of data used in a paper. I get that internet surveys are dirt cheap and it's easy to get large number of responses, but you have to take the results with a such a massive boulder of salt that it seems more like a convenient way to churn out papers (or even an easy way to get a desired result) than a way to conduct actual worthwhile research.
> an easy way to get a desired result
Reminds me of that bit from yes prime minister https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GSKwf4AIlI
Well a good surveyor would take into account order effects, i.e. the order in which questions were asked for example using Latin square designs.
An uncontrolled selection bias that has changed over time as the social media landscape has changed.
Yes, which is why the parent points out that it wasn't this.
The survey data can be measured against itself.
I'm not sure it's social media as much as just mobile phones. I used to memorize phone numbers, addresses, directions, short notes, etc.
Memory works like a muscle - use it or lose it.
Quite a while back (I think 10+ years), I began to realize that I was too dependent on Phones for even the basic info. So, I’ve gotten back to writing a lot more and use Notebook + pen. It helps. I still use Phones but I like the idea of being able to know numbers, and details without pulling out the phone for everything.
Using the dialpad instead of the Saved/Favorite Name in the phones is an interesting habit I built up even for most used numbers such as my wife, sister, and even the neighbors. I remember quite a few numbers; even if I cannot say it, I can look at a keypad and the muscle memory kicks in.
This is the same for some key Passwords, I quite often just type them out. Again, I might not remember but my fingers just glides through the keyboard. I remember it being handy at a hospital making some large payment saving my brother’s family from malaria in a Hospital in Bombay.
Btw, it is also fun to no look at Map on the phone for most journey that I already have an idea or traveling for the 2nd time and henceforth.
I recently participated in a research study, and at one point, the researcher told me I was going to be given 3 minutes with a list of 20 words. I was to memorize as many of the words as possible. I would then be asked to perform a specific task, and then repeat back as many of the words as I could.
When I was given these instructions, I realized it's been many years since I had to memorize anything of meaningful length. I spent the first 20 seconds trying to remember as much as I could about how to memorize things, and the rest of the time actually memorizing. It truly is a muscle, and I was very out of practice.
Zoomers these days have to memorize hundreds of reaction wojaks so they can bring up the correct one immediately in an argument.
Not only we don't use it, but it seems that everything we see is of no value at all, streams of meaningless events
This is more important than you know.
Since "A variety of memory systems are regulated by dopamine in the brain." [1], being force feed stimulation after stimulation will affect memory due to the diminishing release of dopamine of less stimulating events.
Being from the first year of Gen X I lived both of these lives. I remember reading newspapers on the subway going to work in Manhattan, having to focus to scan the small stock market print. Yes the news was stimulating, but comparatively slow and limited. I could never read the news at work, but in my later years, working in tech, it was a constant thing throughout the day.
Dopamine if the fuel of capitalism, even illegal capitalism, like the drug trade. This is not dismissive of capitalism, it is just a truth. The only thing that changed is that humanity has found a newer, stronger way to milk dopamine out of the human brain.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/edited-volume/...
I'm not sure it's entirely similar to what you mentioned, but I too remember the sensation of focus, that I'm struggling to get these days. I started to realize this after the web2.0 era.. thinking that ajax infused web apps would allow for better communication and thinking but it mostly unleashed noise, and whenever I run into old, limited forms of communication, i get the sense of value and focus back. Only the things that matter gets to your attention, and it reaches deeper and faster.
Maybe we're memorising different things. On this site it will be remembering where different settings are found in different software tools, or the map of languages to libraries to functions.
Gwern's writing on working memory might also interest you
https://gwern.net/dnb-faq
I’m in my thirties. I have to mail books around the world and country because so few of my friends read. (It’s worst in the 50+ cohort.)
I've taken to audio books over reading, not sure how this will affect me but I do enjoy them.
Likely both, the phone acts as an easy access point to social media, making the two a mentally lethal cocktail.
I think it has little or nothing to do with screens. Young people are just adapting to a society that thinks of people who remember things as annoying at best and troublemakers or terrorists at worst. We've become a say the words society, not a have something to say society. You don't have to remember for very long in order to repeat something, in fact it can become a problem because you'll remember back when you were told to repeat the opposite.
It's also very difficult to claim to be a victim if everyone still remembers what you did.
I think I remember a study about this a few years ago but I can't recall the details
Everyone also forgot their sense humour too.
These are survey results, not actual memory test results. They answered positively to having "serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions”.
I'd bet $1000 bucks that these people don't have actual memory problems.
What an unspecific question that is. Could very well be memory problems, could very well be problems concentrating.
Its the low quality food, my memory improved a lot, after I stopped eating sugar and most refined foods. Theres even some research that Alzheimer starts from bad bacteria in the gut, that loves sugar.
Shitty food has been around for a long time. Some virus known for causing long-term effects in non-negligible parts of the population has been around since 2019.
> The increase in disability prevalence from 2016 to 2022 is likely attributable in part to the long-term effects of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
Wild to me that the first mention of COVID is this far down the page.
Most people have been infected at least a couple of times may this point, and at this point it’s very well documented to cause lasting cognitive decline.
The actual article (not the blog post) does mention it as likely partial cause.
This thesis contradicts the chart though. Why would older people be much less affected and the generation 70+ even show a negative trend if these people were far more likely to experience a more severe disease progression? You would expect them to be hit at least as hard (if not harder) as young people from those long term memory effects. The trend for the youngest age group also starts well before 2019.
First when you have combination of factors, this can happen.
Second, old people were more likely to die on covid. Kids were getting covid too, just not dying and long term covid consequences were observed in then. It can easily be that where old person died, young ended up with long term consequence.
There is no reason to assume the effect would be uniform accross generations.
-----
Either way, cell phone obsession and "rewiring of biology" claims are wven further from anything shown in the article. They are both purely what HN and the blogger want it to be.
I don't see your argument. Are you suggesting that covid pruned old people with weak memory to the point that it improved their memory on average? Because that is the only conclusion of your argument combined with the data. And that's not just completely unfounded, it's a pretty wild violation of Occam's razor.
In my family, people 70+ stop using mobile phones or never used them in the first place.
I was just talking with my wife yesterday about how readily people assume they have superior competence to or greater insight than experts in a given field. I'm not picking on you in particular, but your comment jumped out at me.
Substantially:
We've been eating "low quality" food of one type -- ultra-processed food -- since at least the '60s, so what's your explanation for the recency of the effect?
And some time earlier than that -- very roughly the 1920s and earlier -- we were eating "low quality" foods of a different type: spoiled, adulterated, and questionably-sourced food products, so do you claim that we started with poor concentration then, got better/had a heyday in the mid-20th century, and now we're declining again?
In short: what's your evidence to support your claim?
It's reasoned conjecture on an internet message board. Yes, it is over-stated. But if one treats quality of diet as one variable among many in cognitive capacity, which is the only sane approach, then trying to match the diet of a population to trendlines in society-wide cognitive performance is not going to tell you anything.
Could be multiple factors. In my N=1 experience fiddling with various things in my life.
* Improving diet (primarily avoiding refined foods and sugar) generally improves my energy levels.
* Cutting out social media mostly improves concentration.
* Trying to avoid rumination such as problem solving or rehearsing arguments through meditative practices reduces stress levels, makes it easier to be present and react to things in front of you.
* Sleep is also pretty big for cognitive clarity. Having a consistent sleep schedule and not drinking coffee past noon helps with sleep.
But really, all of these seem to tie into each other. If you want to improve your diet, it's much harder if you are tired from lack of sleep or overstimulation. If you want to improve your sleep, you can't be scrolling social media all day. Mental exhaustion also makes awareness/meditation harder.
As someone who has eaten way too much sugary food I think my gut-brain coupling may have had enough of this. A few weeks ago I had a sugar binge one night and the cognitive effects were impossible to ignore the next day. Fortunately after 2-3 days I was back to normal but of my sample size of one, and in my condition (which is pre-diabetic) I observed a clear link.
It was a good experience as it's prompted me to get more serious about cutting back sugar, implemented as long term, achievable habit change.
Bacteria (and your body) like sugar because it’s an easy to use fuel source. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having reasonable amounts of sugar in your diet.
The catch is that the body likes lots of things that are awful for it. For instance drug abuse isn't limited to humans - some bears have gotten addicted to huffing gas to get high. [1] Quite cute if it wasn't so awful! The big issue is that in modern times a whole bunch of things are going wrong - testosterone levels (adjusted for health/bmi/age) are declining, IQ is declining [2], basically every single psychological disorder is skyrocketing, and much more.
And the reason why isn't clear. So the most likely reason is that we're doing what humanity has done repeatedly and endlessly throughout history and likely accidentally poisoning ourselves with some thing or things -- things that we believe to be completely safe. So a precautionary principle approach to consumption is to consider what we evolved with and sugar definitely wasn't that. Sugar only really took off in the 19th century. And various further refined sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup and other such things only took off in the late 20th century.
[1] - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2294757/Bear-ly-con...
[2] - https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-...
> So a precautionary principle approach to consumption is to consider what we evolved with and sugar definitely wasn't that. Sugar only really took off in the 19th century.
We have evidence that apiculture has been a thing for well over 8,000 years.
Our bodies literally love to burn glucose as fuel and we perform better physically (and mentally I assume) when glucose is readily available.
We have literally evolved to be sugar burning machines.
Just don’t eat too much of it and you’ll be fine.
You completely missed the point GP was making. Yes, sugar is an easy fuel source. The point is we have NOT evolved to consume massive amounts every day without breaks (i.e. daily) and without lots of fiber to buffer it.
I think you might be the one that’s missing the point. I’m saying some sugar is absolutely fine as part of a balanced diet, this isn’t a controversial point. Excessive calories are bad, whether they’re sugar or anything else.
As a European visitong the US, I am constantly amazed at how there is masses of sugar added to 'normal' food over there. You take a bite expecting a certain flavour, and go wtf did someone glace this with caramel or drop some candy in the flour mix?
Reasonable amount being whatever you get from an occasional fruit snack.
Not whatever we have in the modern / food pyramid diet.
What is the reasonable amount? Could it be less than we currently have in many diets?
Less than the average American diet, probably. Less than other diets? It depends.
"Eating sugar" and "reasonable amounts of sugar in your diet" are two very different things.
Sure, but like literally anything else, the dose makes the poison.
Define reasonable.
Not a major proportion of your daily caloric intake and not in excess of your daily caloric burn (unless you’re actively trying to gain weight). More if you’re doing a lot of aerobic exercise.
There’s no reasonable amount of sugar, unless there’s fibre to go with it. Sugar by itself (ie refined sugar) is a poison.
What kind of content are you looking at to believe nonsense like that?
Apparently very popular content - a parent at my kid’s kindergarten wanted to make cake for their kids birthday, said they’d only use 1 tsp of honey in the whole thing.
Cue universal freak out in the parents’ WhatsApp group.
Apparently, sugar:
It’s weird, IMO. I let my kiddo have sugar within reason, and somehow she’s leaner than any of the other kids in her class, who even already have rotten teeth at two, despite their sugar free diets. They feed them simple carbs almost exclusively, and are oblivious to amylase.Perhaps it’s because she’s physically active - the rest of her cohort are pretty much forbidden from walking or running as those pose risks, and children must be sheltered from all conceivable risk so that they grow up into independent and capable adults.
I would argue that that - physical activity - is far more important than what you shove in your face.
There have been repeatedly, credibly and demonstrably shown to be significant benefits to not spending your entire life sitting on your ass - but I guess it’s harder to get off your ass than to proselytise about sugar being an evil and artificial harmful chemical that has no place in the human body - despite it literally being what we run off of.
"I would argue that that - physical activity - is far more important than what you shove in your face."
No, it bloody is not.
I used to drive a bicycle for 6 - 12 hours ever day while working in the delivery. I also didn't watch what I was eating.
I ended up getting fat and with haemorrhoids. So I had to quit cycling.
Then I spend some time (years actually) researching and slowly improving my diet.
Result? I lost weight, my haemorrhoids (and several other health issues) stopped acting up, and I am overall much healthier despite most of my physical activity being walking.
Yes, exercise is important. But it won't help you if you eat massive amounts of garbage food.
So stop talking stuff you have no clue about.
Also, we do not "run off of" sugar. Human body can run off sugar, or fat, or a combination of these. And argument could be made that running off fat is actually healthier. Body can in fact produce all sugar it needs with absolutely zero need for dietary sugar (note that doesn't mean you should go zero carb, just that carbs / sugars are not a metabolic necessity).
As for this: "who even already have rotten teeth at two, despite their sugar free diets. They feed them simple carbs almost exclusively, and are oblivious to amylase."
Uhh... carbs ARE sugars. It literally doesn't matter that you are avoiding "sugar" if you end up eating bread instead.
Moderate exercising is conaistently shown to improve peoples health results. Study after study, it has positive impact.
It may or may not affect peoples weight (which is aesthetic issue on itself), but in terms of health improvements it is one intervention that consistently works.
They are not saying kids should be 8 hours on bikes whether they feel like or not. They are saying they should run around with other kids which something entirely different.
Sugars are carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are not sugars.
"A carbohydrate (/ˌkɑːrboʊˈhaɪdreɪt/) is a sugar"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate
“Or a sugar derivative”
Great selective quoting. 10/10.
Long before RFK Jr said it recently, Dr Robert Lustig, paediatric endocrinologist, went viral about 15 years ago with a video "Sugar: The bitter truth"[1] and book and talk slots following on from it.
Gary Taubes, who became widely known for researching tons of studies on diet and coining the saying "eat food, not too much, mostly plants". Food meaning unprocessed stuff your (great great) grandma would recognise as food, wrote an NY Times article agreeing with it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
[2] https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/1...
The dismissal in these comments is astonishing.
I agree. Over the last 10 years, I've been growing in awareness of how in general people, developers, and their managers, and their company owners are incapable of the communications necessary for basic cooperation in project teams, in their own self planning, and forget about their ability dealing with more complex issues like market & social-political manipulation of the public. Far too many people appear to only be capable of 1-step forward planning. Seriously. My career has become a consultant that can see multiple steps forward and when explaining this insight I get everything from angry refusals to daunting obedience, but never a competing insight, only 1 step past their present situation. People are way to quick to enter into short sighted conflict, and then completely ignore their real responsibilities.
I was ready to dismiss the article on the basis of its sensationalist writing, but I wanted to dig into the study as well. After reading through it, I asked my wife, who's a sociologist and researcher, what she thought about these conclusions based on the survey data. She said that collecting survey results in this kind of longitudinal study is considered a valid source of data about trends like this, but she said the obvious caveat is that you can't determine causation or what the practical impact is. The article does not hesitate to state hypothesis as fact, which is probably where the dismissals are coming from.
this is real. the cognitive environment has changed, where the the things that are retained in order to survive and thrive, one, have been removed and comodified, and are no longer absolutly personal and private, and two, there is a never ending merry-go-round of changing passwords, apps, submissions,sign ins, acciunt verifications, two factor authentications, to get at, what was once absolute, personal, and private. What has been created is compliance and a lack of personal agency, and any motive to give a damn....whats the point of remembering something that you have zero chance of holding onto and building from? A population stuck in that mid stage of grief , always letting go......
The paper discussed in the article: https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000214226
My big issue with this study is it points to a cause. How can they know the issue is social media, and not, say, the climbing atmospheric CO2 or other long-COVID related issues?
The root cause is likely to the surge of dopamine in the brain related to activities like scrolling social media, fast-paced tik-tok videos, porn, etc. This means that the brain is so much addicted to this dopamine that normal level are no longer enough to be functional.
Please see my post above about dopamine and memory. The low dopamine effects memory as well as concentration.
See:
Novelty and Dopaminergic Modulation of Memory Persistence: A Tale of Two Systems
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6352318/
There can be many causes. Aside from social media, games, porn and AI, it can also be caused by the decline of the living standards or increase of stress in the West due to shift from social-democratic to neoliberal economic policies.
Study does not point at causes. The blog post does. A blog post inspired by a study and study itself are two different things.
Feels like a lot of jumping to conclusion in the article. It just assumes the causation like it's been proven.
It also assumes the finding is negative, which is more subtle but similarly problematic. Decline in memory might just mean that our brain is reallocating capacity for something else. It could also mean that the nature of what we're trying to remember has changed and it's now more difficult (e.g. There's more entropy in the data, or the data is changing more often).
Research good, article reasoning sloppy.
The surging decline in typewriters in the 90's had nothing to do with how bad typewriters were or how they were used.
It's a symptom of society barrelling toward exponential progress more than a pathology imo
We're told not to feed the wildlife at parks and beaches because of the dangers when they become dependent on visitors for their food source. It changes their natural behavior to the extent that it becomes difficult to revert to natural food sources in the absence of visitors.
(there are other behavioral and disease-related dangers but they're not as appropriate to this metaphor)
I think the more alarmed voices in this comment thread are not reacting to the change or "exponential progress" but are instead concerned about the impact of becoming reliant on something else to do our remembering.
This last part is anecdata (but no worse than the survey data in TFA), I think smartphone users have not really lost the ability to memorize, in general, but that the things being memorized are different. If the memory test (mentioned in a cousin-comment) had a set of 20 memes instead of 20 words, I expect most study participants would be a lot better at recall.
I suppose the question of "is this like junk food, though?" may be relevant.
spike protein is known to travel across the blood brain barrier
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35052867/
But of course something introduced between 2013 and 2023 that gets your cells to manufacture spike protein, with no way of regulating the spike dose, couldn't possibly be connected with memory decline.
If you approximate the youngest age group's data points as a linear trend, it starts well before 2019. After all, they originally were at the same level as the next two higher age groups. So even if you assume that the entire rise after 2020 was due to this cause, it would only explain ~50% of the total effect. And it would not explain at all how older people who were most likely to experience a severe disease (particularly before vaccines) actually show a slight inverse trend, while the age groups in between show barely any statistically significant effect. If you really want to blame covid, I would assume closing schools and mass remote-schooling to protect old people is a much more likely explanation for the trend among the youngest people post 2020. This is the one thing that truly sets them apart from all the other age groups.
You people are suffering from something worse than long covid.
Why would that differentially affect young people?
That is a good point. Injection rates were higher with older population. I would say that younger immune systems are more robust, potentially leading to exaggerated inflammatory responses to spike protein, which could heighten neuro-inflammation and cognitive impacts.
Possibly same reason why youngest people had highest rates of myocarditis
Wouldn't it also have something to do with it being hard to judge quality in the quantity of information today?
The irony is that we're now telling ourselves, "attention is all you need".
Not surprised when you are born in the smartphone era where your attention and memory are constantly hijacked.
The memory that is involved is the working memory, which is similar to the CPU cache. The short term is RAM and the long term is the physical storage.
The problem is completely reversible if you stop electronic screen usage and stick to traditional education (nature, friends, books etc)
One on the few pieces I was able to read from start to finish.
what is a “decline surge”?
It's a bit like an increase plummet but worse.
The AI writing here is so hard to read I honestly couldn’t finish the article.
“It’s not X, it’s Y” is a turn of speech that has to be consciously removed from a polite society.
> consciously removed
Please retain this turn of speech that helps autonomic (carbon) and automated (silicon) filters.
I don’t think I quite caught your meaning.
I mean this turn of speech makes it easier to identify hunan (carbon) or machine (silicon) content.
Took me a bit to figure it out too
Thanks, human :)
Uh oh. Did I just get filtered?! Don’t put me in the recycling vats!
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> Study finds memory decline surge in young people
Who would have thought that bread (fast food) and circus (smartphone) would dumb them down. /s
So fast food was invented around the same time as the smartphone?
dysgenics at work