81–90 of 245 posts
How many businesses can I remember around addictions? What s the most famous anti-TV addiction company? Anti-cigarettes? Anti-sex addiction? If it's none, then the opportunity is not underappreciated. Making an anti-addiction product is by its nature the opposite of a sellable product. And the people who have the frontal lobe to willingly go against their addiction, have already solved their problem.
In my own experience struggling with addiction I've found that it is a symptom rather than a cause. Once you craft a life that is actually stimulating the tech loses its hold over you pretty quickly, if not instantly (for example when you go on a weekend outing in nature and completely forget your phone). Of course, the time and energy wasted due to the dysfunctional behavior presents a chicken-and-egg roadblock agai…
How many businesses can I remember around addictions? What s the most famous anti-TV addiction company? Anti-cigarettes? Anti-sex addiction? If it's none, then the opportunity is not underappreciated. Making an anti-addiction product is by its nature the opposite of a sellable product. And the people who have the frontal lobe to willingly go against their addiction, have already solved their problem.
Nicotine Patch/Gum
Earlier quoted context omitted.
social media is specifically designed to provide you regular bursts of instant gratification. Of course that's going to be more attractive to your brain than natural vistas, it's engineered for maximum impact. When comparing natural and artificial stimuli I like to refer to this comic, which lays out the issue at hand beautifully: http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/supernormal-stimuli/
The same can be said for processed food. It's designed to be hyper-sensual. Of course it tastes better than an apple, it's designed that way. But one is healthy, and the other only tastes good.
I promise no phone signal for 30 days.
"The real answer to solving technology addiction is the answer to sustainably solving most problems: innovation spurred by capitalism." I find that when capitalism spurs innovations, those innovations work toward the sustenance of capitalism as a system, which I take some issue with. If some plucky startup solves tech addiction, it will be in a way that makes you a more effective worker or consumer.
Well, that might not be ideal, but it might be better than the alternatives. My last employer paid me a dollar for every day that I tracked a workout meeting certain criteria and synced it with the insurers app. Employers save on insurance by having healthy employees, so they pass on the incentive. Not exactly utopian, and there are privacy concerns, but overall it was positive, even if the motivation behind it wasn't really because they care. But now try to think of an alternative. No one else has the incentive to do it, except government. And if government did it, it would probably end up being a complicated tax deduction only taken by wealthy people who hire accountants or would involve some Orwellian government-backed tracking app.
I'm not really afraid of capitalism doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. The beauty of capitalism is how often self-interested people are incentivized to work for mutual benefits. If the free-market actually has incentives to fix smart-phone addiction, that's great. If the incentives aren't strong enough, then we'll probably end up with a government solution involving GDPR type clumsiness, but that might be the best we can do.
In my own experience struggling with addiction I've found that it is a symptom rather than a cause. Once you craft a life that is actually stimulating the tech loses its hold over you pretty quickly, if not instantly (for example when you go on a weekend outing in nature and completely forget your phone). Of course, the time and energy wasted due to the dysfunctional behavior presents a chicken-and-egg roadblock agai…
I'm a gamer and about as attached to tech as you can be without actually having mental issues over it. My wife and I recently bought a house and I've been finding that I'd rather spend time fixing it up than playing games or doing other stuff with electronics much of the time. That doesn't mean that I've quit wholesale, though. I eventually get physically or mentally tired and want to just relax, and it's back to the…
Edit to add:
I should have clarified/furthered my thoughts - and it's true you shouldn't by default trust a startup to do things safely or ethically, you should certainly do your due diligence that they aren't making claims that can't be backed up, nor are following processes (etc) that can do more than what is a pre-existing level of acceptable risk/harm.
Presumably however, if they're/a startup is expecting to survive in the long-term they'd need to be leveraged and connected with safety and people with the appropriate knowledge, because they should be scrutinized more thoroughly if they're involved with health. Otherwise they're going to die off - and hopefully without hurting too many people or getting too big, like where we could reference Theranos.
Having worked on a product for 3 years that attempts to target this market I can tell you the sad reality, is that nobody really cares. Sure, there are clickbait headlines and companies/parents will feign interest, but when it comes to actually paying for a product or making any tangible change to usage habits, our numbers prove that nobody even tries. For full disclosure our product turns the Internet off until they…
In my own experience struggling with addiction I've found that it is a symptom rather than a cause. Once you craft a life that is actually stimulating the tech loses its hold over you pretty quickly, if not instantly (for example when you go on a weekend outing in nature and completely forget your phone). Of course, the time and energy wasted due to the dysfunctional behavior presents a chicken-and-egg roadblock agai…
A lot of the time, though, we have to quit dysfunctional behavior before we can identify what functional behavior looks like.
I totally agree with you that there is a chicken and egg problem. My typical advice for folks is to quit the behavior completely: you're correct in identifying how blocking tools cause their own problems and just mimic the same addictive behavior.
Then, at that point, it's going to be necessary to find some other behavior, but that's often a lot easier once you've got to do something... you just have to make sure that the things you choose to do are good.
Like, I gave up my codependent relationship with my ex wife, and that made it possible to give up drinking, but I still have to play a shit-ton of scales on guitar and piano and about an hour of yoga or I get weird.
Or I quit facebook, but now I do a a daily run of Kahn academy and working on electronics projects; that's a symptom, but it's a symptom that I enjoy.