How to overcome Phone Addiction

Unlikely unless it starts becoming violent and challenges the government's monopoly on violence.

It's not that drugs are of concern to citizens but the people involved in the supply side are essentially directly challenging the government in a market that it refuses to regulate.

Whoever holds control over the apparatus for distributing violence the most efficiently and at large scale ultimately dictates the laws. Anybody posing a challenge to this basic low common denominator will become a target of the State which declares itself as the sole monopoly over violence.

This is why I believe countries fight all the time, it is simply not enough to hold monopoly over your own borders, to maintain its "large security apparatus" it needs new threats otherwise it stops growing, losing momentum and many groups declaring their own autonomous zones will find it easy to challenge the government as we saw in Syria and Arab Spring countries.

on android, you can set your phone to grayscale (night time mode). This helps with the fact that the bright colors subconsciously lure you in

given that most phones are designed in such a way that running anything other than curated apps on it is fairly difficult the distinction is quite blurry.

The phones and the operating software they run are built to discourage anything that isn't media consumption or passive app use.

I’ll second this. Here’s an anecdote from just this morning:

I sat down at my desktop with my coffee. The first thing I did was fire up Unity and Visual Studio to continue some work on learning about networked multiplayer games. I spent about 2 hours reading API documentation and prototyping different things. I came away feeling like I had learned something and was making progress on a thing I care about.

After that I picked up my phone. I spent an hour scrolling through different news sites and jumping between apps. I came away feeling depressed, anxious, and like I just wasted an hour of my life on meaningless information consumption.

I’m sure some people have the same experience on a desktop/laptop and others can use their phone for creative endeavors, but for me, personally, the differences in experience between the two environments is quite stark.

Escapism is intensely popular, it’s behind the boom in video games, watching people stream themselves playing video games, super hero movies, scripted tv. OnlyFans let’s you have a quasi-partner who takes your money and gives you intimacy. Instant gratification, and if you don’t have what you want, just blame society for not giving it to you.

What’s great is that if you are a hard worker and have a long time horizon, it’s never been easier to extract huge compensation. Wealthy people want to invest to make money without any effort, and learning hard stuff like computer science, mechanical engineering, biochemistry and pharma development, etc. takes a tough decade of study and practice to get skilled enough to really kill it. But once you are an expert you can produce actual stuff that matters and investors can’t find enough smart and talented people willing to actually do stuff, so the premium paid to those that can make entertainment, life saving drugs, productivity-increasing tech, and so on gets ever higher.

Bet on making stuff for the Netflix box and drugs that keep fat people alive longer, and fun games that distract people from reality.