Doomscrolling ourselves to death

Post by Felger » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 8:54 PM UTC

ikr678 wrote: post #210

Escapado wrote: post #69

On a personal level I have become more anxious and it has become more difficult to deal with my tendency to procrastinate the more screen time I have and the more I am exposed to social media. I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube. A few weeks ago I blocked them too. I would say in totality I read…

How much caffiene do you consume? I had just been prescribed a script for an ssri for generalised anxiety, was scared of the side effects, decided to try cutting out coffee instead. Anxiety gone. I was only having 2-3 filter cups a day, probably less mg than a single large energy drink but that was enough.

Post by jodrellblank » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #105

pj_mukh wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most insidious realities of the introduction of AI is that we've taken our eye off of tech's original sin - the algorithmic feed forensically designed to hijack the brain. I don't see how it's any different than opium and why the regulations should be any different. Even the problem of "AI slop" is mostly that it invades the algorithms, weaponizing them even more. I'm not a huge fan of heavy-handed regulat…

> I don't see how it's any different than opium During the marijuana prohibition days the resounding chorus in the discourse was that marijuana was not physically addictive like other drugs, and therefore we must treat it differently. There were problems with that argument if you got into the details, but it did establish the idea that not all drugs are equally harmful and therefore treating them all equally was not…

Post by talon8635 » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 9:04 PM UTC

giarc wrote: post #82

Here's my n of 2 story, but my young kids read all the time and it's likely for two reasons. My wife and I read, and still read to them every night, and second, they both have Kobo Clara Colour e-readers. They love graphic novels and the colour screen keeps them engaged (we had black and white e-readers before and it just wasn't the same). We get 100% of our books from the public library and they probably read 5-20 g…

Post by talon8635 » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 9:08 PM UTC

hdz wrote: post #157

I encourage those who want to read more to start a book club with their friends. My club has read 6 books now and it gets at two things the article mentions, isolation and illiteracy. I’ve recently also subscribed to a few in print magazines to address the desire for up to date recent information we get from social media. HN is still hard to quit, the amount of useful information here is still high. digg.com summariz…

Post by watwut » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 9:20 PM UTC

originalvichy wrote: post #192

coffeefirst wrote: post #11

I can tell, usually within a few minutes of meeting them, who’s really into social media. There’s a little bit of frenetic emotional dysregulation, and then they say the weirdest stuff to me. I don’t think you could have made a similar argument about heavy trash tv watchers. They may have had less to talk about, you may have found them less interesting, but it didn’t literally alter their personalities. We have a big…

The easiest way to tell in Europe is that a woman who has never visited USA speaks in phrases or uses slang words that an African-American woman from Atlanta would use. African-American men and women probably have the largest global cultural effect based on the relative size of the community to the population of the world.