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 games I go.
My point is that tech isn't what drives my life, it's just one of the things that I enjoy. And actually improving our house has proven even more enjoyable.
I don't think the "solution" for "tech addiction" (as most people see it) is limiting phone time or focusing on the tech at all. Instead, the solution is for people to find a hobby that doesn't require an internet/cable connection and enjoy that instead.
And if they don't, it doesn't bother me a bit. People can do what they want, so long as it doesn't harm others.
People who have an actual "addiction" should seek professional help, though. Not some random guy that's making a startup, but someone with an actual degree in a profession that can help with mental issues.
actually improving our house has proven even more enjoyable
Plus you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
That was what completely killed my interest in any amount of game grind- it hit me mid-game that if I spent that time grinding my actual corporeal self, I'd have something to show for it after.
I've since improved my AeT mile pace (your "all-day" level) from around 15:00 to 10:00ish. (My dream/goal is to get to 7:00-8:00 at that level of exertion)
It probably helped that I did just enough game design to be acutely aware of even less-obvious time sink mechanisms, but I don't think it was an essential feature of what changed. Even simple puzzle games and other things that aren't manipulative started to pale in the face of the realization that "hey, I could go fix a broken shelf or read a book or exercise and get a lasting benefit".
It's not a sense of duty or anything else people would describe as "not being lazy", doing something fruitful just started feeling better. I still play games, and I'm happy with that, but the set of games has shrunk to things with ongoing interest and no grind, and the timing to stretches where I'm tired, stuck (e.g. at an airport), or playing with friends.
I don't doubt that addictiveness is a real factor, but I think lots of horror stories about gaming and tech addiction grab the wrong end of the stick. I've seen a half dozen people take "young men now work fewer hours, and game for a similar number more hours" and say "obviously, games destroyed their will to work!" Meanwhile, half my friends have gamed heavily when they had crap jobs, short-term rented apartments, etc, and then stopped as soon as they got bored and found opportunities for lasting improvements. Games are a fantastic way to kill a lot of time comfortably, but that doesn't mean they override all our other impulses.
I generally only read fiction, so I see video games and books as being in the same category: They're great for relaxation and entertainment, and occasionally bring a new plot or idea, but generally not nearly as useful as fixing or making things.
And that's okay. But getting myself to believe that was okay took some doing. I struggled with it for years before I finally found a good balance that didn't make me think I should be more production instead of relaxing.
Yes! I don't like games that grind. I have more important things to do with my time. I'll put _some_ time into some grind-y games. I like hearthstone, but don't grind. I play ~5-10 minutes a day. I like diablo, but I get maybe an hour or two a month in usually. I never keep up with everyone.
If the game is more adventure and skill based, it grabs me longer, but if I feel the grind, I lose interest fast.
> That was what completely killed my interest in any amount of game grind- it hit me mid-game that if I spent that time grinding my actual corporeal self, I'd have something to show for it after.
I wish I could relate to this. IRL grinding seems hilariously inefficient and unreliable, which I think is why people enjoy their gaming grinds so much.
I agree with you, but at the same time, I have to point out that not everyone might have that perspective (anecdotally or not). I'd argue sometimes that the rewards from grind in real-life might seem so marginal such that some people feel as if they have made no effective progress.
Yes, it's definitely a slower grind than a video game, where it feels like a slog but you make progress in days or even hours. I have now run many hundreds of miles over the course of years to reap gains I can feel really good about.
That might have been easier for me to sign up for now that I am older, and more comfortable thinking about multi-year horizons.
(1) Professional help for addiction tends to be very expensive; in contrast, even buying a "specialty" smartphone to replace one's existing smartphone would cost much less.
(2) Even those who can easily afford the best professional help, e.g., Ben Affleck, end up having to go back into an in-patient addiction treatment center multiple times (3 times so far for Affleck, the first time's being in 2001), which casts doubt on the effectiveness of professional help.
(3) Some people need to advance in their career before they can afford professional help, but addiction makes it harder for a person to make progress in life. An affordable tech solution or partial-solution to addiction can help break this vicious cycle.
Not relevant, since the fundamental issues still aren't being addressed. By and large, dysfunction will just find a different way to manifest itself.
Moreover, treating the symptom without treating the disease will be an inordinate struggle until the underlying issues are understood, processed and addressed. This will leave most of the afflicted no better off, and in some ways, significantly worse for the failed effort.
Mental health is costly and difficult. There is no shortcut around this. You can't replace it with an app, or we would have replaced it with a book.
Recovering mental health usually takes years. The sufferer or people who care about the sufferer have to learn enough to solve the problem. They must free themselves from false beliefs and keep trying things till they find something that works.
Addiction is an obstacle to learning and (more generally) to making progress in life because a large fraction of one's potentially-productive time gets absorbed by the addictive behavior.
Replacing an iPhone or Android phone with a phone that is even slightly less addictive (if such a phone existed) would allow a person and those who care about the person to engage in the probably-years-long process of learning and trial and error faster, resulting in fewer years lost to addiction (statistically speaking).
* * *
Seeing concrete examples of lives ruined by addiction (or by some other illness) makes a person uncomfortable. A natural human response would be for me to reduce that uncomfortable feeling by telling myself it will happen to me because, e.g., (a) the sufferer behaved immorally whereas I am moral or, e.g., (b) the sufferer did not obey the rules of society whereas I do.
Are you sure that you haven't reduced your discomfort around addiction by telling yourself that it cannot happen to you or those you love because you and those you love are willing to do the hard work of getting to the "root cause" of the addiction?
(Or maybe you believe that it can happen to you, but that you will be able to fix the root cause before a large fraction of your life is ruined by the addiction.)
I ask because your comment skates close to what we might call "essentialism", in which you argue that it is useless for you and I try to help the addict because what is wrong is something essential to the addict, so of course only the addict himself can help.
I wonder whether this next would be considered by you as merely treating the symptom of addiction:
Joe notices that most of the time he spend on the web is wasted time. So he cancels his home internet connection and relies on his connection at work to get done everything that needs to get done on the web. For example, at work he downloads movies and TV shows from the iTunes Movie Store (or whatever they're calling it now) onto his MacBook for watching at home. (or he uses youtube-dl to download Youtube and Daily Motion videos.)
Is that in your opinion uselessly treating a symptom of addiction?
If it was that easy for Joe, he wasn't addicted, and it was his integrated recognition of the problem, and not the ritual he imposed as a result, that substantiated the change.
If he was, he found something else to replace it, and is no better off.
>My wife and I recently bought a house and I've been finding that I'd rather spend time fixing it up than [engaging in things that many people get addicted to]
I propose that most of the hours lost to tech addiction will be lost by people with a severe life problem (e.g., they're paralyzed and in a wheelchair; e.g., they have an incurable disabling illness; e.g., they cannot get a job because they're ugly and have an IQ of 70) in addition to the addiction. Most of them will not be able to find anyone trustworthy and sane to marry them. Most of them will not be able to buy a house.
It is natural for a person to respond to the assertion that X is dangerous (or pernicious) by focusing on how dangerous X is to people sufficiently like themselves without considering the danger (or perniciousness) to people in different life circumstances.
The private market will do a far better job fixing the status quo than the government or industrial complexes will. Some "random guy that's making a startup" presumably would do things to be safe, and ethical, no? You can make generalizations and assumptions otherwise, though that isn't very helpful. If you've ever had the displeasure to experience the healthcare system, you'd learn too that "professionals" are indoctrinated in a system that doesn't update their knowledge, keeps their knowledge in silos, and overall is inefficient and not getting people access to the most recent/best information/knowledge.
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.
> If you've ever had the displeasure to experience the healthcare system, you'd learn too that "professionals" are indoctrinated in a system that doesn't update their knowledge, keeps their knowledge in silos, and overall is inefficient and not getting people access to the most recent/best information/knowledge.
This is crankery. Not all doctors are the best medical practitioners, but I will always trust a random medical doctor more than a random “health” startup.
Your statement is equally a "crankery" if you've never had to deal with or experience the healthcare system. Unless you educate yourself on a topic to try to understand what's going on with yourself (unless it's something very simple), then you'll likely have as good of odds deciding if a doctor is good at what they do/figuring something out, as does a "health" startup. The systems of indoctrination are real and human error is a huge problem, likewise, doctors are selected primarily for their memorization skills and not critical thinking. - so if it is something more than simple, - good luck. They will listen to you for symptoms (assuming your self-awareness is adequate to notice everything important and your ability to share those symptoms is adequate) to then match up what might be going on, and then send you for testing, further specialist opinion, or whatever else. Technology will replace most of the processes in health - and that is good. Another example is using AI to analyze x-rays and MRIs for issues. Your family physician will depend on the report to decide if there's anything that needs to be treated - I have had more than one MRI reports where on second look by a different doctor they spot something that the original didn't.
> Some "random guy that's making a startup" presumably would do things to be safe, and ethical, no?
That's a very risky assumption to make. Ethics are often secondary considerations for engineer and business thinking (for better or worse). To the point that people advocate the removal of ethics courses from university STEM curricula (not sure how widespread this viewpoint is, but I've heard it my entire adult life, so this whole century).
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.
Anecdotal evidence, but I personally know quite a few people with mental health issues who’ve found psychiatrists very helpful. I don’t know anyone who has received significant help with mental health from a tech startup. Startups are great, but they aren’t the answer to everything.
So directory services? Great, but then they have nothing to do with the actual healthcare, so your original comment on private market care doesn't apply.
Sorry but I don't understand how my comment on the private market doesn't apply? I think there is definitely difficulty in seeing the underlying aspects of where innovation comes from, mainly because the "lowest hanging fruit" is what will get investment money first, and part of that lowest hanging fruit will scale quickly too - meaning it'll be what gets the most mainstream exposure - so that can skew people's view about private vs. public.
Do you have much experience personally dealing with healthcare systems to reference?
I can only imagine there are a lot of health tech companies we could find/reference who have received VC money, and who haven't hurt anyone - who are aware of the ethics and are good people. Of course there will be people who are naive, perhaps the "mercenary" type who see an opportunity, get money, and try to push for growth and marketshare without caring about health and safety first; Theranos seems to be one of these situations.
You first argue that the free market is suited to solve these problems, then criticize the health-care industry for problems caused by its competitive nature.
I want to address your point here, but I have no idea what it is.
There's an educational complex (including for/with medicine-healthcare), a manufacturing line of people's education towards "higher education." I am not saying this is inherently bad, however it has allowed indoctrination and stagnancy in practices to take hold in some areas - and which other means of education haven't caught up (via the private/"free" market) to counter-balance this for the mainstream masses to use and benefit from; programming has easily become a decentralized task with platforms like Codecademy, as one example.
There is also a difference between healthcare in countries like Canada vs. the US, where you can compare how "free market" the different systems are - see where more innovation has occurred or stagnated due to policy or other.
My point is that it's dangerous to blindly trust professionals - professional titles that were/are created and maintained through systems that include indoctrination - and just because they have a degree in something doesn't mean you should trust them (on a simpler level, just because someone has their driver's license - doesn't mean you should assume or trust they're a good driver). And obviously I'm not relating this type or level of trust to say someone who's gone through schooling who's a brain surgeon, to trusting someone else who just claims to be a brain surgeon but has no references or experience.
The problem with indoctrination is there is new knowledge and tools being developed every year, however that knowledge is not distributing - it takes far too long, in part, because of indoctrination.
There's indoctrination within individual organizations/companies as well, with like Theranos, where the VCs and controllers must not have understood the science themselves - or had trusted parties they could refer to outside of the company - and so it could grow to the scale it did.
The free market can counter these complexes, it's just not going to be a simple endeavour, it will be complex. And just because the free market can solve these issues, doesn't mean there shouldn't be societal changes and rules enacted, and doesn't mean that this same free market and say health-care industry can't be part of creating problems that then need to be addressed.
Good - as you and everyone should - however, in the context of a health startup, and if the startup wants to have a long existence, they're not going to last very long if they're hurting people? I didn't mean to imply to blindly trust, like you shouldn't blindly trust any doctor you see.
In context I was speaking of health-related companies, that generally are scrutinized more - you can't create a medication and just start giving it to everyone, and you can't claim a medicine does something it hasn't been proven to do in studies, etc.
And once again, Facebook et al, ties into health as social is health. Facebook did some experiments/research specifically to see the impact of showing more positive or more negative posts to people, on a large scale, and without people expressly knowing or asking to participate. They should have gotten into huge trouble for this. How would you prevent this otherwise than having good whistler-blower laws, along with substantial rewards for doing so? Is the best option have someone else notice the problems and develop competition that is a better solution? It's difficult of course to compete with things like network effect and economies of scale, so then it will take more effort, more ambition, more passion, and perhaps more resources and time to reach the same scale - if that scale is even healthy.
Soylent and Theranos are two recent counterexamples that come to mind. In the former case, a company made many claims they have since dialed back; and in the latter case, outright fraud, though it may not have started out that way.
23andMe were shut down for a period by the FDA.
There are of course plenty of healthcare startups that are working within the established boundaries of the existing system, but if you want to push those boundaries, it's going to take a while for regulations to catch up, and in the meantime caveat emptor.
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 games I go.
My point is that tech isn't what drives my life, it's just one of the things that I enjoy. And actually improving our house has proven even more enjoyable.
I don't think the "solution" for "tech addiction" (as most people see it) is limiting phone time or focusing on the tech at all. Instead, the solution is for people to find a hobby that doesn't require an internet/cable connection and enjoy that instead.
And if they don't, it doesn't bother me a bit. People can do what they want, so long as it doesn't harm others.
People who have an actual "addiction" should seek professional help, though. Not some random guy that's making a startup, but someone with an actual degree in a profession that can help with mental issues.