How to Become a Person After Smartphones Have Rotted Your Brain

How unfortunate that even the act of quitting the rat race of notoriety that comprises life in a modern online society requires the publishing of manifestos, books, newspaper profiles, viral photos of you holding up your non-smart phone published to every corner of the internet.

I remember ny highschool teacher in 2019 teaching the class how the smartphones have become an extension of our hand. I didn't take it seriously at that time, but now I do realise that it is infact has become not just an extension of our hands, but an extension of our mind.

Are there any ways a person, whose work requires to be connected to internet, devices like laptop or smartphone can possibly practice digital detox?

I understand that technology has advanced us in many ways. I also think it started to regress us in other ways. At rates where the regression feels faster than the progression.

I think many of us feel this. Even if it is expressed differently.

Halfway in I almost expected the conclusion to be to find God. Some many references to religion.

Smartphone brain rotting is one thing. A child posting themselves online (reddit of all things) seems more nuclear to the psyche.

I'm reminded of a kid, and there is always such a kid, whose parents put them in front of everyone and asked them, 'what do you want to be when you grow up?'. And when they answered, 'i want to be a president!' Everyone cheered and clapped and remarked how cute they were.

The kid's lying of course, he just said what he knew they wanted to hear. He didn't mean any of it. But i find this disgusting, especially because it's pervasive basically with everyone, me, you probably, in the age of social media, just a little more sophisticated.

Louis CK, in a different way, said that you shouldn't do that. If your bit is 'i want to be a president' then all your thoughts should be of how you want to be a president, not of cheers or of bombing the bit.

Most people don't mean what they say. That's why they don't feel compelling. And it's so sickening to us, that we flee to the media, actors, politicians, who seem to say things, say things they mean. The ultimate irony is that ofc they do, they are performing. They dont mean it either.

So I guess, realize it's all performance. And try to mean what you say.

Not trying to be dismissive, but this is so pretentious that I question whether the smartphone or social media were ever really the problem.

It sounds more like this person was/is captured by the zeitgeist which, unfortunately for them, requires a metric shit ton of performative politics and pseudophilosophy. This is not what makes a person. It takes a lifetime of experience and there's no rush.

I think this type of writing is misguided. Framing things as a "spiritual moral collapse" is just religious language. I don't believe this is a problem unique to smartphones. Smartphones are merely a mirror reflecting inequality. The case of August Lamm in this article is exactly that.

The desire for recognition, appearance evaluation, artistic success, follower counts, and social status competition have all been quantified through the interface of the smartphone.

School, looks, and sexual attractiveness are all powerful things that society rewards. In East Asia, there is a saying: "the parent lottery." It means that a parent's social class determines their child's lifelong outcomes, and it is true. The poorer the class, the more severe smartphone addiction tends to be, and the reason is that the more they labor, the poorer they become.

In modern society, except for a small portion of labor that can be leveraged, physical labor generally makes you poorer. This is due to wage growth rates and capital inflation.

So why are people addicted to and obsessed with smartphones? Because for them, it is the only leverage they have.

High college tuition and access to high value knowledge require enormous amounts of money. Not only that, but parents' asset levels and networks give students different opportunities. The problem is that people refuse to acknowledge this. They find it hard to admit the underlying premise: "Because I lack ability, all I can pass on to my child is the value of labor." They do not want to accept that the circumstances of the past and the values of the modern era have changed.

In today's society, what makes money are popularity, looks, and personal branding. Smartphones just show that.

Censoring or restricting smartphones will not change what society demands. Not unless it becomes a form of resistance movement. This is simply a property of capitalism.

Of course, smartphones do play an active role in distorting the process. But it is not a fundamental distortion. As the world becomes more connected, consumption points converge into one. And at that single unified point of consumption, 8 billion people must compete infinitely for attention. In a world without physical barriers, the cheapest and surest way to attract public attention is to strike at primal human instincts (sex, anger, jealousy, showing off). Inevitably, an "inflation of stimulation" occurs. It is not that algorithms actively corrupt people, but rather that they have found the most efficient survival equation in an extreme competitive environment where consumption has converged to a single point.

And what is the essence of this destruction? It is that social inequality is severe, and in a world where meritocracy reigns, the only perceived path to success lies in those very things.

The less educated a person is, the more this holds true. For them, leverage is going viral and becoming an influencer. That is success. If they give that up, they are pushed into insecure positions where they cannot be replaced by AI and machines.

That leaves usually only two options: completely abandon those mainstream values and find your own, or get on that hellish track. And considering that HN is ironically the place where the most startup hype gets posted, I sometimes find it ironic.

Moral choices emerge only when one has the luxury to survive. People who have never been poor will never understand their desperation.

For poor people, obsession with smartphones is not simply addiction to pleasure. It is like constantly staring through a window at a warm room they can never enter. What the smartphone shows them is a scoreboard of what everyone in the world desires, a way to check where they themselves might stand, and an entrance through which they can test whether they might ever get inside. Should we really call that destruction, like the little match girl watching a warm home from outside? She did not light her matches out of foolishness. It was because the illusion was less painful than reality. How can we tell those people to face reality?