The title says exactly that (replacing commenting with reading).
Whereas the post is also about internet addiction, and in shortform on top of that. This maximizes the benefits for an internet addict who still takes pride in reading stuff longer than individual tweets.
I'm curious how these data points correlated with religion, assuming the ACX readership is religious enough to provide meaningful data on religious people as a subgroup.
As a decade-ish Convert to Catholicism and a 3-4 year internal Convert to Traditional Catholicism I wonder to what extent that having a rational right-ordering practiced system with good-Anchor based direction on guidance and thinking (that I am now Blessed with) correlates throughout.
.. of course, some level of discernment of 'religious' is needed to exclude the insanity Satanic-directed sects of Christians and others that somehow accept abortion, women clergy and other woke sicknesses that are disOrdering and damaging in general to self and all goodness.
Just curious, before you converted to Catholicism were you a member of a different Christian denomination? And why did you choose Catholicism specifically? Also, what prompted the conversion from Catholicism to Traditional Catholicism and what does that mean exactly?
These questions are exactly what interests me from similar testimonies from others, and perhaps if I had been exposed of some when younger I may have converted earlier and not suffered as much or as deeply through most of my working and active adulthood, a suffering that had a needed Cleansing and other God Blessed goodness it resulted in His love He gave me.
All but the first question would require huge volumes of writing I am likely unable to provide to convey, and much would require Angelic ability to provide not only the information but all the background and abilities to fully understand them, a sharing of not only the facts and background context but all those abilities that are uniquely mixed within us that God have help shape to best face and succeed in our lives that He Wills in His Love for us, and that we only surrender to in the best effort we can, and with His Sacrificed Son aspect of Him we can all succeed with.
I was a non-practicing Quaker that had been exposed to Orthodox sect of Judaism (Hasidim) when a friend was converting and showed a want to learn through the access his friendship provided and discovered a Rabbi and Community welcoming and that their lives were filled daily with rituals and prayers that each Called to God for Sharing with.
That I suspect reOpened at some level my once and future potential to Hear and Follow God's Call and Invite I had already rejected at least twice I clearly remember, once at puberty and during or before the exposure to the Jewish Orthodox community, and the relatively recent Answered response mentioned.
That learning about and exposure to what little of the Orthodox sect of Judaism provided rapid insight into some of the basics of Catholicism and is the reason I would impress of the value of learning some or much of the 2nd Temple Judaism that Jesus was raised practiced in, and for which ignorance of them cannot but results in an incomplete realization of the ministry the Gospel Testifies to.
I entered into the new-rite modernist Sickened Church that is a false version of Her most See and Suffer the soul-murdering betrayal and treachery that the Vatican and many of the leadership Vomit in service to their god - Satan, and that the Vatican suppressed warnings about as in the real complete release of 3rd secrete of Fatima that was directed to be released on or before 1960, in time to warn The Body of Christ and those pure-intending of the Ordained, warned of the infiltration of Vatican and leadership by Modernist tools of Satan, and the horrors that follow that we have today in post heretically contained Vatican II and most of the changes from Traditional Catholicism we have suffered that followed.
.. I was aware soon on entering and exposure to the false new-Rite version but only solidified as evil intended in learning of the forced switch of all Catholics from the Traditional Roman Catholic Latin Mass to the new-rite version while suppressing that TLMass old Rite used through much of the linked ad continuous apostolic history of the Church and that wear the pathway for so many Saints and Followers of the Faith, that the forced change could only be understood as soul-murdering Church-harming Body-of-Christ Sickening intent.
And since then I slowly discovered the real Church and it's existence through those that offer the old-rite, the TLMass, and because of Her Beauty (that the new-Rite false version lacked or destroyed in unTruth, inJustice, and rightness disOrdering design) I have been self-directing learning of the doctrines and the theology behind much of the Realization Holy-Ghost inspired, and from that expanded understanding I can more Clearly see the Horror being done to the publicly present Sickened version and those that are directing and pushing it and further falseness and evil.
I now consider the position held by Sedeprivationism are reasonable, so much so I may state that it is my position to our present situations from before Vatican II, that this Pope and previous Popes from the Office holder that suppressed the 3rd Secrete and allowed that heretical containing Vatican II result, that they are 'legally' Popes but since their intent was and is to betray their Office and duties and oaths to the destruction or access of the Catholic Church ad replace with a false 'Ape' worldly Sin focused soul-murdering version, they never received the other aspect of the Papal Office normally supplied by God, the Charismas, Graces, and increased focus and support of the Holy Ghost that is normal for the Office.
And the rest I may hope to address some other time.
If you want information on the internet's impact in child development the recent book "The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness" by Jonathan Haidt is great. It carries a 4.43 rating on 54,000 ratings at Goodreads as well.
Just to reinforce the above: this is extremely rigourously researched, far more than the average nonfiction book with an agenda (which it does have, but the agenda is amply justified).
They have anticipated every counter argument you can think of and address it in footnotes, on their website, or in their research papers.
If you disagree with their conclusions, you really need to engage with their ultra in depth counterarguments.
Really? I haven't read it, and I like Haidt, but from a few podcast appearances and blogposts I read I didn't get the sense that the case was rock solid. Lots of correlations without strong causation. Am I wrong?
Did they take a thousand children and randomly assign them to social media Vs non-social media childhoods? No, that would be rather difficult, and if a causally-rock solid RCT is the threshold we'll never get there.
What they do do, however, is do a detailed analysis of many, many other explanations and show how they don't fit the data.
They can say that without having read or understood much of anything. It's a popular blanket rhetorical device. Not to say that there can't be valid criticism.
I found it unconvincing. I believe that the negative outcome he blames on social media are due to exposure to wokeness through social media. When you look at countries with far less wokeness the bad effects of social media go away.
Haidt ignores this confounder and never tried to engage with it on his susbtuck either. Social media makes for a better whipping boy than wokeness so he sticks with his explanation.
And by "found it unconvincing" you mean you didn't read the many, many times Haidt directly says that liberal social media targeted at girls is disproportionately bad for mental health and has emphasised disempowering beliefs heavily linked to Wokism?
I found his explanation unconvincing. I believe that the negative outcome Haidt blames on social media are due to exposure to wokeness through social media. When you look at countries with far less wokeness the bad effects of social media go away.
Haidt ignores this confounder and never tried to engage with it on his substack either. Social media makes for a better whipping boy than wokeness so Haidt sticks with his explanation.
Haidt has an agenda, but the evidence is not at all compelling. An army of academics have been trying to prove Facebook is bad for going on 20 years and every study ends up like 🤷. To the extent he has anything at all, haidt continually conflates the internet and social media, shifting between them when it suits his purposes. He seems like a nice guy but he's way too focused on his conclusion and he's not a rigorous thinker at all.
I am a new ACX reader so I might be missing historical context, but I'll just say that I have trouble parsing a lot of discussions about internet "addiction" because it seems like a label we only use when we think the activity is bad.
How would I answer the first question about how internet-addicted I am? Well, I use it frequently for all kinds of things, from entertainment to work. In that sense I'm highly dependent on it and I've built my life around it (partly because it's so useful). I would struggle to live life without it. But am I addicted to my washing machine because I use it all the time and even have changed my lifestyle habits around it (wearing more different clothes each week)?
It feels like letting people rate how addicted they are to something is really just asking a) do you use this thing and b) how negative is your affect toward it. And tying that information to other attributes just ... doesn't seem like it tells us anything interesting?
> because it seems like a label we only use when we think the activity is bad.
People also refer to:
- masturbation addiction
- work addiction
- exercise addiction
You're not addicted to your washing machine because you don't suffer from a compulsion to use it. You use it because you want to, and if for some reason you stopped wanting to, you would stop using it.
I would in fact find it very difficult to stop using my washing machine, on account of how I would have to start handwashing my clothes instead. If I tried to do it anyway, I would probably fail and be back to using the machine within a couple of weeks. It seems like the main reason we don't talk about "washing machine addiction" is that very few people think relying on a washing machine is a terrible vice they suffer from, whereas it's much more common to feel that way about e.g. pornography.
Yes, but also tradeoffs. Handwashing isn't generally considered to be an especially virtuous activity, so washing machine doesn't prevent anything important, whereas internet, porn, excessive work etc. likely keep you from engaging in Meaningful Personal Interaction, and that's Bad.
Addictive behavior has attributes beyond being considered a vice.
A washing machine addiction might look something like a person repeatedly washing their clothes even though they were clean, reading about washing machines so much that their job performance suffers, buying new washing machines and new clothes to wash up to the point of not being able to spend their bills, trying to cover all this up and make it seem as if no problem existed, and spending most of their time using washing machines even though they'd repeatedly tried to stop.
The reason we don't often witness this is likely due to the fact that using washing machines doesn't strongly recruit the brain's reward system, when compared to smoking, gambling, porn, amphetamine or alcohol. My guess would be that one could most easily become addicted to shopping for washing machines.
Are you familiar with the classic joke about water addiction? People compulsively drink water, often multiple times a day, if you try to take it away from them they'll soon abandon important things just to get more, and so on, clearly they are suffering from water addiction.
The joke here is that common descriptions of "addiction" don't actually distinguish addiction from normal, sensible, behaviours because they don't specify that the behaviour has to be bad or unreasonable, because they want to make "addiction" an objective scientific concept which must therefore exclude value judgements. But the value judgements are what distinguish my water and washing machine non-addictions from someone else's porn or meth addiction. People call things they do "addictions" when they do it regularly and don't like that about themselves. When they think it's fine and good, they don't.
There are real reasons some things lead to this judgement more often than others, but as a description of what things get called "addictions" this is irrelevant.
I think you are generally right about the over-use of addition as a label when we really mean "thing I don't approve of that you like to do". On the other hand, you arguments here miss a few points.
Regarding washing machines: I expect you would stop using a washing machine if, e.g. you acquired a lot of money and could hire a maid to do your laundry for you, or maybe you got married and your wife decided you do the laundry wrong and said you weren't allowed to use it and she would do your laundry. The point being that it isn't using the machine per se that is what you like, but the outcome of clean cloths. Compare that to a junky who no longer feels a high but keeps taking the drug to chase the dragon, as it were. If you started running the washing machine without even putting cloths in it, then yes, that would be an addiction most likely. (Or dementia :D I have run the coffee machine without remembering to put in coffee some mornings!) To properly label a behavior addiction it has to go beyond the normal use cases in those sorts of ways.
Regarding water, the key distinction the joke leaves out is that the thing you are addicted to shouldn't be necessary to life or shouldn't have substitutes. So, yea, you need water to live, not an addiction. However, if someone freaks out because they can't get water, yet juice, milk, soda, etc. are all readily available but they just have to have water to be ok over a reasonably short time, that is starting to sound a bit like addiction. It isn't that they need hydration, but that they need a very specific type and no other. Or, likewise, if they have to drink a bottle of water every hour regardless of how dehydrated they are, being unable to function properly unless they do, then addiction starts to seem like a good description.
It is also worth noting the time frame of activity. People drink water multiple times a day, but everyone needs to drink some sort of hydrating fluid every day. Compare to say heroine where most people never use it at all while some people use it nearly everyday or more. That is a good criteria for addiction, although not the only one.
Out of curiosity: have you ever dealt with severe addictions personally or close by? There's a very good reason why alcoholism is classified as a disease, and it's not social stigma. I have very little interest in stigmatizing addictive behavior, but having suffered from addictions myself I find the comparison to water and thirst bizarre.
I can't speak for anyone else's porn or meth addictions, but I can definitely attest to addictions being very real, and causing severe harm mostly to the addict themselves.
Personally I've found that negative value judgments do seem to worsen addictive behavior because they amplify secretive behaviors, and worsen the feelings of shame and worthlessness often accompanied by the lack of control.
I agree that negative value judgments might cause non-harmful, non-addictive behaviors to be perceived as addictions, but I don't think this makes real, actual addictions lose their meaning. Just because someone might think sex drive was unhealthy does not mean an alcoholic does not have a problem.
Beyond that I believe value judgments have little to do with addictions in themselves, and I'm not interested in discussing them further.
What you describe as water addiction does not sound like an addiction to me at all. I won't address psychogenic polydipsia here, which has similarities to addictive behavior, but the joking version of treating normal thirst as an addiction.
Thirst does not lead to increasing self-administration beyond the point of becoming obviously harmful. If a person is thirsty enough to neglect other matters, they probably should do so. This is in contrast to an alcoholic neglecting eating in favor of heavy drinking, for example.
Drinking water does not lead to physical dependency or increasing tolerance, requiring larger doses to give the same pleasure. Thirst typically disappears after drinking, and after thirst dissipates, it is very uncommon to keep drinking water heavily to get the same feeling as one had when they drunk water while thirsty. Such a phenomenon just doesn't exist, because water addiction isn't real (again, not discussing polydipsia here, but the version of thirst being an addiction).
In contrast, addictive behaviors work just like so. People keep gambling, masturbating, drinking or taking speed often again and again, often exactly because they want to experience the initial high for a longer time. They end up feeling like crap because of doing it often while drunk or high, and they still keep taking more, often while wanting to quit already. The lack of control can be utterly devastating.
Thirst builds up again, yes, but fulfilling that need always seems to return to the same level of satisfaction, which doesn't lead to self-harm, dissatisfaction or repeated attempts to get the "I want to get rid of that thirst!" high in spite of negative consequences.
Drinking water typically does not lead to reduced pleasure from other activities or to water dominating a person's entire personality. Taking water away from people will do that, yes, but they will also die due to that, and they know it.
Meanwhile NOT doing or taking whatever it is an addict is addicted to typically is a central part of recovering from the addiction, and DOING or taking the target of addiction is what worsens it. This is in direct contrast to water and thirst, where the dynamic is exactly the opposite. Withdrawal or withdrawal-like symptoms such as craving exist, yes, but the difference of "water withdrawal symptoms due to dying soon" and "craving for more hits / more winnings" is far from trivial. If an addict goes through withdrawal, they won't die (aside from a case of severe physical dependency), but people die of thirst.
This likely could be expressed better and I could go on, but I won't go further than this. Thanks for engaging.
Leaving chemical dependency aside, addiction is purely a state of mind. It is a relationship (to something) that has become dysfunctional. It’s an external manifestation of a dysfunctional relationship with yourself. I am an addict by the way. I smoke. I drink too much often. I think about both those things a lot. I know I would probably be better off not doing any of those things. And yet I persist. (I am nowhere near as bad as I used to be, which I guess is a positive sign.)
Not really. Millions of people are addicted to coffee with little to no downsides, some argue it's even beneficial. Many people are addicted to exercise, but except for professional athletes, it's very rare for it to cause any issues. I'd give more examples but can't think of any right now.
When I said "entails" I meant that is is actually definitional to the concept of addiction, so...yes really. Caffeine use that causes withdrawal symptoms is not addiction unless it causes problems, it's substance dependence (a separate concept). If someone feels compelled to exercise, it's not a behavioral addiction unless it causes problems for them.
You might want to say hey, mustn't there be some underlying process going on before something crosses the line into addiction? But that's just reinforcement learning and it's ubiquitous and doesn't help us carve out the phenomenon of interest at all.
Edit: you might synthesize this by saying that addiction is what happens when what you've been conditioned to subconsciously believe is good for you diverges too far from what is actually good for you and life starts going less well as a result.
I think you're missing the distinction between an "addiction" and a "dependency." A dependency doesn't become an addiction until it starts ruining your life. Almost none of the millions of coffee-dependent people are addicts.
Learn something new everyday. Thank you. But then, wouldn't that mean almost none of the internet addicts the article talks about has actual addiction? Is this one of those cases where the colloquial and the clinical definitions are so different they barely describe the same concept, similar to the p-word?
How much time are you spending actively engaged with your washing machine? Do you turn it on, pull up a chair and watch the clothing spin around? I for one throw clothes in the thing, pour in some soap, turn it on and walk away, and it all takes about two minutes in a day. Another two to move things to the dryer. Four minutes a day (if it even reaches once a day) is a pretty weak addiction.
As someone who has suffered from actual addictions, I can attest that addictions are in fact a real thing, and mostly bad. An addiction's impact varies depending on its target, its severity and a bunch of other stuff.
It's not always easy to distinguish whether a behavior "crosses the line" to addiction, as it isn't an on/off thing, and because the symptoms and their severity vary. Sometimes it's easy to say (think of a homeless meth addict or a gambler deep in debt) and sometimes not (think of a meth user with a job but who has begun to somewhat struggle due to using more than they intended).
However, some helpful signs exist. These are not exhaustive, and not all appear at the same time (it isn't on/off).
- The activity becomes compulsive.
- The ability to feel interest towards, or to feel pleasure or satisfaction from other activities decreases.
- The activity (self-administration) continues in spite of obvious harm to one's health, or psychological, social or economic well-being.
- It (or planning, arranging and recovering from the activity) takes up an increasing proportion of one's life, to the point of severely interfering with other activities and needs and reducing life quality.
- It continues beyond the point of bringing benefit, joy or satisfaction.
- It continues in spite of repeated failed attempts to reduce the behavior or stop it.
- It begins to severely impact the person's self-esteem, is accompanied with feelings of guilt, shame and lack of control, and leads to secretive behavior.
- Physical tolerance causes the person to repeatedly increase dosages (to drugs) or an insensitivity develops causing the person to reach for more extreme material (as sometimes in porn addiction).
I don't know if most people consider the above when thinking how addicted they are to something, but I do. These would distinguish that I need air, food and water to survive, but I'm not addicted to them. I also wouldn't be addicted to washing my clothes, as it benefits me, doesn't harm me, doesn't interfere with my values or other life and doesn't seem to develop tolerance - etc.
A more difficult example would be an intense work life, interfering with other life, taking up time and causing sleep issues and me not eating well. Is that an addiction? That depends. Do I repeatedly self-administer the job even if I could choose to go home, to my detriment? Do I keep going harder even though the extra brings no seeming benefit? Have I repeatedly tried to quit, failing? Have I lost interest to other stuff, while feeling that the only thing that pleasures me anymore is the job? Etc. If yes, I might be addicted to my job.
I think there's an assumed (but likely entirely reasonable) distinction between internet addiction and merely heavy internet usage. I'm not a psychiatrist (if only we knew a psychiatrist who was interested in this question.....) but I would suppose:
Fellow who reads online fanfiction instead of books, does all their shopping online instead of driving to the shops, connects with people via dating apps and social media instead of going to pubs, and watches Youtube instead of television: probably a heavy internet user rather than an internet addict?
Fellow who can't look up from their laptop even when visiting their elderly grandmother who lives 200 miles away; who can't leave the house without their phone, even just for a brief stroll around the block or to pop to the corner shop, because it makes them too anxious; who constantly misses important events/deadlines and regularly fails to wash/eat/sleep because they can't tear themselves away from the screen: probably an addict?
(nb. Personally the heavy internet user above makes me awfully sad - I want there to be a healthy market for literature, thriving local shops, a lively pub scene, etc. and I don't like the small handful of massive megacorps that mediate almost-all of our internet usage having their tendrils insinuated so deeply into society - but, much as I personally disapprove, I do have to admit that the heavy internet user probably isn't doing anything morally wrong or self-harmful or unhealthy.)
This is a good distinction. The internet is a multi-purpose tool, and those purposes cover a considerable range of activities. People using it heavily can make sense, no addiction needed.
The question is can someone put the internet away when doing something where it doesn't serve a purpose or when it's even counter-active? During in-person family get-togethers, can someone put down their cell-phone for a hour or two, to join their family in conversation and/or playing games like boardgames or cards? If someone goes to watch a movie at the movie theater, can they at least set their cell-phone to vibrate and leave it alone barring an emergency call?
For young kids, the best way to prevent internet addiction might actually not be to set firm limits on how much a kid can be online, but rather to help cultivate interests and activities that have nothing to do with the internet.
As one of the data points, I feel I can weigh in on some of this! Scott calls out a larger group with my pattern (restricted internet as a youth, heavy usage, self-describes as addicted, and lowered life satisfaction) and my specific line of reasoning may or may not cover multiple points.
I've vacationed places where internet access isn't a given, and by day four I notice I've become irritable, high-strung, fatigued, and feeling other malaise while wishing I could get back to the internet. I'll check and discard offline devices in a sequence, trying to get something out of them while knowing what I want just isn't there. This pattern-matches pretty well to "withdrawal" for me, but to what level that's a culture-bound concept of withdrawal vs novel needs being unfulfilled is probably unknowable.
Interesting. I always feel just the opposite. It feels like time has passed more in the way it did in the Before Time. But also, this may be a function of age - my eyes are always very happy to have the respite from the screen.
ETA: read more carefully and see I am not close to being in your cohort.
Thanks for raising this important issue. "Addiction" is a rabbit hole of a word that is difficult to think and communicate clearly about.
How does "addiction" differ from "compulsion" differ from "habit"?
Let's first establish some ground. Feel free to challenge but these are my assumptions:
1. A human nervous system is designed to be stressed and to regulate stress. Human nervous systems can and do forgo wants and needs for a time for social and other reasons. We can endure some discomfort, grit out teeth, bear it, hold it, wait it out, and delay gratification. Each situation and circumstance seems to manifest a certain threshold at which a person cries out, says something, can't stand it anymore, or addresses the stress.
2. When the nervous system has been under stress, it needs to be addressed, calmed, sated, or relieved at some point. When done in healthy ways, the mindbodypsyche develops trust and confidence in itself and its group, that stress is a part of our lives, word, and routines, that it will be worth it, and that it will be addressed and regulated before it reaches levels of pain and suffering.
3. Humans are a fundamentally social species. We take care of each other. Parents regulate their children. Spouses watch and take care of each other (not always in equally shared ways). *Our nervous systems are linked.* *Our nervous systems are linked to each others'.* So many really smart people are blind to this. We keep viewing ourselves as individuals, and treating ourselves as individuals. This is because of our natural and healthy egoic sense of individual identity. We should not disrupt this, but our capacity to see deeply and understand each other and ourselves is limited until we understand the dynamics of larger social bodies, until we start treating groups and communities as the living systems that they are. *The things an individual nervous system experiences are inseparably connected with the rhythms, norms, expectations, roles, history, memory, and scripts of its groups.* This is my current soapbox and its difficult to speak to because I feel so far out of the overton window with this stuff.
Given all this, I submit that "addiction" is when an organism latches on to a habit or practice of nervous system regulation that is unhealthy, harmful, or unacceptably risky for that organism - whether this be an individual organism or a group organism. An intelligent organism generally perceives when it is engaging in self-harming or unhealthy practices, but in repeated suppression or dismissing of such promptings, gives way internally to a certain "spirit" that helps it relieve or endure stress, pain, or discomfort, at the cost of long-term health and mental/social clarity.
Compulsive behaviors are like "soft" addictions. Internet/social media, to me, seems more appropriately dealt with in terms of compulsiveness than addiction, but there's some toMAYto toMAHto here in our use of these terms. It can be helpful to notice and observe what is experienced in mind and body when habitual behaviors are ceased or refrained from. What does withdraw feel like? It can range from uncontrollable shaking and panic to generalized anxiety.
For me, the "recreational" and the "non-recreational" internet usage blends together so tightly, that the hypothetical nanny state would need mind reading powers to implement the policy.
I'm more on the creative/investigative side of things, so even when I'm scrolling reddit memes and listening to whatever Youtube throws my way, that's never mindless, just fuel for my work, I often interrupt the doomscrolling to scribble down a freshly surfaced idea.
This is why I had a hard time restricting my smartphone when I was doing my thesis. Practically everything I need for it was also everything I used to entertain me. I can theoretically block and uninstall some app/sites but I really still need the phone itself.
Is personal learning recreational? My hobby is SARS2 and COVID-19, and I spend a lot of time keeping up with the science of virology, immunology, and epidemiology. I don't do this for a living, though. Does that count as recreation? Also, I spend a lot of time watching science and history lectures on YouTube. I'd say that's a form of recreation, though. I spend an inordinate amount of time on ACX because I like discussing things and arguing with people. But ACX frequently sends me down Internet rabbit holes to dig up data on subjects I'm not familiar with. I'd say ACX is recreational, even though I'm learning. And I read the news. Is that recreational? I don't listen to a lot of streaming music because I have a huge old-style CD collection. I don't play online games. I check in on Facebook every couple of days to see what my friends are up to. I might spend half an hour each week doing online banking (that feels like work) and ordering things (much of it necessities — that feels like work). I've been on the Internet since 1991 (in the days of Usenet, Archie, and Gopher), and I'd say I've spent at least four or five hours a day online, most every day of those 33 years, doing personal research. And when I was working, I spent another four or five hours online doing email and (more recently) Zoom calls.
"Hi, my name is Beo, and I've been a hardcore Internet user for 33 years. And f**k your 12-step program because I love being an Internet addict!"
Oh, I haven't owned a TV since 1985. But I occasionally binge-watch TV series on my laptop. That's definitely recreational!
"I restricted this question to people under 30, to make sure I was only catching people who grew up during the Internet era": Would it not have been better to ask everybody - and then filter by people under vs. over 30* to establish a local value for the Lizardman Constant**?
(Or is the Lizardman Constant only a minor concern with the ACX survey relative to the "unnecessarily annoying one's readership with irrelevant questions" concern?)
* though I'd have supposed under 40 would be nearer the mark?
Just did a 16 day passage on a yacht which had starlink but limited to 1 hour a day (it's very expensive offshore) and found that my appalling all day every day habit is comfortably compressed into that, or less. So I would be happy with the government turning it off 23/7.
Your yacht trip sounds fascinating. Could you provide more details such as whether and how much company you had on board, whether you stopped at ports or remaines at sea, and where, geographically, this trip took place?
I'm not sure the context outside what was presented in the article, but I think it's really hard to separate 'pathological' Internet use from ordinary use. I'm in front of my computer and phone most of the day for personal and professional reasons, work and leisure. It's today's everything portal. Also, the number of screen hours listed seem comparable to amounts of time Americans watched TV in the pre-interent era based on numbers that were reported in periodic surveys.
Your mental space at the time of responding to the survey will also have an impact on your perception of internet use. I don't think I spend more time online when I feel down, but my internet diet is drastically different to "baseline me" and that translates into lower satisfaction levels across the board, including the internet use. I'm also more likely to say I'm addicted to it in those moments – baseline me is perfectly fine with the time he spends online, and generalizes that immediate feeling to his entire relationship with online content.
A fascinating point highlighted in this post is how many people would give total freedom to their 16 year-old with regards to time spent online. I imagine such a free range attitude would also extent to their online diet (i.e. not invading their privacy by checking what they're actually doing on there). I personally can't fathom that level of freedom for a 16 year-old. There's no inherent vice to spending any amount of time online, the crux of the problem is how you're spending that time and what you're consuming. Predatorial attention algorithms create echo chambers and push kids towards toxic communities way too early for them to make sense of their toxicity (since they spend >8 hours a day within them, they don't really have a working model of "normality" outside of their algorithmically driven bubbles). I could go on forever on this topic, but I was very surprised at the survey results on that front.
Scott, next time you do a survey in internet use, maybe you could get a more granular understanding by asking about how much time online was spent intentionally (I'm going to watch, read, THIS) vs unintentionally (scroll scroll, check messages. autoplay next).
How do you define addiction? For the 27% of people who would accept the nanny state offer, it seems like they're doing something that they would rather not do and think their lives would be improved if they stopped. What would you add to this to make it qualify as an "addiction"?
Years ago, for a book published by Steve Jackson Games, I enriched their future history setting with the Ataractic Movement, a group of people who believed that chemical reward as such was pathological and should be minimized as far as possible. In their view anything that caused the release of chemically rewarding neurotransmitters amounted to an addiction: It was a source of craving in something like the Buddhist sense. I think that might be a value-neutral definition of addiction, if such a thing can exist.
Some alcoholics, for example, will have seizures if they don’t get alcohol. Internet “addicts”, on the other hand, will not have anything bad happen to them if they can’t their daily Internet.
You're talking about withdrawal, not addiction. Many non-addictive substances have withdrawal syndromes (eg SSRIs, aspirin) and many addictions have pretty minimal withdrawals (eg marijuana, gambling). This is just a natural consequence of most drugs based on how receptors work.
A lot of the time, people do things they like but which have poor long-term consequences. The possible causes are obvious - lack of willpower, bias towards the current situation, and so on. Afterward they wish they hadn't.
Is this inherently addiction? I wouldn't say so.
Let's say, purely hypothetically, that I slack off more than would be optimal for long-term outcomes, especially compared to spending the time in exercise. Am I addicted to slacking off? No, clearly not - it's just a choice I make in the present (probably a poor one). A _lot_ of addictions seem to be about such things - shopping addiction, sex addiction, internet addiction, gaming addiction (gambling addiction really does seem to different, though), chocolate addiction... sure you can make a mess of your life that way, but it seems fundamentally different from being hooked on heroin or being an alcoholic.
Some other things described as addictions seem to be compulsions instead, which is of course bad but in a different way. If you can't stop biting your nails, it's not that you're _addicted_ to biting your nails, it's that there's some compulsive behaviour going on.
I imagine you would also disqualify most things from this reality show from actual addictions?
What would it mean for someone to have an Internet addiction? I'd say that the behaviour has to be compulsive in some way, not just that you wish tomorrow that you had done something more productive today. It probably has to have some pretty severe outcomes on their life (although since much of that could be in the future, it makes things trickier). If someone is locked inside browsing Twitter 18 hours per day and lost work and family over it, and is getting panic attacks whenever parted from it, that would certainly seem to qualify. This clearly is neither 27% nor people who wish that they could perhaps halve their internet use.
I would like an external force that motivates me to go to the gym more but that doesn't mean that I'm addicted to not going to the gym.
The clinical definition of addiction, according to my many years of listening to Loveline with Dr Drew, is continued or increasing use in the face of negative consequences. The problem with internet addiction is that many of the negative consequences (decreased socialization, less time reading, less exercise, etc) are hard to distinguish from normal lifestyle choices, or even generic lack of discipline. If I surfed the internet yesterday instead of going to the gym does that mean I'm an internet addict or does it just mean that I'm lazy? Not every deficit of executive function is attributable to addiction and I don't think it's socially useful to have a low bar for demonizing certain behaviors as addictive because that tends to enable victimization narratives. ("Oh no, I'm an addict! Now I CAN'T quit!")
As a side note, I don't think not doing something or avoiding doing something can easily be framed as addiction. Even if the opportunity cost of not doing something else was high, that doesn't easily translate towards the current activity being addictive in the assumed absence of other factors of addictive behavior (see my other comments for examples).
In the case of avoidance producing increasingly negative results, more useful way of thinking would likely still be an anxiety disorder (which have avoidance behaviors as a key symptom).
That said, I'm not sure how to interpret the rest of your comment - are you suggesting Internet addiction does not exist? Or are you just saying you personally don't think you suffer from it?
I do agree that psych labels seem to be overused to describe behavior within the range of "normal" or mostly functional limits.
I don't have a strong opinion on whether internet addiction specifically exists (I'm definitely not an addict) but I'm generally opposed to categorizing non-substance-involved behaviors as addictions. There are exceptions (gambling being the most obvious) but on a social level I think it's bad policy to medicalize bad choices. On net those sorts of labels tend to enable the behaviors ("It's not his fault he's an addict."). I think society needs a healthy dose of holding people responsible for their actions ("You're making bad choices and that makes you bad. Stop it.").
I would say a habit that one cannot control, used to suppress or not experience negative feelings.
Maybe it is the wrong word, but I call my self internet addicted because I am using it more then I want to ( many hours every day, and this basically for entertainment. My entertainment is mainly intellectual, but still it is entertainment). My use is mainly passive. I can't control it, and it affects my mood and self image in a negative way. When I stop scrolling, I experience uncomfortable feelings and want to start again immediately to get rid of that feeling. Also, when I occasionally feel really good, it is easy not to use the internet, which makes sense because then I don't have to get a way from negative feelings.
"This is pretty funny! People whose parents put no restrictions on them as a child use the Internet most, but are least likely to consider themselves addicted"
But then at the end you say:
"People whose parents restricted their screen time as children are less likely to be Internet addicts as adults"
Are you assuming that self-reported 'are you addicted' is meaningless but self-reported 'amount of time spent' is a good tracker of addiction? That seems strange.
Yes. Compare to a question like "are you a bad person?" This might load on actual bad-person-ness, but also on guilt, and good people are more likely to be guilty (eg a true psychopath doesn't care and feels fine about themselves).
In the same way, "are you addicted" loads on a combination of high Internet use and some sort of restraint or unhappiness about it. These go in different directions, whereas just measuring screen time feels safer (although I suppose it doesn't catch that some screen time might be worse than others).
There's decent evidence that having your food restricted when you're young can contribute to eating disorders when you're older. So it's not totally odd to think that "free-feeding" on the Internet would lead to less compulsive behavior later.
My screen time is astronomical. If I’m ever taking a walk, I’ll be listening to an audiobook, if I’m ever taking a break from work, I’m either on my phone, or sometimes reading a book.
My job is 90% online too, so I easily spend 8-10 hours a day on the internet or otherwise consuming content.
No idea what the effect is on my life. I’m quite happy and have positive relationships, and don’t feel that I’m addicted to the internet. I have prevented myself from consuming many sorts of internet content though (no short form, almost nothing that’s a complete waste of time, etc.), so maybe that’s part of it.
I'm not sure all of that counts as Internet addiction. I spend a good part of my time looking at this screen. But part of it is reading ebooks that I've downloaded; part of it specifically is reading rpg books and planning campaigns. This discussion may be confounded several different things: looking at monitor screens, interaction with remote electronic devices, and interacting with people via electronic connects may be phenomenologically distinct.
It would seem super strange to me to differentiate to you listening to a (streaming? or at least requiring an internet connection?) audiobook on the phone, and me listening to one on the HDD of my ancient iPod. It's a minor difference in technological delivery.
Yet one is "using the Internet" fopr hours count and the other isn't.
...nice cut off of the quote to exclude the non-financial criteria.
Yes, I think making lots of money is one measurable proxy for the sort of success that comes from not being Internet addicted, along with the other proxy (life satisfaction) that you cut off.
I wasn't trying to be deceptive, but was just trimming the quote to the part I was commenting about (thus the "and..." at the end and the "a" in "a proxy").
Imagine someone saying "I also took a closer look at the subgroup who are most successful in life - in successful monogamous relationships and life satisfaction above 7/10." Wouldn't you find the "in successful monogamous relationships" to be worth objecting to on its own?
No, successful relationships also seem like an important proxy for life success. I'm not trying to make a deep philosophical statement here, just find things on the survey that make me think somebody's doing okay and hasn't ruined their life spending every hour of the day on TikTok.
Dang, I was really hoping that this would be a deep dive into the internet addition literature.
I also have a young child, and am very internet addicted (I've had to delete all my social media apps or outright delete my accounts) and would like an answer on this. On the one hand I intend to keep screens away from him as much as possible, on the other hand... I'm always looking at a screen. Hoping that I can give home a voice-only chatbot to talk to as a screenless alternative when he's a bit older.
Basically I'd like to hear another well-informed person's opinion on the reliability of Jonathan Haidt's work around the mental health harms of smart phone usage, particular as it pertains to ADHD (which is pervasive in my family).
My initial impression was that he makes an extremely strong argument for the casual link between smart phones and mental health issues, but more recently I've been seeing a lot of claims to the contrary.
Basically: "If I know that my child is genetically predisposed to developing ADHD, what steps can I take to help mitigate it, and how much of an effect will keeping high-throughput stimuli like smartphones/videogames/television away from them help, and at what ages should this help be concentrated?"
There isn't great evidence of a causal link between smartphones or social media and mental health outcomes, mostly because the experimental studies that have been done are often quite low powered or have methodological issues. Right now, for example, Haidt is arguing that experiments have to track outcomes past 3 weeks of abstinence to allow withdrawal symptoms (which can sometimes be quite intense!) to subside.
I personally have a pretty high prior on large amounts of screen based entertainment being damaging, partly because of it's affects on attention. I found my ability to concentrate and work on more boring tasks to get significantly better once I successfully cut back on my screen time.
Maybe you could start by getting a handle on your own internet addiction to see how it affects your ADHD type symptoms?
“If you are looking at the results from a statistical analysis, and those results tell you that screens are worse for you than heroin, then either we’ve got the debate around screen time very wrong, or I would gently suggest that you’ve borked your analysis.”
The Haidt position is super weak and has almost no evidence. It seems based on crummy statistical anlysis.
Per day, about 3 hours writing code and answering people's questions about my code, 1 hour here or reading other articles, 3-6 hours procrastinating on writing code with discord or solitaire, and a highly variable amount of time (maybe 2 hr/week) playing computer games. Trying to increase the last one and decrease the second-from-last.
Desktops vs smart phones made internet "addiction" feel very different to me, and look very different to others as well. When I only had public computers at school labs to use in college, the first thing I did was find guides to learn html and java and create web pages. I used email listservs to read articles, or news readers to goof off reading giant crazy theories about how Wheel of Time would end. When I finally got my own computer with unlimited internet in law school, I spent a lot of time playing Diablo 2 and browsing the SA forums, but still most of it was finding articles to read about politics or music or history, I just used it as a substitute for the fact that magazines only came out once a month. I don't feel like that was any worse than being "addicted" to sitting in the library and reading magazines.
And when you were done, you got up from your chair, and that was it. The internet was over there, in the other room, and you're finished with it. It was discrete sessions of usage. There was a feeling of disengaging when you got up from the computer that isn't there anymore with smart phones. Every time there's a 60 second break in your life, the phone is there, you can waste 60 seconds on twitter. I still try to use it mostly like I'm carrying around a bunch of magazines, and I don't do video which helps, but the ratio of good to bad media consumed on there has gotten worse.
>if a perfect nanny state offered to magically limit your Internet use with zero downside, would you accept?
>I think acceptance/rejection ended up loading more on ideas of dignity and whether you trust even a perfect benevolent nanny state to make decisions for you.
Why do people always use the government for metaphors like this? It could just be a program on all your devices.
If theres a perfect state you cant circumvent, then why not a perfect program? I hear that apple is quite good at making programs normies cant turn off.
I have a short anecdote on this topic. Recently, my smartphone broke. Initially, I panicked. Many of us, myself included, have come to depend on our phones for so much in our day-to-day lives: GPS, digital wallets, messaging, two-factor authentication, alarms and timers, and so on. I rushed to buy a replacement the same day, but, for whatever reason, I didn’t open the box (one reason: a new smartphone is quite expensive, and I wanted to keep the option of returning the new one and buying a second-hand phone instead). Over the course of the next couple of days, I was phone-less and… it was great. I realized that I actually wasn’t nearly as dependent on my phone as I thought (for example: GPS and turn-by-turn directions are useful, but it’s really not that hard to find your way around without them).
The main improvement in my life without a phone was that, if I had a couple minutes of downtime (waiting in line for something, etc.) I wouldn’t be able to pull out my phone and start mindlessly scrolling. My biggest vice previously was Twitter/X and reading political articles and analysis. I was a victim to Twitter’s outrage-optimizing algorithm. I would find myself drawn in to reading online arguments that would just make me mad. This wasn’t improving my life or making me feel better, but nonetheless I found myself spending time engaging. Without a phone, if I was waiting in line for something outside, I would use the couple of minutes to look around and enjoy the scenery rather than burying my face in my smartphone. If I got bored, I would consciously find an interesting topic to think about rather than let an engagement-optimizing algorithm decide for me what to think about. Within only a couple of days, my ingrained habit of reaching for my phone during a moment of boredom was gone.
I did end up buying a second-hand smartphone, but since this experience I have managed to avoid relapsing into my previous habits. (To be clear, I wasn’t even an outlier in terms of phone usage—my screen time used to be about 2 hours per day total, which was well within the range of typical usage). These days, I aim for under 10 minutes of phone screen time per day (completely eliminating the phone, while not impossible, is impractical, and there aren’t big downsides to using it for almost essential things like 2FA). To help with this, it’s been really useful to silence all notifications and get rid of the red badges on app icons. Seeing a red badge for an unread notification would cause me to feel almost a compulsion to open the app. It’s really easy to turn them off altogether, and then the urge is gone.
I did notice a bit of a substitution effect: in order to keep my phone usage down, I would sometimes use the computer instead. Of course, if the phone internet usage is completely replaced with computer internet usage, there isn’t going to be a big benefit. Eventually, I decided to use an app on my computer to block access to my most frequently accessed news and social media websites. The app is helpful because, over time, I had developed a habit of opening a new tab with a social media website without even thinking, and so it was hard to stop just through force of will. Thus far, the experiment is successful: I spend way less time browsing news and social media websites (regarding news, we really don’t need to be kept up-to-date on everything that’s happening on an hourly basis—we can be still be well-informed while reading much less news much less frequently), and feel like it’s made a positive impact on my life. If anyone else feels like phone/internet/news/social media is having a negative impact on their life, I would encourage them to try something similar: you really don’t need your phone as much as you think you do, and it’s possible to greatly reduce screen time without having negative impacts on other parts of your life. Having the willpower to stop can be a problem (as with any addiction), but I found blocker apps to be effective for me at least.
Less than 4% of parents in Germany admitted to giving their 6 years olds more than 2 hours screen time*. Good to see ACX-readers being more honest. (*When school admin asked them.)
I have kids that have recently finished school. When they were in high-school the only internet restriction we had was the following. At my bed time (around 10pm) I would turn off the power to the router/wifi and turn it on again around 7am. During this time no one in the house had internet access except using data on their phones. My kids' mobile plans at the time didn't include much data (about one hour per day usage).
The goal was just to help them get a good night's sleep. The fact that it applied to parents as well made them more accepting of the restriction (and to be honest definitely had benefits for my wife and I as well - nevertheless we still abandoned the rule as soon as the youngest finished high-school).
We tried things like x hours a day briefly but it lead to constant arguments about exceptions (e.g. "sure I've been watching Netflix for hours and used all my online time but I need to do homework now and need the internet again") and was just a pain to manage. I briefly tried MAC address filtering but they quickly figured out how to change MAC addresses in software. I just needed something that was simple and could get buy-in so ended up with the above.
>People whose parents restricted their screen time as children are less likely to be Internet addicts as adults.
Correct me if I've missed something, but this conclusion doesn't follow the data. If anything, based on the actual data, the conclusion should be the opposite! To review:
Addiction rating:
No Internet: 3.24
Limited Internet: 3.23
Free Internet: 3.04
Now, I assume that Scott is using actual usage as a sort of "revealed preference" of addiction:
Usage:
No Internet: 4.4h
Limited Internet: 4.3h
Free Internet: 4.9h
But I would strongly argue that this is bad practice! First off, you're ignoring inconvenient data that measures the actual thing you're talking about, and substituting second-order data that's correlated. But usage does not equal addiction! Someone dutifully taking their Adderall meds isn't considered to have a stimulant addiction, same as someone regularly taking a moderate-but-stable does opiates to manage pain. Scott as written about this exact thing before: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudoaddiction/
And beyond that, we can't conclude that usage is addiction in the first place - the delta in usage could be from usage that contributes to their life satisfaction - e.g. they could be watching youtube or netflix on the couch with their partner. Hell, their partner could *be* on the internet.
Not helpful late in the game, but when I'm doing extended family child care, the separating point is "Can they safely see porn/isis decapitating a guy", where below that point they get semi-unlimited internet use but I have to be in the room, extremely limited whitelist use if I'm not in the room.
If they are above that point they get mostly unlimited use if they do some amount of enrichment activity (cook dinner, play a musical instrument, read a paper book, garden a bit, etc.) that varies constantly so it doesn't become a reward response thing.
At that point we trust them to figure it out; it's not like you can really stop technically savvy people from getting on the internet without living in a radio quite zone.
I'm quite addicted to the internet, and have had a difficult time trying to find good information on how to get unstuck.
The scientific literature on internet addiction treatment seems to be pretty limited to just therapy and medication, both of which I've tried unsuccessfully.
I thought maybe the best available information on treating internet addiction could be found in stories from people who successfully did so. So I combed through ALL of the posts on reddit/r/nosurf for stories of people who successfully cut back their screen time, collected data on all the stories, and wrote up my analysis.
Psychologist here. What’s helpful is a specific form of therapy. Not the
what-was-your-mother-like kind, and not the what-were-your-stresses-this-week kind, but one using cognitive and behavior techniques geared to breaking habitS.
I've got no doubt that there is therapy that helps with internet addiction. That's what all the studies demonstrate.
But there are a few problems with the research focusing almost exclusively on therapy (and medication). For one thing... most people won't do therapy for many reasons. Stigma, cost, time, lack of access, inability to find someone who takes your insurance.
Also, I've seen many therapists for this and couldn't find a single one who: took my insurance, had any real understanding of internet addiction, and had openings for new clients.
So what I went looking for were more practical suggestions that people could perform on their own without the help of a therapist.
Make a plan for how you're going to go about reducing internet use. A characteristic of successful plans is that they involve commitments to helper activities -- i.e., things that, if you do them, improve your chances of succeeding at the main goal, reducing internet time. Examples:
-Make it an ongoing practice to read success stories.
-Find or start a peer group of people who take overcoming the habit seriously and are doing decently.
-Search for activities that get you out of the house. Actively go to them and try them. Any that are decent, commit to going to them regularly.
-Look for experiences that are powerful and good enough to really tweak your head. Week of meditation practice? Psychedelic retreat? NOLS course? Use the tweak to up your level of seriousness and optimism.
-Identify the times, places, situations where it is hardest to stay off computer, and have multiple plans and helper activities for getting through those successfully.
-Get helper activities up and running before you throw yourself into internet reduction.
-Use Beeminder or some such to track your follow-through on helper activities.
-When actively reducing internet use, avoid framing any plans as "I'm going to try to reduce it by X hrs/day." No "I'll try." Instead, pick something you believe you can succeed at, even if it is a very small time reduction, and then commit to doing it come hell or high water. Obviously you may fail sometimes, but the "I'll try" way of thinking of it is bad because what it translates into is "When I am supposed to get off the computer, acc/to my plan, I will introspect to see whether I am up to doing it. If I feel up to it I will do it." So you are putting your subjective state, your craving, in charge. That is the structure of addition: craving is in charge. You want your plan to be in charge. So make plans that are modest enough that it is reasonable to expect yourself to just power through and do them regardless of how you feel.
-As for ways to actually block getting on internet, once you are doing that, there are many. Content blockers, time safes, etc. But the things I said earlier are crucial. I wish you well on this.
Thanks for the lengthy write up of advice. I think most of it is quite good.
I'm sorry if you thought I was specifically asking for that though. When I said "I went looking for were more practical suggestions..." I was describing my motivation for doing my study.
Oh, I wouldn't have replied at length unless I felt like it, even if you had asked me to urgently and directly. I enjoy opportunities to do something quick that could be quite helpful. Also I think I was motivated to do it because there is a lot of shrink-bashing on here, most of which I actually agree with, but I want people to know that there actually are pretty effective treatment approaches for a lot of common problems, and there are professionals who use them.
Later edit: so I looked at your Reddit post, which I had not done before writing mine, and I think yours is quite good too. So I think that puts you in a good position to design a plan for yourself -- or maybe you already have.
One further miscellaneous tip, which I did not mention, though maybe you did in your write-up and I missed it: Alcohol & cannabis both reduce inhibition, and are your enemy when you are trying to put a plan, rather than your cravings, in charge. So look for ways to confine getting high to times when use of the internet is not possible.
Would be interested to hear how all this works out, both your personal attempt and also your info-gathering. You're welcome to DM me if you like.
The types of parenting strategies you are able to execute on a kid depends a lot on the kid.
My mother came from a family of difficult people, and she desired to escape that by having a normal nuclear family with normal parenting strategies. However, it turns out that (from when I was a kid) I was a lot like the aforementioned men in her family: very intelligent, very rebellious, high functioning on the autism spectrum, and fairly self-absorbed. A lot of friction ensued. Her template was mostly thrown away, and a lot of improvisation was required.
Most people who are able to execute really rigid, strict, and consistent parenting strategies (like being able to put a hard consistent cap on daily internet usage without it being circumvented or severe negative externalities) come from families of people who are reasonably family-oriented, agreeable, and deferential to authority.
Outside of LaVar Ball and Laszlo Polgar type parents who groom their kids to be child prodigies in some specialty in a way that doesn't burn them out or foster resentment, most of parenting comes down to who the kid is.
If my body could take it I feel like I would be online 8-12 hours. Sadly its not very physically healthy. The Internet has all the best entertainment. It has most possibly friends. It's the best source of knowledge
The rational amount feels like it should be higher than four. At least assuming your eyes and neck can handle it.
"Average time online for the whole sample was 4 hours. Average “screen time”, including TV and video games, was 5.5 hours."
I have high credence that the survey respondents are underestimating both of these numbers. Dunno how this should inform your parenting strategy though.
I do not consider myself to be Internet addicted. Most of the things I do online are quite interesting and important to me. There’s not much mindless scrolling followed by regret. But even so I am not happy about the Internet’s effect on me. It does something to my attention. Whenever I go thru a period of unusually heavy internet use I find afterwards that it is difficult to read a book. It feels too slow, too restrictive — sort of limited and boring. Takes me a day to readjust to a form of information and entertainment that does not allow me to quickly leave to check email, to look up something I’m curious about, etc. And I had been a heavy book reader for quite a long time before I encountered the Internet. I think the effect on the attentional habits of people who grow up with Internet on tap must be immense.
"I am more confident in time spent online as really measuring something objective."
I would be more confident in that too, but this survey didn't measure time spent online, it measured how much people thought they spent time online. Like you point out with other similar issues, you could imagine this affecting things in lots of little ways . Maybe unhappy people perceive a similar actual amount of time spent on the internet as longer (or shorter). Maybe people with time restrictions as kids are better/worse at estimating how much time they spend on the internet (or consistently over/under-estimate how much time they spend). Etc.
There are similar apps to the “benevolent government”. These apps allow you to set a blocklist for selected times. For instance, an app called SelfControl makes it so that blocked content cannot be accessed without reinstalling macOS.
This works by making the undesirable action difficult, aligning with the “response” step in the “cue, craving, response, reward” framework from “Atomic Habits.”
On the other hand, there are apps designed to decrease distractions by removing the cue for distraction.
For example, consider the app “Untrap.” It lets you customize what you see on YouTube. For instance, it can remove related videos, reducing the likelihood of getting “sucked in.”
However, this is different because, although related videos can be distracting, people aren’t actively seeking them out as much as they use the internet for entertainment. In other words, this app is effective because it removes the cue. If the cue for related videos isn’t there, then there is little desire to seek out related videos. Therefore, the fact that you can disable the app does not undermine its purpose.
I forgot the survey questions, but did you separate social media from The Rest of the Internet at all in any form or question?
------
As to causality, obviously only one data point (mine) but re "less satisfied people spend more time online" seems to be EXTREMELY unidirectional mechanism for me. The days and periods when I spend more time online (could be significantly more than 6 hours) are the days (and periods) where I'm more miserable, less productive, less social and overall less happy AND less satisfied with my life -- either because of external circumstances (winter or other shit weather, no study or work tasks) or personal practical setbacks (no money, car broke down, injured foot, etc) or mental dips (anxiety spiking, difficult dates with sorta flashbacks etc). Onlineness that's not related to work or study is what I do in big quantities to fill in "holes" or to escape to from being totally skint, lassitude-tinged-bored, alone and lonely, scared or sad. Otherwise couple of hours is absolutely sufficient (and I don't watch TV-as-tv at all).
I'd not want a magic nanny to take it away from me because THE ALTERNATIVES ARE WORSE!
The title is good
Except it says nothing about indulging your internet addiction by commenting about internet addiction
The title says exactly that (replacing commenting with reading).
Whereas the post is also about internet addiction, and in shortform on top of that. This maximizes the benefits for an internet addict who still takes pride in reading stuff longer than individual tweets.
That should be the ending sentence, with colon at the end.
I indulge everyone else's internet addiction by commenting.
I'm curious how these data points correlated with religion, assuming the ACX readership is religious enough to provide meaningful data on religious people as a subgroup.
I would also like to see those results.
As a decade-ish Convert to Catholicism and a 3-4 year internal Convert to Traditional Catholicism I wonder to what extent that having a rational right-ordering practiced system with good-Anchor based direction on guidance and thinking (that I am now Blessed with) correlates throughout.
.. of course, some level of discernment of 'religious' is needed to exclude the insanity Satanic-directed sects of Christians and others that somehow accept abortion, women clergy and other woke sicknesses that are disOrdering and damaging in general to self and all goodness.
God Bless., Steve
Just curious, before you converted to Catholicism were you a member of a different Christian denomination? And why did you choose Catholicism specifically? Also, what prompted the conversion from Catholicism to Traditional Catholicism and what does that mean exactly?
These questions are exactly what interests me from similar testimonies from others, and perhaps if I had been exposed of some when younger I may have converted earlier and not suffered as much or as deeply through most of my working and active adulthood, a suffering that had a needed Cleansing and other God Blessed goodness it resulted in His love He gave me.
All but the first question would require huge volumes of writing I am likely unable to provide to convey, and much would require Angelic ability to provide not only the information but all the background and abilities to fully understand them, a sharing of not only the facts and background context but all those abilities that are uniquely mixed within us that God have help shape to best face and succeed in our lives that He Wills in His Love for us, and that we only surrender to in the best effort we can, and with His Sacrificed Son aspect of Him we can all succeed with.
I was a non-practicing Quaker that had been exposed to Orthodox sect of Judaism (Hasidim) when a friend was converting and showed a want to learn through the access his friendship provided and discovered a Rabbi and Community welcoming and that their lives were filled daily with rituals and prayers that each Called to God for Sharing with.
That I suspect reOpened at some level my once and future potential to Hear and Follow God's Call and Invite I had already rejected at least twice I clearly remember, once at puberty and during or before the exposure to the Jewish Orthodox community, and the relatively recent Answered response mentioned.
That learning about and exposure to what little of the Orthodox sect of Judaism provided rapid insight into some of the basics of Catholicism and is the reason I would impress of the value of learning some or much of the 2nd Temple Judaism that Jesus was raised practiced in, and for which ignorance of them cannot but results in an incomplete realization of the ministry the Gospel Testifies to.
I entered into the new-rite modernist Sickened Church that is a false version of Her most See and Suffer the soul-murdering betrayal and treachery that the Vatican and many of the leadership Vomit in service to their god - Satan, and that the Vatican suppressed warnings about as in the real complete release of 3rd secrete of Fatima that was directed to be released on or before 1960, in time to warn The Body of Christ and those pure-intending of the Ordained, warned of the infiltration of Vatican and leadership by Modernist tools of Satan, and the horrors that follow that we have today in post heretically contained Vatican II and most of the changes from Traditional Catholicism we have suffered that followed.
.. I was aware soon on entering and exposure to the false new-Rite version but only solidified as evil intended in learning of the forced switch of all Catholics from the Traditional Roman Catholic Latin Mass to the new-rite version while suppressing that TLMass old Rite used through much of the linked ad continuous apostolic history of the Church and that wear the pathway for so many Saints and Followers of the Faith, that the forced change could only be understood as soul-murdering Church-harming Body-of-Christ Sickening intent.
And since then I slowly discovered the real Church and it's existence through those that offer the old-rite, the TLMass, and because of Her Beauty (that the new-Rite false version lacked or destroyed in unTruth, inJustice, and rightness disOrdering design) I have been self-directing learning of the doctrines and the theology behind much of the Realization Holy-Ghost inspired, and from that expanded understanding I can more Clearly see the Horror being done to the publicly present Sickened version and those that are directing and pushing it and further falseness and evil.
I now consider the position held by Sedeprivationism are reasonable, so much so I may state that it is my position to our present situations from before Vatican II, that this Pope and previous Popes from the Office holder that suppressed the 3rd Secrete and allowed that heretical containing Vatican II result, that they are 'legally' Popes but since their intent was and is to betray their Office and duties and oaths to the destruction or access of the Catholic Church ad replace with a false 'Ape' worldly Sin focused soul-murdering version, they never received the other aspect of the Papal Office normally supplied by God, the Charismas, Graces, and increased focus and support of the Holy Ghost that is normal for the Office.
And the rest I may hope to address some other time.
God Bless., your Servant in Christ, Steve
Thank you for the thorough reply, that is very interesting!
If you want information on the internet's impact in child development the recent book "The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness" by Jonathan Haidt is great. It carries a 4.43 rating on 54,000 ratings at Goodreads as well.
This is a very well researched book with a lot of understanding both of human development psychology and social media effects. Would recommend!
Just to reinforce the above: this is extremely rigourously researched, far more than the average nonfiction book with an agenda (which it does have, but the agenda is amply justified).
They have anticipated every counter argument you can think of and address it in footnotes, on their website, or in their research papers.
If you disagree with their conclusions, you really need to engage with their ultra in depth counterarguments.
Really? I haven't read it, and I like Haidt, but from a few podcast appearances and blogposts I read I didn't get the sense that the case was rock solid. Lots of correlations without strong causation. Am I wrong?
Did they take a thousand children and randomly assign them to social media Vs non-social media childhoods? No, that would be rather difficult, and if a causally-rock solid RCT is the threshold we'll never get there.
What they do do, however, is do a detailed analysis of many, many other explanations and show how they don't fit the data.
Here's a good sample: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/13-explanations-mental-health-crisis?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
> Lots of correlations without strong causation
They can say that without having read or understood much of anything. It's a popular blanket rhetorical device. Not to say that there can't be valid criticism.
I found it unconvincing. I believe that the negative outcome he blames on social media are due to exposure to wokeness through social media. When you look at countries with far less wokeness the bad effects of social media go away.
Haidt ignores this confounder and never tried to engage with it on his susbtuck either. Social media makes for a better whipping boy than wokeness so he sticks with his explanation.
Do you have any studies you can link on this correlation? Would be curious to learn more about this.
Seconding HM's request for a link to that correlation. I'd be really interested to see that kind of data.
And by "found it unconvincing" you mean you didn't read the many, many times Haidt directly says that liberal social media targeted at girls is disproportionately bad for mental health and has emphasised disempowering beliefs heavily linked to Wokism?
Like in this piece:
https://open.substack.com/pub/jonathanhaidt/p/mental-health-liberal-girls?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=gbrga
I found his explanation unconvincing. I believe that the negative outcome Haidt blames on social media are due to exposure to wokeness through social media. When you look at countries with far less wokeness the bad effects of social media go away.
Haidt ignores this confounder and never tried to engage with it on his substack either. Social media makes for a better whipping boy than wokeness so Haidt sticks with his explanation.
Haidt has an agenda, but the evidence is not at all compelling. An army of academics have been trying to prove Facebook is bad for going on 20 years and every study ends up like 🤷. To the extent he has anything at all, haidt continually conflates the internet and social media, shifting between them when it suits his purposes. He seems like a nice guy but he's way too focused on his conclusion and he's not a rigorous thinker at all.
You have children plural? Did you have a second already??
He had twins.
Their names are Emily and Control.
I am a new ACX reader so I might be missing historical context, but I'll just say that I have trouble parsing a lot of discussions about internet "addiction" because it seems like a label we only use when we think the activity is bad.
How would I answer the first question about how internet-addicted I am? Well, I use it frequently for all kinds of things, from entertainment to work. In that sense I'm highly dependent on it and I've built my life around it (partly because it's so useful). I would struggle to live life without it. But am I addicted to my washing machine because I use it all the time and even have changed my lifestyle habits around it (wearing more different clothes each week)?
It feels like letting people rate how addicted they are to something is really just asking a) do you use this thing and b) how negative is your affect toward it. And tying that information to other attributes just ... doesn't seem like it tells us anything interesting?
> because it seems like a label we only use when we think the activity is bad.
People also refer to:
- masturbation addiction
- work addiction
- exercise addiction
You're not addicted to your washing machine because you don't suffer from a compulsion to use it. You use it because you want to, and if for some reason you stopped wanting to, you would stop using it.
I would in fact find it very difficult to stop using my washing machine, on account of how I would have to start handwashing my clothes instead. If I tried to do it anyway, I would probably fail and be back to using the machine within a couple of weeks. It seems like the main reason we don't talk about "washing machine addiction" is that very few people think relying on a washing machine is a terrible vice they suffer from, whereas it's much more common to feel that way about e.g. pornography.
Yes, but also tradeoffs. Handwashing isn't generally considered to be an especially virtuous activity, so washing machine doesn't prevent anything important, whereas internet, porn, excessive work etc. likely keep you from engaging in Meaningful Personal Interaction, and that's Bad.
Addictive behavior has attributes beyond being considered a vice.
A washing machine addiction might look something like a person repeatedly washing their clothes even though they were clean, reading about washing machines so much that their job performance suffers, buying new washing machines and new clothes to wash up to the point of not being able to spend their bills, trying to cover all this up and make it seem as if no problem existed, and spending most of their time using washing machines even though they'd repeatedly tried to stop.
The reason we don't often witness this is likely due to the fact that using washing machines doesn't strongly recruit the brain's reward system, when compared to smoking, gambling, porn, amphetamine or alcohol. My guess would be that one could most easily become addicted to shopping for washing machines.
Are you familiar with the classic joke about water addiction? People compulsively drink water, often multiple times a day, if you try to take it away from them they'll soon abandon important things just to get more, and so on, clearly they are suffering from water addiction.
The joke here is that common descriptions of "addiction" don't actually distinguish addiction from normal, sensible, behaviours because they don't specify that the behaviour has to be bad or unreasonable, because they want to make "addiction" an objective scientific concept which must therefore exclude value judgements. But the value judgements are what distinguish my water and washing machine non-addictions from someone else's porn or meth addiction. People call things they do "addictions" when they do it regularly and don't like that about themselves. When they think it's fine and good, they don't.
There are real reasons some things lead to this judgement more often than others, but as a description of what things get called "addictions" this is irrelevant.
I think you are generally right about the over-use of addition as a label when we really mean "thing I don't approve of that you like to do". On the other hand, you arguments here miss a few points.
Regarding washing machines: I expect you would stop using a washing machine if, e.g. you acquired a lot of money and could hire a maid to do your laundry for you, or maybe you got married and your wife decided you do the laundry wrong and said you weren't allowed to use it and she would do your laundry. The point being that it isn't using the machine per se that is what you like, but the outcome of clean cloths. Compare that to a junky who no longer feels a high but keeps taking the drug to chase the dragon, as it were. If you started running the washing machine without even putting cloths in it, then yes, that would be an addiction most likely. (Or dementia :D I have run the coffee machine without remembering to put in coffee some mornings!) To properly label a behavior addiction it has to go beyond the normal use cases in those sorts of ways.
Regarding water, the key distinction the joke leaves out is that the thing you are addicted to shouldn't be necessary to life or shouldn't have substitutes. So, yea, you need water to live, not an addiction. However, if someone freaks out because they can't get water, yet juice, milk, soda, etc. are all readily available but they just have to have water to be ok over a reasonably short time, that is starting to sound a bit like addiction. It isn't that they need hydration, but that they need a very specific type and no other. Or, likewise, if they have to drink a bottle of water every hour regardless of how dehydrated they are, being unable to function properly unless they do, then addiction starts to seem like a good description.
It is also worth noting the time frame of activity. People drink water multiple times a day, but everyone needs to drink some sort of hydrating fluid every day. Compare to say heroine where most people never use it at all while some people use it nearly everyday or more. That is a good criteria for addiction, although not the only one.
Out of curiosity: have you ever dealt with severe addictions personally or close by? There's a very good reason why alcoholism is classified as a disease, and it's not social stigma. I have very little interest in stigmatizing addictive behavior, but having suffered from addictions myself I find the comparison to water and thirst bizarre.
I can't speak for anyone else's porn or meth addictions, but I can definitely attest to addictions being very real, and causing severe harm mostly to the addict themselves.
Personally I've found that negative value judgments do seem to worsen addictive behavior because they amplify secretive behaviors, and worsen the feelings of shame and worthlessness often accompanied by the lack of control.
I agree that negative value judgments might cause non-harmful, non-addictive behaviors to be perceived as addictions, but I don't think this makes real, actual addictions lose their meaning. Just because someone might think sex drive was unhealthy does not mean an alcoholic does not have a problem.
Beyond that I believe value judgments have little to do with addictions in themselves, and I'm not interested in discussing them further.
What you describe as water addiction does not sound like an addiction to me at all. I won't address psychogenic polydipsia here, which has similarities to addictive behavior, but the joking version of treating normal thirst as an addiction.
Thirst does not lead to increasing self-administration beyond the point of becoming obviously harmful. If a person is thirsty enough to neglect other matters, they probably should do so. This is in contrast to an alcoholic neglecting eating in favor of heavy drinking, for example.
Drinking water does not lead to physical dependency or increasing tolerance, requiring larger doses to give the same pleasure. Thirst typically disappears after drinking, and after thirst dissipates, it is very uncommon to keep drinking water heavily to get the same feeling as one had when they drunk water while thirsty. Such a phenomenon just doesn't exist, because water addiction isn't real (again, not discussing polydipsia here, but the version of thirst being an addiction).
In contrast, addictive behaviors work just like so. People keep gambling, masturbating, drinking or taking speed often again and again, often exactly because they want to experience the initial high for a longer time. They end up feeling like crap because of doing it often while drunk or high, and they still keep taking more, often while wanting to quit already. The lack of control can be utterly devastating.
Thirst builds up again, yes, but fulfilling that need always seems to return to the same level of satisfaction, which doesn't lead to self-harm, dissatisfaction or repeated attempts to get the "I want to get rid of that thirst!" high in spite of negative consequences.
Drinking water typically does not lead to reduced pleasure from other activities or to water dominating a person's entire personality. Taking water away from people will do that, yes, but they will also die due to that, and they know it.
Meanwhile NOT doing or taking whatever it is an addict is addicted to typically is a central part of recovering from the addiction, and DOING or taking the target of addiction is what worsens it. This is in direct contrast to water and thirst, where the dynamic is exactly the opposite. Withdrawal or withdrawal-like symptoms such as craving exist, yes, but the difference of "water withdrawal symptoms due to dying soon" and "craving for more hits / more winnings" is far from trivial. If an addict goes through withdrawal, they won't die (aside from a case of severe physical dependency), but people die of thirst.
This likely could be expressed better and I could go on, but I won't go further than this. Thanks for engaging.
Leaving chemical dependency aside, addiction is purely a state of mind. It is a relationship (to something) that has become dysfunctional. It’s an external manifestation of a dysfunctional relationship with yourself. I am an addict by the way. I smoke. I drink too much often. I think about both those things a lot. I know I would probably be better off not doing any of those things. And yet I persist. (I am nowhere near as bad as I used to be, which I guess is a positive sign.)
Addictions entail substantial negative consequences so I'm curious what that washing machine has been doing to you.
Not really. Millions of people are addicted to coffee with little to no downsides, some argue it's even beneficial. Many people are addicted to exercise, but except for professional athletes, it's very rare for it to cause any issues. I'd give more examples but can't think of any right now.
When I said "entails" I meant that is is actually definitional to the concept of addiction, so...yes really. Caffeine use that causes withdrawal symptoms is not addiction unless it causes problems, it's substance dependence (a separate concept). If someone feels compelled to exercise, it's not a behavioral addiction unless it causes problems for them.
You might want to say hey, mustn't there be some underlying process going on before something crosses the line into addiction? But that's just reinforcement learning and it's ubiquitous and doesn't help us carve out the phenomenon of interest at all.
Edit: you might synthesize this by saying that addiction is what happens when what you've been conditioned to subconsciously believe is good for you diverges too far from what is actually good for you and life starts going less well as a result.
Another commenter explained I was confusing addiction with dependence. I was unaware of the difference in definition. Apologies for confusion.
I think you're missing the distinction between an "addiction" and a "dependency." A dependency doesn't become an addiction until it starts ruining your life. Almost none of the millions of coffee-dependent people are addicts.
Learn something new everyday. Thank you. But then, wouldn't that mean almost none of the internet addicts the article talks about has actual addiction? Is this one of those cases where the colloquial and the clinical definitions are so different they barely describe the same concept, similar to the p-word?
It shrunk my wife’s favorite nightie, and now I don’t get to see her in it anymore.
That sound like a *clothing* addiction to me.
How much time are you spending actively engaged with your washing machine? Do you turn it on, pull up a chair and watch the clothing spin around? I for one throw clothes in the thing, pour in some soap, turn it on and walk away, and it all takes about two minutes in a day. Another two to move things to the dryer. Four minutes a day (if it even reaches once a day) is a pretty weak addiction.
As someone who has suffered from actual addictions, I can attest that addictions are in fact a real thing, and mostly bad. An addiction's impact varies depending on its target, its severity and a bunch of other stuff.
It's not always easy to distinguish whether a behavior "crosses the line" to addiction, as it isn't an on/off thing, and because the symptoms and their severity vary. Sometimes it's easy to say (think of a homeless meth addict or a gambler deep in debt) and sometimes not (think of a meth user with a job but who has begun to somewhat struggle due to using more than they intended).
However, some helpful signs exist. These are not exhaustive, and not all appear at the same time (it isn't on/off).
- The activity becomes compulsive.
- The ability to feel interest towards, or to feel pleasure or satisfaction from other activities decreases.
- The activity (self-administration) continues in spite of obvious harm to one's health, or psychological, social or economic well-being.
- It (or planning, arranging and recovering from the activity) takes up an increasing proportion of one's life, to the point of severely interfering with other activities and needs and reducing life quality.
- It continues beyond the point of bringing benefit, joy or satisfaction.
- It continues in spite of repeated failed attempts to reduce the behavior or stop it.
- It begins to severely impact the person's self-esteem, is accompanied with feelings of guilt, shame and lack of control, and leads to secretive behavior.
- Physical tolerance causes the person to repeatedly increase dosages (to drugs) or an insensitivity develops causing the person to reach for more extreme material (as sometimes in porn addiction).
I don't know if most people consider the above when thinking how addicted they are to something, but I do. These would distinguish that I need air, food and water to survive, but I'm not addicted to them. I also wouldn't be addicted to washing my clothes, as it benefits me, doesn't harm me, doesn't interfere with my values or other life and doesn't seem to develop tolerance - etc.
A more difficult example would be an intense work life, interfering with other life, taking up time and causing sleep issues and me not eating well. Is that an addiction? That depends. Do I repeatedly self-administer the job even if I could choose to go home, to my detriment? Do I keep going harder even though the extra brings no seeming benefit? Have I repeatedly tried to quit, failing? Have I lost interest to other stuff, while feeling that the only thing that pleasures me anymore is the job? Etc. If yes, I might be addicted to my job.
I’m an addictionologist and I just wanted to say that that is in excellent comment! Thank you.
I think there's an assumed (but likely entirely reasonable) distinction between internet addiction and merely heavy internet usage. I'm not a psychiatrist (if only we knew a psychiatrist who was interested in this question.....) but I would suppose:
Fellow who reads online fanfiction instead of books, does all their shopping online instead of driving to the shops, connects with people via dating apps and social media instead of going to pubs, and watches Youtube instead of television: probably a heavy internet user rather than an internet addict?
Fellow who can't look up from their laptop even when visiting their elderly grandmother who lives 200 miles away; who can't leave the house without their phone, even just for a brief stroll around the block or to pop to the corner shop, because it makes them too anxious; who constantly misses important events/deadlines and regularly fails to wash/eat/sleep because they can't tear themselves away from the screen: probably an addict?
(nb. Personally the heavy internet user above makes me awfully sad - I want there to be a healthy market for literature, thriving local shops, a lively pub scene, etc. and I don't like the small handful of massive megacorps that mediate almost-all of our internet usage having their tendrils insinuated so deeply into society - but, much as I personally disapprove, I do have to admit that the heavy internet user probably isn't doing anything morally wrong or self-harmful or unhealthy.)
Those seem like good criteria for internet addiction to me.
This is a good distinction. The internet is a multi-purpose tool, and those purposes cover a considerable range of activities. People using it heavily can make sense, no addiction needed.
The question is can someone put the internet away when doing something where it doesn't serve a purpose or when it's even counter-active? During in-person family get-togethers, can someone put down their cell-phone for a hour or two, to join their family in conversation and/or playing games like boardgames or cards? If someone goes to watch a movie at the movie theater, can they at least set their cell-phone to vibrate and leave it alone barring an emergency call?
For young kids, the best way to prevent internet addiction might actually not be to set firm limits on how much a kid can be online, but rather to help cultivate interests and activities that have nothing to do with the internet.
As one of the data points, I feel I can weigh in on some of this! Scott calls out a larger group with my pattern (restricted internet as a youth, heavy usage, self-describes as addicted, and lowered life satisfaction) and my specific line of reasoning may or may not cover multiple points.
I've vacationed places where internet access isn't a given, and by day four I notice I've become irritable, high-strung, fatigued, and feeling other malaise while wishing I could get back to the internet. I'll check and discard offline devices in a sequence, trying to get something out of them while knowing what I want just isn't there. This pattern-matches pretty well to "withdrawal" for me, but to what level that's a culture-bound concept of withdrawal vs novel needs being unfulfilled is probably unknowable.
Interesting. I always feel just the opposite. It feels like time has passed more in the way it did in the Before Time. But also, this may be a function of age - my eyes are always very happy to have the respite from the screen.
ETA: read more carefully and see I am not close to being in your cohort.
Thanks for raising this important issue. "Addiction" is a rabbit hole of a word that is difficult to think and communicate clearly about.
How does "addiction" differ from "compulsion" differ from "habit"?
Let's first establish some ground. Feel free to challenge but these are my assumptions:
1. A human nervous system is designed to be stressed and to regulate stress. Human nervous systems can and do forgo wants and needs for a time for social and other reasons. We can endure some discomfort, grit out teeth, bear it, hold it, wait it out, and delay gratification. Each situation and circumstance seems to manifest a certain threshold at which a person cries out, says something, can't stand it anymore, or addresses the stress.
2. When the nervous system has been under stress, it needs to be addressed, calmed, sated, or relieved at some point. When done in healthy ways, the mindbodypsyche develops trust and confidence in itself and its group, that stress is a part of our lives, word, and routines, that it will be worth it, and that it will be addressed and regulated before it reaches levels of pain and suffering.
3. Humans are a fundamentally social species. We take care of each other. Parents regulate their children. Spouses watch and take care of each other (not always in equally shared ways). *Our nervous systems are linked.* *Our nervous systems are linked to each others'.* So many really smart people are blind to this. We keep viewing ourselves as individuals, and treating ourselves as individuals. This is because of our natural and healthy egoic sense of individual identity. We should not disrupt this, but our capacity to see deeply and understand each other and ourselves is limited until we understand the dynamics of larger social bodies, until we start treating groups and communities as the living systems that they are. *The things an individual nervous system experiences are inseparably connected with the rhythms, norms, expectations, roles, history, memory, and scripts of its groups.* This is my current soapbox and its difficult to speak to because I feel so far out of the overton window with this stuff.
Given all this, I submit that "addiction" is when an organism latches on to a habit or practice of nervous system regulation that is unhealthy, harmful, or unacceptably risky for that organism - whether this be an individual organism or a group organism. An intelligent organism generally perceives when it is engaging in self-harming or unhealthy practices, but in repeated suppression or dismissing of such promptings, gives way internally to a certain "spirit" that helps it relieve or endure stress, pain, or discomfort, at the cost of long-term health and mental/social clarity.
Compulsive behaviors are like "soft" addictions. Internet/social media, to me, seems more appropriately dealt with in terms of compulsiveness than addiction, but there's some toMAYto toMAHto here in our use of these terms. It can be helpful to notice and observe what is experienced in mind and body when habitual behaviors are ceased or refrained from. What does withdraw feel like? It can range from uncontrollable shaking and panic to generalized anxiety.
For me, the "recreational" and the "non-recreational" internet usage blends together so tightly, that the hypothetical nanny state would need mind reading powers to implement the policy.
I'm more on the creative/investigative side of things, so even when I'm scrolling reddit memes and listening to whatever Youtube throws my way, that's never mindless, just fuel for my work, I often interrupt the doomscrolling to scribble down a freshly surfaced idea.
This is why I had a hard time restricting my smartphone when I was doing my thesis. Practically everything I need for it was also everything I used to entertain me. I can theoretically block and uninstall some app/sites but I really still need the phone itself.
Is personal learning recreational? My hobby is SARS2 and COVID-19, and I spend a lot of time keeping up with the science of virology, immunology, and epidemiology. I don't do this for a living, though. Does that count as recreation? Also, I spend a lot of time watching science and history lectures on YouTube. I'd say that's a form of recreation, though. I spend an inordinate amount of time on ACX because I like discussing things and arguing with people. But ACX frequently sends me down Internet rabbit holes to dig up data on subjects I'm not familiar with. I'd say ACX is recreational, even though I'm learning. And I read the news. Is that recreational? I don't listen to a lot of streaming music because I have a huge old-style CD collection. I don't play online games. I check in on Facebook every couple of days to see what my friends are up to. I might spend half an hour each week doing online banking (that feels like work) and ordering things (much of it necessities — that feels like work). I've been on the Internet since 1991 (in the days of Usenet, Archie, and Gopher), and I'd say I've spent at least four or five hours a day online, most every day of those 33 years, doing personal research. And when I was working, I spent another four or five hours online doing email and (more recently) Zoom calls.
"Hi, my name is Beo, and I've been a hardcore Internet user for 33 years. And f**k your 12-step program because I love being an Internet addict!"
Oh, I haven't owned a TV since 1985. But I occasionally binge-watch TV series on my laptop. That's definitely recreational!
"I restricted this question to people under 30, to make sure I was only catching people who grew up during the Internet era": Would it not have been better to ask everybody - and then filter by people under vs. over 30* to establish a local value for the Lizardman Constant**?
(Or is the Lizardman Constant only a minor concern with the ACX survey relative to the "unnecessarily annoying one's readership with irrelevant questions" concern?)
* though I'd have supposed under 40 would be nearer the mark?
** à la https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars
Just did a 16 day passage on a yacht which had starlink but limited to 1 hour a day (it's very expensive offshore) and found that my appalling all day every day habit is comfortably compressed into that, or less. So I would be happy with the government turning it off 23/7.
Your yacht trip sounds fascinating. Could you provide more details such as whether and how much company you had on board, whether you stopped at ports or remaines at sea, and where, geographically, this trip took place?
Galapagos to Marquesas islands (non stop, there is nothing in between). 8 of us on a comfortable 62 foot boat.
I'm not sure the context outside what was presented in the article, but I think it's really hard to separate 'pathological' Internet use from ordinary use. I'm in front of my computer and phone most of the day for personal and professional reasons, work and leisure. It's today's everything portal. Also, the number of screen hours listed seem comparable to amounts of time Americans watched TV in the pre-interent era based on numbers that were reported in periodic surveys.
Your mental space at the time of responding to the survey will also have an impact on your perception of internet use. I don't think I spend more time online when I feel down, but my internet diet is drastically different to "baseline me" and that translates into lower satisfaction levels across the board, including the internet use. I'm also more likely to say I'm addicted to it in those moments – baseline me is perfectly fine with the time he spends online, and generalizes that immediate feeling to his entire relationship with online content.
A fascinating point highlighted in this post is how many people would give total freedom to their 16 year-old with regards to time spent online. I imagine such a free range attitude would also extent to their online diet (i.e. not invading their privacy by checking what they're actually doing on there). I personally can't fathom that level of freedom for a 16 year-old. There's no inherent vice to spending any amount of time online, the crux of the problem is how you're spending that time and what you're consuming. Predatorial attention algorithms create echo chambers and push kids towards toxic communities way too early for them to make sense of their toxicity (since they spend >8 hours a day within them, they don't really have a working model of "normality" outside of their algorithmically driven bubbles). I could go on forever on this topic, but I was very surprised at the survey results on that front.
Scott, next time you do a survey in internet use, maybe you could get a more granular understanding by asking about how much time online was spent intentionally (I'm going to watch, read, THIS) vs unintentionally (scroll scroll, check messages. autoplay next).
This is just casual eyeballing, but it looks as though parental policies on internet use don't have huge effects on later internet addiction.
I very much doubt Internet addiction is a thing. The large majority of "addictions" aren't proper ones.
How do you define addiction? For the 27% of people who would accept the nanny state offer, it seems like they're doing something that they would rather not do and think their lives would be improved if they stopped. What would you add to this to make it qualify as an "addiction"?
Years ago, for a book published by Steve Jackson Games, I enriched their future history setting with the Ataractic Movement, a group of people who believed that chemical reward as such was pathological and should be minimized as far as possible. In their view anything that caused the release of chemically rewarding neurotransmitters amounted to an addiction: It was a source of craving in something like the Buddhist sense. I think that might be a value-neutral definition of addiction, if such a thing can exist.
Some alcoholics, for example, will have seizures if they don’t get alcohol. Internet “addicts”, on the other hand, will not have anything bad happen to them if they can’t their daily Internet.
You're talking about withdrawal, not addiction. Many non-addictive substances have withdrawal syndromes (eg SSRIs, aspirin) and many addictions have pretty minimal withdrawals (eg marijuana, gambling). This is just a natural consequence of most drugs based on how receptors work.
A lot of the time, people do things they like but which have poor long-term consequences. The possible causes are obvious - lack of willpower, bias towards the current situation, and so on. Afterward they wish they hadn't.
Is this inherently addiction? I wouldn't say so.
Let's say, purely hypothetically, that I slack off more than would be optimal for long-term outcomes, especially compared to spending the time in exercise. Am I addicted to slacking off? No, clearly not - it's just a choice I make in the present (probably a poor one). A _lot_ of addictions seem to be about such things - shopping addiction, sex addiction, internet addiction, gaming addiction (gambling addiction really does seem to different, though), chocolate addiction... sure you can make a mess of your life that way, but it seems fundamentally different from being hooked on heroin or being an alcoholic.
Some other things described as addictions seem to be compulsions instead, which is of course bad but in a different way. If you can't stop biting your nails, it's not that you're _addicted_ to biting your nails, it's that there's some compulsive behaviour going on.
I imagine you would also disqualify most things from this reality show from actual addictions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Strange_Addiction
What would it mean for someone to have an Internet addiction? I'd say that the behaviour has to be compulsive in some way, not just that you wish tomorrow that you had done something more productive today. It probably has to have some pretty severe outcomes on their life (although since much of that could be in the future, it makes things trickier). If someone is locked inside browsing Twitter 18 hours per day and lost work and family over it, and is getting panic attacks whenever parted from it, that would certainly seem to qualify. This clearly is neither 27% nor people who wish that they could perhaps halve their internet use.
I would like an external force that motivates me to go to the gym more but that doesn't mean that I'm addicted to not going to the gym.
The clinical definition of addiction, according to my many years of listening to Loveline with Dr Drew, is continued or increasing use in the face of negative consequences. The problem with internet addiction is that many of the negative consequences (decreased socialization, less time reading, less exercise, etc) are hard to distinguish from normal lifestyle choices, or even generic lack of discipline. If I surfed the internet yesterday instead of going to the gym does that mean I'm an internet addict or does it just mean that I'm lazy? Not every deficit of executive function is attributable to addiction and I don't think it's socially useful to have a low bar for demonizing certain behaviors as addictive because that tends to enable victimization narratives. ("Oh no, I'm an addict! Now I CAN'T quit!")
As a side note, I don't think not doing something or avoiding doing something can easily be framed as addiction. Even if the opportunity cost of not doing something else was high, that doesn't easily translate towards the current activity being addictive in the assumed absence of other factors of addictive behavior (see my other comments for examples).
In the case of avoidance producing increasingly negative results, more useful way of thinking would likely still be an anxiety disorder (which have avoidance behaviors as a key symptom).
That said, I'm not sure how to interpret the rest of your comment - are you suggesting Internet addiction does not exist? Or are you just saying you personally don't think you suffer from it?
I do agree that psych labels seem to be overused to describe behavior within the range of "normal" or mostly functional limits.
I don't have a strong opinion on whether internet addiction specifically exists (I'm definitely not an addict) but I'm generally opposed to categorizing non-substance-involved behaviors as addictions. There are exceptions (gambling being the most obvious) but on a social level I think it's bad policy to medicalize bad choices. On net those sorts of labels tend to enable the behaviors ("It's not his fault he's an addict."). I think society needs a healthy dose of holding people responsible for their actions ("You're making bad choices and that makes you bad. Stop it.").
What would your definition of addiction be?
I would say a habit that one cannot control, used to suppress or not experience negative feelings.
Maybe it is the wrong word, but I call my self internet addicted because I am using it more then I want to ( many hours every day, and this basically for entertainment. My entertainment is mainly intellectual, but still it is entertainment). My use is mainly passive. I can't control it, and it affects my mood and self image in a negative way. When I stop scrolling, I experience uncomfortable feelings and want to start again immediately to get rid of that feeling. Also, when I occasionally feel really good, it is easy not to use the internet, which makes sense because then I don't have to get a way from negative feelings.
Thanks for this!
Including standard errors for estimates of the mean it's relatively easy and really helps interpret the results.
I am confused. You say:
"This is pretty funny! People whose parents put no restrictions on them as a child use the Internet most, but are least likely to consider themselves addicted"
But then at the end you say:
"People whose parents restricted their screen time as children are less likely to be Internet addicts as adults"
Are you assuming that self-reported 'are you addicted' is meaningless but self-reported 'amount of time spent' is a good tracker of addiction? That seems strange.
Yes. Compare to a question like "are you a bad person?" This might load on actual bad-person-ness, but also on guilt, and good people are more likely to be guilty (eg a true psychopath doesn't care and feels fine about themselves).
In the same way, "are you addicted" loads on a combination of high Internet use and some sort of restraint or unhappiness about it. These go in different directions, whereas just measuring screen time feels safer (although I suppose it doesn't catch that some screen time might be worse than others).
There's decent evidence that having your food restricted when you're young can contribute to eating disorders when you're older. So it's not totally odd to think that "free-feeding" on the Internet would lead to less compulsive behavior later.
My screen time is astronomical. If I’m ever taking a walk, I’ll be listening to an audiobook, if I’m ever taking a break from work, I’m either on my phone, or sometimes reading a book.
My job is 90% online too, so I easily spend 8-10 hours a day on the internet or otherwise consuming content.
No idea what the effect is on my life. I’m quite happy and have positive relationships, and don’t feel that I’m addicted to the internet. I have prevented myself from consuming many sorts of internet content though (no short form, almost nothing that’s a complete waste of time, etc.), so maybe that’s part of it.
I'm not sure all of that counts as Internet addiction. I spend a good part of my time looking at this screen. But part of it is reading ebooks that I've downloaded; part of it specifically is reading rpg books and planning campaigns. This discussion may be confounded several different things: looking at monitor screens, interaction with remote electronic devices, and interacting with people via electronic connects may be phenomenologically distinct.
It would seem super strange to me to differentiate to you listening to a (streaming? or at least requiring an internet connection?) audiobook on the phone, and me listening to one on the HDD of my ancient iPod. It's a minor difference in technological delivery.
Yet one is "using the Internet" fopr hours count and the other isn't.
Same thing with TV vs. YouTube - what difference does it make, really?
I nodded approvingly at "people's parents' ". But then you blew it with "childrens'/teens' ".
I don't have any idea what you mean by either part of this comment.
Look at those apostrophes, Scott!
I think they're commenting on the positions of the apostrophes.
> ...most successful in life - income above 200K and...
Oof. Are you really going to use high income as a proxy for "most successful in life"? I recommend you avoid that temptation.
...nice cut off of the quote to exclude the non-financial criteria.
Yes, I think making lots of money is one measurable proxy for the sort of success that comes from not being Internet addicted, along with the other proxy (life satisfaction) that you cut off.
I wasn't trying to be deceptive, but was just trimming the quote to the part I was commenting about (thus the "and..." at the end and the "a" in "a proxy").
Imagine someone saying "I also took a closer look at the subgroup who are most successful in life - in successful monogamous relationships and life satisfaction above 7/10." Wouldn't you find the "in successful monogamous relationships" to be worth objecting to on its own?
No, successful relationships also seem like an important proxy for life success. I'm not trying to make a deep philosophical statement here, just find things on the survey that make me think somebody's doing okay and hasn't ruined their life spending every hour of the day on TikTok.
Dang, I was really hoping that this would be a deep dive into the internet addition literature.
I also have a young child, and am very internet addicted (I've had to delete all my social media apps or outright delete my accounts) and would like an answer on this. On the one hand I intend to keep screens away from him as much as possible, on the other hand... I'm always looking at a screen. Hoping that I can give home a voice-only chatbot to talk to as a screenless alternative when he's a bit older.
What specific question would you like an answer to?
Basically I'd like to hear another well-informed person's opinion on the reliability of Jonathan Haidt's work around the mental health harms of smart phone usage, particular as it pertains to ADHD (which is pervasive in my family).
My initial impression was that he makes an extremely strong argument for the casual link between smart phones and mental health issues, but more recently I've been seeing a lot of claims to the contrary.
Basically: "If I know that my child is genetically predisposed to developing ADHD, what steps can I take to help mitigate it, and how much of an effect will keeping high-throughput stimuli like smartphones/videogames/television away from them help, and at what ages should this help be concentrated?"
There isn't great evidence of a causal link between smartphones or social media and mental health outcomes, mostly because the experimental studies that have been done are often quite low powered or have methodological issues. Right now, for example, Haidt is arguing that experiments have to track outcomes past 3 weeks of abstinence to allow withdrawal symptoms (which can sometimes be quite intense!) to subside.
I personally have a pretty high prior on large amounts of screen based entertainment being damaging, partly because of it's affects on attention. I found my ability to concentrate and work on more boring tasks to get significantly better once I successfully cut back on my screen time.
Maybe you could start by getting a handle on your own internet addiction to see how it affects your ADHD type symptoms?
If you're interested, here are 21 stories of people who claim that their ability to pay attention, or get less distracted, got much better after cutting down on screentime: https://internot.tools/successes/?category=ben&tag=ben-better-attention
https://petergray.substack.com/p/45-the-importance-of-critical-analyses
Critique of Jonathan Haidt's thesis on social media by professor of psychology Peter Gray. He disagrees emphatically.
Recommended listening:
https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-25-is-it-the-phones
Or reading:
https://www.freethink.com/internet/confusing-debate-on-social-media-and-mental-health
“If you are looking at the results from a statistical analysis, and those results tell you that screens are worse for you than heroin, then either we’ve got the debate around screen time very wrong, or I would gently suggest that you’ve borked your analysis.”
The Haidt position is super weak and has almost no evidence. It seems based on crummy statistical anlysis.
How *do* y'all spend your screen time exactly?
read bibel and scot
Watching videogames on Youtube/Twitch and arguing with commenters here. Occasionally movies.
Reading MR and Substacks and listening/watching YT, mainly stuff about history and politics.
Per day, about 3 hours writing code and answering people's questions about my code, 1 hour here or reading other articles, 3-6 hours procrastinating on writing code with discord or solitaire, and a highly variable amount of time (maybe 2 hr/week) playing computer games. Trying to increase the last one and decrease the second-from-last.
Desktops vs smart phones made internet "addiction" feel very different to me, and look very different to others as well. When I only had public computers at school labs to use in college, the first thing I did was find guides to learn html and java and create web pages. I used email listservs to read articles, or news readers to goof off reading giant crazy theories about how Wheel of Time would end. When I finally got my own computer with unlimited internet in law school, I spent a lot of time playing Diablo 2 and browsing the SA forums, but still most of it was finding articles to read about politics or music or history, I just used it as a substitute for the fact that magazines only came out once a month. I don't feel like that was any worse than being "addicted" to sitting in the library and reading magazines.
And when you were done, you got up from your chair, and that was it. The internet was over there, in the other room, and you're finished with it. It was discrete sessions of usage. There was a feeling of disengaging when you got up from the computer that isn't there anymore with smart phones. Every time there's a 60 second break in your life, the phone is there, you can waste 60 seconds on twitter. I still try to use it mostly like I'm carrying around a bunch of magazines, and I don't do video which helps, but the ratio of good to bad media consumed on there has gotten worse.
>if a perfect nanny state offered to magically limit your Internet use with zero downside, would you accept?
>I think acceptance/rejection ended up loading more on ideas of dignity and whether you trust even a perfect benevolent nanny state to make decisions for you.
Why do people always use the government for metaphors like this? It could just be a program on all your devices.
Because you can turn off or circumvent the program. You can't turn off the government.
If theres a perfect state you cant circumvent, then why not a perfect program? I hear that apple is quite good at making programs normies cant turn off.
no matter how good the program you could always go out and buy a new phone.
What could stop you from buying a new phone? Pretty much only the government.
>What could stop you from buying a new phone?
Cost, and at least half an hours delay before you get to use it making it not worth.
I have a short anecdote on this topic. Recently, my smartphone broke. Initially, I panicked. Many of us, myself included, have come to depend on our phones for so much in our day-to-day lives: GPS, digital wallets, messaging, two-factor authentication, alarms and timers, and so on. I rushed to buy a replacement the same day, but, for whatever reason, I didn’t open the box (one reason: a new smartphone is quite expensive, and I wanted to keep the option of returning the new one and buying a second-hand phone instead). Over the course of the next couple of days, I was phone-less and… it was great. I realized that I actually wasn’t nearly as dependent on my phone as I thought (for example: GPS and turn-by-turn directions are useful, but it’s really not that hard to find your way around without them).
The main improvement in my life without a phone was that, if I had a couple minutes of downtime (waiting in line for something, etc.) I wouldn’t be able to pull out my phone and start mindlessly scrolling. My biggest vice previously was Twitter/X and reading political articles and analysis. I was a victim to Twitter’s outrage-optimizing algorithm. I would find myself drawn in to reading online arguments that would just make me mad. This wasn’t improving my life or making me feel better, but nonetheless I found myself spending time engaging. Without a phone, if I was waiting in line for something outside, I would use the couple of minutes to look around and enjoy the scenery rather than burying my face in my smartphone. If I got bored, I would consciously find an interesting topic to think about rather than let an engagement-optimizing algorithm decide for me what to think about. Within only a couple of days, my ingrained habit of reaching for my phone during a moment of boredom was gone.
I did end up buying a second-hand smartphone, but since this experience I have managed to avoid relapsing into my previous habits. (To be clear, I wasn’t even an outlier in terms of phone usage—my screen time used to be about 2 hours per day total, which was well within the range of typical usage). These days, I aim for under 10 minutes of phone screen time per day (completely eliminating the phone, while not impossible, is impractical, and there aren’t big downsides to using it for almost essential things like 2FA). To help with this, it’s been really useful to silence all notifications and get rid of the red badges on app icons. Seeing a red badge for an unread notification would cause me to feel almost a compulsion to open the app. It’s really easy to turn them off altogether, and then the urge is gone.
I did notice a bit of a substitution effect: in order to keep my phone usage down, I would sometimes use the computer instead. Of course, if the phone internet usage is completely replaced with computer internet usage, there isn’t going to be a big benefit. Eventually, I decided to use an app on my computer to block access to my most frequently accessed news and social media websites. The app is helpful because, over time, I had developed a habit of opening a new tab with a social media website without even thinking, and so it was hard to stop just through force of will. Thus far, the experiment is successful: I spend way less time browsing news and social media websites (regarding news, we really don’t need to be kept up-to-date on everything that’s happening on an hourly basis—we can be still be well-informed while reading much less news much less frequently), and feel like it’s made a positive impact on my life. If anyone else feels like phone/internet/news/social media is having a negative impact on their life, I would encourage them to try something similar: you really don’t need your phone as much as you think you do, and it’s possible to greatly reduce screen time without having negative impacts on other parts of your life. Having the willpower to stop can be a problem (as with any addiction), but I found blocker apps to be effective for me at least.
Less than 4% of parents in Germany admitted to giving their 6 years olds more than 2 hours screen time*. Good to see ACX-readers being more honest. (*When school admin asked them.)
I have kids that have recently finished school. When they were in high-school the only internet restriction we had was the following. At my bed time (around 10pm) I would turn off the power to the router/wifi and turn it on again around 7am. During this time no one in the house had internet access except using data on their phones. My kids' mobile plans at the time didn't include much data (about one hour per day usage).
The goal was just to help them get a good night's sleep. The fact that it applied to parents as well made them more accepting of the restriction (and to be honest definitely had benefits for my wife and I as well - nevertheless we still abandoned the rule as soon as the youngest finished high-school).
We tried things like x hours a day briefly but it lead to constant arguments about exceptions (e.g. "sure I've been watching Netflix for hours and used all my online time but I need to do homework now and need the internet again") and was just a pain to manage. I briefly tried MAC address filtering but they quickly figured out how to change MAC addresses in software. I just needed something that was simple and could get buy-in so ended up with the above.
>People whose parents restricted their screen time as children are less likely to be Internet addicts as adults.
Correct me if I've missed something, but this conclusion doesn't follow the data. If anything, based on the actual data, the conclusion should be the opposite! To review:
Addiction rating:
No Internet: 3.24
Limited Internet: 3.23
Free Internet: 3.04
Now, I assume that Scott is using actual usage as a sort of "revealed preference" of addiction:
Usage:
No Internet: 4.4h
Limited Internet: 4.3h
Free Internet: 4.9h
But I would strongly argue that this is bad practice! First off, you're ignoring inconvenient data that measures the actual thing you're talking about, and substituting second-order data that's correlated. But usage does not equal addiction! Someone dutifully taking their Adderall meds isn't considered to have a stimulant addiction, same as someone regularly taking a moderate-but-stable does opiates to manage pain. Scott as written about this exact thing before: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudoaddiction/
And beyond that, we can't conclude that usage is addiction in the first place - the delta in usage could be from usage that contributes to their life satisfaction - e.g. they could be watching youtube or netflix on the couch with their partner. Hell, their partner could *be* on the internet.
Not helpful late in the game, but when I'm doing extended family child care, the separating point is "Can they safely see porn/isis decapitating a guy", where below that point they get semi-unlimited internet use but I have to be in the room, extremely limited whitelist use if I'm not in the room.
If they are above that point they get mostly unlimited use if they do some amount of enrichment activity (cook dinner, play a musical instrument, read a paper book, garden a bit, etc.) that varies constantly so it doesn't become a reward response thing.
At that point we trust them to figure it out; it's not like you can really stop technically savvy people from getting on the internet without living in a radio quite zone.
I'm quite addicted to the internet, and have had a difficult time trying to find good information on how to get unstuck.
The scientific literature on internet addiction treatment seems to be pretty limited to just therapy and medication, both of which I've tried unsuccessfully.
I thought maybe the best available information on treating internet addiction could be found in stories from people who successfully did so. So I combed through ALL of the posts on reddit/r/nosurf for stories of people who successfully cut back their screen time, collected data on all the stories, and wrote up my analysis.
Here's my post on reddit the project: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/1gevzqy/160_success_stories_and_what_they_can_tell_us/
The stories themselves are compelling examples of how bad it can get to be severely addicted, and how much better life can be when quitting.
Psychologist here. What’s helpful is a specific form of therapy. Not the
what-was-your-mother-like kind, and not the what-were-your-stresses-this-week kind, but one using cognitive and behavior techniques geared to breaking habitS.
I've got no doubt that there is therapy that helps with internet addiction. That's what all the studies demonstrate.
But there are a few problems with the research focusing almost exclusively on therapy (and medication). For one thing... most people won't do therapy for many reasons. Stigma, cost, time, lack of access, inability to find someone who takes your insurance.
Also, I've seen many therapists for this and couldn't find a single one who: took my insurance, had any real understanding of internet addiction, and had openings for new clients.
So what I went looking for were more practical suggestions that people could perform on their own without the help of a therapist.
Make a plan for how you're going to go about reducing internet use. A characteristic of successful plans is that they involve commitments to helper activities -- i.e., things that, if you do them, improve your chances of succeeding at the main goal, reducing internet time. Examples:
-Make it an ongoing practice to read success stories.
-Find or start a peer group of people who take overcoming the habit seriously and are doing decently.
-Search for activities that get you out of the house. Actively go to them and try them. Any that are decent, commit to going to them regularly.
-Look for experiences that are powerful and good enough to really tweak your head. Week of meditation practice? Psychedelic retreat? NOLS course? Use the tweak to up your level of seriousness and optimism.
-Identify the times, places, situations where it is hardest to stay off computer, and have multiple plans and helper activities for getting through those successfully.
-Get helper activities up and running before you throw yourself into internet reduction.
-Use Beeminder or some such to track your follow-through on helper activities.
-When actively reducing internet use, avoid framing any plans as "I'm going to try to reduce it by X hrs/day." No "I'll try." Instead, pick something you believe you can succeed at, even if it is a very small time reduction, and then commit to doing it come hell or high water. Obviously you may fail sometimes, but the "I'll try" way of thinking of it is bad because what it translates into is "When I am supposed to get off the computer, acc/to my plan, I will introspect to see whether I am up to doing it. If I feel up to it I will do it." So you are putting your subjective state, your craving, in charge. That is the structure of addition: craving is in charge. You want your plan to be in charge. So make plans that are modest enough that it is reasonable to expect yourself to just power through and do them regardless of how you feel.
-As for ways to actually block getting on internet, once you are doing that, there are many. Content blockers, time safes, etc. But the things I said earlier are crucial. I wish you well on this.
Thanks for the lengthy write up of advice. I think most of it is quite good.
I'm sorry if you thought I was specifically asking for that though. When I said "I went looking for were more practical suggestions..." I was describing my motivation for doing my study.
Oh, I wouldn't have replied at length unless I felt like it, even if you had asked me to urgently and directly. I enjoy opportunities to do something quick that could be quite helpful. Also I think I was motivated to do it because there is a lot of shrink-bashing on here, most of which I actually agree with, but I want people to know that there actually are pretty effective treatment approaches for a lot of common problems, and there are professionals who use them.
Later edit: so I looked at your Reddit post, which I had not done before writing mine, and I think yours is quite good too. So I think that puts you in a good position to design a plan for yourself -- or maybe you already have.
One further miscellaneous tip, which I did not mention, though maybe you did in your write-up and I missed it: Alcohol & cannabis both reduce inhibition, and are your enemy when you are trying to put a plan, rather than your cravings, in charge. So look for ways to confine getting high to times when use of the internet is not possible.
Would be interested to hear how all this works out, both your personal attempt and also your info-gathering. You're welcome to DM me if you like.
The types of parenting strategies you are able to execute on a kid depends a lot on the kid.
My mother came from a family of difficult people, and she desired to escape that by having a normal nuclear family with normal parenting strategies. However, it turns out that (from when I was a kid) I was a lot like the aforementioned men in her family: very intelligent, very rebellious, high functioning on the autism spectrum, and fairly self-absorbed. A lot of friction ensued. Her template was mostly thrown away, and a lot of improvisation was required.
Most people who are able to execute really rigid, strict, and consistent parenting strategies (like being able to put a hard consistent cap on daily internet usage without it being circumvented or severe negative externalities) come from families of people who are reasonably family-oriented, agreeable, and deferential to authority.
Outside of LaVar Ball and Laszlo Polgar type parents who groom their kids to be child prodigies in some specialty in a way that doesn't burn them out or foster resentment, most of parenting comes down to who the kid is.
If my body could take it I feel like I would be online 8-12 hours. Sadly its not very physically healthy. The Internet has all the best entertainment. It has most possibly friends. It's the best source of knowledge
The rational amount feels like it should be higher than four. At least assuming your eyes and neck can handle it.
My screen time statistics say that I spent 13 to 14 hours per day online.
For my little sister, it’s 15 to 16 hours per day online.
"Average time online for the whole sample was 4 hours. Average “screen time”, including TV and video games, was 5.5 hours."
I have high credence that the survey respondents are underestimating both of these numbers. Dunno how this should inform your parenting strategy though.
Maybe they're leaving out screen time during work hours (e.g programmers, zoom meetings).
I do not consider myself to be Internet addicted. Most of the things I do online are quite interesting and important to me. There’s not much mindless scrolling followed by regret. But even so I am not happy about the Internet’s effect on me. It does something to my attention. Whenever I go thru a period of unusually heavy internet use I find afterwards that it is difficult to read a book. It feels too slow, too restrictive — sort of limited and boring. Takes me a day to readjust to a form of information and entertainment that does not allow me to quickly leave to check email, to look up something I’m curious about, etc. And I had been a heavy book reader for quite a long time before I encountered the Internet. I think the effect on the attentional habits of people who grow up with Internet on tap must be immense.
This is great!
"I am more confident in time spent online as really measuring something objective."
I would be more confident in that too, but this survey didn't measure time spent online, it measured how much people thought they spent time online. Like you point out with other similar issues, you could imagine this affecting things in lots of little ways . Maybe unhappy people perceive a similar actual amount of time spent on the internet as longer (or shorter). Maybe people with time restrictions as kids are better/worse at estimating how much time they spend on the internet (or consistently over/under-estimate how much time they spend). Etc.
But still, nitpicking aside, this is great!
There are similar apps to the “benevolent government”. These apps allow you to set a blocklist for selected times. For instance, an app called SelfControl makes it so that blocked content cannot be accessed without reinstalling macOS.
This works by making the undesirable action difficult, aligning with the “response” step in the “cue, craving, response, reward” framework from “Atomic Habits.”
On the other hand, there are apps designed to decrease distractions by removing the cue for distraction.
For example, consider the app “Untrap.” It lets you customize what you see on YouTube. For instance, it can remove related videos, reducing the likelihood of getting “sucked in.”
However, this is different because, although related videos can be distracting, people aren’t actively seeking them out as much as they use the internet for entertainment. In other words, this app is effective because it removes the cue. If the cue for related videos isn’t there, then there is little desire to seek out related videos. Therefore, the fact that you can disable the app does not undermine its purpose.
https://www.pluckeye.net/ is great aswell
A distinction should be made between "Addiction" & "Dependence" and too many studies fail to do so .
I forgot the survey questions, but did you separate social media from The Rest of the Internet at all in any form or question?
------
As to causality, obviously only one data point (mine) but re "less satisfied people spend more time online" seems to be EXTREMELY unidirectional mechanism for me. The days and periods when I spend more time online (could be significantly more than 6 hours) are the days (and periods) where I'm more miserable, less productive, less social and overall less happy AND less satisfied with my life -- either because of external circumstances (winter or other shit weather, no study or work tasks) or personal practical setbacks (no money, car broke down, injured foot, etc) or mental dips (anxiety spiking, difficult dates with sorta flashbacks etc). Onlineness that's not related to work or study is what I do in big quantities to fill in "holes" or to escape to from being totally skint, lassitude-tinged-bored, alone and lonely, scared or sad. Otherwise couple of hours is absolutely sufficient (and I don't watch TV-as-tv at all).
I'd not want a magic nanny to take it away from me because THE ALTERNATIVES ARE WORSE!
It has a good title. https://papalouie.io