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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

I too feel exactly this way with almost everything. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Email, Messages ... it's kind of tough to escape. Impossible even.

And here's the worst part: We grew up with this shit. My generation was one of the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit. That means we'll never escape. Ever. We're literally wired to seek approval of strangers on the internet instead of the people around us. It feels more ... correct? Real? True?

That red circle with a number literally gives more enjoyment than a close friend saying "Heh that's cool". The worst part is that there's likely no cure. Rehab, maybe. But rehab for this shit doesn't exist yet.

Plus try explaining to your boss that you're not reading email and slack and you're never coming back because you're in notification rehab.

Simon Sinek explains it perfectly: https://youtu.be/hER0Qp6QJNU?t=195

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I watched the video and the speaker spends a great deal of time making some very elegant (if somewhat obvious) points. But then at the end he comes to the wrong conclusion, Imo. He blames the corporations where millennials work and passes the responsibility for fixing their attention/relationship deficits off to them! This is totally backwards.

Every generation has their dopamine hits. Of course, as society creates more leisure time, the number and (arguably) complexity of these increase. That is the trend. But, as always, the responsibility should be squarely on your own shoulders! You were not "dealt a bad hand." If that's a truth, then everyone ever born was dealt a bad hand. If being born at the time when the length and quality of life (health-wise) is at its longest, then deal me in! There are many, many benefits to being born in this time and as always, it is up to us to find the life we want and the balance we need.

> He blames the corporations where millennials work and passes the responsibility for fixing their attention/relationship deficits off to them! This is totally backwards.

He does blames them, but only as part of his point, not as the whole conclusion. He blames the corporations for focusing on reductive, short-term metrics† instead of people, which is precisely what's lead to this[0] and that[1] abusive situations. As a company you're not hiring robots, you're hiring people.

> Every generation has their dopamine hits.

Indeed it has. The trouble starts when it reaches such heights, recurrence and omnipresence that it throws whole lives off balance.

> If being born at the time when the length and quality of life (health-wise) is at its longest, then deal me in! There are many, many benefits to being born in this time and as alway

Strawman. Life expectancy does not invalidate the new challenges we have to face. If anything, with modern discoveries about happiness vs hardship, people may literally have been happier in spite of such matters (shocking!). I'm suddenly reminded of Gladia's tirade in Robots and Empire: would you rather live a long, dull, purposeless life endlessly being bored to no end or a shorter life full of brilliance? But we digress.

> it is up to us to find the life we want and the balance we need

This is the kind of attitude that reviles me. You can't blame someone for becoming alcoholic/depressive/etc. If you do then you don't understand what those are: illnesses. Nobody breaks his leg or catches a flu on purpose. If a company refuses to take such humane matters into consideration then you're just a tool and it's parasitically just sucking onto you till you're dry. When you're in situations of illnesses, all the good will of the person is not sufficient: help is needed, from everywhere it can come[2].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14703661

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14711621

[2]: https://medium.com/@OlarkLiveChat/its-2017-and-mental-health...

† ironically, themselves being addicted to that very same dopamine (or rather its ethereal corporate equivalent) rush.

>This is the kind of attitude that reviles me. You can't blame someone for becoming alcoholic/depressive/etc. If you do then you don't understand what those are: illnesses.

Waaaait a minute. This is another strawman. My comment did not blame illnesses on the individual. But I think we need to define carefully what an illness is. I don't doubt alcoholism is an illness, but I would reasonable argue that browsing Facebook on your phone is not an illness. Do you really believe that? I don't. There may be people at the far end of that spectrum that cannot help themselves, but there are plenty of others that are just bored.

> My generation was one of the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit. That means we'll never escape. Ever. We're literally wired to seek approval of strangers on the internet instead of the people around us. It feels more ... correct? Real? True?

I don't think that's really true. I'm about your age, and you were ~20 when the iPhone came out, right? Facebook was just settling in as the tool of choice for every college student, but even then it was mainly just photo-sharing and event-planning. The fact that we missed out on social networking in our entire teenage and preteen years means that we narrowly escaped this.

If you spend any time around people a bit younger than us, the contrast is particularly stark. My cousins are about a decade younger than me (just started college), and throughout high school, Snapchat/Twitter/etc were simply a must-have. The amount of time they spent sharing content and scrolling through others is insane, and if you talk to them about it, they're very aware that it's somewhere between a chore, an addiction, and good ol' fun.

That's the kind of "hardwired into your formative social years" thing that we never really had to deal with.

Impossible is hard to square with the people in this thread (myself included) that did it.

You don't have to tell your boss you're not reading notifications. You just have to eliminate the notifications that serve no purpose except a high. Facebook still spams my email; it's filtered to the trash. Business carries on.

"You can totally quit heroin! Just stop taking it"

"Oh and if all your friends are doing it and are wondering why you're not having fun with them, just ignore them"

Sure you've quit Facebook. But did you quit dopamine-seeking technology use?

What I've found in myself is that when I pry myself away from Facebook, I spend more time on Twitter. When I pry myself off that as well, suddenly my HN engagement goes up. When I manage to ignore all those, then I check Slack every 2 minutes. If I avoid even that, then I refresh my email all the time.

The medium isn't the problem. The behavior is the problem. There's always another medium you can switch to.

I mean, it's not like I was on Facebook when I got hooked to social media at 14, 15, 16. I was on internet forums and MSN Messenger. The draw was and still is that it broadened my horizons, exposed me to different people, and sometimes I learned really useful things. Hell, it helped me build my entire career.

> "You can totally quit heroin! Just stop taking it" "Oh and if all your friends are doing it and are wondering why you're not having fun with them, just ignore them"

The heroin analogy is lazy and irrelevant. The reason people say stuff like "try doing X to quit or cut down" is that, unlike heroin, a fairly large chunk of people who've recognized the problem have been pretty able to easily cut down or stop their "dopamine addiction" to the level that they're comfortable with.

If heroin had such a high success rate from going cold turkey, you can be damn sure that people would be saying "try going cold turkey" or "try this specific path to quitting", because it's worked for so many others. There are successful suggestions on this thread that amount to "I deleted my dealer's number from my phone and poof problem gone".

That isn't to say that these will definitely work for everyone: some people have a more severe problem when it comes to their relationship to dopamine. But it's awfully self-centered to complain about people talking about things that have been successful for them and others.

The question isn't does it work, it's how long does it work for.

For example, diets work. But most have a fall-off-the-wagon rate in the couple of months range.

It's definitely easy to quit a social media platform cold turkey. The hard part is quitting social media. I have yet to see anyone who's actually quit social media as a whole (yes that def includes email and texting) and kept with it for more than a month.

Social media addiction in the modern world is a lot like food addiction. Sure you're addicted, but you still gotta eat or you die. Sure you're addicted, but without social media you can't be a functioning member of current society.

Hell, I had one of those "I quit the internet" articles on the frontpage of HackerNews a few years ago. You know what happened? I quit all social media, but I needed access to Github to do my work. So I started friending people and being all social media on Github.

[1] https://swizec.com/blog/my-ideas-are-shitty-so-im-going-on-a... [2] https://swizec.com/blog/the-end-of-my-internet-diet-experime...

> The question isn't does it work, it's how long does it work for. For example, diets work. But most have a fall-off-the-wagon rate in the couple of months range.

Off the top of my head, I have a friend who have been off of Facebook for 9 years, another for 7, and another who never made an account at all. These are all healthy, happy people with robust social lives: their friends just know they need to be texted to be looped into plans. I know still more people (myself included) who have always had a healthy relationship with social media: short periods of "maybe I'm mindlessly browsing this a bit" followed by minor habit tweaks and straight back to a fully healthy relationship. I eat extremely healthy but every once in a while notice that I'm eating a bit of junk food (perhaps due to stress at work or something). I notice it and fix it and go back to eating extremely healthy. It would be completely inaccurate to claim that any lapse means I have an unhealthy relationship with food, and this is exactly the same as with social media et al.

> I have yet to see anyone who's actually quit social media as a whole (yes that def includes email and texting) and kept with it for more than a month.

This is a beyond-absurd definition of social media, and you're now talking about something that no one else here is talking about. The idea that there's no value in email and texting beyond dopamine addiction is frankly just insane. When I get statements from my bank, or delivery notifications from my package receipt service or laundry service, or an update that my friend wants to move our dinner date back by half an hour, am I feeding my addiction? Because your bizarre definition doesn't leave any room for responsible e-mail/text usage.

Anyone defining "communication with other people" as an addiction that needs to be killed off is battling far worse demons than social media/dopamine-hit addiction. That may be interesting in and enough of itself but it couldn't be less relevant to this thread.

You're being hyperbolic, and it diminishes your argument. Not everybody in your generation suffers from the same addiction as you. I could be persuaded it's a large problem and is generational, but I don't believe we have the same kind of biological responses to social media as we do to something like sunlight.

I also believe there is another side of the argument, and people just consume media differently today. The internet came and it was the death of media, the TV came and it was the death of books, the books came and they were the death of the bard, etc. Maybe some people actually enjoy Facebook?

Watch the video I linked. Sinek does a good job of explaining how most (many?) of us have a similar problem with social media as alcoholics do with alcohol. For much the same reasons.

Quitting dopamine-seeking is called death. Dopamine is how the brain's reward system works, and eating or parenting is dopamine-seeking just as much as any other behaviour.

It sounds like technology isn't the problem - if you're doing these things with technology you'd be doing the same things without it. Perhaps you'd be spending a lot of time chatting around the water cooler instead of online, but that's not actually any healthier or better. Facebook has brought me a lot of fun in my life - on Tuesday I went to a gig that I only found out about because a casual acquaintance posted it there, and tonight I'm meeting up with another acquaintance because I saw on Facebook we're going to the same gig. I see it as like the gold medal in Cool Runnings - if you're not enough without it, you're not going to be enough with it.

Different activities provide differing reward for differing efforts.

Water cooler chat, which requires active social engagement and is time bounded, is not as addicting as an endless stream of content accessed with a twitch of the finger. You might not use Facebook in that way, and I similarly don't find it that engaging, but I've certainly experienced it with reddit and HN.

And I don't think this is some intractable personality flaw, I think people get used to the comfort of frequent dopamine hits, and find it very difficult to drag themselves away from these sources as a result. Cold turkey can and does make a difference.

If you're talking about dopamine you're already /inside/ what makes up someone's personality. "Dopamine hits" are called being happy.

You should maybe read up about what addiction really is. What it is caused by. I think you misunderstand what is meant by "dopamine hit".

Yes dopamine is part of a loop or cycle that is a survival strategy. In a healthy individual in a healthy situation.

When this loop works properly then yes, it is called being happy (there's more things to being happy but a properly functioning dopamine loop is part of it).

Think of a dopamine release and its causes like a particular message in a protocol that runs inside our body.

Our bodies aren't perfect or tested against every possible situation.

Sometimes the combination of the dopamine protocol and the environment causes a weird feedback loop that is no longer beneficial to this survival strategy.

In most of those cases, this results in a state called an addiction. (and in that case we call the dopamine release a "dopamine hit", to emphasize the role of addiction)

Fighting this bad feedback loop can be a constant struggle. A daily, constant struggle that lasts a lifetime once you get stuck in it. If you compare that to "being happy", then I can only assume you've never experienced it (and I hope you never will, but you can still learn compassion).

Sometimes these faults are exploited on purpose, very often for the commercial purposes of the amoral corporations.

It's also the case that certain people are more susceptible to these exploits. For instance ADHD is well-known to be co-morbid with susceptibility to addiction.

Peace :)

Dopamine triggers satisfaction, not happiness. Otherwise we just fond the magic recipe for the whole world to be extremely happy! Instead it turns out that just makes everyone feel miserable.

> Otherwise we just fond the magic recipe for the whole world to be extremely happy! Instead it turns out that just makes everyone feel miserable.

What is it you're saying makes everyone feel miserable? AIUI the artificial substitute for dopamine is cocaine, which only makes people miserable when they run out (and more generally as tolerance kicks in)? Social media seems to make some people miserable, but despite how much people love to throw around "dopamine" in Internet arguments ("skinner box" is another good one) there's no scientifically demonstrated connection AFAIK.

Being happy is more of a serotonin/oxytocin thing. Or, it's not a chemical thing at all and happiness is self-determined.

> And here's the worst part: We grew up with this shit. My generation was one of the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit.

Yeah, I am only a year away, born in 1988. Our family's first home computer was put in my room when I was 6 years old and my parents were hands-off about using it, so I grew up on multi-player gaming, forums, chat rooms, porn, etc. It's difficult to express how strongly the internet shaped the direction of my life, and I'm not even as addicted as most people.

Not having a phone helps with staying off Facebook...

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