The primary cause (in my opinion) of the youth mental health crisis and falling happiness rates was the introduction of the smart phone. Blaming social media is a clever cop out, it's the actual device and inability of people to stop looking at it.
Totally abnormal to human life. Will we adapt to it over time? Possible, but many people will be lost along the way.
> But Alexander wondered: is this about the drug or might it be related to the setting they were in? To test his hypothesis, he put rats in “rat parks,” where they were among others and free to roam and play, to socialize and to have sex. And they were given the same access to the same two types of drug laced bottles. When inhabiting a “rat park,” they remarkably preferred the plain water. Even when they did imbibe from the drug-filled bottle, they did so intermittently, not obsessively, and never overdosed. A social community beat the power of drugs.
It's possible to provide an activity that would temporarily redirect the obsession but we're talking about 24 hours. At some point the individual will resume the obsessive behavior.
I also bet that the rat park study would eventually fail given a long enough amount of time. The rats would eventually get bored of their environment and experiment with the drug filled bottle. I speculate all this of course. Can't be positive.
Which era of our history might best reflect "normal" human life?
Imagine taking a person today and forcing them to use virtual reality for the average amount of time one looks at a smartphone over a 24 hours period.
You would see an even greater loss in overall happiness, increase in mental illness etc . We're evolving much too fast. The mind can't keep up. So it falls apart.