I'm becoming increasingly skeptical of the "destroying our mental health" framework that we've become obsessed with as a society. "Mental health" is so all-encompassing in its breadth (It's basically our entire subjective experience with the world) but at the same time, it's actually quite limiting in the solutions it implies, as if there's specific ailments or exercises or medications.

We're miserable because our world is bad. The mental health crisis is probably better understood as all of us being sad as we collectively and simultaneously burn the world and fill it with trash, seemingly on purpose, and we're not even having fun. The mental health framework, by converting our anger, loneliness, grief, and sadness into medicalized pathologies, stops us from understanding these feelings as valid and actionable. It leads us to seek clinical or technical fixes, like whether we should limit smart phones or whatever.

Maybe smart phones are bad for our mental health, but I think reducing our entire experience with the world into mental health is the worst thing for our mental health.

Yes

I keep saying it's not the smartphone. It's the social media people are constantly using on their smartphone.

Reading a book all day? Great!
Reading all celebrity gossip, and what your "friends" say they're doing? Not great.

Reading stuff like this all day isn't great.

Yeah...

I say as I scroll on my smartphone

Well it's definitely not the late capitalistic hellscape we endure and are forced to participate in every day while helplessly careening towards inevitable environmental destruction that's doing it. Nope! It's the phones, y'all.

Weeeellll... They're probably not helping.

It's just a tool. If there is someone who destroys your mental health it's you or sometimes other people.

Industrialization and capitalism have figured largely in an intergenerational mental health crisis. But it's so ubiquitous we think dysfunctional behavior is normal and accepable like vodka addiction in Russia.

Social media and dysfunctional smartphone behavior is yet another cope, yet another way to tolerate a stressful live forced upon us. And it's probably less harmful than other coping methods such as drinking or domestic violence.

So giving phones to kids and not parenting them enough to ensure they learn how to interact with people IRL is bad?

I thought we had kinda already come to that conclusion some years ago tbh

(Not your fault OP) Clickbaity headline

"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

Eh. Wasn't much there to destroy anyways. At least i got memes and cat pics out of the deal.

Sometimes I dream of a flip phone or regressing to using a Treo but the core services like Facetime, etc. are quite handy. I’m thinking when I get much older it’ll be easier. Still got a Palm PDA that runs on AAA’s sitting in a box waiting… but of course the year 2038(?) problem is a thing and there’s a capacitor I’ll have to replace on the board eventually. But syncing things locally sounds neat since I’m back down to one phone and one computer now.