Is screen addiction actually rotting our brains?

Thread for discussion about posting studies showing effects of excess screen time on the brain, discussing your own experience with it, things you've done to reduce screen time, or even arguing the opposite position.

How does excess time materially affect our mental faculties?

I've noticed a pronounced change with smart phones as opposed to the computer, but just curious about the group feeling before I get in detail

Yes.

Lock thread

sorry, I was going to write an answer but I have the four apps to flip between and it looked like too much bother, and actually I'm supposed to be working and shouldn't be on my phone anyway

yes

yes

yes

i've been staring at computer screens since i was a young child and my brain is completely cooked

No? Not from what I've read on social media.

my attention span is

wait what was I doing

The only way out is through.

yes. intelligence and cognitive ability are embodied and developed in physical space among other humans. too much screen time dims those things accordingly.

ewww are you implying that I have to go out and talk to people face to face???


jk, I love doing this, I'm just bad at making myself do it for some reason

my brain is more active and thoughtful than ever, which i mostly credit to the presence of estrogen, but i do try to spend significant time away from phone and computer. rarely works

yes

yes

yes

It not only rots brains w/r/t analog activities like reading, problem solving, creativity, socializing, it even (imo) makes us worse at the digital ones we used to use a computer for. Even blogs and social media and ranked lists and shit!

when was the last time you were watching a movie or show, with other people, in a theater, and somebody didn't pull out their phone halfway through?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGHUT_T0wuE

society is in the gutter.

no

when was the last time you were watching a movie or show, with other people, in a theater, and somebody didn't pull out their phone halfway through?

― 龜, Monday, July 6, 2026 4:52 PM (three minutes ago)

At home, though, my wife can't leave the phone alone for a 20-minute sitcom episode, and it drives me crazy.

this thing is way overpriced for what it is but it's been very helpful to me

Brick — Take Back Control of Your Screen Time – Brick LLC https://share.google/9iWabi3Mbx3LTk9IC

The trick is to go to a show before 11 a.m. You'll have the theater to yourself, so you can pull out your phone. Or not. It doesn't matter.

Someone pulling out a phone in cinema is still a notable exception for me - so much so I even remember the last time, it was at the Barbie film.

Went to the cinema two days ago (The Invite) and nobody took out their phone.

I guess there is also the subgenre of taking the phone out specifically to film the screen, has happened to me at bollywood stuff and a Wong Kar Wai rep screening.

I was walking behind a young dude yesterday (maybe early 20s) and he had his phone in his back pocket and he reached back there probably ten times in a city block, and patted it just to confirm it was there

The wife and kid both have ADHD and the search for scrolling dopamine hits is constant.

“You know, [wife who I love dearly and often has insomnia], they say that being on a screen right before bed makes sleep more difficult.”

“Huh…” scroll scroll scroll

She used to CONSTANTLY send me “interesting” things that she found on Instagram and I stopped looking at them and eventually quit the app. I do all the cooking and she’ll request a dish.

“Where’s the recipe?”
“Instagram.”
“I can’t see that and I don’t want to see that.”
“I typed it out!”

Looking at the recipe, it’s all fucked up with no measurements or whatever because Instagram often doesn’t have such information. So I google the name of the dish and countless actual recipes pop up. I have gently pointed out that she can simply browse recipes online or look in our many, many cookbooks that she continues to buy. And yet the thrill of finding a small reward in the river of algorithm keeps her going like a slot machine junky.

The older kid with a smart phone reads less, makes less art, and has a hard time making it through a movie. Just getting her to disengage with it is hard. We were in NYC for the first time and we’re walking around. She’s on her phone texting people (or gramming or whatever) that we are walking around NYC.

There is an intolerance to dead air, leaving no space for being with one’s thoughts.

I was walking behind a young dude yesterday (maybe early 20s) and he had his phone in his back pocket and he reached back there probably ten times in a city block, and patted it just to confirm it was there

― Andy the Grasshopper

I pat my ass because (a) I'm notorious for leaving my phone in bookstores, bars, libraries, restaurants, homes (b) I like my ass.

I agree with the other people who say it hasn't affected them as much as others.

I don't

I should bitch about myself too. That last point definitely applies to me as well. While I’ve cut out most social media, the ones I’ve stuck with I refresh often.

I know so much of it is generational. I have read physical books my entire life, the pleasure they give me is engrained. It’s easy for me to make space for that. Still, the unread books pile up. If only I read books as often as I read ILX.

The last point being an intolerance for boredom.

If I was specific about how much online Scrabble I played this weekend, you'd suggest treatment--Lost Weekend-level. And it does have a very negative effect on everyday life; generally takes me a day to re-engage with the world.

I should bitch about myself too. That last point definitely applies to me as well.

i'm absolutely at my stupidest but i don't gaf lol.

I badly need to cut down, but living alone and travelling alone a little and working from home makes the old internet quite compelling.

Have tried to just actively read and ignore my phone for longer with positive results.

Germane

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jul/06/the-one-change-that-worked-i-banned-myself-from-social-media-and-my-children-have-never-been-happier

It’s hard to say if I’m more calm/happy/grounded when I’m not looking at screens or if I’m less likely to look at screens when I’m happy/calm/grounded (bc compulsive screen use is definitely a way of coping with - though not to say helping - emotional discomfort.

But yes. Yes.

interestingly we have watched almost zero television since moving to an island, we used to do an hour a night at least.

maybe once our bandwidth improves we will watch more, but I don't see it happening.

i can't remember

I don't mind using the computer/phone as long as I'm actively choosing what I'm doing (my job and several hobbies require it), but I do go to reddit many times a day when I'm waiting for my son to change clothes or waiting for a build to finish at my job. Always like 2-10 minutes. I've curated it enough that it aligns with my interests, but it's ultimately overloading my brain with things that don't improve my life and are forgotten by the end of the day. I removed it from my home screen and really tried not to use it but found it unbearable to sit and do nothing in those 2-10 minute periods. So I'm back to using it and slightly depressed about confirming my addiction and inability to handle boredom

screen addiction has so rotted my brain that i don’t even care about any studies about it or what they prove, i already know

when i was a kid i was very smart and quick and my memory was crazy good, and i prayed to god to make me “normal” so that cool and taller kids wouldn’t make fun me of me as much, and then god was like “ok buddy” and 40 years later i can’t tell a coca cola from a coconut

I read some of the shit i wrote 10 years ago and it was much better structured and flowed logically.

I can't get out of intense editing mode now because screen time accelerated my OCD which makes me rewrite shit so much that some of my work emails have recently taken me an hour

last night I was trying to read a magazine article and but I was super tired and so just stared at my phone for awhile... I hate that I consider that some kind of 'reward' (for nothing) but that's how my brain is wired to view it

even audiobooks when driving --- i enjoy them more than podcasts, but the chatty podcast format is easier to follow so i listen.

it hasn't rotted my brain, but i don't think i'm addicted. i get bored of social media stuff pretty quickly/easily. still read books and stuff. by "rotting brain" do yall mean literally like reduced problem solving, reduced executive functioning, forgetting things?

i'm more concerned about what social media does to the heart and soul, and like, how it affects fulfillment and enjoyment and depth of engagement etc..

i remember getting slightly chewed out early on in my ilx career for bemoaning a family of four at a restaurant all sucked into their phones. the response was something like "life is hard who are you to judge". but it was sad! i like map's point about interacting with people being the core, the heart intelligence

I was a relatively late adopter of the smart phone (2016 maybe?) but I think I did fine in life with a little Nokia, after I shut down the landline... though having an okay camera in my pocket comes in handy. The rest is mostly a time-suck

by "rotting brain" do yall mean literally like reduced problem solving, reduced executive functioning, forgetting things?

For me, it's forgetting things but mainly a feeling of overload. I've been getting more frequent headaches in the last five years, which is very likely related. I don't think I have reduced problem solving or executive functioning (yet; but the more I use AI, the more that will happen)

You know how one of the knee jerk references that come up whenever a new medium is criticised is that Socrates believed books were bad because people would train their memory less if they could just write shit down?

I've been thinking - what if that's right? Obviously the trade off would be worth it, it's kinda inarguable, but with all this talk of how our current media condition our attention spans, could it be that if you were "on the ground" as it were you did notice people being less on the ball, especially as he was specifically talking about students?

Don't worry all, we turn to ashes in the end.

I believe smart phones have rotted my brain somewhat, in terms of messing up my attention span. I use a lockbox, and when I use it it feels like a holiday

I think the "dopamine" thing is real, and that chemistry affects us all to a much larger degree than we'd like to admit, but i so also think there's a natural, innate curiosity in human beings about other people, and about the world, and mobile phones are simply astonishingly great at serving up other people, and the world - people we would have no chance of meeting IRL, places we would have no chance of visiting IRL. it's INSANELY addictive, being able to just stick your hand into the river and pull out fish after fish. and i think, like anything, like vodka or chocolate cake, or jogging, you want to do it a bit, but not too much. if i do it too much my brain and nervous system get too activated and i can get migraines and struggle to wake up, etc.

I love the studies and how they are reported in the papers. You could rewrite the thread to talk about all these studies on whether drinking wine is good or bad for the heart/health too. Not saying there is nothing in this but this issue functions as panic inducing when it's put out there in the ways it currently is.

Just reading some of the posts and er, isn't it just old age? You do get more forgetful, things don't come as quickly to you. It's just a natural process.

Someone pulling out a phone in cinema is still a notable exception for me - so much so I even remember the last time, it was at the Barbie film.

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Monday, 6 July 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Went to the cinema two days ago (The Invite) and nobody took out their phone.

― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Monday, 6 July 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Most cinemas clamp down on this quite a bit now? There are more announcements beforehand and people are also fairly intolerant of that behaviour, but I only go to mostly art house fare at tiny cinemas

Should really see The Odyssey at a proper one to see how bad things are.

Plugging into the virtual world is ridiculously addictive. But I had long-standing issues with not reading enough books and spending countless hours mindlessly way before this era.

Just reading some of the posts and er, isn't it just old age? You do get more forgetful, things don't come as quickly to you. It's just a natural process.

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, July 7, 2026 4:38 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's not just old age for me. It activates certain ADHD/dopamine things for me to the extent that I will pick up the phone to check for something specific and necessary, like an email, and before I even get to that I decide I need to know what the weather is going to be tomorrow, or check a Discord conversation and I must do it right now, distracting me from actually checking for the email I think I need to know and regardless of the fact that I just checked the weather/Discord an hour ago/five minutes ago.

These are all issues I've obviously dealt with outside of the phone, but the shifting of screen time from the more delimited desk/laptop to a screen I can have in my pocket has made them worse, 100%.

I've never used a smartphone for anything other than things like seeing when the bus is coming. Almost everything I do is on my macbook. This wasn't any kind of considered decision I just never switched to phone and never picked up the phone habit.

I have a ton of screentime from working long hours on difficult things under pressure but I can't imagine brain rotting, I can't afford that to happen! I definitely get mentally fatigued but it's not from endless scrolling or similar, its from running out of brainpower usually by Thursday afternoon.

I think the "dopamine" thing is real, and that chemistry affects us all to a much larger degree than we'd like to admit, but i so also think there's a natural, innate curiosity in human beings about other people, and about the world, and mobile phones are simply astonishingly great at serving up other people, and the world - people we would have no chance of meeting IRL, places we would have no chance of visiting IRL. it's INSANELY addictive, being able to just stick your hand into the river and pull out fish after fish. and i think, like anything, like vodka or chocolate cake, or jogging, you want to do it a bit, but not too much. if i do it too much my brain and nervous system get too activated and i can get migraines and struggle to wake up, etc.

― Tracer Hand, 07 July 2026 08:31 (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes, but i also think that the disorders and behaviours covering things like ADHD et al seeing the increases they have aren't unlinked to the same source, even if there are ofc positives across it all

comrade xyz your stock answer to most things isn't "we all turn to ashes in the end/red wine is also bad for you or not who knows" and im curious, because whataboutery isn't a trait I'd have said you exhibited very often

is there a bit of the lady protesteth overmuch defensiveness, and the question isn't meant to have any sting in it, because well consider the source for starters, im not at all saying im not glued to the bloody things myself all day but i can just about admit if as long as nobody dares try to take it from me

https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,quality=80,format=auto,onerror=redirect/uploads/asset/file/ee217029-fa7f-4dad-b9db-e2d0548ef265/Screenshot_2026-07-06_at_10.04.55_AM.png

Most cinemas clamp down on this quite a bit now? There are more announcements beforehand and people are also fairly intolerant of that behaviour, but I only go to mostly art house fare at tiny cinemas

Should really see The Odyssey at a proper one to see how bad things are.

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, July 7, 2026 4:47 AM (four hours ago)

fwiw somebody getting shushed for taking their phone out at a movie still counts as someone taking their phone out

I think the "dopamine" thing is real, and that chemistry affects us all to a much larger degree than we'd like to admit, but i so also think there's a natural, innate curiosity in human beings about other people, and about the world, and mobile phones are simply astonishingly great at serving up other people, and the world - people we would have no chance of meeting IRL, places we would have no chance of visiting IRL.

Same, tracer. But that's just me, and I used to use books to escape reality + manage my okay-ness to the extent that the adults in my life (when I was young) worried about me and wanted me to put books down. I practically refused to do ANYTHING except read...school, sports, socialize, chores, go outside... and would get a little panicky/intense if reading was taken away. Talking to people on the internet is actually MORE interactive than I would probably be otherwise although I like socializing a lot more now and I can kind of hack my brain with certain amounts of stimulation so that I can concentrate on things I don't like. So I'm probably not a good baseline.

I don't think social media is melting my brain but it's bad for my productivity, to the extent that that is a thing that we should worry about. I def spend time on meedz that I would otherwise be driven to do a project or make something, or go out into the world and find something to do because I can't sit still. It's aided and abbetted by my aging body and sometimes chronic pain that makes it appealing to lie down so nothing hurts. Idk it's all of a muchness.

xp seen maybe some person being shushed for this in years. That there are notices means this has happened often enough, but there are also notices for people to be mindful of others, i.e. not talk so loudly if you are with somebody.

Darragh: the ashes stuff is a continuation from a poem I posted on another thread last week but it was also as a response to some of the 'I could do things then now not so much' and all I was saying is you are now a few years older, maybe a few decades so maybe that's a factor? It's just life.

PBKR and Darragh: points taken. Personally feel we should take a pause on saying this stuff totally cooks/rots the brain, and to just looks for affirmation in studies which are written about in a click baity fashion (a lot of the time) but feel the group has spoken.

fair

On reflection I also am feeling that my ability to be physically productive and do things in the world I live in, is currently being hampered by living in an apartment in a city when I want to be outside doing outside things. My productivity wasn't a problem when I had access to more kinds of space. I love cities and urbanism but doing physical projects takes a garage, a yard, a garden, a workshop...when these things get more complicated and there are more barriers, I do them less. (I need a community bike workshop is what I need.)

I find it hard to get mad at people for using social media when tv, including sports, including broadcast and premium channels and everything that comes through the tv through various channels, has been getting more and more cunning at hacking our brains for decades. It's all competition for our time and which side you're on depends on how you draw the lines.

https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem

This makes a lot of sense to me

Your inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking. You’re trying to sustain attention in spaces engineered to shatter it. You’re fighting algorithms explicitly optimised to keep you scrolling, not learning.

The solution isn’t discipline. It’s architecture. Build different defaults. Create different spaces. Establish different rhythms. Make depth as easy as distraction currently is. Make thinking feel as natural as scrolling currently does.

What if, instead of mourning some imaginary golden age of pure text, we got serious about designing for depth across all modes? Every video could come with a searchable transcript. Every article could offer multiple entry points for different levels of attention. Our devices could recognise when we’re trying to think and protect that thinking. Schools could teach students to translate between modes the way they once taught translation between languages.

Books aren’t going anywhere. They remain unmatched for certain kinds of sustained, complex thinking. But they’re no longer the only game in town for serious ideas. A well-crafted video essay can carry philosophical weight. A podcast can enable the kind of long-form thinking we associate with written essays. An interactive visualisation can reveal patterns that pages of description struggle to achieve.

That was absolutely written by AI

Your (x) isn’t (x). It’s (x).

The solution isn’t (x). It’s (x).

What if, instead of (x), we (x)?

This distinction matters because it changes everything

i mean i'm sorry to mock if you got something out of that essay but i find it borderline unreadable due to being written by AI. to actually address its substance, its argument seems to boil down to

if the problem is design, then we need design activism and regulatory intervention. The same screens that fragment attention can support it. The same technologies that extract human attention can cultivate it. The question is who designs them, for what purposes, and under what constraints.

and the answer is, capitalists who have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to rot our fucking brains

this is true but what do some people thirty years younger than me on X have to say? don't use x just curious

hey man i can take it if you didn't get anything out of it. no biggie. i got something out of it. the dude publishes a substack that i now see is pro AI (I guess?) so I will be a little more wary in the future.

but. . . I got the same answer you did (capitalists who have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to rot our fucking brains) so that's something.

hahaha

A podcast can enable the kind of long-form thinking we associate with written essays

This is my favourite bit

a lot of people confuse listening to a podcast with thinking tbf, not surprising an AI does too

podcasts can help people think and learn and new and different ways since it's a different modality and also there are some folks who don't think or learn as well via reading as they do via other sorts of media but i'm sure you're aware of that

some great podcasts obv, but most podcasts are just 3 of the dumbest fucking dudes you could ever meet making terrible banter

sometimes Phil Braun calls in too

i so also think there's a natural, innate curiosity in human beings about other people, and about the world, and mobile phones are simply astonishingly great at serving up other people, and the world - people we would have no chance of meeting IRL, places we would have no chance of visiting IRL. it's INSANELY addictive, being able to just stick your hand into the river and pull out fish after fish.

but you don't get fish after fish. you get fish after fish on a screen. you have no idea what a fish feels like. you don't release the fish back into the river.

i'm more concerned about what social media does to the heart and soul, and like, how it affects fulfillment and enjoyment and depth of engagement etc..

to this point, i think when we spend too much time in a simulacrum of life and the world, our spirit starves, because the stuff of life and the world simply cannot be transmitted through an led screen. a little bit of it can - all of it in the highly structured, closed world of human language - but the real presence of it is in the material reality of it, the distributed machine.

i think it's less that we need less screen time and more that we need more 'everything else' time, but the screen time has very persuasively slipped in as a fake of the 'everything else'. all of the chains that bind us to a certain way of life, mostly capitalism, love the screen time. and it's true that we get a certain amount of reward from it. i don't think it makes any sense to abolish it personally speaking but i've very much benefited from a concerted effort to do regular daily activities where it just isn't there. and most importantly, activities that are rich with the real world 3d open-ended presence that the phone lacks. anything in the natural world does the trick imo. exercise also works for me but ymmv. meditation. repetitive, productive behavior. creating or building something. cooking. doing a puzzle. intentional rest. it takes some will and discipline to silence the phone and go deeper into the real world it's worth it imo.

lmao frogbs

Also, I’m not sure we’re really meant to meet endless numbers of new people all the time, it winds up being a thing where the more people you connect with, the fewer people you really know. And the thing with social media is we remain connected with people in an almost unnatural way, it’s probably not too cynical to suggest that there are people we were meant to have fade away and be forgotten. And we were meant to be the same to others. I told the story once here about how a few years ago someone I hadn’t seen since fifth grade reconnected with me and wanted to meet up, so I did and it was just the strangest and most unnatural social experience I’ve had. Not just awkward because it was someone I hadn’t seen in a while, but it was someone who had been completely erased from my memory, and I spent the entire time hanging out with them trying to remember something, anything about them.

there's definitely something very grotesque to the way social media has become this arms race for likes/comments/subscriptions and now all content has to be optimized in certain ways that specifically seem to seek to eliminate as much humanity and nuance as possible. YouTube's own dashboard metrics really seem to push you in this direction...like hey, HEREs a thumbnail that got a lot of engagement, oh and I noticed people seem to be dropping off at THIS point in your video more than usual, also see if you can get people to comment more, oh if you'd like give us $200 and we can slip it into people's feeds...it all feels so inorganic and I've noticed lately a lot of people who make videos I like pointing out that they feel like these platforms are pushing them in directions they can't be creative in. but if they don't nobody will see their stuff because ultimately the algorithms decide everything.

it does feel like there's a correlation between that and the lack of any good viral stuff lately, in the last 5 years we've gotten what, "Hawk Tuah" girl (who immediately launched a podcast and crypto scam) and maybe the Coldplay couple

Me and a couple buddies who know zero about 'football' were talking about the World Cup and it was clearly all nonsense we had heard somewhere, so we're starting a podcast called Uninformed to pontificate. Next one will be about physics or the Great Silk Road

i'm so fn allergic to podcasts. i have no idea how ya'll do it. like talk radio but worse in every way.

The only good podcasts are basically audiobooks.

podcasts can help people think and learn and new and different ways since it's a different modality and also there are some folks who don't think or learn as well via reading as they do via other sorts of media but i'm sure you're aware of that

― a (waterface), Thursday, 9 July 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Yes many ways to learn sweet.

But it would be good to have some examples of podcasts that match really good essay collections, to maybe test that comparison.

thanks to screen addiction i've discovered the most alluring thing imaginable, abandoned swimming pools in basements.

i'm so fn allergic to podcasts. i have no idea how ya'll do it

I'm the same way... but honestly, they're in serious decline across the board... lots of folks selling fancy microphones and preamps on craigslist

Hope so, the less podcasts the better

I deactivated my instagram account a couple of weeks ago. The whole point of my account was music, but it felt like I just kept getting toxic political content of various stripes, often relating to Israel, Palestine, antisemitism, and Jews, and no matter what I did to try to curate my feed, it kept creeping back in, probably because I wind up "engaging" with the content whether I intend to or not. It was genuinely starting to make me feel deranged, like I'd just randomly open my phone and see a "stand up comic" I'd never heard of making a "joke" about why Hitler was right (that implied that he actually was), alternating with very circle-the-wagons pro-Jewish content, alternating with islamophobia, alternating with "antizionist" conspiracy stuff, and I was actually feeling imbalanced and paranoid. I still have facebook but that's a lot milder and my feed is not even very active because it's just whatever few random acquaintances I have who are still posting on it.

Putting that aside, I feel like a lot of what's wrong with social media is ironically the same thing that would be good about it - there's just too much of it. It used to be fun and cheering to occasionally get a video of a dog dancing on its hindlegs to salsa music, or a skateboarder trying to land a trick 30 times, or a woman from rural arkansas providing an interesting linguistic explanation of the origins of local jargon, but, even putting aside the toxic stuff discussed above, even assuming your feed is wholesome, having infinite, 24/7 access to every dog that dances to every kind of music in every country, and every great skateboarder, and every interesting explanation of every linguistic tic, the firehose effect of it overwhelms any modest emotional benefit you might get from it, as you start to just think in little snippets and lose access to the underlying human reasons that might make those things a pleasant and affirming break from your normal reality in the first place.

I don't see podcasts as even a related phenomenon other than that both happen to be enabled by the internet. I think podcasts are in many ways an improved way to spend time I used to spend listening to radio.

:(

i liked social media when it was just keeping up with friends, before all the "suggested for you" stuff started creeping in

I told the story once here about how a few years ago someone I hadn’t seen since fifth grade reconnected with me and wanted to meet up, so I did and it was just the strangest and most unnatural social experience I’ve had. Not just awkward because it was someone I hadn’t seen in a while, but it was someone who had been completely erased from my memory, and I spent the entire time hanging out with them trying to remember something, anything about them.

Wow, this is WILD.

But it would be good to have some examples of podcasts that match really good essay collections, to maybe test that comparison.

yeah no one's saying they match essay collections, speaking of not being good at reading

That was absolutely written by AI

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, July 9, 2026 11:50 AM (three hours ago)

with all due respect, what the fuck are you talking about

i can't say for certain it wasn't led to ai, but why do you think it was written by ai? because the writer writes in complete paragraphs? because he provides citations? because he says things you don't agree with?

the fact that he says things i don't agree with is why i _don't_ think it's written by ai. i can look at the things he's saying and say "look, i'm not sure i agree with your take on fredric wertham, and why the hell are you citing the cato institute to support your point?"

these are things i can _critique_ because he is making a coherent statement and backing it up with citations of actual works. he _links to his citations_. that's, like, the least fucking ai thing i can imagine!

i mean it's weird. i know you're an intelligent, thoughtful person. six hours ago waterface posted a link and three hours later you shoot back saying that it was "absolutely" written by ai and three hours later i, a presumably intelligent, thoughtful person, am shooting back saying "what the fuck are you talking about"

are we _not_ trying to think in an environment - i'm talking the internet here, not ilx - designed to prevent thinking? like, really, i spent ten minutes reading his 3,200 word article, one which was actually EDITED by a CREDITED HUMAN BEING, and i'm trying to do critical analysis on it. it takes _time_. it takes time for me to read and think and draw conclusions. social media is all about the quick quip, the pithy comment, the IMMEDIATE RESPONSE. everything is now, now, now.

it is an issue for me. i hunger and thirst for information. i want to know more. and you know what? you know, in a lot of ways i'm a better writer than i was 30 years ago. i have that stuff saved. it's not _bad_, but if y'all think i ramble on _now_, that stuff verges on word salad sometimes. as skeptical as i am of the internet, it makes me a better writer and a better thinker. because if i'm gonna say something, i double-check to see if i'm remembering things correctly before saying it. so much of everyday life 30 years ago was me saying stuff i half-remembered and _thought_ i knew and other people, when i look at other people a lot of us were the same way. i check my facts and i learn so much, things i didn't expect. and ok yes, it does lead to "adhd" in that i take the scenic route. i'm not direct and to the point. and to a lot of people that's frustrating. but to me, the reason i _have_ a point is because i took the scenic wrote, because i started writing without drawing conclusions first. because the key to learning here is to _not_ assume that i know what i'm talking about.

---

yeah i've gone through three drafts of this post and this doesn't make me stupider or a worse writer, i don't think. i'm considering multiple critical perspectives... maybe i'm _overthinking_ but i can't say i'm not _thinking_. there's so much data to consider with regards to how seriously to take this guy. and frankly i do take what he says seriously. and there's _so much_ context available... and communication, i mean, is about creating shared context for me. there's this "oh wait he likes ai? fuck him" impulse, and gah there's too much cognitive dissonance in that because i'm not arrogant enough to say that i _know_ whether or not something is written by AI.

Also, I’m not sure we’re really meant to meet endless numbers of new people all the time, it winds up being a thing where the more people you connect with, the fewer people you really know.

― omar little, Thursday, July 9, 2026 2:15 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago)

well this is the thing, like, i'm weird. that's not to say that i'm better than other people - i'm not - but they used to talk about the "long tail" of the internet. all of this focus on quantity, yeah, i don't need to be talking to _everyone_, i'm trying to find people i can talk to and i can do that _and we're all too fucking traumatized by bullshit patriarchal white supremacist capitalism to do anything fun_. that's the annoying bit. so at some point yeah "i fucking hate techbros can we have control the means of production now thank you" does become part of it. it's just that, uh, that's not something that's within my direct control.

---

anyway that's all the time i have for writing right now i guess, in 15 minute a friend of mine is coming over and i'll probably buy milk and hang out with them. the internet is cool sometimes but it takes a lot of work and a long time to make meaning out of it, and i don't always have the time i'd like to give to it. i know it _wants_ all my time and attention and it's not going to get it lol.

thanks to screen addiction i've discovered the most alluring thing imaginable, abandoned swimming pools in basements.

― shaking babies (map), Thursday, July 9, 2026 2:52 PM (fifty-five minutes ago)

that's cool. yesterday i found out about sofubi toys. i didn't know there was a word for these things! and so many of them are so cool looking! it's like shit you would make in the Thingmaker before they banned the Thingmaker for being a tremendous burn hazard to children.

i liked social media when it was just keeping up with friends, before all the "suggested for you" stuff started creeping in

― c u (crüt), Thursday, July 9, 2026 5:39 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, and even on facebook this is a problem now, I still occasionally get baited by literal junk, AI slop, etc. It's important to remember that if you're pausing to comment "This is obviously AI," you're as much the mark as the people who think it's real.

FWIW, my favorite instagram rabbit hole has been midwestern (mostly) black roller skating culture. And also of course bluegrass music - I do have instagram to thank for the fact that I got obsessed with playing bluegrass music in the first place. I genuinely think it was better back then, roughly 5 years ago, which means I guess there is a plausible way such a platform could be not toxic.

On reflection I also am feeling that my ability to be physically productive and do things in the world I live in, is currently being hampered by living in an apartment in a city when I want to be outside doing outside things. My productivity wasn't a problem when I had access to more kinds of space. I love cities and urbanism but doing physical projects takes a garage, a yard, a garden, a workshop...when these things get more complicated and there are more barriers, I do them less. (I need a community bike workshop is what I need.)

I find it hard to get mad at people for using social media when tv, including sports, including broadcast and premium channels and everything that comes through the tv through various channels, has been getting more and more cunning at hacking our brains for decades. It's all competition for our time and which side you're on depends on how you draw the lines.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Tuesday, July 7, 2026 7:25 AM (two days ago)

and yeah i'm having to... pick up a lot more skills in getting out in the physical world, skills that i never really had when i was younger, just because i'm finding out how bad the internet is at meeting those human needs, how bad it's always been at meeting those needs. i do think we all have a need for that physical presence. i don't know what or how to manage that because i'm extremely uncoordinated, i'm dyspraxic, so it can be frustrating trying to do tactile things!

It's important to remember that if you're pausing to comment "This is obviously AI," you're as much the mark as the people who think it's real

Yup... better just to let it go

Also the rage-bait stuff: "Without Gram Parsons, there would be no country rock" and shit like that... just let it go

why do you think it was written by ai?

i provided a number of examples of why i think this!

you're giving the article credit for making coherent statements with links to citations (which seems like kind of a low bar, but anyway) but AI is great at this - it can do this as a matter of routine. this is why lazy writers and managers love it! in fact this is pretty much all it does apart from hallucinate the number of "r"s in the name of a calendar month and generate dubious n00ds. but the coherent statements it makes tend to fall apart the second you really interrogate them. they have a lulling rhythm that feels thought-out, but try and fit the pieces together and you realise that you're dealing with surface-level slogans. taking the article above as an example the guy's basically saying hey, things don't HAVE to be this way, we can re-engineer schools to teach digital literacy, we can get tech companies to make the interfaces of their devices healthy and mindful - all quite nice in theory but there is zero recognition of the power dynamics and vested interests which are the reason we don't have these things in the first place! write an article about THAT and you might start getting somewhere. the problem with that, though, is that's about the material world, it's political, it's messy - these are areas where AI has very little to say because it's been trained on the most pandering and anodyne parts of the internet

re the idea that some people should fade away, that that's the natural state of things, absolutely agree and that's why i quite facebook almost 20 years ago now. it's getting to that point with instagram too. if you can't make the effort to reach out to someone individually to connect and catch up then that person is not actually one of your friends ihibidtace

People fade away on social media too tbh. I don't use facebook but do still have an account and even when I was still using it there were all these old acquaintances that I still had added but never saw anything from, now I barely know who they are. Unless one of you is a power user or you just engage a lot on the same topics, ppl can fade fast...

Another thing I noticed last time I looked at Facebook is how now that I'm in my fourties I, and most of my old uni classmates, all still have these photo galleries of our 20's, the past is much more present than for previous generations who would have to get out the photo albums. Soon all their kids will be able to see mommy and daddy young and drunk at parties.

like I'd just randomly open my phone and see a "stand up comic" I'd never heard of making a "joke" about why Hitler was right (that implied that he actually was), alternating with very circle-the-wagons pro-Jewish content, alternating with islamophobia, alternating with "antizionist" conspiracy stuff, and I was actually feeling imbalanced and paranoid

this is what my feed is like too, but for charts about inflation and interest rates not israel

it would be good to have some examples of podcasts that match really good essay collections

the good podcasts are the ones that are least like good essays though. the podcast gambit is that it takes an hour to convey less information than you’d get by reading for two minutes, but in exchange you get to experience the joy of parasocial friendship with the hosts

continually low-level annoyed at the idea that podcast = two guys chatting about something

the leon nayfakh ones are good too. but those are more like documentaries than essays

it would be good to have some examples of podcasts that match really good essay collections

This doesn't really make sense because collections pick and choose from amongst an essayist's work, leaving aside mountains of less stellar writing. Equally any podcast will have its share of dud episodes.

But if we disregard the collection aspect and just say "match a really good essay":

Politics Theory Other is a UK leftist interview podcast, mercifully free of the easy dunking and attempts at comedy much of its brethern indulge in. Goes pretty deep into niche topics with people who know their stuff, I'd say easily the equal of any given LRB essay, and obviously miles ahead of anything on the BBC.

Juliet Jacques recently restarted her arts podcast, Suite 212. If you like her writing for, say, Tribune I think you'd like it too.

As far as single person podcasts go, You Must Remember This does well researched deep dives, sadly the focus is Hollywood only but hey there's a lot of great stories there. Particularly loved the series comparing the careers of Jean Seberg and Jane Fonda. It is pure death whenever she tries to do voices tho.

I don't see podcasts as even a related phenomenon other than that both happen to be enabled by the internet. I think podcasts are in many ways an improved way to spend time I used to spend listening to radio.

correct. it's just one of those words people like to define themselves against around here for reasons more to do with personal neurosis and groupthink. should make a podcast about it.

One could even say podcasts allow you to hear voices not represented in teaditional media etc etc etc

The two dudes joking thing is a bit like saying "I hate movies, they're always about superheroes".

Be surprising if dudes talking about stuff at length was something people who post here are so allergic to.

It me.

I think it's the lack of editing in some of those podcasts, compared to a radio documentary on an interesting topic. Plus some of the Brit ones have the annoying posh authoritative sounding voice that irritates me. Why I don't listen to R4 shows.

Whereas if they are putting that voice down on the page, and it's good, I can go with it.

I don’t think it’s that podcasts are bad, so much as there was a boom that led to a glut of bad ones (especially during the pandemic), and a bust, which has made it significantly harder for interesting independent podcasts to survive. The podcast industry has been imploding in the last few years, meaning less money to invest in personnel, research, resources needed for more ambitious and better produced reporting, meaning more generic celebrity interview podcasts.

I love a small handful podcasts that add to my life; the rest I just don’t think about.

Meanwhile, I think I’m going to try locking away my phone at museums. The quality of my engagement with art has declined precipitously over the last several years, and I think screen addiction has a big role in that

It would be easier to do that if the background material on the wall was any good which it's so frequently not

in fact this is pretty much all it does apart from hallucinate the number of "r"s in the name of a calendar month and generate dubious n00ds

so juner is in fact not a good month to eat oysters in?

Juner is bustin' out all overer

xxpost: the problem isn’t so much the content of what’s on the wall so much as I’ll read it and completely forget all of it as soon as I’m done, then try to think about what I’m looking at while also thinking about what doorbell mount I should buy, or even thinking about how I can’t focus or spend time with something that I used to devote a lot of attention and care to, and how I should post about it on this thread. This was my experience yesterday, and it felt pretty disheartened to realize how much flatter life feels this way.

with increasingly little patience as I keep looking at my phone spending increasingly little

Forgot to delete that last paragraph.

Also never got the hate that wall texts get. Some are kind of pointless, but I will read texts about works I’ve literally taught courses about and still find them semi-useful. Though part of that is having a hard time recalling facts and information about many different things. That might be an effect of conveniently looking up stuff on my phone for the last 15 years, maybe also age.

Wall text is there for whoever needs it and is easy to ignore. The only reason I to hate it is if you’re a total art snob who thinks they already know everything or an artist who understandably hates seeing creative works boiled down.

I was just at MOMA in NYC and a lot of the labels would ask a question or tease interesting facts and then encourage the viewer to scan a QR code or log in to some shit to see the information. Pissed me off greatly.

"this wall text is dumb as rocks... and there's so little of it!!"

i went to teotihuacan last year and it was mind-blowing how there was just.. nothing to explain what you were seeing. apart from like a few scattered metal signs with a couple of paragraphs each. i want a whole freakin book about it! tell me everything!!

Podcasts are just a way to make boring tasks (in my case, mostly household chores) less boring. It probably does induce brain rot to a certain extent because I'm spending less time thinking about stuff and just absorbing a podcast instead but I really don't need as much introspection in my life as I would get if I was just doing all my chores in silence.

regarding the main topic here, I force myself to read books, even when I don't really feel like reading too much, basically self-assigned homework. I think it helps.

The next thing I'd want to do is try to write more, in my early 20s I would just write short stories, essays, fictional news stories and other random things just for fun. I'd really like to get back to that but probably won't have enough time for that kind of thing until my kids are a bit older.

If I wasn’t listening to podcasts while biking and mowing the lawn, I would be listening to something else. Podcasts can be enjoyed with minimal screen activity. It’s an entirely different thing.

i went to the local art museum and saw an exhibit of... rothko, i think. the paintings had wall texts explaining that rothko hated wall texts and really didn't like that people were always asking him to explain what the painting _meant_. funnily enough, that wall text helped me "get" rothko's paintings better!

I love that perhaps your shortest post is about walls of text :)

i provided a number of examples of why i think this!

― Tracer Hand, Friday, July 10, 2026 2:20 AM (six hours ago)

well, maybe it is ai! i don't, i have to admit, i don't have the ability to determine whether or not something used ai or not. it makes me feel really stupid and not want to say stuff, because i actually agree with a lot of what the article says. like ok there's a bunch of jargon about "multimodal learning" and all that, and for me it's like... i mean my framing comes a lot from dbt, comes from "radical acceptance". i hate capitalism and white supremacy and patriarchy and these things aren't going to just go away, so what do i do now? how do i live my life?

well first i want to understand why this shit makes me so miserable on a personal level. and it's because of the way, to me, because of the way these systems want to control and... i mean, _colonize_ my mind. i'd call it that. and to me it's not a new thing, growing up my mind was colonized in a lot of shitty ways. so the question is how do i operate in the world in ways that challenge the colonial mentality of the oligarchs.

and the first thing is to maintain my bodily autonomy. i don't... to me, the clock is another form of tyranny, honestly, the way it's so _precise_. i want to be reliable but i'm learning that i don't need to be exactly on time on the dot for everything. but i do need to say, at some point, ok, well, i want to stop doing this and do something else. to do something with my hands, to do something with my body. and there's always _more_ out there, through the screen. always more.

to say "screen addiction is rotting my brain", well, i mean, i do struggle with addiction in a lot of ways. i have an unhealthy relationship with food, for instance. i like the way food tastes, it's delicious, it feels good. and i eat to fulfill emotional needs. and that takes a toll. i think "screen addiction", i think that's similar in some ways. the more i use screens, the worse i feel, and the more i want to use screens. so the challenge is to find ways to get my needs met that _can't_ be met with screens.

and it is hard, it is a challenge, and i'm not entirely successful with it. i deserve more opportunities. we all do. there are these structural factors getting in the way of things and, i mean, "radical acceptance". i can't just _not use screens_. it's not practical.

if you can't make the effort to reach out to someone individually to connect and catch up then that person is not actually one of your friends ihibidtace

― Tracer Hand, Friday, July 10, 2026 2:20 AM (six hours ago)

thank you for sharing your opinion, i guess? i do consider, for instance, christy a good friend of mine, and we don't get to talk much, because we're not on the same social media platforms. i mean i don't know, we haven't talked in years and maybe we're not friends anymore, but we stopped talking because we weren't on the same social media platforms. there are all these people that i was friends with for 30 years and most of them stopped being friends when i quit facebook. it was a sacrifice. quitting facebook did cost me those friends, who were real friends.

i value people i can have a genuine human connection with. that doesn't come easily for me, because i'm weird and because i'm very socially anxious. i mean i'd have more in-person friends if i went out more, i guess, if i did more things socially. and i can sit in front of a screen and write about it and judge myself and i make the effort to _not_ do that. to try and know when to stop. which means that i don't communicate as effectively through a screen as i'd like, i guess. if i did a couple more drafts of this posts, maybe it'd be better, shorter.

if this antipodean uni librarian thinks that AI can provide benefits, well, i welcome his empirical documentation showing that benefit. in the meantime, on a simply personal level, i do find myself dealing with an internet environment that interferes with my ability to get my needs met, an environment i can't actually disengage with entirely.

one day i'd like to be part of making a better world, structurally. i think it's possible. for now, i get up, i have text conversations with myself, i drink my coffee, take my meds, go for a walk, take a shower. and sometimes, then, i'll go on ilx. and think about things. ilx is a good place for thinking about things, for me.

I love that perhaps your shortest post is about walls of text :)

― beard papa, Friday, July 10, 2026 9:20 AM (five minutes ago)

i can go shorter

i value people i can have a genuine human connection with. that doesn't come easily for me

i'm not sure this comes easily for many people at all - and it's probably why actual friends are so rare and valuable

privileging the reading of books is a bit of a tell in 2026 imo

whats ihibitace or whatever tracer is this absurdly young slang again

whats ihibitace or whatever tracer is this absurdly young slang again

― Wichita Referee's Assistant (darraghmac), Friday, July 10, 2026 9:50 AM (four minutes ago)

i think it's something you take for high blood pressure

I guess this is getting afield of the subject of this thread, but I was just in Berlin and thinking a lot about how the museum exhibits I saw had genuinely good wall text, and what a difference that made. Like there was an exhibition on art dealer Paul Cassirer and impressionism, and I came away with actual coherent thoughts about who Cassirer was, his relationship to the German art world, and how this fit into various political questions of the time. Or the DDR museum, in spite of being sort of cheesy, did in fact educate me on life in the DDR in a way that enriched my understanding. And some of my ability to absorb all of that was probably also improved by the fact that I wasn't trying to snap things for my now deactivated instagram account, but I also think a lot of wall text in American museums is awful.

In my experience, wall text is entirely on the curator responsible for the show, with some of it possibly done by curatorial assistants. Not only will quality of text vary from one institution to another, it will also vary by departments.

If I’m walking through a permanent collection show, I won’t pay attention to labels at all unless something strikes me as inspiring and I want artist name and year, or materials. For a more curated show or a retrospective, I’m more likely to read text because there’s more of a narrative to follow. I just saw a Duchamp retrospective at MOMA and, look, I love Duchamp all day long, but that is a show that has
to have a lot of text for Joe Public to have any understanding of wtf is going on. Too much text and nobody reads it.

To bring it back to the thread, I do take pics of art in museums if I need a reference for my own work in some way, or to remember a name I want to look up later. I have a shit memory, so the phone is a blessing in that regard.

is how i break it down to a certain extent

iykyk

The writing on the little card at art galleries is some of the worst, most clichéd, inward-looking jargon in existence in any field of work. It also has broken out of its cage a little bit so you see it elsewhere.

local garda frames his practice as an interrogation of the decolonised subject in a post-subaltern east london pub

interrogating the certainties and uncertainties of liminality while contesting the nature or "unnature" of the space itself

it has always seemed crazy to me that art schools dont routinely offer some kind of a basic "writing for artists" course, being able to communicate coherently about your work seems like an important skill for artists and only about .00001% seem to have any idea how to do it

sort of agree but then also wonder if the point is to just never say anything anyone could understand and never move away from the accepted cliches

I don’t know about art schools, but in masters programs you’re expected to write a thesis and present a final project. I think most people come out of it as better writers and more able to articulate their work. But there is so much art speak and it blends in with therapy speak and sometimes poorly understood science speak, and it really is like herding cats.

Labels should not be written by artists unless it’s a little group show at the local nonprofit art space. In big institutions a curator who often has a PHD is writing or signing off on text.

In most major museums I don’t think it’s too bad, and only in about 30% of galleries at this point. I guess I mean to say that this trend has lessened a lot in the past few years, from my ken going to galleries large and small on the east and west coasts of the US

sort of agree but then also wonder if the point is to just never say anything anyone could understand and never move away from the accepted cliches

― LocalGarda, Saturday, July 11, 2026 4:17 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

In some cases the wall text is definitely the fog machine for the artist’s intellectual glam rock

otm

I’ve been thinking about it as I’ve been visiting several museums and galleries while travelling.

- Putting away my phone (well, turning it on airplane mode, setting it to greyscale, turning brightness to minimum, and putting it in a different pocket than usual) does help, though not dramatically.

- I went to a museum with very few labels for individual works, just short texts for certain rooms. This was waaaay more enjoyable and engaging than trying to cram in immediately-forgotten details before glancing at a work. Granted, this obv works better for some things than others: most of the work I’ve been most affected by and studied have been possible because I got textual context cues from wall texts.

- What museums are y’all going to with indecipherable academic texts? This sounds like “rude record store clerk” syndrome (the cliche is everywhere, but I’ve never really seen it). Ok, this is true at private galleries and some contemporary art galleries, but most places I’ve been to (museums, at least) have pretty accessible texts. That said, today I went to a small contemporary art gallery that had a standard undergrad-level text about the exhibition, alongside one in plain language, which I think is a great idea I’d like to see more of.

I deleted instagram and reddit two weeks ago, the last social media apps I had. The first week I was still compulsively picking up my phone at random times and that physical act felt like an addiction kicking in. This week less so. My attention span is still pretty messed up but I have been reading more, trying to occasionally leave the house without headphones and so on. More and more, I was actively feeling it and I now feel I have actively fight back.

trying to occasionally leave the house without headphones and so on

woah woah woah woah woah

I keep hearing about people having experiences involving other people. Supposedly that occasionally happens if you dont close yourself off listening to avant garde jazz when you go outside.

Big if..

Last night my FYP showed me a video by someone who likes to visit lighthouses. In the comments, someone said that their great-great-grandfather was a lighthouse keeper and raised a family in a MI lighthouse that is now a museum. I said, "Oh bet, where was that, because my hometown has a lighthouse that is now a museum." Answer: It was the same place! A very charming coincidence esp bc I had photos of touring that museum that I could share.

Just a lil bit of whimsy to add to the convo. I promise I also go outside and experience other people (not today though).

I deleted instagram and reddit two weeks ago, the last social media apps I had. The first week I was still compulsively picking up my phone at random times and that physical act felt like an addiction kicking in. This week less so. My attention span is still pretty messed up but I have been reading more, trying to occasionally leave the house without headphones and so on. More and more, I was actively feeling it and I now feel I have actively fight back.

― a hoy hoy, Friday, July 17, 2026 9:04 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

the physical act stuff is not unlike smoking in that regard

Yup. I sometimes grab my phone and then set it down again because I realised I'm watching a film/listening to music/doing something else I should be focusing on. Ofc probably there are more instances where I keep going.

I've been taking the elevator down at work lately instead the stairs because of a knee issue and nearly every time I step in the elevator I pull out my phone even though I can't get any service in the elevator.

I instinctively take out my phone whenever I'm finished with some task or just moving from one place to another, it's annoying. I don't give myself any free time.

it's become a way to move time faster for me.

have to fight the urge at traffic lights

My Instagram feed has become 1/2 clips from tv and movies… but excerpted differently… like, in the past week I have seen 3 different edits of the Key & Peele sketch with the rapper interrogated for murder and the “put your hands in the air if…” sketch. I feel like sketch comedy is a good formal use of “the feed”… scrolling substack feels a bit more edifying but there’s enough fluff that it still feels rotten.

I recently got a stylus for my ipad so I could physically write things and draw, as opposed to saying “oh I should get off the screen and do that… “ and then not do that.

I keep hearing about people having experiences involving other people. Supposedly that occasionally happens if you dont close yourself off listening to avant garde jazz when you go outside.

don’t want to risk it

My great fortune and saving grace is that I have never found it comfortable to do anything on a smartphone. I don’t know if my hands are too big or my eyes are too bad or what, but I can only stand interfacing with my phone for a few minutes at a time before I want to throw it into a fireplace. I’m your frustrating friend who asks you to email the Youtube / Facebook / whatever link you just texted. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to ask, so if it seems like a link that might actually be worth opening (it’s usually 50/50, depending on the sender), I will c+p the link and email it to myself.

If this all sounds somehow virtuous, I should mention that between scrolling Twitter, reading record reviews, compulsively watching eBay auctions, doing work-related stuff, checking emails, checking message boards (hi!), personal banking, and moving hi-hats around on Logic (which is my idea of fun), I am probably in front of my Macbook for 75% of my waking hours. I wish it weren’t so, and I know it has had a negative effect on both my mental and physcial health. I still read an above average (I think) number of books, but I’m usually only reading them for an hour or two before bed (or in the bathroom).

Also, I’m not sure we’re really meant to meet endless numbers of new people all the time, it winds up being a thing where the more people you connect with, the fewer people you really know. And the thing with social media is we remain connected with people in an almost unnatural way, it’s probably not too cynical to suggest that there are people we were meant to have fade away and be forgotten. And we were meant to be the same to others. I told the story once here about how a few years ago someone I hadn’t seen since fifth grade reconnected with me and wanted to meet up, so I did and it was just the strangest and most unnatural social experience I’ve had. Not just awkward because it was someone I hadn’t seen in a while, but it was someone who had been completely erased from my memory, and I spent the entire time hanging out with them trying to remember something, anything about them.
― omar little, Thursday, July 9, 2026 5:15 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

This post really resonates. I think someone - maybe Douglas Rushkoff? wrote a bit about this phenomenon, basically about the unnaturalness of meeting someone at a bar once in 2008 and friending them on Facebook and now, two decades later, you are staring at a screen watching their child, who you’ve never met and never will meet, get their driver’s license or graduate high school, and how strange that is

I quit facebook and instagram but held onto bluesky and reddit. I think I’m going to ditch reddit. I don’t know if I’m using it wrong, but I see the same dumbass questions over and over. I joined a turntable group and 96% of the posts are images of bent-ass styluses with people asking “is my stylus bent?”

damn, nice omar post there, resonates with me too.

gonna be the one who says that this didn’t resonate with me at all— but part of that probably has to do with my being connected with a lot of people i have never met irl, or only met a few times. i think this is true of a lot of people in the art and writing world generally.

a nice counter-example: met a guy in 2006 when he was road managing a band i had booked, we then hung out a few times in the bay area circa 2009-2010, then he moved to NY and i didn’t see him for years. we would stay in touch and follow each other’s doings but never saw each other. then i gave a reading in 2023 at a fancy art gallery, and he came because he saw my name on the bill! we had a great conversation afterwards, catching up on stuff that had happened in the intervening decade and a half.

so for me, the random person from the past can be someone who is interested and interesting, and is worth keeping around and staying connected to.

it can also be some dude from middle school whom you haven’t thought about in many years, and it is this latter category that actually evidences the wisdom of culling friends lists and connections. lord knows i have.

i guess this is my way of saying that the random dude from the bar often ends up being a connection i want to keep over the person i was friends with when we were kids, because the random person from the bar is someone i might actually have something in common with.

like, i look up people i was friends with in middle and high school and we have literally nothing in common except having skin.

I had an hour-long phone call yesterday with a guy I haven't been in the same room with in 25 years. (I had emailed him, and he had a 10-hour drive from California to New Mexico ahead of him, so he called.)

I think "people I went to middle school with" and "person I met at a bar once" are basically the same level of random, middle school is so far away that connections from that time are de facto dudes I met at a bar once in terms of actual familiarity.

If I can actually remember the name of “person I met a bar once” that indicates a better connection than the mean girls I grew up with whom I have no desire to reconnect with.

Lots of false conclusions here imo. You can be happy for someone you met once in a bar, because they live a good life and you get a tiny window on it, if you want to peek in. Or you can, for yourself, decide that in your limited time and social battery, you're going to focus on 5 good friends to make sure you have enough time & energy to give them. It's all YOUR CHOICE. Do what you want. None of it is inevitable, good lord. Just do you what you want and stop trying to make up pseudo psychological or scientific rationalizations for it.

https://i.ibb.co/mCnbMMH1/Screenshot-2026-07-18-at-6-39-42-PM.png

https://i.ibb.co/Vp9Tx23p/Screenshot-2026-07-18-at-6-39-50-PM.png

I value my childhood friends as a source of continuity. And if I don't have a lot in common with them now, that itself is interesting information - how much two people's paths can diverge from having been in roughly the same place in 1983.

Some of them? We've gone through some shit together and we can connect and reflect on that.

Some are mathematicians. Some are carpenter's wives.

iirc one of the very first people I met online whom I tried to friend on Facebook was the table is the table, and he was like "I'm sorry, do I know you?" lol

Another false conclusion: that one cannot both be happy for the person they met in a bar once and also have the focus and attention for five good friends, and recognize that difference.

Like it is a completely false dichotomy that one either chooses “social media and parasocial interactions” or “real in depth friendships”.

Yes! Just literally enjoy having self determination and agency and do what you want. Tell people you don’t remember them if you’re uncomfortable or just be the level of interested in other people that you want to be. And it will be different on different days. Just, like, live your life.

I feel like I'm hallucinating typing these words onto this message board full of people whose children I have literally watched grow up on Facebook and astonishingly it hasn't stopped me from also having irl friends as much as I want lol

I'm a little more open to speculation that maybe we aren't, like...adjusted...to focusing on so many people's faces so intently? But then ppl have been living in cities and in crowded communities since idk farming and money were invented so while there might be something there about beauty standards and our expectations for things that we see on screens/in media, it's not going to be just a surface level "Human beings weren't meant to look at so many of each other; smaller groups of people such as the nuclear family are the correct amount of people" kind of statement.

once again i’m sorry that i have shared

I mean it's ok to have differing feelings on this subject? Not everything has a consensus and that's fine.

Social media was huge for me between 2007 - 2012 because it helped me become social by initiating conversations I was too chickenshit to initiate in person due to severe social anxiety. I actually had ny healthiest serious relationship ever begin as an innocuous FB message.

Over time that helped me actually be able to be sociable without the social media crutch (only for the pandemic and the PTSD of 2020-2024 to immediately destroy it but that's a me problem).

These days I shrunk my circle because I'm wounded and struggling, When I was happier before all the damage, I kept up with everyone. Now it's hard for me to hold convos with people outside my closest friends so that translates to me also not following them online.

But I don't think my way is the right way, it's just right...for me

I often question what I am doing looking at this message board almost daily for a decade+. I do condemn para-social engagement, engagement that screens have obviously amplified. I am out of the social media game, and have rationalised that I am here for the little cultural trails it can lead me down. But do I really need directions at this point? And why would I click on this thread if I was just looking for recs and criticism? Sure, there is value in social criticism, but I don't think that's why I am here. I am here to see the character portraits continue to play out in a way that has come predictable as it would for anyone seeing a *usernamehere* post everyday for a decade. Something tells me that's a sign of a rotted brain. I wouldn't mind being more ascetic about this, but I have yet to definitively weigh the scales. Someday!

Peace and strength to you Neanderthal

i do think that sometimes maybe we aren't supposed to be soooo instantaneously connected to each other all the time bc i feel like i spend a lot of time being anxious about unreturned texts but maybe everyone spent months or years in anxious fugues about unreturned letters back in the day. then again idk if i'd argue against the development of the telephone, which texting is just an extension of

Before electronic communication, it was easier because you'd go hours per day where you couldn't be contacted, and people contacted you less often, so when you got home, you checked your answering machine, and if someone called, you got back to them when you could, if not right away, but there was an expectation of delay.

Even emails, there wasn't generally the expectation of immediate response because the idea was still that of it was earth-shattering, you'd call. Plus you had to be near a computer to access it.

Smartphones kinda wrecked it all. Now you have texting AND access to the entire internet and voicemail so it has expanded the expectation of availability. Most people are glued to their phones through the day, and people also tend to text you more often than they emailed or called due to the ease of access.

So it's like, whereas pre-smartphones, you would only get a handful of contacts to respond to but during your time out of the house, were free to dedicate 100% attention to what you were doing, now if you have your smartphone on you, you have to proactively decide to ignore messages if you need your attention to be undivided.

I don't think that's a challenge for lots of people, but people with people-pleasing tendencies and OCD like me, it was harder. I'd struggle with having "open tasks" (aka responding) and respond right away, which set the expectation to everyone that o always respond immediately.

Had to retrain myself to take my time to respond to unimportant messages and leave responding to when I'm free and my attention is not divided - it still drives my senses nuts sometimes but it's made for a happier existence, plus most of my friends understand boundaries (and if they don't, I gave them a dressing down or stopped talking to them).

But I'll listen to some friends vent about other friends and how they "left them on read" and "oh this is so shitty, they're online RIGHT NOW but can't respond to me?"

and it seems so miserable to me to have the expectation of other people that they're on-call 24/7, like reading the message automatically means the person is in a good place to respond to it immediately, that some imaginary timer starts ticking immediately.

Obviously intentionally leaving people hanging on important things repeatedly isn't a good thing, but otoh, if you msg a friend 25 times a day about things, 95% of it dumb stuff, perhaps assume that 10 other people are doing the same to them and forgive them that they don't want to spend the entirety of their day msging back and forth.

I've seen actually fights break out and friendships end over it, which was more amusing to me than anything because it meant said friendship was probably teetering on a cliff the entire time.

I recently reread My Antonía and reflected on how much the "women talking over the back fence" would have been an information and communications network for our great-grandparents.

Did you hear that Malachi's cattle have the hoof-and-mouth? And I think your Clarissa should get a stern talking-to about her skirt lengths.

xp my impatient elderly MIL will call or text and if it’s not answered immediately she goes straight into “WHERE ARE YOU?!?” mode and I’m polite about it but mentally I think “IT’S NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS.”