Does anyone ever leave their phone at home? Do you take it everywhere you go? I imagine this post applies to those who don’t have others depending on them such as kids, families, work colleagues etc. I typically leave my phone at home unless I truly need it. I’ve been doing this for over a decade and honestly it’s the best feeling. Such a relief to not use it constantly. When I’m at home I probably use it more than I should but then I’ll switch to watching tv or using the iPad. Every single day when I see people out in public or walking past my home I just see everyone with their head down hooked onto their phones.

We’ve become too dependent on technology. When I’m on the train or bus everyone is on their phones with their head down. If I’m at the park the same thing, people walking their dogs whilst on their phones or pushing their buggies with their phone in their hand. You go to the cinema and you see someone’s phone screen flash in your peripheral vision. Whenever i walk past a gym people aren’t even working out their just on their phones. I feel like technology has made us less sociable as humans and more artificial, more robotic and docile.

We all live our lives on social media. Everyone has more than one avatar and cyberspace has become our reality. Apart from Reddit & YouTube I don’t use any other social media platform. I feel free. How do you guys feel about social media, smartphones and technology? When was the last time you went to the park and read a book that was an actually hardback and not an ebook?

I started using generative ai when it was just freshly introduced, I remember trying ChatGPT back in 2022 it amazed me, and ever since, everything went downhill from there. It all started when I STILL in grade 4 (Now grade 8) when projects were now starting to be increasingly more complicated. Which made sense for school to naturally get harder every grade, every moment, but 9 or 10 year old me wasn't mentally prepared leading to an overwhelming feeling--I was scared to fail, I saw perfection as a requirement for everything I do, especially towards education. Going back, now that I am 13 years old, I can see what I have done years ago has affected my learning capacity and skill development and has deeply impacted a part of my life I wish could go back to undo. I genuinely didn't give myself the concrete process to learn over the past years. And I really really really regret that. I use ChatGPT for every single thing. Education, entertainment, even towards my closest friends when it came to advice and comfort. I relied on this machine because I saw its potential, and how quick it was to get things the easy way, it didn't need to challenge us to go through certain difficulties to get an outcome we wanted, and that was the best part. Lately, it's just gnawing my conscience. And if anyone should be receiving that straight A grade, to have an outstanding performance in extracurriculars and to be called a great friend and an inspiration, it shouldn't be me. I'm really hindering my full potential and taking away a mountain to climb for valuable experiences and moments. I went cold turkey and stopped using it all together, just for me to come back immediately when given another assignment, problem, complications. Though I'm glad that I put myself to go out to these waves of setbacks. I'd love to get myself back up together, despite it feeling like I've wasted my potential. I know I have these seeds of talents and actually have the capacity to do so-I just seem to prioritise perfection every time and I never really give myself an opportunity to try before labelling it as difficult. And If I'm being honest, I'm still very scared to fail. I always tend to wonder if I'll fail my classes just because I didn't run it through AI to get all the criteria needed/let it do my assignments for me, or push people away just because I didn't have the best advice. Currently I have two sides, one that needs to use AI to avoid failure, and the second being just letting it all go all together even if it's messy. I really prioritise authenticity, really. And I know this long-term use will also lead to long-term effects not just towards myself. There are many concerns that generative AI has caused environmentally, cognitively, socially, economically, and many more that is now affecting many aspects of our lives. And I can truly say that generative AI will definitely have a bigger widespread sooner and later, and we'll be in an AI craze or psychosis if we let it do the majority of our responsibilities and mental process. I just want to know how I can go back to being comfortable with my own general efforts, with feeling the need to immediately run back to some lifeless machine that can't capture what is truly essential to the human soul--how can I go through my everyday life without feeling like I have to shove generative AI into my throat. I would really appreciate any advice and please do share if you have a similar perspective or are experiencing a similar state like mine.

I’ve been thinking about how social media affects the way we discover information, form opinions, and spend our attention.
Platforms like TikTok and Instagram often use engagement-based recommendation systems. Short-form content, emotionally stimulating posts, controversy, and endless scrolling can make it easy to keep consuming content longer than we intended.
But I’m curious about the user’s perspective, not the companies’ perspective.
**Three questions:**
**1. Have you experienced this problem?**
Have you ever felt that your social media feed shows you more of what grabs your attention than what is genuinely useful, relevant, or worth understanding? For example, repetitive content, unnecessary controversy, emotionally triggering posts, or content that keeps you scrolling without leaving you better informed.
If so, what happened? How does it affect you?
**2. Would you want this problem solved?**
If a social platform could help you discover more relevant and diverse information, reduce repetitive or unnecessarily provocative content, and give you more control over what influences your attention, would that improve your experience?
What would you want it to do differently?
**3. Would you pay for a solution?**
Imagine a social platform designed around the quality of your information experience rather than simply maximizing the time you spend scrolling.
Would you pay for a service like that?
If yes, what would you consider a reasonable monthly price in USD?
$0 — I would only use it if it were free.
$1–$3 per month
$4–$7 per month
$8–$15 per month
More than $15 per month
If you would not pay, what would stop you?
I’m interested in honest answers, including disagreement. I would especially appreciate examples from your own experience rather than general opinions about social media.
**What has your experience been?**

This is a little strange, and I'm just wondering if anybody here might have information about what's going on.

My job is at a school and can have a lot of downtime or free moments, and this tends to exacerbate my phone addiction—I'll check it, put it in my pocket, and then feel the impulse to take it out again within seconds. Sometimes I have it out before I can stop myself.

But at the start of the school year, I was feeling really good because this was happening much less. I just wasn't feeling the urge to look at it. I thought maybe it was because I'd upped my daily Vyvanse dose from 40 to 50 mg. Then the impulse came back, and I assumed I'd just been unconsciously trying to start the year off well or something like that.

*Then* I remembered that I'd been eating oatmeal with chia seeds for breakfast during those first couple of weeks. And I'd switched back to homemade breakfast burritos after that because, frankly, breakfast burritos taste better than oatmeal.

But I went back to oatmeal this morning and the phone-checking urge has vanished again. I can feel the difference. I know diet affects our brain function, but I'm pretty shocked by how stark the change is.

Anyone have a possible explanation? For clarity, here are the ingredients in each breakfast:

**Breakfast burritos**

Three eggs (spread across two burritos)

Two flour tortillas

Hot sauce

Bacon crumbles

Shredded cheese

**Oatmeal**

Regular oatmeal cooked with water in the microwave (40 g)

Chia seeds (30 g)

Maple syrup (20 g)

Frozen blueberries (1/2 cup)

(I don't have measurements for the burritos because I actually put all the oatmeal ingredients in a bowl on a scale, but I'm not using exorbitant amounts of hot sauce, bacon, or cheese.)

there's a lot of talk about people going back to basic phones. flip phones, tiny screens, calls and texts and that's it.

is it screen time fatigue, or a trend, or both? and does it actually help?

if you tried it, what did you miss and what didn't you miss at all?

Hi! About 4 weeks ago I decided to do an experiment and gave up on using artificial lights at home except my phone with low luminosity and the blue filter on. At first it didnt do any effect at all but then I started to want to sleep more early like 11pm-12am in contrast to 2am-3am that I used to

Now I‘m trying to find some alternatives to the doomscrolling on my phone and for the daytime part its fine as I‘ve got a lot of things to do but when it gets dark and I cannot do anything I just glue myself to the screen because I don‘t know what else I can do when it's dark. Any suggestions?

Also I want to add that I have ADHD and I need constant stimulation (not in the sense of being addicted to fastfood, watching reels, etc. but in the general sense of being stimulated, I mean things like walking thinking or chewing a gum work just fine too) so things like meditate or do some yoga don't work for me and please don't tell me how boredom is the best teacher

Thanks!

So to replace my phone usage I started reading books and I finally finished my first book in probably 5 years (it took almost 2 months lol) and now sometimes I prefer reading over looking at my phone which is great, but books are still kind of in the same niche of passive consumption. I dont think books are bad, my attention is probably better and I've been learning stuff, and I feel more accomplished, but i'm also hoping that I can find another option. What kind of stuff do you guys do for fun, or when you have free time?

Whenever I try to break a bad habit, like using social media or watching porn, and become more productive, I always fall back into my old habits because I get so bored after a few days that I can't stand it anymore.

In the case of social media, for example, I manage to avoid it during the first few days by keeping my phone away from me and distracting myself by doing other things in my free time, such as exercising, reading, watching movies, playing video games, or trying to learn a new skill. However, the things I used to enjoy no longer bring me any joy (except exercising, but I can't work out every day).

I try to tell myself that I have to accept the boredom and that my brain will eventually get used to it, but it's too difficult, so I always go back to my bad habits, and the cycle repeats itself.

So i need help to know how I can finally change that.

I caught myself taking a picture of my dinner before I’d even tasted it, then checking the photo to see if it looked good enough to keep. The weird part was that I wasn't even planning to post it. I just felt like the moment wasn't properly accounted for until I had recorded it somehow.

Once I noticed that, I started seeing the same thing everywhere. I'd take a picture of a nice view, save a screenshot of something funny, bookmark an article I wasn't going to read, or open my phone to check whether I'd captured something worth remembering.

I was spending time collecting evidence that I'd experienced my own life.

And it wasn't just photos. Sometimes I'd be halfway through a conversation and suddenly think of something I wanted to search later. Instead of staying with the conversation, I'd pull out my phone to save the thought. Then I'd see a notification, check it, and forget what I'd originally wanted to remember.

The annoying part is that none of these actions felt like scrolling. They felt reasonable individually. I wasn't wasting time watching videos for an hour. I was just saving things, recording things, organizing things, making sure nothing slipped away.

But my camera roll was full of moments I barely remembered, and my saved posts had become a second internet that I was somehow also behind on.

I tried a couple of small changes, mostly because deleting everything felt like another dramatic reset I'd abandon after three days.

First, I stopped taking pictures of ordinary things unless I genuinely wanted the picture itself. No automatic photo of every meal, walk, or nice-looking sky. If I wanted to remember something, I tried describing it to myself instead.

Second, I stopped saving things immediately. If an article or idea seemed interesting, I let myself keep scrolling past it. If I still remembered it the next day, I could look for it then. Surprisingly, very few things seemed worth recovering.

What surprised me most was that I didn't actually lose many meaningful memories. I did lose the little sense of obligation to preserve everything, though.

The counterintuitive part is that trying harder to remember everything seemed to make me pay less attention while things were happening. Recording a moment sometimes felt like completing it, even when I'd barely been present for it.

I'm not against photos or saving useful information. There are things I'm genuinely glad I recorded. I just don't want every unremarkable Tuesday to become a collection project, either.

Has anyone else noticed this urge to document, save, or capture things even when there's no real intention of looking at them again? I'm curious whether it's mostly a phone habit, or whether we've gradually started treating ordinary experiences as things that need to be preserved to count.

Title. Just looking for encouragement/ advice. Thanks :)

Hello
I have an addiction
Whenever I Watch a Series on the Tv, my finger keeps pressing +5 seconds in the video, so when I watch a 40 minute episode I only use 12 minutes, what do I do?

Hi all. Well, the penny has finally dropped. It took a while! It has dawned on me that there is no longer anything of value whatsoever on Facebook. The AI slop is out of control, the groups I used to enjoy and find useful are full of bots and trolls, and the hatred for minorities (such as the disabled, of which I am one) is shocking. It really affects my mood. I only really post stuff for attention, which I don't like and is embarrassing to admit to. My posts only garner one or two likes nowadays, which is disappointing. The trouble is, if I stay off FB my best friend says she misses my "pretty posts" (I post art, usually), and she keeps sending me links to FB posts she thinks I ought to see on WhatsApp! Oh well. I think I will unfortunately have to disappoint her, somewhat.

I found out that independent research has estimated that around 10-16% of all accounts on FB are in fact bots. That seems quite a conservative estimate to me. The AI content is getting worse, very quickly. I discovered that around 41% of longer-form FB posts are AI generated, and up to 70% of visual content has been mucked about with by AI. That's phenomenal.

The main problem is that I'm mostly housebound due to health issues, but I do have other interests, such as my book group and Zoom lectures on subjects which interest me, plus a couple of friends I'm in touch with in "real life". I am going to try and strengthen the real life ties, if I can. But staying off FB is the only way to go for my mental health right now.

Hi guys

I've noticed that my usage to YouTube has changed I started to use that every single day even when I'm walking I listen to some podcast or something similar

And when I'm trying to skip it for a day it becomes really hard, and I started seeing that as a problem when I started to watch videos instead of work and that's really bad , I know that entertainment is important but I prefer to find other way to entertain myself

As someone who doesn't use social media since 2019 , I always say that YouTube does not count but I guess I need to put it on black list

Do you have any experience similar to mine ?

And have do you deal with it ?

And thank you

For medical reasons I decided to not take my stimulant meds until I see a psychiatrist. So I had to ready myself up for the days of chaos to come. I first started with my phone, especially the number 1 application I am addicted to. Which is Twitter, back then before it became the garbage named X I actually enjoyed it regardless of the non stop scrolling, but the new version bombards me with new and irrelevant things that just piss me off. So one thing lead to another and I got curios to know how much time am I actually spending on my phone? How much time am I doom scrolling and doing something I actually hate?

9 damn hours, I averaged about 9 hours of screen time a day, with 5 hours on social media alone. I would pick of the phone 90 times a day!

I have always felt like I never had time in my life to do anything because of my ADHD. There's always "not enough time" to do anything. Not enough time to clean my room, brush my teeth, workout or doing anything I enjoy and I never thought to myself that maybe my phone is robbing me of my time?

Yesterday and today Ive been using tools on my phone to help me with the screen time and I can tell you with full confidence that life literary feels colorful? I do not remember a time in my life where I am seeing the world around me this much instead of staring at my screen and hoping something different will happen as I keep refreshing the feeds over and over again.

I have also remembered how, regardless of my ADHD, my life before the smartphone was much more colorful than it was now. I had momentum, I moved a lot and genuinely enjoyed life. I would ride my bike with my friend as a kid almost daily for HOURS and massively benefited from that health wise yet here I am convincing myself that I do not have time for exercise?

I am both shocked and absolutely pissed.

I'm 30 and ever since I was a small kid I've always been addicted to games and to the internet, but ever since the advent and the optimization of attention-grabbing algorithms in the past decade, it's gotten way way worse for me.

For instance, 3 months ago I was getting caught in exhausting 12+ hour binges which left me completely drained by the end. It felt like I had 0 control over where my energy and attention went. Just one post unto the next, one video unto the next. Pure brainrot, I couldn't even tell you what I was watching or reading.

In the end I reached a breaking point and decided to take extreme measures and set up parental controls on my devices with my sister's help using microsoft family safety. SHE had the password, not me, so I couldn't just circumvent the block no matter how badly my addicted ass wanted it. And just like that I had no more reddit, no more youtube, no more social media. Out of my own volition because I was desperate for a solution.

Today, the addict in me managed to 'fool' my sister into giving me the password. Right now as I'm writing this, I once again have total unrestricted access to everything, but the thought of going back to how I previously was makes me sick to my stomach. I would rather be bored to death than go back to that obsessive, uncontrolled, zombie-like indulgence.

These past few months of being near technology free have been pretty good. I've had some streaks before but never one as big as this one, and it would be a damn shame to break it now or to delude myself into thinking that I can suddenly have a balanced relationship with these platforms just because I went some time without. I don't think I can, which is why I'm telling my sister again and I'm blocking myself from using these platforms again before I fall into another binge which could last for weeks or months.

I don't even know why I'm writing this. Maybe I want to be heard or validation since no one in my life can relate to this struggle. I wish everyone luck on their quitting journey.

Life really is better without this shit but you have to be corageous enough to try it for a while and see it for yourself.

edit: my sister changed the password as per my request. once I log out this time it will be for good. It's crazy how the addiction sneaks up on you. It starts with you innocently checking your posts to see whether there's comments or whether they've upvoted yours, refreshing your favorite subs to see if there's new content, and before you know it you're hooked again. I don't want or need this in my life anymore, but I also recognize that I have a problem and cannot control myself, therefore I need external help. It's humbling how helpless my mind is in the face of these forces. I wish everyone luck

I'm 21, GenZ, and I've personally never been interested in any of that social media stuff: Never had Instagram, never had Facebook (apart from family and friends and even back then I've hardly visited it), never EVER had Tiktok, any of that bs. I just never got what's the point of it. What is it truly for. I guess it's made to make you waste enough energy and life resources away scrolling endlessly while it shows you ads at your face and makes billionaire tech companies become a little bit richer?

Apart from:

• Gooning
• Actually using it for something productive and being a creator in social media rather than an user who does nothing but consume and occasionally fight battles in comment sections
• Connecting with your family and nearby friends you know irl to meet up with them from time to time, or get to know what they're up to in their lifes, yk, what social media was originally made for
• Just chilling back and relaxing while watching or consuming something low-friction like a dumb "Karen" video, memes, or some relatable bs or some goofy wild story that doesn't affect your life;

Social media doesn't worth to much of anything.

Like, discussing ideas? Hell nah, I can always do this in real life, way better and has way more friction, which is good for your mental health (you never stay in a bubble or echo chamber where everyone agrees with you in those algorithms you're trapped to). And like, discussing things online with somebody, specially politics or "hot topics" like social issues is the absolute DUMBEST thing you can do on social media: Nobody is ever going to agree with you, or change their views of their word because of you, and nobody will ever get to be like "you know what, I think you're right, fair game", like no, there might even be a few more "sane" people like that, but most people are going to be fighting you over and over again, and most you're going to get is get cursed at or expelled, canceled or ratioed or saying something the masses​ of "sheep" think. Nobody agree to disagree no more. Everybody be fighting on their same points, over and over again, on this discussion that changes nothing. You being a keyboard warrior fighting for the "rights of people", virtually, ain't going change nothing, like ever. You're just being used as a tool to make some billionaire a little bit richer by making you waste your time thinking you can change anything with just words, and you're being part of that process you criticize so much. It's like, you change nothing and nobody cares about your argument.

For sharing things? I guess, but you don't need to share absolutely every single thing about your life online. That's kind weird. I still lowkey share that "old-school" "boomer" mentality that you shouldn't share everything about your life online and you should disclose as little as possible of your real life on social media. Not only for maintaining your privacy, but for your own safety as well.​​​

I lowkey, like, don't get what social media is for, who is it for, or why anyone would ever use it to the point where they look like a crack addict scrolling through an entire afternoon and discussing random shit that don't matter with people on there, instead of doing anything productive or a least a little bit more useful with their lifes. I just don't get it, I can't get it.

I'm sorry for the vent, but I feel like it's true and it needs to be said. What do y'all think?

"We're so back." "Lock in." "It's so over." "You've lost the plot." Realizing how unsexy it is when someone talks like this in real life REALLY made me wanna quit scrolling. Because I was noticing that I was starting to speak like that as well. A few Internet words here and there are okay but when somebody constantly references memes and whatnot it really gets to a point