“My kids don’t have anything they want to do…”

“My kids don’t have anything they want to do…”

I hear this a lot. These days, children say that there is nothing they want to do. But in fact, neither do they. They have traveled to Europe, but they just say that they will stay in their hotel rooms. They want to play games. From a parent’s point of view, they are so excited. Latte is! If my parents take me to Europe! I went to London Heathrow three times a day! By the way!!

When I ask my kids what we’re going to do in London, they say they want to play games with the phone. I want to say, “Oh, my kids just like to read books on their own, so I just raised them easily!” But I confess that frankly, I’m a corpse. In my house, my threats about phones and games dampen everywhere in the house like spring rain.

In order to survive in the AI era, I insisted that there is no AI and humans should have what they have, but for the humans I am raising, if the only thing that wants is to look into the phone and play computer games, it is simply a big deal.

It’s not just children. There’s a saying called bed roasting. It means you’re lying in bed and rotting. The new word doomscrolling has also arrived. There are a lot of people who never have to leave the house with the Internet and phone.

This is an interview I read a while ago from Stolen Concentration, where Aza Raskin commented that he had too much of a negative impact on humanity. Too much self-conscious. I almost snorted over and was stunned to see what he had invented. “Infinite scrolling.” Yes, he was Doomscrawling’s father.

There was a straightforward rant that it was you…! Yes, he needs some self-reflection.

Doom-scrolling and short-form slaves remain in this world? The world’s best brains have created the Dream Team Bundesliga, where top-tier companies throw money indefinitely, and algorithms that use the knowledge of humanity and user patterns of humanity accumulated so far and then complete hundreds of millions of real-time tests dominate social media and content feeds. It’s impossible for the general public to fight against this. We are constantly scrolling through content on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok today.

I once had an app that tracks how much time I spend on my phone last year. I’m ashamed, but as a working mother who is a full-time office worker, I started to make a comeback because I seemed to waste more than three or four hours every day looking at my cell phone, but from the first day, I couldn’t tell people around me.

it has been more than seven hours.

So I started to measure in more detail. I’m an old man in the morning, so I wake up 3-40 minutes as soon as I wake up. I eat, wake up the kids, and spend school, and whenever I have time, I get extra hours before I go to work. Watching 10 minutes each break time gets a little longer even though I go to work. And during lunchtime. I’m watching the phone while eating alone. And in the afternoon, I add a little more time, and in the evening, I watch it for another hour or two when I rest after meals. I also watch it before I go to bed. I was spending more than seven hours on my phone, and most of them were doomscrolling, which I don’t even remember.

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It is said that today’s generation of children does not have deficiencies, but they cannot artificially create deficiencies and starve themselves. However, there is a deficiency they really need, which is a lack of stimulation.

If you keep snacking, you won’t be hungry. I can’t think of anything I want to eat. But not if you’re on a diet. I think about what to eat while I’m hungry, and I constantly recall what was delicious before. People who can pick up and eat this and that because they have increased snacks may not have much thoughts about food. Therefore, dieters may appear to be gluttonous, but overall calorie consumption will be much higher in snackers.

If modern food science has been able to study DNA, which has not changed much since the beginning of human history, to find out exactly what food tastes good, and to indefinitely manufacture food that is not nutritious, but only high in calories, delicious, and low in manufacturing cost, AI has succeeded in hacking the brain’s reward structure in a similar way.

Those born in the ’80s and before will remember. How boring school was, and how absurd they were at that moment. But modern people can’t stand boredom more than not being able to stand poverty or hunger. I can’t remember the days when I was hungry and now I’m half a day hungry and I’m a leper. We can’t stand boredom for a single five minutes. Immediately, the phone is pulled out and scrolling begins. Then, the brain is entrusted to a dopamine machine carefully curated by advanced AI.

The brain that is already preoccupied with stimuli loses its sharp “intention”. As you continue to snack, you’re not hungry and you don’t have anything you want to eat. Planning “plan” with “intention” requires concentration and continuous ego survival, and content that changes every few seconds satisfies our curiosity, erases boredom, and dulls the surrounding situations. It’s boring to talk with others, and I’m also nervous about situations I can’t control. If it’s a YouTube feed, you can skim it over if it’s less fun than a few seconds, but the reality is that it’s hard. If it’s a game, you click a few times and the rewards are poured out, but that’s not the case. No matter how short it is, it takes hours, days, months, and in fact, usually years of investment to feel a sense of accomplishment.

So one thing I want to ask parents who raise young children is, –

Adults are also facing tough challenges. Even though children grew up without short form in their childhood, they cannot beat them. Young children are not competitors to fight against. Content feeds are the place where the best AIs created by grinding global capital and global brains blew away their money worries to Andromeda. Among them, the short-form is the worst