have you been outside recently? I mean outside without a phone for a couple of months. Give yourself a no-data diet, and just observe what is going on in others. Wait alone at a bus-stop or alone at a pub or cafe. You can see them addicted to their screens everywhere. It's the norm now to immediately reach for the phone because god forbid they might otherwise feel 2 seconds of boredom.

I think you're vastly overestimating how social people were before smartphones were widespread. This is a really awful source, but it proves the point pretty well [0].

> It's much much worse than any hard drug you could be addicted to because with hard drugs you still have others who you can do them with.

I hope you don't really believe this. I don't disagree that some modern tech/algorithm solutions are making the world a worse place, but to say that you'd be better addicted to heroin than Facebook is nonsense. Humanity is always calling the "next" thing worse than the current thing when the current thing is normalised (music, rock music, television, video games, smart phones) - here's [1] an article from 30 years ago speaking about TV addiction.

> Just do yourselves a favor and never unplug because what you see might be so upsetting that you might wonder if it's still worth living.

I sincerely hope you don't feel this way, and if you really do, you should speak to someone about your feelings.

[0] https://www.sadanduseless.com/evil-iphones/ [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/16/science/how-viewers-grow-...