But this is the future. Most people are too lonely. People are forced to value jobs and careers more than relationships.

4 years ago, no one would have predicted the success of only fans, a porn influencing site. But here we are, people are working too hard at work to make money and then throwing it away at rent and to pay for imaginary sex. Next step, get them to pay for the emotional relationship.

I don't like the future.

> People are forced to value jobs and careers more than relationships.

This feels like an 80s trope. People are lonely because the discomfort of social situations drives them to hide in their smartphones rather than take the time to get to know people. It's a sad prison.

Blaming smartphones is a recent meme for a phenomenon that precedes smartphones

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

>Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a 2000 nonfiction book by Robert D. Putnam. It was developed from his 1995 essay entitled "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital". Putnam surveys the decline of social capital in the United States since 1950. He has described the reduction in all the forms of in-person social intercourse upon which Americans used to found, educate, and enrich the fabric of their social lives. He argues that this undermines the active civic engagement which a strong democracy requires from its citizens.

Ah yes, I forgot about all of those “meme” studies of youth mental health showing a marked decline during the 1950s like we see today with studies that analyze mental health after the introduction of the smartphone.

Nothing else in youths lives has changed even remotely since 1950s other than the smartphone, it clearly must be the cause!

" He concluded the main cause was technology "individualizing" people's leisure time via television and the Internet, suspecting that "virtual reality helmets" would carry this further in the future."

Smartphones fit nicely in his conclusion.

Stop this old person trope. Your friend network is offline. There is life for you offline.

For a lot of youngsters, they don't have a network outside. They grew up online. All they know is online.

It is really hard for youngsters to get out of when they don't know anyone outside it.

I didn’t suggest anyone get out of anything. I was merely pointing out it’s easier to be insular in the age of the smartphone. And this isn’t just a passing observation. Studies on many facets of social health show declines since smartphones have been adopted.

IDK, back in my edgy years I was suicidal due to "loneliness"- even though I had friends and family. I even (kinda) had a partner.

I had no money, because you can't pay almost $100K in student loans and $900/mo in rent when you make $37K/year before taxes. I never went anywhere when my friends did.

I was the only person in my friend group that liked certain hobbies and social media wasn't that big back then (my main social media sites up until that point were blackplanet and geosites- Facebook had JUST come out) so there was no way for me to connect with like-minded individuals about things I really cared about.

I went to school ~600 miles away from my family in a city of ~35k people and only 88 of them were the same ethnicity as I, so I had to suppress most of my personality to "not stand out", which strained my relationship with my partner and led to a surprise breakup.

By the time I hit 22 I was legit prepared to end it all- I even left a "final farewell" note on /b just to give them one last "rofl" on the way out.

A full decade later I look back and realize that it wasn't my shitty job or financial situation. It wasn't being in a minority group in a hostile school or the breakup. I wasn't (committed to being) suicidal. I was literally just being an edgy dingleberry. My problem was 100% made up and I was just looking for ANY reason to stay trapped in a cycle of sadness. Eventually it just... Went away? At some point at 24 something changed in my brain where all of a sudden I want thinking about how lonely I was.

None of it had anything to really do with social interaction, at least not ACTUAL interaction. It felt like I was just bitter because I couldn't do all the stuff I WANTED to do, and that stuff just happened to be related to social interaction. Maybe my scenario isn't the same as what you're describing but I don't think smartphones/social media were my issue. I just needed to mature a bit more and not be so focused on what I COULDN'T do.

Having said that while I think smartphones are one of the most influential inventions to come out since the turn of the millennium... The biggest social media sites are a net drain on society and I would not be sad to see them go in the slightest.

Now throw in access to a gun and the odds of you being able to take your life in a vulnerable situation rise dramatically.

Throw in access to a smartphone where you’re bombarded with images and videos of the best version of everyone you know’s lives and you start feeling even more like you are the problem and are more likely to take your life when in a vulnerable position.

Throw in cyber bullying and if you happened to be bullied by any groups you’re part of that bullying would continue even when you’re home.

The one good thing about the internet is that it may have allowed you to communicate with others in your situation and help you realize you’re not the problem.

But we don’t need smartphones (and an always available camera) for that.

I want to cherry pick this:

>"...Throw in access to a smartphone where you’re bombarded with images and videos of the best version of everyone you know’s lives and you start feeling even more like you are the problem and are more likely to take your life when in a vulnerable position..."

This is exactly my point- it is NOT the smartphone's fault. This is the fault of social media/advertisers and the fact that people refuse to get off of social media (because why work for money when you can just trade your privacy for a sponsorship deal and 10k followers). Nobody is "bombarding" you with anything if you just don't use those services, and if you replace "smartphone" with "Internet", "computer", "TV", etc... Your statement is still 100% true. I'm no expert but to me this is a dead ringer that the _smartphone_ isn't the root problem, and it would be unreasonable to blame this on "every device capable of displaying a webpage."

This is a "corporations suck" issue- not a technical issue. Smartphones are a convenient punching bag to blame, just like how millennials were "being corrupted" by violent video games.

Your other points are absolutely rock solid- no objections (especially the always-on camera bit, and not just because of bullying). It's this one point I take issue with. The social media and advertising companies are at fault- not the technology those companies use (yet. I love VR/AR but I do NOT like where it's going right now).

If it helps make sense of how I view this problem, the gun industry is a direct parallel. To fight gun violence we want to go after the sellers. Replace "gun" with "smartphone" and ask yourself: "does it make sense to go after smartphone manufacturers and sellers to stop cyber bullying? Is it fair to hurt the eCommerce, gaming, telephone, etc... Unrelated companies because ad companies are driving kids to despair?" To me the answer is "no", because I don't think it's fair to impact other digital companies relying on smartphones for business because a few of them are problematic. I also don't think it's fair to punish sport shooters, hunters, etc... By impacting their rights to (legal) gun ownership just because sellers want to protect their bottom lines.

Something needs to change, but I don't believe it's smartphones. We need to make it illegal to base a business model on the suffering of others.

It's actually a lot about a car based, commercialized society more then a phone or anything. If we had walkable cities, communities we wanted to be a part in, people would feel a whole lot less lonely. Fixing zoning laws, beautifying cities, better public transportation and working to bring more of nature into our everyday lives would make a digital one less interesting and we also would not need to work as hard as a good life would be in reach. It's like blaming books for causing people to be antisocial, same thing as video games...

So why does youth mental health show a steep decline after the introduction of the smartphone, especially in girls?

It is both. They both absolutely contribute to our mental health crisis, and I'd argue it's worse in suburb-locked North America. I, as I'm sure others have as well, have identified these two individual problems as major offenders of my mental health. When I spend time away from both, I feel magnitudes of order happier. Mix that with the dystopian job culture of "the future" (today) and you've got yourself a nightmare only 80s writers would've thought of.

Lots of things changed around that time. Lots of things change all the time. Unless there's an intervention that is shown to work (ban smartphones, mental health goes up), I wouldn't trust such correlations.

I choose to put my effort towards improving those values, rather than new ways to cope with worse ones.

Maybe it's a good thing.

As a suicidal person it can be extremely difficult to open up to another human being because my convictions of hopelessness and futility are so strong that to truly communicate them would also mean cursing the listener with knowledge that would make they themselves suicidal.

Maybe it wouldn't directly cause them to also become suicidal, but it could be a contributor. It could be one cut in a death of thousands. If you've ever seen the show Smiling Friends, the first episode is an example of how wanting to help can backfire in harmful ways.

An AI chatbot might be uniquely useful as a therapy option. I wouldn't have to feel the guilt of corrupting an innocent human being with dark suicidal thoughts. Sometimes a human connection is important for therapy, but the ability to talk things out may actually outweigh it for this context.

> As a suicidal person it can be extremely difficult to open up to another human being because my convictions of hopelessness and futility are so strong that to truly communicate them would also mean cursing the listener with knowledge that would make they themselves suicidal.

It's kind of interesting to hear that perspective. I don't worry about making others suicidal (maybe I should?) but instead worry that they'd be overly concerned about me all of the time when, e.g. I've just had a particularly bad day that day.

I certainly agree that chatbots seem to be a low-risk alternative to that. It's a never-ending delicate calculus over who you can tell what to considering that here in the US you can be locked up in a psychiatric facility for (at least) 48 hours for being a "harm to yourself." Thus, you can't explore your own feelings with another person and keep them locked inside, which is a much better alternative. /s

I'm definitely interested in using a chatbot as long as it itself isn't tied into any suicide hotline reporting scheme.

Reminds me of this quote: "I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.” You don't want to "break" other puppets.

Meanwhile, in a real dystopia (imperial Russia) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misery_(short_story)

I already know people for whom ChatGPT and other chatbots are better friends and partners than almost any they had in real life. Especially for the disabled or consistently unhoused. It is dystopian but so is the existing world. Simulated empathy may be better than none at all.