Comment by ramon156
3 days ago
Short Form Content is high dopamine low effort. Yes, it's addictive, close to Nicotine even.
The harm is it's wasting an insane amount of your day. You could spend6 hours doing anything more productive
3 days ago
Short Form Content is high dopamine low effort. Yes, it's addictive, close to Nicotine even.
The harm is it's wasting an insane amount of your day. You could spend6 hours doing anything more productive
> Short Form Content is high dopamine low effort. Yes, it's addictive, close to Nicotine even.
Sorry, but this line of argument just isn't acceptable. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter created by the body itself, and is released naturally as a response to a wide variety of experiences. Nicotine is an exogenous chemical substance that alters the body's biochemistry and creates physical dependence.
Extending the meaning of "addition" to cover anything that people enjoy doing and are thus motivated to do more of is a disingenuous equivocation.
If the best you can do to argue against something is to attempt to lump it in with something qualitatively different in the hopes of attaching the connotations of the latter also to the former, then I'm afraid you've lost the argument.
> The harm is it's wasting an insane amount of your day. You could spend6 hours doing anything more productive
Claiming that one particular pastime is any worse than any of the others people have wasted time on -- readying mediocre novels, watching television, drinking alcohol -- etc. is just a case of judging other people's choices by your own particular preferences.
I agree with you that the vast majority of social media is stupid and a waste of time, but other people's time is theirs to waste.
> close to Nicotine even
I find that incredibly hard to believe especially since nicotine causes a physical chemical dependency. Sure it is hard for some people to get off of social media, but let's no go overboard here with the social media == big tobacco metaphor.
Let's hear what you think about gambling addiction then. People have destroyed their lives and families due to it. No chemical dependency either.
I think it's possible to criticize things for what they are, without having to resort to conflating them with other things. Excessive gambling doesn't have to be equated to physical addiction in order to be regarded as a bad thing -- it can be a bad thing as a result of its own consequences without having to be compared to anything else.