> Throughout time, people have complained that technology is ruining the world. Before AI it was the internet, and before that it was TV, nuclear power, and so on.

What if throughout time they have been right ? Any proof thst while tech brought longer lifes and more material wealth, we haven’t just spiraled down for a while in term of mental wellbeing, sense of meaning, sense of belonging etc ?

That’s obviously not true of every piece of tech (I.e. it’s hard to imagine how antibiotics or replacing a coal plant by a nuclear power plant could have negative impact of people’s mental wellbeing) but it could be true about technology in general. It’s not a stretch to believe that technologies that radically transform what a day in the life of a human being looks like, can also have an impact on said human beings life.

Our bodies and mind, have been finetuned for living in nature and hunting gathering, with a small group consisting of our families and friends for millions of years. Now we live a sedentary life, for many away from family and without any sense of community, in large, noisy, devoid of nature cities having to do day in day out the same job that is more and more compartimentalized and less and less concrete and meaningful, only to go home and sit in front of a tv to be bombarded by ads trying to induce fomo, or god forbid, doom scrolling on tik tok for hours.

If it just so happened that those two modes of life generate the exact same levels and qualities of stress in our little brains, that would be quite the coincidence.

Look at every stat around mental health: anxiety, depression, sense of meaning etc. They are all getting worse over decades. And if you think it’s caused by people just complaining more than before, look at how the rate of people willing to kill themselves, that’s the ultimate truth. All worsening.

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turnsout 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If you continue this argument ad infinitum, you'll eventually conclude that agriculture was our first mistake, and we should have just stayed in the cave.

Like, how is this line of reasoning constructive?

I guarantee our hunter-gatherer ancestors felt all the same emotions—burnout, comparison, envy, anxiety, stress, overwhelm, hopelessness. The setting has changed, but our brains have not changed that much.

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sailingparrot an hour ago | parent [-]

> I guarantee our hunter-gatherer ancestors felt all the same emotions—burnout, comparison, envy, anxiety, stress, overwhelm, hopelessness.

Yes they felt all the same emotions. You absolutely cannot guarantee they felt them in the same proportions thought.

> our brains have not changed that much.

That is the point: our brains have not changed and is still evolving at the speed of gene mutations. Our environment though is changing magnitudes faster than before.

> how is this line of reasoning constructive?

This is not trying to be constructive, just trying to understand the human condition. We probably have no choice but to learn to deal with it, that doesn’t mean technology has no adverse impact.

	▲	turnsout 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Friend, hunter-gatherers felt more existential dread than you do, because 50% of their kids died, and they themselves would be lucky to live to the ripe old age of 40. Every generation in history has felt that things used to be better and they got the short end of the stick. My grandparents lived through the Great Depression and World War II. My parents lived through the cold war, Watergate and Vietnam. Millennials have phones that they like too much, and it's slightly harder to buy a house, and they feel like no one has ever endured this much hardship. We need to grow up. "Too much Instagram" is not remotely on the same level as "we need to hide in the basement during air raids." PS, I don't buy any argument that there's more depression now than there was at an earlier point in history, because psychology does not have the most stellar track record when it comes to scientific rigor. I just don't trust any measure that's over 20 years old.