This shift has been in everyone – but I’m curious about your perspective. I think about the men I know, 34 or so and up – they were raised very differently than younger guys and it shows. There is a groundedness, a respectfulness, a joy and lightness, maturity. It’s so interesting to see this juxtaposition between generations. I’m 28 and definitely feel in between this – I didn’t have a smart phone until I was 19 or so, and I see the decline in my mental health pretty clearly from that point onš¬ Curious to hear any thoughts, and maybe what we’re going to do about it for future generations?
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Iāve seen this in myself. Iām 34 and I distinctly remember a Before Smartphone me and an After Smartphone me. Itās helpful to have had an upbringing and adult memories without the smartphone, I know so many of my current depressive feelings and inattention started with the phone. Iām slowly weaning off the more addictive apps and porn, but it was so much easier without the addiction in my pocket.
Something is changing that is for sure. I ordered a book yesterday “the anxious generation”. It just arrived in the mail so I’ll probably start reading tomorrow. I’m hoping to grasp some information about how children are being rewired by smartphones.
I just went to drop my kid off at nursery. Two other guys (both under 30) were there as well when I got there waiting for it to open. Both were on their phones ignoring their kids. Neither looked up to say good morning to me.
Before smartphones weād probably have had a chat. Now we donāt even say good morning.
I think this accurately answers your question.
Edit as so many people here seem to think I want to have a half an hour chat with them. All Iām saying is that they should lift their head up so we can say good morning or hello. Reading comprehension really is a struggle in the smartphone eraā¦
I kinda think that what youāre noticing is maturity. You mentioned groundedness and respect and I think those two qualities in particular come with life experience.Ā
Men kind of need life to knock them down a peg or two before they really connect with other peopleās humanity. I know when I was young I felt like the world was a sort of quest map laid out for me and the people in it were part of my story. I had to eat some punches to realize the truth.Ā
The humility we learn allows us to see people, and that comes together with a sureness about oneself and the way one can move in the world. Ā By realizing weāre one among many in a hard world we can see the way to be a member of a community (respect).Ā
For a long time I resisted getting a Smartphone and only got one because my children insisted. I do not take it with me when walking the dog so i do still have some gadget free time.
This is honestly a really fascinating question. Good on ya!
Nearing 40 now, I honestly have no answer. My peer/friend group has definitely shrank some, but I’m still a pretty social person.
There also isn’t anyone I work with below 31. This dude seems well adjusted and a bit eccentric. I like and respect him. Which is kinda surprising now that I think about it. Most of us are significantly closer to 40 like I am though.
If you want some raw data on this, I bet there are some pretty extensive scientific studies currently under way on this topic, or ones pretty closely related to it. With very large sample sizes.
If there have been some significant studies released recently I am not aware of them. And that is in no way saying there haven’t been at all. I’m not super into this type of topic like I was in the past.
Good luck to you finding your answer!
My gym shows this for me, young lads on their phones between sets whilst us older chaps are fully engaged in banter. There is a clear divide between those who talk aloud and those who don’t and it’s definitely age related!
Smart phones are turning us all into zombies
Ultimately it just makes it easier for late bloomers like myself to stick out in a positive way when compared to other men.
I always walk around making eye contact with everyone and that alone is something that is being lost.
It has more to do with age than smartphones. I have one, have had one since they came out.
One generational observation I might make is that when you’re in a restaurant, it’s more common for younger people to be on their phones. Not only are they taking photos of their food (which I find pretty annoying for some reason), they’re not engaging in conversation. For me, it’s very strange because the last thing I’m thinking about when having a meal with someone is my phone.
Furthermore, that person who is checking their phone and maybe texting in a movie theater? Under 30. But the person who forgets to put their phone on silent? Over 50. One is very disrespectful but the other is just oblivious, lol.
More person than age. Someone once complained about everyone bring on their phones in a subway carriage. But someone else posted a picture of everyone reading newspaper from the 1960’s. My point is that people who wanted to avoid talking have always being able to do so.
Before phones, the antisocial people would hide from plain sight. Now they can stand with their phones in plain sight.
Im 36. I tend to not interact with many people below 27 ish. Not because im against it, but because they generally are always looking at a phone, filming something, or listening to something. I like to live present in realty, screens are for when i have no other option to me. So i find myself mostly connecting with 50 years olds who seem to know life before the screens.
Iām 45. I donāt say hello to random people in line with me wherever I am. Iāll say good morning at work to all the people I work with because I need to have rapport with them. But random people in line at the grocery store or at a movie do not get greetings. I donāt know you, why am I gonna talk to you. Then again I really donāt like talking to most people. As an introvert small talk is draining to me. I donāt need to waste time and energy talking to people I donāt know about things that I donāt care about.
Yes, absolutely.
I’m a therapist and I see many disenfranchised and confused young men.
I didn’t get a smart phone until I was 29. To me they are just a convenience, not a life style.
The COVID zoomers are zombies. They literally don’t talk. At all. You could sit right next to them at a dinner for 2 hours and they won’t tell you their name. They’re broken, completely broken. I don’t think any of them will ever be able to reproduce.
Maybe Iām exaggerating, but this is how I see it: smartphones may have brought some benefits, but in my opinion, the downsides far outweigh them. We hold in our hands an endless source of knowledge, yet we often use it to numb ourselves and waste time. It’s like having a book that reveals the meaning of life and choosing to hit yourself over the head with it instead of reading it.
On top of that, I can’t stand the fact that nowadays everyone carries a high-definition video camera at all times, ready to record anything. If I had known the future would turn out this way, I would have enjoyed the pre-digital years much more. The internet is flooded with videos of people minding their own business or dancing in a funny way, filmed and uploaded without their consent. There’s just too much exposureātoo much of everything, all the time.
I noticed a shift in my neck and shoulders from staring at the damn thing all day.
https://preview.redd.it/9vd0goq45jze1.png?width=777&format=png&auto=webp&s=6d1c70cb08e6bcf1a2536920aa60bd9513a81f97
self explanatory
You’re basically saying older people are more mature. Well yeah. The 20 y/o man today is probably more respectful and mature in 15 years, at 35. And then there will be a new generation of immature 20 y/os.
100%, and really just anyone, no one talks to each other. No wonder thereās so much loneliness and anxiety.
Social conversation is a skill. You donāt use it and you lose a lot of it and when you do have to talk to people, you get anxious. Saying that as someone with ADHD and GAD who trends more introverted.
And I donāt think itās isolated to just us above 30. I just think weāre all of the generations that knew what life was like before phones.
Like those small conversations at the checkout counter. Complimenting people on things as you see it in public. Asking for recommendations or just general passerby chit chat.
Iāve also noticed in myself how much social content has affected me interacting with people. You see women talking about not wanting to interact with men or wanting space in public, rightfully so, and you find yourself second guessing approaching women to talk to them or ask them out.
This isn’t a “mens” or “waiting room” problem, it’s an “everyone” and “everywhere” problem. The truth is smartphones and airpods offer an addictive, personalized, predictable, and accessible escape from human interaction and the discomfort that sometimes comes with it.
Go to a park, concert, or walk around your city and take note of how many people are buried in their phones and airpods. No eye contact, no acknowledgement of our shared humanity, no curiosity about the world around them. You can feel the resultant loss of the ethereal human connection we all share, especially in highly individualist societies like the USA.
There’s less socializing, less interacting, less connecting and the result is more loneliness, disconnection, alienation, and division. Exhibit A: Politics. Exhibit B: Culture wars. Exhibit C: Gender wars.
Make no mistake, much of this division is by design. A distracted, divided, and lonely populace spends a lot of money trying to connect and also forgets to ask hard questions about the systems in place perpetuating those very problems.
In college, I had a professor who diligently warned us about the consequences of smartphones, social media, and personalized algorithms and here we are a decade later.
We all need to make more of an effort to take our airpods out of our ears, keep our phones in our pockets, and acknowledge the presence of others more often. I think that would be a good start.
I try to stay away from my phone for extended periods and I’ve never regretted a single moment when I’ve managed to do that.
There’s a dude at work 12 years younger than me who does the same job. He keeps basically telling the rest of us things that amount to “hey, I just figured out if I don’t do all of my work it gets finished anyway!” and can’t understand why the rest of us don’t like him
He also takes his “lunch” multiple times a day in his car watching his phone, and even admitted that he has YouTube on while driving (we are delivery drivers)
I really hope this guy is just an idiot, because if everyone that age is this bad, we’re cooked
The decline is horrible. Young people are basically not functional without smartphone. I just heard young people in a park ask their phones how to make fire for a barbeque.Ā
It’s very worrying for me to see the decline in basic competency + the absolute lack of critical thinking.Ā
I believe the huge rise of right wing politics all over the world comes from this fact and the bot armies implemented to influence exactly those people who are incapable of understanding how echo chamber and psychology of masses are working. It’s a slow burning disaster in the making, especially in vulnerable low income and low education parts of our society.Ā
There seems to be a pretty big mentality difference between those of us whose childhoods took place before the internet was pervasive (like before dial up AOL days) and those who are a decade younger and who have always had the internet. The same kind of shift seems to have happened when smartphones became pervasive. This is just a cultural shift man.
The iPhone didn’t even exist until I had been out of high school for 8 years, so I thankfully escaped all of the bullshit that everyone having the internet and a camera in their pockets 24/7. I sometimes miss the days when you could settle an argument with fake facts you pulled out of your ass on the spot as long as you could SOUND convincing.
TBT phones seem to have added a layer of abstraction to society in general. People just don’t talk to each other anymore, strangers waiting together in the same place just unplug and zone out, there does not seem to be a general sense of “we’re in the same boat, let’s be cool with one another due to circumstances” that existed before.
We DID stuff. From the get-go. And we weren’t bombarded constantly by “influencers” telling us how to live our lives…we had to figure things out on our own.
But mostly, we lived and still live IN THE WORLD. The real one, with all it’s complexity and unpredictability.
Now, everything is just handed to kids. They don’t actually DO anything, so they have no idea what has value (because it WORKS) and what is useless (because it DOESN’T). There’s a ready-made echo chamber that requires no actual accomplishment for reinforcement…in fact, it is more likely to pull them down to the lowest and try to undermine them when they try and rise above.
And it’s not “interesting”…it’s more like watching de-evolution take place before our very eyes. Hate to say it, fifty years later, but Devo was right.
>I think about the men I know, 34 or so and up – they were raised very differently than younger guys and it shows. There is a groundedness, a respectfulness, a joy and lightness, maturity.
I DEFINITELY don’t see this. Some of the most immature, ungrounded, emotional men I know are boomers. I think you are projecting a bias. Yes smartphones have def changed younger generations. But they have changed older generations too.
40s. I genuinely think itās mobile phones and porn. I donāt know if I think that because I was so dam hooked on it. Now Iām off it, Iām a huge advocate of getting rid of porn or making it less accessible.
My mental health took a blootering but didnāt realise how bad it was until I got off Porn.
In terms of other behaviours, I was certainly a bad boy growing up, drinking to much, vandalism and stealing. I think the younger generation is not so naughty which is a good thing but yeah they seem less personable than the generations before.
Iām 36, mom got me a phone when I was 16 and suddenly out with friends in our cars all the time. I stayed on a flip phone until 2019. Honestly at this point I almost wish I still had one. Smart phones really have screwed stuff up
Construction site coffee truck line up. There’s probably 25 guys in line. I’m the only one without my phone out. I’m 40. There was a time when it was conversation and jokes. It was an odd feeling.
That’s a really hard thing to show tho.
Maturity is gonna change how different generations act of course.
How does smartphones affect that? Great question! I suspect that smartphones would affect how maturity and mental health is expressed but that this progression of maturity would happen either way.
Smart phones are a great tool, but I have been making an effort to stop reading comments on Facebook and Instagram because, who cares what I think and why do these people’s opinions really matter to me? Before they could insert themselves into a discussion I am having, I would have never known they didn’t like a band I like. I’m not going onto their posts to yuck their yum.
I have been putting more energy into hobbies and projects that I sidelined because of engagement in social media (and here I am on Reddit, but this is a good discussion). After about 2012, I started to see a significant shift in how people engage in public. I see TV shows and movies that are pre-smartphone and I feel a sentimentality for the way the world was. Getting old is weird. I’m starting to see why older people stop keeping up with the current fads.
It’s ok to be uncomfortable. Think about what that means and if a distraction is truly what you need.
It’s not the smartphone itself, but the apps themselves that are causing the shift in society.
Video games, social media (including reddit, youtube), porn, dating apps, and now online gambling (sports betting) and also information overload (google searches and AI chats).
These quick easy dopamine hits make real-life activities like finding a real-life girlfriend, skill based activities like sports or arts or playing instruments much less rewarding. Getting real life validation through your work and interests/hobbies is less rewarding too… you can just post some garbage photo online and get a ton of likes.
I mentioned in another post that around 2007-2008 was a perfect blend of technology vs. living in real life. We could communicate (phone calls, text, AIM lol), navigate (not turn by turn directions, but had a map of where we were going), and to get information you had to be on a computer and do some research usually through forums. Also to socialize online, you had to be on a computer (usually) to access MySpace/Friendster/Facebook/dating app or could do minor instant messages on like an crude AIM app. The internet did not have the answers to all your life questions. You had to go out in the real world and find out for yourself. Trial and error. Fucking up. Success. Failure. We had enough technology to give us the tools to explore, gather and socialize, find new interests, but not enough to take out all the surprise.
Also the internet had less influence on your personality and style. People’s personality was developed by their real life peers and family members and environment. Now young men are so generic. They all act and look the same. Same style, same clothing, talk the same, same tattoos, same interests (porn, gambling, video games), go to the gym, etc. Everything so generic.
yeah, it’s frustrating. but it’s not just men under 30, i know guys in their 40s that are glued to their phones too. and of course women too, it’s everybody at this point. my 70 year old dad plays his golf game probably 5 hours a day.
i have no idea how to fix it, but at some point society will just have to collectively agree it’s a problem, and a real addiction.
personally, i just keep my phone on silent 24/7. emergency contacts can call and it will ring, but that’s it. all notifications turned off for everything.
You’re describing people that are confident and mature. These things come with time. Even between 28 and 32 I changed a lot.
You’re pointing out a correlation – it would be more appropriate to say there’s a shift in men raised during different years and social climates.
I’m sure internet, social media, and phones have contributed, in their ways, but I think the change you’re noticing is a broader societal/cultural one, that can’t just be pinned on one invention alone
Sort of, I didnāt mature until I hit my 30s and even now Iām very immature. But I am more respectful and grounded now.
The biggest difference I see is that every younger generation has more information given to them at a younger age than the previous generation. But what truly builds a person is experience not information. I can tell a virgin all about sex but unless they have sex they will never truly know.
Yes. Soooo many younger men/boys seem incredibly stunted socially to me. Like no variation in their voices, no eye contact, like I’m not sure why their parents didn’t teach them how to act, but something is seriously missing for many of them. Like they are so uncomfortable existing in the world that isn’t looking down at their phone.
I don’t think smartphones are the reason per say. Let me submit that what has changed and what you are observing is a change in commercial media. Sometime in the last 20-30 years the media has figure they can get more interaction from discontent, anger and division. It represents more view, clicks and what not. It turns out more advertising revenue for them. So, that is what they have pushed onto society. It’s like porn and political discord, hate is the only thing that really drives the Internet. After decades of this, it’s had it’s impact and now we are witnessing the long term negative effects of commercial media, news and whatnot. They have slowly poison people’s minds. You will not find a better example of but right here on Reddit. I like music, horticulture and engineering topics, but there is no activity in those subs, everything on Reddit is hate and visceral hatred of all things good. Even subs like Christian, are just there to bash Christians. That is the world we live in, men and women under 30 do not know of any other world. Soon it will be everyone. Just a world full of hate for each other just so someone will click and scroll on yet another garbage news article or social media post.
I work from home doing startup & software development stuff all day every day, so I make a point to physically leave my apt & interact with people in person regularly so that I don’t become some weird modern hermit who doesn’t understand how to interact with anyone anymore.
Absolutely.
I see it every day, because my job for the past 15 years is to hire and supervise a large team of minimum wage laborers. I’ve seen hundreds of applicants come and go, many of which are young men and women fresh out of high school who just want some gainful employment. A few years before COVID hit, i started noticing a trend among younger applicants and trainees. More and more often the young ones are showing poor listening and verbal communication skills, poor critical thinking and common sense, less inclination to talk to and befriend older coworkers, less likely to ask questions or expose their mistakes, and more quickly get frustrated and give up when faced with a task that requires practice to do well (blaming the instructions for being insufficient or the task itself for being poorly designed).
10 years ago, younger applicants were just different. They could carry on a conversation with anyone. They were more likely to ask questions while they were being trained and take written notes. They were more likely to use critical thinking to overcome unexpected issues in their work (or at least seek help from a nearby coworker) rather than go straight to their supervisor for guidance every time they ran into a slight deviation from the norm. They had more patience for tedium. Though their math+reading+writing skills tended to be worse than today, they tended to behave a bit more obnoxiously, and they tended to have worse attendance, they were still overall better workers.
And its thanks to smartphones. Today’s young adults – as teens – never had to navigate without GPS, shop without google, endure frequent periods of unstimulated boredom, interact with strangers daily, or roam far from the safety of their home without a line of communication. Turns out all these mundane risks and inconveniences actually helped temper kids brains, making them more resilient, socially adept, and capable of dealing with uncertainty as adults.
I practically grew up outside playing if the weather was nice enough. I donāt ever see boys outside playing anymore unless it is a planned paid for activity like little league or something.
That’s the benefit of being a millenial. We grew up without technology long enough for it to not affect us negatively in our youth unlike Gen Z but were still young enough to be able to adapt to it unlike Gen Xers. Growing up on PokĆ©mon and Digimon characters telling us to never give up will always be greater then growing up on YouTube & Tiktok pranksters harassing random people at a Walmart or airport. And it shows.
I saw a big difference between class of ā99 and class of ā00 even in school. For example, in our middle school it was like your first transition to a more grown up school environment. Had a different teacher for each class, had a locker instead of your desk in your one classroom.
In ā93 when CO 2000 entered, they changed it to more mimic elementary school with a single teacher/single classroom like elementary school for the incoming 6th graders.
1992 we had a teacher die in our middle school (heart attack) and the paramedics rolled her body out through the school. She just wasnāt there anymore, life went on.
In ā97 we had another teacher die in high school (cancer) and they brought in counselors and had all sorts of grief activities, only the freshmen (class of ā00) participated. It was like watching the coddling move along with them.
Shortly after I graduated college āsafe spacesā started becoming a thing.
I think cell phones are just a marker of the time when the effects coddling the kids started to show.
To be fair, youāre judging what youāre seeing by your years of experiences. You are seeing young people who are young and comparing them to older people who have learnt a lot more of lifeās lessons and values.
You can only make this observation when the young people you are currently observing have had the benefit of having lived for another 20-40 years.
I think the younger generations today are better than mine at the same age.
At the end of the day life teaches us all the same lessons, just maybe in a different order or to a different intensity
Put the phone down, a lot of the content we consume is produced for our attention / focus in the hopes of showing us ads (e.g. youtube,instagram,tiktok,facebook etc), our attention and focus is what they are all after.
Seeing how things evolved to more advertising, more intrusiveness, more fake media, more narrative supporting media especially given algorithmic vs time based or vote based feeds has created this.
My friends and I play a game at dinner, everybody puts their phone on a stack and whoever touches it first pays for the meal smartwatches count too.
My nephew, over 30, has zero social skills largely bc he is on his phone all the time. I’ve stopped making the effort to stop in his city and see him since it’s not a worthwhile use of my time. That he wonders why he doesn’t have a gf or a lot of close friends is amazing to me’ he isn’t dumb but he’s dumb. It will prob. be another decade before he wakes up and realizes that the phone is not his friend but his source of pain and by then it’s too late.
I’ll write you a thing that can be helpful to someway to understand millenial teenages:
I remember summer 2005.
My family had an house in the Eastern Ligurian Riviera, Northern Italy, (italian M35 here) in a little village that now sadly has become a ”tourist trap / cardboard coast town / influencerbait”, but back then it was a living and thriving village of winemakers, fishermen, farmers (that Pixar movie, Luca, was inspired by this village and my childhood was literally like in the movie except for magic lol)
I was literally part of the village youth and every generation there cohoperated and talked, there was a collectivity, like a superorganism.
In that summer, i forgot in my ”autumn/winter/spring” city (north Italy) my Nokia, so i literally lost contact with EVERYONE from there for whole two monts; my dad (r.i.p.) bought me a temporary number for SMS and calls, no internet, so i literally spent two months isolated from my ”native” city, with only ”villagers”.
It was the best time of my life.
I had a lot of things happening in my life, but girl, these two months back in summer 05 were almost MAGICAL and HEAVEN.
No thoughts, no worries, no axiety, not constant texting, no PC, no internet, even the Tv was broken this summer. Pura vita and careless at their PEAKS. We talked to the elders, we talked to the ”boomers”, we played with kids, whe picked up angloamerican girls, we had typical italian sagras, we went to discos, we played, we laughed till the Dawn, … we (i ) lived.
I chased this sensation for decades, i know it’s wrong but i did. If Heaven exist, for me is an endless 05 summer.
I discuss this exact same issue with friends and family. Smart phone addiction is doing incredible harm. Social media destroys realistic perceptions. Instascam highlights only wins . Women and men edit pics as the.norm. incredible time suck with life’s simple pleasures ignored. I will stop as I witness it more life altering by the day.
Smart phones made it too easy to be self-absorbed. While scrolling or working via phone isn’t necessarily bad, it can come across to others like they do not matter to the person on their phone.
Growing up with just a landline and payphone makes you remember the feeling when you were alone and couldn’t hang out with friends or chat on the phone with them all day. It brings back the meaning of human connection and how valuable it is.
People standing in the street without their phones in hand are instantly suspicious, but I won’t bat an eye if theirs is glued to their phone screen.