> "You can totally quit heroin! Just stop taking it"
"Oh and if all your friends are doing it and are wondering why you're not having fun with them, just ignore them"
The heroin analogy is lazy and irrelevant. The reason people say stuff like "try doing X to quit or cut down" is that, unlike heroin, a fairly large chunk of people who've recognized the problem have been pretty able to easily cut down or stop their "dopamine addiction" to the level that they're comfortable with.
If heroin had such a high success rate from going cold turkey, you can be damn sure that people would be saying "try going cold turkey" or "try this specific path to quitting", because it's worked for so many others. There are successful suggestions on this thread that amount to "I deleted my dealer's number from my phone and poof problem gone".
That isn't to say that these will definitely work for everyone: some people have a more severe problem when it comes to their relationship to dopamine. But it's awfully self-centered to complain about people talking about things that have been successful for them and others.
The question isn't does it work, it's how long does it work for.
For example, diets work. But most have a fall-off-the-wagon rate in the couple of months range.
It's definitely easy to quit a social media platform cold turkey. The hard part is quitting social media. I have yet to see anyone who's actually quit social media as a whole (yes that def includes email and texting) and kept with it for more than a month.
Social media addiction in the modern world is a lot like food addiction. Sure you're addicted, but you still gotta eat or you die. Sure you're addicted, but without social media you can't be a functioning member of current society.
Hell, I had one of those "I quit the internet" articles on the frontpage of HackerNews a few years ago. You know what happened? I quit all social media, but I needed access to Github to do my work. So I started friending people and being all social media on Github.
> The question isn't does it work, it's how long does it work for. For example, diets work. But most have a fall-off-the-wagon rate in the couple of months range.
Off the top of my head, I have a friend who have been off of Facebook for 9 years, another for 7, and another who never made an account at all. These are all healthy, happy people with robust social lives: their friends just know they need to be texted to be looped into plans. I know still more people (myself included) who have always had a healthy relationship with social media: short periods of "maybe I'm mindlessly browsing this a bit" followed by minor habit tweaks and straight back to a fully healthy relationship. I eat extremely healthy but every once in a while notice that I'm eating a bit of junk food (perhaps due to stress at work or something). I notice it and fix it and go back to eating extremely healthy. It would be completely inaccurate to claim that any lapse means I have an unhealthy relationship with food, and this is exactly the same as with social media et al.
> I have yet to see anyone who's actually quit social media as a whole (yes that def includes email and texting) and kept with it for more than a month.
This is a beyond-absurd definition of social media, and you're now talking about something that no one else here is talking about. The idea that there's no value in email and texting beyond dopamine addiction is frankly just insane. When I get statements from my bank, or delivery notifications from my package receipt service or laundry service, or an update that my friend wants to move our dinner date back by half an hour, am I feeding my addiction? Because your bizarre definition doesn't leave any room for responsible e-mail/text usage.
Anyone defining "communication with other people" as an addiction that needs to be killed off is battling far worse demons than social media/dopamine-hit addiction. That may be interesting in and enough of itself but it couldn't be less relevant to this thread.
The heroin analogy is lazy and irrelevant. The reason people say stuff like "try doing X to quit or cut down" is that, unlike heroin, a fairly large chunk of people who've recognized the problem have been pretty able to easily cut down or stop their "dopamine addiction" to the level that they're comfortable with.
If heroin had such a high success rate from going cold turkey, you can be damn sure that people would be saying "try going cold turkey" or "try this specific path to quitting", because it's worked for so many others. There are successful suggestions on this thread that amount to "I deleted my dealer's number from my phone and poof problem gone".
That isn't to say that these will definitely work for everyone: some people have a more severe problem when it comes to their relationship to dopamine. But it's awfully self-centered to complain about people talking about things that have been successful for them and others.