[dewclin]

I'm sorry to read this, I also have a similar same situation with my father.

He's in his late 70's and a year ago bought himself an iPhone. He now spends ~4 hours a day reading a tabloid newspaper app, which has endless content. His attention span has fallen noticeably and he can't keep up with conversations that happen in the same room while he's "scrolling".

When I visit he's on his phone, and we go out for a walk (in the beautiful countryside around us) he stops and disengages when his app sends him the latest notification about what's happened on "love island", or some other nonsense. When I leave he's on his phone.

I tried to talk to him about it, and about how it's particularly effecting my mother, who I can see is lonely and lost a person she could talk to, important at their time of life. He just gets defensive and angry, which leads no-where.

Will he spend the most of the rest of his life looking at a screen?

Edit: wording of final sentence.

[polishdude20]

Similar with my father but he's got a dumb phone and browses on his laptop. When we have conversations with family he seems to always tune out after a few minutes and goes on the computer. His whole world view has been flipped upside down by conspiracy and hoax content. We've talked to him about not mentioning that stuff while we're over but it seems to be affecting his happiness nonetheless.

[1270018080]

Mine too. It seems like every old father has fallen into the right wing conspiracy cesspool that has warped their mind. An entire generation lost. I really wonder what makes them so susceptible to that content. Internet illiteracy? Old age? It's just who they are? In other words, they want the conspiracies to be true, they want a reason to hate Fauci, Greta Thunberg etc.?

And even more, I wonder if it can be cured. I think it ties into how socially isolated men are, especially old men. Once you retire and your work social network is gone, their only social ties are online. They need to identify with a community, and I guess there is something appealing to being in a conspiracy in-group. It's just impossible to pull them out, because you have to replace that group with something else. And there's just nothing there for them.

[polishdude20]

Maybe a life of manual labor, always feeling like you can't get ahead in life. Then a group of people tell you it's because of some simple reason that you need to get angry about. Obviously it's something that you can't actually do anything about. So it makes you feel worse and makes you feel like you're at least doing something when you consume the content and spread it to others.

[galfarragem]

> It seems like every old father has fallen into the right wing conspiracy cesspool that has warped their mind.

Unfortunately this is not an age thing. Youngsters just have the tendency to embrace different manias (e.g. woke movement).

[skinnymuch]

Left and right politics aren’t equal. Just because they are on opposite sides.

[hnuser847]

But the extreme ends do have similar features (hatred of certain ethic/racial groups, black and white thinking, desire to destroy the existing political order instead of reform it, conspiratorial thinking, etc.). The fact that you don’t think they’re equal is just because you have more sympathy towards one end of the spectrum over the other.

[skinnymuch]

Why would the extreme left have hatred of certain ethnic/racial groups? Which ones would that even be? I hope this isn’t some the left hates white people thing. Bigotry of superficial things doesn’t make sense for what the hard left is about.

Conspiratorial thinking for the hard left is nothing close to what it is like for the alt-right. They are basically not similar at all. The alt-right is about Q, saying Trump lost a rigged election, or thinking moderates are grooming children and molesting kids. What is the equivalence with the hard left?

The black and white thinking is also super simplistic. How do moderates not have black and white thinking in comparison to the extremes? IE a moderate would say don’t vote or spend time on any one but the two main party candidates in the US. In other countries, they’d say focus on who has a proper chance of being elected. Black and white thinking and self fulfilling.

> The fact that you don’t think they’re equal is just because you have more sympathy towards one end of the spectrum over the other.

Or maybe I know they aren’t equal because they aren’t. Perhaps it says more about you and only you, that you jump to such an assumption and conclusion without knowing me.

[iasay]

Ah sounds like my father. He’s currently going through Musk is Jesus’ second coming and covid is a hoax phase.

[WalterSear]

My father thinks Putin is just waiting for the right time to strike and set everything right in the world.

We don't talk much, not because we fight but because he's always too busy with his phone when I visit him :(

[2b3a51]

Well, I'm 10 years younger than dewclin Senior and I recently switched to a Nokia dumb phone for the summer and I have been keeping a record of screen time and what I was actually doing on the laptop. Using a paper page a day diary.

I'm not in the tabloid market segment, and perhaps I had the insight to self-diagnose? Did dewclin Senior do much before the iPhone arrived?

Perspective: I remember that Uncle Dave spent most of his (long) retirement watching sport on the telly back in the 1970s/80s. Any chance of sparking an outside interest?