I'm not sure I agree. We had all these complaints about TV going back to the 1970s (the earliest clear memories I have). It was called "the plug in drug" and "the boob tube."
Homebound and housewives used to watch hours of game shows and soap operas all day.
If a kid liked to read, some parents would tell them to "get your head out of that book and go outside."
We've had those complaints for a long time, and associated stereotypical problems with them - like daydrinking housewives. And now we have increased loneliness, mental health issues, etc. So maybe there's something to the complaints. Maybe sticking your face in media cloistered away at home 24/7 is worse for the mental health of most people than socializing, having to get out there and find ways to entertain yourself with others.
If you never practice making and having friends, how are you ever going to have them?
at least from what i've seen, most Americans now live in communities where even if they wanted to there are an increasing lack of places to just hang out, particularly if you don't want booze involved.
the real estate shortage is driving two effects; places not optimized for revenue are being priced out of existence, and workers need higher wages to pay housing costs which squeezes these places further and results in things like shorter operating hours even if full closure doesn't happen.
If they weren't constantly driving themselves to distraction most people would be able to make at least 1 or 2 friends at work or from a shared hobby, based on the experience of all the decades prior.
The US not having "third spaces" went into the founding story of Starbucks. The big difference today is people not even having friends and no longer knowing how to even do so, thanks to the addiction machines. Why risk rejection when you can just go back to your scroll?
malls have basically also optimized for sales per square foot to the detriment of their former status as hangout spots. at the modern mall, "kids just hanging out" is considered a loitering nuisance these days. and the malls that are surviving are those geared towards upper incomes, which means that the availability of third places is bifurcating like everything else in the economy.
amongst the people I know, a fair amount are not able to willing or host events because they have roommates who they are not necessarily friends with; and amongst those lucky enough to live alone, new build apartment sizes have been shrinking.
I would actually say the (indoor) mall apocalypse is a contributing factor since for all their faults, malls were third places in a way that strip shopping centers are not.
At least for retail the problem is moreso that lenders and landlords are playing hot potato with inflated rent and extend and pretend; some(most?all?) commercial loans go into default if rent goes below a certain amount
Not a super useful metric because third places probably wouldn’t be zoned residential. This is like saying 75% of fruits are apples, so there’s no room for asparagus
Ideally they would be in a place zoned residential, just not exclusively residential. If everything is zoned for only single family homes, there won't be a third place nearby. The density is low and it's not mixed use.
Where would those friends ever be in the first place? Everyone I know and see is on their phone doing the same exact thing. Nobody socializes except at work where they're forced to be.
TV is still addictive, and it was. I felt it myself in 80s and 90s, good content was rare and I had to set an alarm in the middle of the night to watch some good stuff. And stick around 5 minute block of ads. Active screens, especially ones always in the pocket or on the table, are way more addictive.
It takes some... special mindset to be polite to not see it literally everywhere, the scale and intensity of it, the addiction of kids especially. They have no freakin' defenses and often didn't experience normal life, ever. Ask any child psychologist about their opinion of screens among kids before say 14, and even afterwards.
It can be fought, we are quite successful so far with our kids and we have quite a few parents around us with same mindset, but we have to lead by example.
Easiest is to unplug from active social cancers (fb, instagram, tiktok or whatever kids are addicted to these days). Ignore most of the news, read about topic from source far away from place/country affected. TV can serve some quality content but one has to do some effort, no ads. Computer games are a waste of time and life (I know, I've wasted half of my childhood with them, 100x that for any online gaming), if one is bored then get a sport, passion, read a book, force yourself into some social action, whatever is vastly better. Then comes along junk food, again parents lead by examples.
Life is freakin' short, its pretty sad view to waste it on all above in more than a minimal fashion. Its sort of life success in 'look I am not a homeless person or heroine addict', but just a good fat notch above that. Literally anybody can do better.
I agree with quite a few points here especially on short form content and the mainstream news these days. However on computer games I am still a little undecided. I tend to (try to?) play "creative" games... think Minecraft, Factorio, etc... where you have the chance to execute some project or vision without any real world costs.
Thinking about it, my overall position is to maintain a balance between dopamine from long-term sources and short-term ones. I think long-running creative projects that make you think are generally good whether they are digital (see: 3D animators/artists) or physical - it's just personal preference which one you tend towards. The types of games I try to limit are those with temporary rounds/matches/etc... unlike a Minecraft world, there is no cumulative aspect, no long-term planning apart from your own increase in skill. Despite that, the short satisfaction from momentary successes in each game keep you playing.
Look, there are way more harmful ways to spend time than those creative games you mention. It can be even net positive for many, especially compared to more mind numbing activities.
I just hate seeing them in hands of kids who should get development pressures from anything but glowing interactive screens, and generally folks who form addictions very easily (I am simply on the opposite side for whatever reason, when comparing to many peers in various drugs but also general mental habits... but I feel if I fell for it hard enough my defenses would weaken across the board, probably permanently).
I never claimed I live a perfect life, but I am trying my best and calling things proper names, even if they are ugly and harmful (in my opinion) yet feel good. Too much time spent in HN comments can be harmful too obviously, mind easily falls for addictive behavioral patterns. Although for me its probably best really good usable information from all aspects of life gained vs time spent ratio for all discussed. And spending 0-30 mins daily, usually during work, commute or similar empty time rather than reading some outrage-filled news is something I am fine with.
Is what I describe so unreachable for you that you make your words make sound... unkind?
I am also doing these passions while helping raising 2 small kids: hiking, sport climbing, via ferratas, skiing, ski touring, diving, and recently abandoned paragliding due to brushing death in pretty bad accident. Those take way more time and effort than coming here. I spend almost 0 time in front of TV, don't have consoles, play like 1 game per 2 years, offline and on desktop PC only (last one was Baldur's Gate 3).
Not the OP, but it's because what's on HN is generally much more informative than the 10-sec TikTok meme videos and click-bait news headlines or FB feeds. I wouldn't be on HN otherwise. (I deleted my FB account 10 years ago, and my Twitter account 3 years ago.)
You weren’t watching TV every free instant you had, like at a red light, on the escalator, while using the urinal, etc. I mean some of these people must not think at all. All free time they could have spent daydreaming or planning or whatever is just taken up by the dumb app in tiny dopamine driving chunks of time. This has to have some effect on brain wiring over time. Just giving yourself absolutely no time for your own thoughts.
Yep. You'd be shocked (or maybe not) at how many people I looking at their phones on a freeway.
I wonder if there's any statistics comparing deaths and injuries from drunk driving versus distracted driving over the past 20 years or so. Is it a comparable at all?
Nah, this misses the point entirely. The scale of the problem today is multiple orders of magnitude greater, for several reasons.
First, TVs were stationary. Unlike smartphones, you couldn't take them wherever you went. If you were wealthier, you could somewhat compensate for this by having multiple TVs, for example in the bedroom in addition to the living room. But whenever you stepped outside your house the TV did not come with you. Places like doctors offices or hotel lobbies might have them in waiting rooms but that was really it in terms of the average person's exposure.
Second, TV programming was not explicitly designed to be addictive. Sure, studios wanted people to watch their programs because that's how they got ad revenue, but they had neither sophisticated tools nor the methods to dial addictiveness to the max. They did not have algorithms, for example, to serve you personalized content based on your tastes and desires. You picked from a limited selection of what was available in that week's programming.
Third, TVs did not have built-in mechanisms to demand re-engagement when you had them turned off. No such thing as notifications. At best you had blurbs about what is next on the program, but those were both channel-specific and also required your TV to be on. So people were not constantly bombarded with micro dopamine hits like they are today.
I could go on, but yeah, your rebuttal does not stand up to critical scrutiny. What we have today is a global scale addiction. It is absolutely nothing like TVs or newspapers/books before them.
I think even highly-engaging well-written high-production-value TV doesn't satiate all of your brain's achievement circuits. Being an Internet native, I was binge watching shows well before the term was invented, and before shows were fluffed out to compensate for bulk half-engaged viewing. When an episode ends I don't want to leave the universe - it's so easy to up-arrow, backspace to the episode number, tab, enter. But I always found there was kind of a limit whereby eventually I would have "had enough" and move on to something different to feel like I was actually achieving something - getting back to work, social interaction, physical chores, etc.
Whereas the plethora of web/apps can provide simulations for all those different circuits in your brain, as you move between them each satiating a different aspect of your personality. And then when you've got time to really "relax", you can still turn on TV in the background to be engaged in multiple low effort stimulations at once.
It was bad then. But it's much worse now because it's ubiquitous -- you're carrying it around in your pocket to fill every empty moment. Not to mention that back then, your "favorite shows" were on a couple of times a day if you were lucky. Now, it's 24/7.
The quantity and availability of "visual entertainment" for me as a child of the 70s pales in comparison to what my young kids have available to them. As parents we're continuously fighting it, including shutting off the router at set times.
Perhaps they disagree with the idea that it’s an addiction or that it’s a problem with screens in particular, rather than a problem with people not being able to or not knowing how to spend their free time in other ways.
I can see that, but IMO the main difference is that this feels like it's intentionally trying to be an active detriment to your life. TV et. al are fairly neutral generally. Even with the ads.
But with targeted advertisement, it feels a lot more like they're trying to get inside your mind to steal your money.
And with content on social media, it feels specifically engineered to make your life as bad as possible. More fear, more anger, more racism, more sexism. Here's some big boobies, now look at this disgusting immigrant. Isnt Earth awful? Aren't these guys ruining everything?
This. Targeted adds + bespoke algorithms make our current tech incomparable to the previous boogeyman of TV et al. We have devices that are designed to keep and farm our attention at all costs
We had opium dens in the past, why not fentanyl dens today?
It's just something to do to fill the boredom.
(That's to say: Just because something was mildly bad in the past doesn't mean that the current, somewhat similar, thing in the present isn't horrifically bad. The issues are orthogonal +- 5deg max)
If we kept opium dens there probably wouldn’t be widespread fentanyl use, isn’t it a reaction to the challenges of getting less dangerous opiates, i.e. is more potent and easier to smuggle?
Many places have “supervised consumption” sites or decriminalization now that has gone very poorly, I think in retrospect having opium dens for those who choose to live that way might have been a better alternative to the current state.
There maybe something more than that. Maybe modern life and the great financial crisis have put us all into more stress, more work, so that we don’t have time for real relationships. It’s part of why politics have shifted the way they do.
I am VERY online, but I don’t usual traditional social media. I mostly read Hackers News and a DC parenting forum which is pretty no-holds bar, but is a website out of the 90s so not really capable of infinite scroll or dark patterns (other than the addictive and open ended topics).
I also read a lot of news like NYT and watch TV like Apple TV, but it’s hardly the dopamine drip of TikTok or Instagram. Yet I am ashamed of my 8 hours of screen time despite my best efforts. I used to reach out to friends more but as I get older it feels intrusive and hard to make conversations.
This explains too much. I remember the Internet before corporate dominance and it was just as, if not more, magical then.
There's just something about having a beautiful OLED screen, the tablet-like shape, touch interface, and access to all of human knowledge/news/entertainment. I remember when people used to have a tv on when they lounged around the house, or cooked, or cleaned. My parents even had a little special splash proof CRT TV in the kitchen.
The modern screens are just that, except also much more convenient and with million times more content, and personalized, and wireless ANC headphones if you like. This is it, this is peak human information environment. It's not a conspiracy of corporations.
Much like obesity is primarily driven by abundance of calories, another fight we won with our natural environment. The highly processed foods and marketing are just barely making a dent at the edge, and are largely a zero-sum game between food manufacturers.
I have noticed that better devices just lead me to more time spent in apps I don’t really enjoy, just because I like the device itself.
I’ve had success consciously worsening my experience, doing stuff like reducing color intensity with accessibility options or using the web version of an app for added friction, which is ridiculous but here we are.
I had a similar experience rebooting my 9yo iPhone [0] after a more recent one went out of service. Hours of screen procrastination got replaced with IRL activities/thinking. I decided to not repair the fancy LCD and keep the little friend. It’s been two years and I don’t feel going back soon.
Reducing color intensity is a great idea to worsen the experience, I’ll give it a go. Yet first thing I do after wake up is checking Hacker News and the design is probably not at fault. Still some self improvement to do.
I have the same experience. I have felt it specially when moving to a new iPhone with 90 or 120Hz screen refresh frequency. Everything is so smooth that becomes pleasurable already by itself.
But not only that, also my work iPhone got recently upgraded from an old SE with small screen and laggy performance to the new 16e, and I found myself more eager to check work emails, ms teams than ever before.
I don’t think that’s a good development, but at the end it’s my responsibility and my own decision on how I use those devices. That also means I will probably downgrade to a worse iPhone instead of getting the best available.
I’ve considered that as well, simply getting rid of the high tech altogether and going for a budget or old phone. My main issue with that is the camera, as I place a lot of importance in photos/videos.
I know some people have gone back to carrying a digital pocket camera, but I haven’t really bought into the idea for convenience and because I think taking it out has different social implications.
It definitely does, but in my experience a standalone camera is usually better received than a phone.
I think it’s got to do with the implication of easy shareability. Pointing a phone at someone always brings to mind the idea that the photo can be sent anywhere within seconds. Are they going to post you on their instagram story? Are they going to send it to their friends and laugh about you?
The friction to sharing photos is so much higher with a standalone camera that I think a lot of people feel much more comfortable with one pointed at them.
Then again, that same friction quickly becomes a problem for the user - I know I’ve lost a lot of my photos just because I couldn’t be bothered to connect the camera, transfer the photos, organize them, back them up etc.
For me it’s not really the risk that it will be well received, but rather that cameras trigger a more artificial response.
Selfies or phone pictures are quick and people mostly don’t react, but cameras make us pose, subconsciously. At least I feel a phone gets me more natural photos, that work better as memories of the moment.
The lack of instant online backup is also a good point, I don’t know if that’s on the table on newer models.
It's a good idea. Companies try really hard to optimize and make everything they want you to do as easy and smooth as possible (and vice versa). Personally I avoid things like Apple Pay for this reason, it's there to remove friction from purchasing stuff, which results in us doing more of it.
Huge agree. Apple likes to pay lip service to this with "screen time" features, but will they make a smaller phone for people who don't want their life centered around staring at the shiny screen? No, because they don't sell as much as big phones.
I disagree, I guess, except for your comment: "and with million times more content"
That's it in a nutshell, I think. We had television at home since I was maybe 10 years old but the content that would interest a kid was very neatly time-slotted to small segments of each day (with Sunday being essentially an entertainment desert to a kid).
So TV was boring most of the day so we went outside, or if Winter, found ways to amuse ourselves indoors. I drew pictures, played board games with my sister, wired up a circuit with my 65-in-1 electronics kit…
How much do you disagree if you agree with the root of the argument?
Whatever it was that made humans enjoy books, newspapers, magazines, movies, tv shows, written correspondence, phone calls, etc, is now available times a million, 24/7, in your pocket, essentially free (if you don’t count externalities ofc). Plus the ability to handle a huge number of admin and business tasks from anywhere. Not hard to see why it’s so addictive for almost everyone.
Good point. I think I was reacting to the notion that we like the physicality of the tech — the OLED, whatever. I think the content is the point (and the lack of content for a kid when there were just four TV stations).
The other half of that is that they used to make 65-in-1 electronics kits. And they were actually educational. There was an expectation that leisure activities could nevertheless improve you as a person. Now you have to go looking for that sort of experience, and it generally only happens as an adult, who has already developed skills and taste to do so.
There is plenty of electronics-oriented content online that will teach you way more than 65 circuits. It's not "hands on" in the sense those Radio Shack kits were, but that's what Sparkfun is for.
"... Sodium cyanide can dissolve gold in water, but it is also a deadly poison. “Atomic” chemistry sets of the 1950s included radioactive uranium ore. Glassblowing kits, which taught a skill still important in today’s chemistry labs, came with a blowtorch."
This explains too little. I remember TV before corporate dominance and it was nowhere as bad as cable-TV.
It's hard to believe but initially the content was much thoughful, with actual cultural gems produced for it. Then that content got pushed further and further late at night and eventually disapeared. We can categorize that trend as some kind of "natural erosion" but that'd be ignoring the various forces that fought to change that medium, one of which may be lazy humans relinquishing their soul to the beautiful screen, but another sure one is profit seeking through selling advertisement.
Also, I remember a time when bringing a handheld video game at school would be terrible for a kid's social status. Now it's socially acceptable to spend time in video games.
That's a fine default stance. But uBO is one of, and some would say the only, extension that you should evaluate on its own merits rather than stereotyping with the rest of the category.
Fair, but the risk of malware is probably much greater if you don't use an ad blocker. Most ads are scams are phishing these days. Even if you're quite savvy, you can always misclick.
> Much like obesity is primarily driven by abundance of calories, another fight we won with our natural environment. The highly processed foods and marketing are just barely making a dent at the edge, and are largely a zero-sum game between food manufacturers.
Who is getting obese from fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, and the like?
People will eat a whole bag of salted potato chips or a whole container of ice cream in a sitting, but who eats a whole bag of oranges in a sitting?
Yes, something i didn't know whan i was 18. It's not easy to know what to eat when you're young, and to pick up bad habits. Then when overeating destroyed your hormonal balance (insulin, ghrelin are appetite regulating hormones that which imbalance can make a tiny bit of hunger massive and painfull), it's extremely hard to adopt "normal" eating habits without a lot of stability in your life.
I suppose that for any given action, there's likely always someone who will do it, but in any case a bag of oranges has significantly different nutritional properties than a bag of chips. How many oranges are we talking about, and what size oranges?
I could too... if I wanted to. For me at least, oranges are not the type of food that inspires me to binge. Do you seriously not understand why people tend to binge on certain foods and not on others? In any case, 5 oranges is at most maybe 400 calories, very low fat and sodium.
> I'm not obese.
Which is my original point: "Who is getting obese from fresh fruit"
Compared to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we have a practically unlimited supply of fruit, but I don't think thats really the problem.
Can we stop redefining-down the word "pandemic" please? I think enough people are already going to stick their fingers in their ears and go "na na na" when the next actual pandemic virus comes along. Maybe just skip the comparison and say screen addiction is the most dangerous addiction humanity's ever seen. Then it just sounds like a normal hyperbole. Or try these:
Historians attribute the decline of the Roman Empire to lead in the water, but that doesn't make it a pandemic, it's something else. The Plague of Justinian was a pandemic. I'm arguing that it serves no purpose to conflate terms describing endemic social problems with those describing acute disease. In this case, language is important, and frequently weaponized.
No, that's not possible. Your comment will be seen by a tiny minority of people on the internet and is a drop in the ocean. The impulse to persuade social change works in small groups, and the frustration you're feeling is completely feckless on the internet. (ie, if you were saying "can we stop [thing] in a small workplace you might actually have success. Out here on the internet this is really impossible, and is a mismatch between our intuitions and reality.)
Fully agree with you comment. I am shocked that the hyperbole with the classic "greedy corporations are eating us alive" empty narrative got so many upvotes here
Thank you for saying it. Ever be around to watch kids grow up or have them yourself? The exposure and cultural, regulatory control that the junk food industry has here in USA is kind of amazing. Especially in schools. It's really insane but it's become accepted here it's normal for kids, toddlers to consume hundreds of grams of added/free sugars per day. Even infants if you think about it, when ever in human history does an infant grow up sucking down pulverized fruit packets multiple times a day, 365 days a year? This is totally normal and acceptable for most people today.
I know it's going to generate a bunch of responses and consume a bunch of attention, but what value does this drive-by comment add to the discussion, really?
Yeah we know sugar is bad. The article's about screens. It's not really important whether sugar addiction or screen addiction is bigger. This isn't worth fighting over.
They can both be bad and you can post an article about sugar for talking about sugar.
As you see in other comments, people are debating the relative net effects of other inventions of modernity. I think it is interesting and very HN to think about screens vs sugar. What value does your pearl clutching add to this discussion?
Yes but it's not just sugar - people are really missing the forest for the trees with this sugar stuff.
Highly processed foods and fast food aren't just bad because of sugar. If you read the nutrition facts, they're extremely calorie dense and contain huge amounts of saturated fats.
Just swapping your sugar intake for steaks and cheeseburgers won't save you. It feels almost like one of those "get rich quick" schemes.
Doctors HATE this one trick! (Just don't eat sugar)
No, actually, you'll still be obese if you do that. You need to eat greens too, and live an active lifestyle, and limit your saturated fat intake, and eat less animal products.
Did you ever go and eat a bag of pure sugar? Or rather a bag of sweets, which usually contain other stuff, not just sugar.
We're not addicted to sugar, the "sugar cravings" are mostly to combos of carbs and fats.
Eating enough turns off my "sugar cravings". Eating lots of protein makes any craving for sugar disappear (I survived last Christmas by not eating any cakes, just lots of meat).
Thats my philosophy too. If you're full, you have no cravings at all. I have zero sugar cravings unless im really hungry, at which point real food is still the better option. Focusing on what you Should eat (nuts, berries, greens, etc) is much more rewarding than obsessing over what not to eat.
> We're not addicted to sugar, (...) Eating enough turns off my "sugar cravings".
Glad it works for you, but that's not universal. I'm pretty much addicted to sugar, regardless of what else I eat. So I have to not buy it in the first place - that way it's just not available.
I think this might be an issue that’s independent of sugar. Something something dopamine and serotonin. I also do not have issues with sugary foods, but I did in the past when my life was more stressful.
Look down the cart of your fellow shoppers the next time you go to the super market. Odds are some of them will have only huge bottles of sugar drink, sugar cereals and cookies.
> You may be surprised how close many candies are to being pure sugar with food coloring.
Grab a fistful of whatever candy you're thinking about when you say that and put it in your mouth. Then once you've done that, try doing the same with pure sugar. Tell me if you think you got different amounts of sugar in your mouth or not.
It's not the first time I hear this soundbite, and while it perhaps sounds cool as a TikTok comment, it really doesn't make much sense in reality.
Now take pure sugar, add a dash of mint essence and a little oil, dissolve in hot water then dry in a warm oven. Kendal mint cake.
Take pure sugar, add to hot water to make a thick syrup, add food colouring, cook at two hundred and something degrees. Hard candy.
Most other candy recipes are similar, and over 50% sugar by weight. Sugar is the main ingredient by weight after water of many drinks.
You're being deliberately obtuse if you continue to insist on comparing a bag of sugar to something made mostly of sugar. It's like saying "You like steak? Ok, go lick that cow then tell me you like steak!" - it's a straw man argument.
The difference you’re tasting is primarily flavoring, not sugar density, so that’s not a great test. People can’t really tell the difference by taste between hard candy made of pure sugar and hard candy made of sugar plus cornstarch, especially when other flavors are added. But anyway, candy generally tastes insanely sweet and sugary to me. What is the point here? The fact that candy is mostly sugar and people say so predates TikTok by a bit… centuries? Isn’t candy defined as anything sweet where sugar is the primary ingredient?
Not sure I would call that an addiction. Sugar is one: almost everybody consumes way too much sugar and would be incapable of reducing that to a healthy amount. I am including myself, pretty sure you're part of the club.
Sugar is very difficult to unplug from if you don't cook for yourself.
Here in Singapore almost every restaurant and hawker is obsessed with jacking their food up with sugar. Worse though is that if they don't the local Singaporean "foodie" hitmen will annihilate the restaurant with poor reviews on Google Maps for being "bland".
So eating out is a no go. Cooking again unless you're obsessed with reading packaging or make everything from scratch yourself you're instantly adding more sugar than you know.
I have a suspicion that now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter because apples are way way sweeter than I remember growing up and a lot of the oranges my mother in law buys for me also are blindingly sweet. And yet I feel there's a certain fragrance missing from these sweet fruits...
> now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter
Yes. But it's not by injecting sugar into fruits like many people think.
Farmers including the one next to my rural alt house:
- Take consultancy of agritech and selectively breed variants that are sweeter [0]
- Optimize min(fruits/tree-or-vine) to concentrate sugars in remaining fruits. [1]
- Ethylene-based post-pluck ripening to convert some starch to sugars and make it sweeter. [2]
- and more. Richer the farmer, the more sophisticated the techniques.
If you want truly fresh natural fruits, buy from a poor farmer directly and pay for logistics yourself. They have to be poor because well, they have to sell at market rate. Tragedy of the commons and all that. And logistics chains depend on fruits being fairly resilient. The logistics loss for natural fruits is 30-50% depending on the fruit. So yeah you need to pay 3x as well.
[1] this technique leads to lesser minerals, polyphenols, vit c etc in fruits. "Crowding out".
[2] this technique leads to less fiber formation since there's no time for polysacs to form. Major reason for fiber deficiency today according to agtech person I know is that people are eating fruits the same way their grandparents did, but whoops, you don't get enough anymore.
[0] They are bred to naturally do the above two things. Mostly, they are bred to autocatalyctically generate ethylene earlier.
If your country is in the business of exporting fruits, then the farmer has to compete with the whole world, and the tragedy of the commons mentioned above goes global. So every effect mentioned above multiplies 2-3x. Because it has to be even more logistics friendly, supply has to be really uniform due to expensive GTM, etc,.
No one is debating whether glucose is or isn't a building block for life, the problem is that humans have evolved from an existence that has of food scarcity but now lives in a world of food abundance.
Not only do we live in food abundance, commercial interests exploit our hardcoded desire to seek out energy rich food to make more profit from us usually by pumping sugar into everything.
This can be as innocent as competing for repeat business at your local restaurants or engineering your food to optimise for the bliss point[0] in order to subvert your natural satiety mechanisms and maximise the addictive quality of the product.
Sugar and its derivatives like HFCS are everywhere. Your sauces and condiments are swimming in it. Subway bread was so high in sugar it couldn't be legally called bread in the UK.
My own personal favourite anecdote was from someone senior in McDonalds:
"we find from our studies that children do not like a meaty beef flavour in their patties so we deliberately choose a bland patty mix while adding sugar to the buns and smothering the burger in ketchup because kids love sweet stuff, unlike our competitor Burger King. Once the habit is conditioned from young, they will be a customer for life"
Case in point, my wife loves the idea of McDonalds and admits every time that the reality is always disappointing but she is still drawn to it due to nostalgia.
Given that a lot of the developed world has obesity problems which puts a strain on public resources, it's really important to get a grip on our sugar consumption
Almost every cuisine Singapore serves will be sweeter relative to the authentic recipe. For example Korean food here is so sweet my wife thought she doesn't like Korean cuisine until she went to Seoul.
Japanese food is definitely healthier in many respects although there's still a lot of sugar hiding in sushi for example, and oyakodon, teriyaki and katsudon sauces are also often quite sweet.
Shabu shabu is better but so are most hotpots in a clear soup
Studies on rats have shown significant similarities between sugar consumption and drug-like effects, including bingeing, craving, tolerance, withdrawal, dependence, and reward. Some researchers argue that sugar alters mood and induces pleasure in a way that mimics drug effects such as cocaine. In certain experiments, rats even preferred sugar over cocaine, reinforcing the idea that sugar can strongly activate the brain’s reward system
This is somewhat intuitive when you think that sugar is almost pure energy and in a food-scarce existence that we evolved for, energy is synonymous with survival. So alongside reproducing, consuming energy is probably one of the most basic of desires we are hardwired to seek out in more ways than one
Restaurant food is optimized for everything but healthfulness.
Portion size, saturated fat, excessive salt, sugar, sometimes alcohol, low fiber— the industry has defined itself as an extension of the junk food industry. Which is ironic! Because pretty much the only food I would be willing to pay a premium for would be healthy food, demonstrably healthy food.
The reason it isn't, is because it's automatic. Your brain keeps you breathing as much as it can (if you hold your breath until you pass out, your brain will start breathing again for you). Breathing isn't reward driven. It doesn't engage the dopamine system the same way, eg cocaine does. You don't become tolerant to breathing the same way you do, eg cocaine. Lastly, for something to qualify for Substance Use Disorder (SUD), they need to keep doing it, despite social and health ramifications of continued use in the face of developing a tolerance for it. Other than some edgelord shit, no one's gonna give you shit for continuing to breath.
Homebound and housewives used to watch hours of game shows and soap operas all day.
If a kid liked to read, some parents would tell them to "get your head out of that book and go outside."
It's just something to do to fill the boredom.