Feels like a bandage rather than treating the cause, but we're collectively injured so some care is important along with prevention.
I miss being bored. I have to make an effort to be bored now. When I go outside I usually don't bring my phone, but increasingly I listen audiobooks instead of read, and when I walk and listen and my mind wanders I realize it's time to pause the story, stop the influx, and let my mind synthesize, or at least relax.
Tech solutions to a tech problem just add more cost. We need better guidance from birth- funding early childhood education for all parents would be a huge step towards reducing all sort of adverse and traumatic experiences so that it's easier to know who and why we are- a sense of meaning and purpose, and thereby less liable to get sucked into videogames with their built-in purpose (that hardly transfers into meatspace, speaking from experience) and phone diversions.
Now that I've embraced parenthood my apps on this six year old iOS device have reached a steady state: rarely do I install anything new, and then it's just a tool (Bitwarden, to learn about it before I suggest it to my coworkers), except for a dalliance with Slay the Spire last fall- unistalled twice within a week :)
I'm even conflicted about HN; I learn from you all, but time here is time not listening to books, etc., and often my motivation is for the dopamine hit of seeing what's new.
