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Rick Bradford's avatar

The end-game of this is not pretty.

If someone spends their life in a shallow, binary (liked / not liked), artificial world, then they inevitably become separated from their basic humanity.

Other people become seen simply as cartoon allies or cartoon villains, simply on the basis of their screen relationship with you. Allies are to be praised, villains to be destroyed. There is no room for concepts such as context, understanding, forgiveness and humility.

The phone-obsessed are at the same time entirely ignorant, and completely certain that they are righteous.

If that simplistic mentality becomes commonplace in the real world, then seriously bad things are liable to happen. It could be argued that we are seeing the early signs of that already.

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Rick Bradford's avatar

These phone people have truly learned the secret of living a crap life.

Their entire locus of validation is outside of themselves, that is, they measure their worth entirely by what other people think about them, via likes and infantile emojis. This leads to anxiety, stress, unlimited narcissism and an addiction to constantly surveilling the online landscape.

They are looking in the wrong place for self-worth. Any decent psychologist would advise that the only place to find true worth is by looking squarely inside yourself to judge how well you are living up to your ideals (whatever those are).

Added to everything, these phone people have zero personality or interesting conversation. They know nothing and have no ideas - except maybe for a new piece of Tiktok imbecility with which to wow their 'friends'.

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