Cigarettes are a flawed analogy. There is no such thing as a "healthy" use of cigarettes. But I would argue that smart phones can be used in a healthy way.
And I would also argue that the phone itself is not the problem. The problem is the reliance on the endorphin hit that comes from a new IM, like, post, etc. Some app makers have optimized their platform for engagement and have consequently made this highly addictive for many people.
But this addiction is much easier to break for most people than an addiction to something like say cigarettes (or even sugar).
> There is no such thing as a "healthy" use of cigarettes.
I don’t think that’s really true. The health effects of a cigarette a week would be indistinguishable from background noise.
The fundamental problem with cigarettes is that they are addictive, and convenient (at one time very convenient), and so it’s easy to smoke more and more. That’s actually very similar to smartphones: their use is addictive, and convenient (you can get a hit at work, in line, in the car, at the store, walking down the street, in bed).
As with tobacco, I believe that the answer is to responsibly use smartphones. Chain-smoking is bad; so too is constantly getting a hit from your smartphone. Smoking a pipe a couple of times a week (or a cigar a couple of times a month) isn’t a problem, and neither is using a smartphone intentionally & deliberately.
I don't think cell phones cause lung cancer or emphysema. The better comparison is to caffeine. Yeah, it's pretty addictive. But it doesn't kill you. That's about where the cell phone is for some people. (And hey, the blue light even screws up your sleep cycle supposedly. As a long-time drinker of caffeine, I don't even HAVE a sleep cycle! Take that, cell phones.)
Also, I am guessing that most doctors would not recommend smoking a pipe a couple times a week. I doubt it's harmless.
Pipes are basically nothing in comparison with cigarettes, though.
My dad's doctor didn't quite recommend he start smoking his pipe again, but he didn't really try to dissuade him, either. It enhances his experience and he's old enough that any remaining cares about cancer are moot.
The exposure to air pollution from living in a city can be equated to number of cigarettes in terms of cancer risks. Living in San Francisco is about 1/3 cigarette a day, with an average PM2.5 of around 8ug/m^3.
I think you'll find a hard time finding any source which will claim cigarette smoking under some threshold is not bad for you.
But keep in mind cigarette studies use the metric "pack-years" where 1 pack-year means smoking 20 cigarettes a day, for a year. "Heavy" smokers are generally considered as 2+ pack-year smokers. And it's not like _every_ heavy smoker gets lung cancer. In fact "only" 25% of heavy smokers get lung cancer, 5% of "former smokers", and 0.5% of non-smokers get lung cancer. And 40 cigarettes a day is a LOT!
So you can do an extrapolation with the numbers above to estimate a conclusion. I'd be hard-pressed to believe that 1 cigarette per WEEK is even as harmful as living in a big city like NYC or SF.
How many of the ones who don’t get lung cancer also don’t suffer from elevetates rates of bronchial infection, cardiovascular symptoms, COPD or emphysema? How many avoid cancers related to smoking other than lung cancer?
>Smoking greatly increases risks of literally every possible health condition.
Actually, cigarette smoking can reduce the incidence of diabetes, metabolic syndrome, endometrial cancer, and Parkinson's, to name a few.
No, I'm not claiming cigarette smoking is good for you. I acknowledge it's very bad for you.
But if you point me towards two people, one who smokes "one cigarette a week" and does light exercise, and a second individual who is sedentary, and drinks alcohol and soda regularly, I'd wager most of my net worth that the 1-cigarette-per-week individual is far healthier. It's possible for something to be very bad for you AND also for the dangers to be overblown.
>Smoking greatly increases risks of literally every possible health condition.
Is that actually true? Somehow I doubt it, but I'm open to reading research (or whatever) on the question. (I'm taking you literally because you specifically wrote "literally", but maybe you didn't mean it...literally)
Medical consensus for most toxins/poisons is LNT - linear no threshold.
The basic idea is that you can perform some interventions at various doses, score the response, and then extrapolate to the origin. In most cases, simple linear regression gets you close to the origin, suggesting a linear response where even small doses has small harmful effects.
The trouble with this is that the data is rarely good enough to really support that model directly, instead you have to extrapolate the data to these smaller doses. This is simply due to variance in the data and errors in experimentation that make small effect sizes extremely hard to suss out. So you're always extrapolating from more extreme data.
For instance, a great deal of fuss has been made about alcohol, and whether moderate consumption (on the order of one drink a day) is actually beneficial. More broadly, this is related to the idea of hormesis, where small exposure to a poison actually confers a benefit, generally explained as coming from a compensatory response in the body. Every so often someone comes out with a new study or meta analysis that claims to be authoritative, but I still remain unconvinced one way or the other about alcohol.
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The other issue here is the idea of relative risk. Even if you posit a non-zero harm from infrequent smoking, there are still many 'acceptable' risks that are likely far greater, such as that of road travel, air quality hazards, poor diet, lack of exercise, etc. These are all well understood and clearly outweigh the risk of infrequent smoking, but are 'business as usual', while a great deal of attention is paid to something like smoking, however infrequent.
In that sense, I would agree that it indistinguishable from background noise. But I would also say that there is likely real harm that results from this. In a broader decision-making sense, such minor harms do have a cumulative impact.
I wonder if some people are built such that they can't just put the phone down, similar to how many people really struggle to quit smoking. For those people there may be no "healthy" was to use the product.
Interesting! This is very similar to how I feel about carbohydrates. Some people get addicted but an extremely small portion of the population. I never thought about there being analogues to other non-nutrition related addictive things.
> But this addiction is much easier to break for most people than an addiction to something like say cigarettes (or even sugar).
Physically? I presume you're right. But here's the problem; you don't need cigarettes to accomplish any other expected, daily task in your life. You need your phone for a whole bunch of useful tasks that aren't health-depleting. I once read someone explain eating disorders in a similar way. You still need to eat, so you can't simply kick the root of your problem out of your life forever.
Not totally true. Cigarettes are a very effective appetite suppressant. That is one of the reasons why people who work in the food industry all smoke so much.
Obesity has skyrocketed as cigarette and other tobacco use has declined. Obesity also increases the risk for most types of cancer, so it is just trading increased lung cancer risk for some people for increased risk of both heart disease and cancer.
In general nature does not like free lunches. There are costs and trade-offs in everything and smart phones are not an exception to that.
Do you have any source for "That is one of the reasons why people who work in the food industry all smoke so much." ?
As far as I can tell most low wage / manual labor jobs are plagued with cigarette smoking because it allows more breaks / and it's a way to kill time.
Here in germany a lot of 30s people picked up smoking during their mandatory military service (cigarettes were free to avoid creation of black markets, people who smoked had more breaks + herd behavior)
Kitchen work is also extremely “crunch-y” with high stakes blocks of time where any mistakes you make have compounding costs. A stress relief drug like nicotine can help you regulate your mood around that cycle.
There are better ways to regulate mood and stress but most of them can’t be packaged and sold for $5, which makes them unlikely to proliferate under capitalism.
I don't know, I have a hard time thinking someone would go: "I better start smoking these cancer inducing sticks, I've read studies proving they reduce appetite".
I doubt people go out of there way to start new addictions voluntarily, but maybe I'm too hopeful.
I'm really unsure what you're implying. What's the appetite control method you have in mind?
I can tell you that in my experience most barely-processed foods don't do any better at filling me than most processed foods. And some of the worst candidates for appetite control are nuts. So I hope "less processed food" was supposed to be an effect, not the cause.
Actually there are a lot of therapeutic applications for Nicotine. Nicotine can be beneficial for a wide range of psychiatric disorders, and there's evidence it might help with Parkinson's symptoms as well.
afaik nicotine is the addictive substance in cigarettes but it's not the most dangerous.
+ Inhaling any burned matter / fumes will have an impact the lungs.
"Cigarette smoke contains over 7,000 chemical compounds, including arsenic, formaldehyde, cyanide, lead, nicotine, carbon monoxide, acrolein, and other poisonous substances. Over 70 of these are carcinogenic." [0]
Yes that is absolutely true, nicotine is not meaningfully toxic on its own as far as I'm aware.
That said, it doesn't mean it's not dangerous. For instance, Opiates were once thought of as a "perfect anesthetic" because they achieve the desired effect with little to no toxicity, but we've all seen how that played out over the last few decades.
Nicotine is quite toxic at moderately high doses, ask any farmer who works with nicotinoid pesticides, or any ER attending. Nicotine is a potent neurotoxin, it’s just that typical use from smoking and food falls below the threshold for poisoning your nAChRs receptors. However with vaping, that’s no longer the case, especially when people spill their vaping liquid on clothing or skin.
Right, early smartphones without social media were far less addictive. Games were less addictive because it was things like Snake not Fortnite. The other missing piece is "What would people do instead?". If you get rid of your smartphone and replace it with six hours of Netflix, you are probably not any healthier or better off.
OTOH, snake can be played without much effort, where as it requires much patience and effort to play Fortnight. This is something that most of the critical discussion on games seems to be missing. Most computer games require lot of effort and time investment to play, they aren't actually an avenue for instant gratification.
Hopefully by the time you have kids wisdom highlights why the above is a destructive mentality. So many children are set up for anxiety and pain by their parents imposing so much of their own bullshit on them.
By all means adopt principles that align with your beliefs, but for the love of god numb your ego a touch and realize if you love your children you have to let go of yourself and free them as much as corral and influence them.
Be reasonable, understanding, compassionate, loving and unselfish, and see how 'no matter what it takes' holds up when considering those virtues.
That's an effort on my part to sort out of my life to a point where I feel comfortable raising kids. I live a very humble/spiritual life and have no intention of imposing bullshit on my kids or anyone else for that matter.
I do know how that works though because a lot of it happened to me personally in my own family during my upbringing.
If my home is a remote village someplace in South America, then that's just how it is going to be for my kids. I guess, right?
the classic "we didn't have nice things when I was a child, so I shall socially constrain my children's options in a completely different era in the same way arbitrarily" style of parenting. I'm sure your kids will be grateful and excited /s
And why wouldn't they be excited about living someplace remote, in a nice jungle either in Peru or in Costa Rica? I mean, it's my home, after all, is it not?
Technology, culture, society, and ourselves -- they all change. I have children born over a period of 12 years. What was appropriate and worked for my oldest may not fit or work with my youngest. And that's just one decade. The space between my teen years and my youngest child's teen years is closer to four decades. What was appropriate and worked for me just isn't even possible for my kids.
You'll understand better when you have kids. I hope.
And I would also argue that the phone itself is not the problem. The problem is the reliance on the endorphin hit that comes from a new IM, like, post, etc. Some app makers have optimized their platform for engagement and have consequently made this highly addictive for many people.
But this addiction is much easier to break for most people than an addiction to something like say cigarettes (or even sugar).