#and social media is not great for complexity

[agentem]

On the one hand, this is upsetting and I don't want someone abusive in the MCU, or in any movies I watch. Making a movie is a group effort, if you abuse production staff (your coworkers) then you shouldn't be employed again.

On the other hand, I don't necessarily trust anonymous accounts and I certainly think the anonymous former Yale drama students saying Jonathan Majors was scary could be racism.

I don't really like Method acting in general. I think it's often used as an excuse to be a jerk to people.

But I also think there are white Method actors who have done worse stuff and got away with it (Jared Leto's Joker performance springs to mind but I guess that was reported on).

And I do think his background and upbringing matter. It sounds like he has been using acting as his therapy and that... doesn't work. Jobs aren't therapy. Jobs are jobs. (I know some people don't' need to go to therapy the way I do, and find solace in nature or meditation or something else like that but I don't believe you can just "power through" emotional trauma.)

Anyway, I hope he gets help.

#idk #i might delete this #i have a lot of complex thoughts #and social media is not great for complexity

[xxxcertifiednerdxxx]

my tinder date wants to know why you’re banned from tinder

Ask and ye shall receive!

Gather round, folks, and lend an ear as I tell you about Arnold.

No, he’s not a first date gone wrong, nor is he a scorned ex-lover who came up as a potential match. He isn’t a rival to whom I am bitterly attracted, and he isn’t an unrequited crush.

Arnold is my son.

He is also a rubber chicken.

[image description: a white hand holds a blue rubber chicken against a white wall. The rubber chicken has a red beak, comb, wattles, and feet, as well as a gold collar that’s says “SQUEEZE ME!”]

Let me set the scene.

A couple years ago, on a cold night in late autumn, I went to a grocery store with some friends. We all separated to get what we needed.

I don’t remember if I actually got anything for myself in that trip, but I do remember wandering around, only to come across a giant bin of rubber chickens.

Immediately thinking of the vine where that person presses a bunch of rubber chickens (geese? some sort of fowl) to make a loud noise, I did the same thing, probably to the chagrin of fellow shoppers.

Some of my friends joined me in my shenanigans, and we left the store in a jolly mood.

Days later, one of my roommates, who was one of the friends from the first grocery trip, came back from another grocery trip with a gift for me.

It was a blue and red rubber chicken.

I looked on my new child with complete adoration and named him Arnold. I thanked my roommate with all my heart and left to plan the many hijinks I would get up to with Arnold. (He has admittedly been through a lot, but the wear and tear mostly comes from love.)

One day, i had the bright idea to make Arnold a Tinder account.

I did not give myself much time to consider the idea before diving in. Arnold had a photo shoot, and I uploaded as many photos as Tinder would allow for his profile. I believe I put his age somewhere in the 20s. I picked the option for any gender to match so as many people as possible would see him. According to what I put in his bio, he got the Covid vaccine, has a natural talent for singing, lives with his mom, and likes Kpop.

Then I published his account.

While matching with people amused me at first, keeping Arnold’s Tinder account active eventually became a chore. Every so often, Tinder would email me and say my his account would be hidden if I didn’t open the app and use it.

I swiped through people, and whenever i matched with people, i would just shoot them a simple “yo.” I tried not to carry on any conversations, though, because I myself was not interested in going on any dates. This was just to entertain me and maybe some other people who came across Arnold.

One day, I got an email saying Arnold’s account was reported and I was no longer welcome on Tinder. I assume someone reported Arnold bc he isn’t an actual person, so I was technically breaking the laws of Tinder or whatever. It was honestly a relief; no more swiping through profiles just to keep the account alive.

I still have Arnold, and I still love him. But you will never see him, or me, on a dating app again.

TL/DR: I made a Tinder Account for Arnold, my rubber chicken. It took over half a year, but Arnold’s account was eventually reported for not being a real person, and I was banned from Tinder.

#sorry for such a long answer but I can’t really help being a storyteller #Arnold does have a social media account #I don’t do much with it but it’s there #it’s tied to my personal life tho so I won’t be sharing it here #fun story one time I thought I lost Arnold in my big apartment complex so I ran around the whole place trying to find him #But one of my friends had just hidden him in my mini fridge #another time my room roommate was asleep and I was going to bed #but it was dark and I forgot Arnold was on my bed #So I accidentally laid down on him #she did not wake up thank goodness #In the morning I apologized and she said she didn’t even hear him #arnold the rubber chicken #nerd out #nerd-out #the great tinder tumblr crossover of 2023 #tinder #ask for moi #lengthy article

[ravenwolfie97]

all pokemon games are good but they are not all equally as good

send post

#pokemon #as a person who has played pretty much every main pkmn game in some capacity #i can find things in them that are worth praise #but like obviously they can't all be the same level of good. there are so many factors to a pkmn game to be balanced #some have a great region. some have a great story. some have just a solid gameplay experience. all of them have great music lol #i could even play devil's advocate and praise bdsp for being a truly faithful remake and pretty incredible for a studio first Real game #but mainly i keep thinking like. everyone has shat on the new pkmn games ever since gen 5 especially #but then over time people are like Huh they aren't so bad after all #like once you get out of the gamehate wormhole generated by inflammatory social media posting you can appreciate a thing more #and there may still be people out there who think red/blue are the best ones. and y'know they have a point #even though objectively those games were littered with bugs to the point where some normal mechanics were not correct #and things just got more complicated and sophisticated with abilities and new types and better moves and stuff #the original games are absolute Miracles to have been made at all and for what they're worth they were Revolutionary #it was a simpler time but the ideas put forth were still pretty complex. especially considering this was the First One #this is the foundation all pokemon games thereafter rose from. and it's a pretty solid foundation despite all the hardships #anyway. i love pokemon. and i love that even after all this time - over 25 years - its spirit from back in 96 still remains in some form #it may not be about catching em all anymore. because physically that's really hard to do with over 1000 guys now #but it's still about finding joy in following a dream of adventure with a bunch of cool animal friends #and sometimes you save the world a little bit. that's p cool

[loveaquarius]

-

#filtering ‘Harry styles’ on every social media platform was the best thing I ever did #I don’t need to know what white gays are saying about him on Twitter or what theories ppl are discussing on TikTok #the homophobia directed at him is so casual and trendy now #the queer baiting discourse is so Harmful for other closeted people (like me 🧍🏻‍♀️) #and I’d rather not see any of it #the majority of his hardcore fans annoy me #H is a complex human being like the rest of us #sometimes he’ll make good music and sometimes it sounds basic #he has great outfits AND bad ones #sometimes he says stupid shit and other times he’s very thoughtful and intelligent #he’s not the evil incarnate nor is he the best thing to walk this earth. #some people are just outright cruel to him just because the hate train is popular these days #he could liteally wear a skirt because he likes it and there would be 100k quote tweets about how he needs to d*e like?? #the conversations around him are so backwards and I’m just glad he doesn’t use any of it #some of the things people say are so UGLY it even affects Me.. can’t imagine how he must feel #anyway.. I enjoy his silly little music and his silly outfits and that’s it #I’m tired of the thinkpieces!! #excume my rant- I saw something that enraged me lol

[netherworldpost]

@kernyen-xo /

Cheaply.

Watercolor sets made by Crayola. Acrylics made by Crayola. The brushes these kits come with are frustrating, cheap brushes are typically $3-5 each. You can spend as much as you want on a brush, the cheap ones are surprisingly good. This is extremely common advice, this isn't just from me.

When you find "ah I like this" go with a student grade of whichever you prefer. Or both! I find watercolor frustrating. I find acrylic doesn't look graphic as much as I want. I fell in love with a paint called gouache because it is very flat, layers nicely.

I would not start with oil paint. It is expensive, requires a lot of special care to keep you safe. Fumes, cleaning agents, etc. Fall in love with painting, then if you want, give oil a try. Be prepared for days (weeks, months, literally) for paint to dry. This isn't to scare you off it -- it's great -- but I wouldn't start here.

Oil has tremendous variety of things you can do with it.

Watercolor is ethereal.

Acrylic has great graphic qualities, lots of range.

I like gouache because it looks almost animated (there is a reason for that, it was/is used in animation background sometimes). It's tricky and tempermental.

Paint by numbers kits if you don't draw. Maybe even if you do and just want to dive into painting.

Mixed media sketchbooks. Lets you experiment a lot, cheaply. The big thing about sketchbook paper is it comes in a few forms -- very cheap (newsprint) and takes dry media (pencils, etc.) well, cheap (mixed media, lets you experiment quickly and a lot), and expensive (hot press has no texture, cold press has a texture).

Painting needs something that can get wet and not fall apart.

Start with a cheap mixed media sketchbook and see how you like it. Move on from there.

Ton of videos across lots of social media and much content. Has the advantage of multiple perspectives, you don't get trapped in "I think this is crap" or "This is the best" versus your thoughts.

Start cheaply.

Art stores and product manufacturers exist to make money. This is a neutral statement. The point is they are a store, they will sell you whatever you think you need, whether you need it or not.

Conversely!

Some things that are not universally useful but sold in art stores are great labor savers. Some people look down at disposable palette paper, others need the flexibility because they have a hard time washing palettes... etc.

Start cheaply. Look at hardware stores, lots of duplicate functions in items.

I come from a background of digital art and a lifetime of business where "ah where the BONES ARE WE GOING TO FIND MONEY FOR--"

Have fun.

Get in deep and frustrated and then drink the frustration (but not the paint water) because you realize you're frustrated because you can FEEL how it should look but you can't get there yet.

The journey is amazing.

I've started looking at the mountain of business problems I have been sorting through for the last few years.

"Okay. How is this supply chain issue with stationery compared to a painting I want to do of the piranha plants of Super Mario Brothers?"

This is literally something I asked myself.

It took me out of the problem (supply chain issue, boxes, our office size, the number of stationery items I want to design) and forced me to look at it as a painting (structure, where does it stay simple, where does it get complex -- what makes sense -- ah, PDF downloads).

Paint.

Learn by doing.

Start cheaply.

Keep going. Build up.

[wip]

Please make it possible to hide users' posts without blocking them. Like, in cases where a person hasn't done anything wrong to be blocked, but you just don't like their posts.

Answer: Hello, @deithwen!

As it turns out, we’ve received this feature request a lot over the years. Usually, it comes in as wanting the ability to “mute” other blogs on Tumblr. While we would love to build it, we’ve balked at it a bit because of its technical and product complexity. Let us explain what that means:

In terms of technical complexity, our current blocking feature is closest to how “muting” would work. Our current blocking feature may seem simple, but it’s very complex because of how big Tumblr is. Every time we fetch a list of blogs for you or anyone on Tumblr, we have to also fetch the list of who you’re blocking, and who’s blocking you, and filter out anyone with that block relationship. This mapping of who’s-blocking-who is stored in a directional way right now, so the “cost” of loading that list gets higher the more people you’re blocking and the more people who are blocking you. If you’re blocking 1,000 blogs, we have to check that list a lot. If you’re being blocked by 1,000 blogs, that’s another big list to check against.

In technical terms, this is a “many-to-many” relationship, which is almost always incredibly difficult to manage while not degrading the experience of using a platform like Tumblr. The more people who are blocking, the harder it is to store those lists in a way that’s easy to check, but we’re working on making it smoother. The vast majority of people don’t block many others, if at all, so it’s never been a huge problem. But the outliers who block thousands of others (or are blocked by thousands of others) can degrade performance for everyone over enough time.

Adding muting would throw on top of that yet another list of blogs to check, increasing the complexity of something that’s already pretty complex. It helps that muting would be one-directional and not bi-directional (as in, it doesn’t matter who’s muting you), but, as that list of muted blogs grows, your experience may degrade further. So we’d need to solve for that, which is definitely doable. It would just take time—and lots of it.

And, as a product, Tumblr is already pretty confusing to people trying to figure out what “blocking” means already, as well as our other filtering options. Up until fairly recently, blocking was almost entirely one-directional, the opposite way you’d expect: blocking made it so the blocked person couldn’t see you, not that you couldn’t see them. We’ve been updating blocking to work both ways instead, which is more common on social media these days. Similarly, the options to filter tags versus content cause a lot of confusion because they don’t work the same way as each other.

So if we wanted to add another filtering option to that mix, “muting” blogs, we’d need to be conscious of how all of those options work together—and are confusing in context with each other. We should really clean up that experience to be more streamlined and simple, not more complex. And I didn’t even mention the oddity of how different settings apply to your primary blog versus your sideblogs if you have more than one blog!

Taken together, it is a great idea for us to clean all of this up, improve our existing options here, and add “muting” for even more control and granularity. Sadly, however, it just isn’t high enough on our list of priorities to tackle anytime soon. We don’t want to simply tack on muting for the sake of doing it—we want to do a better job than that. I hope that makes sense!

Thanks for your question. It was an important one to address. If anything should change here, you will get news through the usual channels: here at WIP, or at @changes. 

#feature #dashboard #muting #blocking #account #security #backend #your suggestions

[anarchywoofwoof]

on Martin Luther King Jr. day, here's a reminder of his words penned from the interior of a Birmingham, Alabama jail in 1963:

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the White moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”

while liberals and self-proclaimed moderates will flock to social media today to post their MLK quotes and laud the achievements of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it's important to keep in mind that Dr. King wasn't always popular with the average american. in the 1960s, public opinion was mixed until around 1966 when his popularity fell off a cliff.

and despite his starkly positive posthumous approval rating, one could argue that Dr. King would not be nearly as popular today if he was still among the living.

King was a strong critic of the Vietnam War and a fierce advocate for labor rights. he spent time in jail, was being followed by the FBI, was charged with having communist sympathies despite his outspoken criticism of the communist party, and was adamantly opposed to poverty and wealth disparity - he actually believed in a guaranteed income. in the modern world, he would not be praised for holding these views.

we do a disservice to Dr. King's legacy and all that he worked for when we choose to celebrate a sanitized version of him that is full of quotes taken out of context and nebulous ideals about peace and harmony; yes, he supported nonviolence when possible. however, as with everyone, his views and convictions changed and evolved with time. his notions about what constituted "resistance" were complex, disruptive, and often culminated in violence by those on opposing sides. furthermore, Dr. King was a staunch opponent of capitalism and the type of society that it creates.

when we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr Day, we celebrate the ideals that he championed. that includes the views that many people find scary and "radical" in today's world.

#martin luther king jr #mlk jr #mlk day #united states #us history

[spirantization]

I'm surprised at the hate that Sokka's character arc from NATLA is receiving. To me, Sokka's development and characterization was one of the strongest adaptations the series made.

In the original ATLA, Sokka's character arc revolves around him unlearning his own misogyny. He makes pointedly sexist comments throughout the early episodes like "Leave it to a girl to screw things up!", "There's no way a bunch of girls took us down!", etc.

Sokka's comments have a strong narrative purpose: they give a platform for women in the show (Katara & Suki mostly) to refute his attitude. Katara emphasizes traditional "women's work" (cleaning, cooking, sewing, etc), which forces Sokka to confront its inherent value. Suki is able to prove to him that women can fight too and he learns to respect female warriors. It's a great character arc and it's well-executed.

It's also characterization that is in direct response to the culture and feminism of the 90s and early 00s. The representation of women in the media at that time was...oof. It was not great. One-dimensional love interests whose only purpose is being saved by the male protagonist, mostly. Female protagonists were not as common, and certainly not ones who were depicted as being able to fight, and certainly not in cartoons. Female protagonists in animation were almost exclusively princesses.

ATLA was progressive in this regard. Katara was a complex female character in a time when there were not a lot of them, in media in general but especially in animation and kid's shows. (I grew up in the 90s; there were no characters like Katara in animation on screen for me.) ATLA incorporated the zeitgeist directly into the story, which is why we have Sokka learning to overcome his sexism in his interactions with Strong Female Characters.

If you go back and watch the original cartoon now, Sokka's sexism feels a bit dated. It's a very 90s, Girl Power, "girls can fight too" style of social commentary. It doesn't match with the media landscape of today. We've got 20 years of media with female superheroes behind us. If your message is "girls can fight too!" the response for the most part is going to be "yes, we know that. And?"

So imagine you're adapting the original ATLA for a live-action remake. You want to keep Sokka's character arc intact, but you want to update it for the 2020s. So what do you do? You look at the conversations that are happening today.

The 90s were about "girls can do everything boys can do", but the 20s are over that. The conversation is more about gender: gender expression, gender roles, gender dynamics. What does is mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a man?

Sokka's character arc in NATLA is focused on this question: What does it mean to be a man? At the beginning of the series, it's his identity as a warrior that defines him. He needs to be the warrior, the protector, the leader. He's constantly trying to reaffirm this part of his identity, and it's completely tied up in his perception of his value as a man. Instead of his interactions with Suki being about "how could girls possibly be warriors", it shifts to Sokka saying "I'm ALSO a warrior" and trying to justify that to Suki (and mostly himself).

His arc over the series is about him accepting other aspects of himself and relearning how to define his masculinity. He can still have value as man without being the greatest warrior. He can still have value as a man by using his skills as an engineer. He can still have value as a man by offering compassion and kindness to others, like the little girl with the doll & Yue in her final moments. Instead of rigidly defining himself by a specific set of gender roles & expectations, he learns how to define himself through his own strengths and qualities.

I know there are a lot of people who are upset at this change to Sokka's characterization, and the most common thing I see is that it results in changes to Katara's character and her anger in response to Sokka's comments. I think there are valid criticisms to be made about how the show handled the adaptation of Katara's character, but I won't go there with this. In terms of Sokka and his characterization, it was well-done and thematically consistent with the original. It's not an exact port, and it never needed to be. It's still a feminist arc that centres on unlearning harmful misogynistic worldviews, but the focus has shifted from external (roles of women) to internal (his role as a man). And his journey is one that people would benefit from seeing represented.

#atla #avatar the last airbender #natla #netflix avatar #atla meta #there are many criticisms to make about the adaptation but this just isn't one of them

[aphroditelovesu]

Yandere Spencer Reid Headcanons (General)

"I promise to keep you safe." — Spencer Reid.

❝ 🕵 — lady l: It's been a while since I wrote a general hc, so I don't know if it's good, but I did my best! I hope you like it and forgive me for any mistakes. 🤎

❝tw: obsessive and possessive behavior, stalking, invasion of privacy, breaking the law (?) and very implicit murder.

❝🕵pairing: yandere!spencer reid x gender neutral!reader.

Spencer Reid is a genius, in every sense of the word. He is not only intelligent but a true genius, someone who hunts criminals with pure skill, and you, his obsession, his darling, even if you are not a criminal, will be hunted by him. He will have you in every meaning because you belong to him, just as he belongs to you.

He is known for his brilliant mind and his exceptional ability to analyze complex patterns. His eidetic memory allows him to retain vast amounts of information, making him an invaluable asset to the FBI team. Too bad for his darling, however, because he will use his skills and resources to get you at the end of it all.

Spencer is fully aware that his thoughts about you are disturbing, to say the least. But is it so wrong to love someone? He believes not. Maybe the graphic and explicit violence he thinks when someone hurts you isn't exactly healthy but he doesn't care as much as he should.

You are like an enigma that he wants more than anything to decipher, to unravel all your mysteries. If he could, Spencer would read your mind to know all of your thoughts, even the most intimate ones. His insatiable curiosity would drive him to explore every corner of your mind, seeking to understand every thought, every emotion and every facet of your personality.

Spencer is driven by his desire for curiosity and his obsession with you. He values ​​his work at the FBI and his friends but he values ​​you even more. You became an extra motivation for what he does; hunt down criminals to keep the world safe so you can live in it.

He would be disturbingly uncomfortable at the thought of losing you, and his analytical mind could lead him to investigate and monitor your activities closely, perhaps even crossing some ethical lines in the process. Spencer can and probably will become a meticulous and highly effective stalker, watching your social media, searching anyone who was/is close to you.

Spencer doesn't know the word "privacy" when it comes to you, he will look up everything he can about you. He can't bear the thought of not knowing everything about you, he hates the thought of you keeping some kind of secret from him. His willingness to cross boundaries and violate other people's privacy shows how far he is willing to go to maintain his control over you.

He would love to be able to read your mind, just to know what you're thinking and if you're thinking about him because Spencer is always thinking about you. His thoughts are always about you, about how he can make you happy, how he can make the world a better place for you to live. Everything is about you and always will be.

Spencer is extremely possessive of you and it becomes evident very quickly. He is not the master of hiding his feelings for you, including the most dangerous ones. He will stare with hatred evident in his eyes and make strange expressions when someone gets too close to you.

He doesn't want to be controlling and he isn't, but Spencer gets jealous very quickly due to the fact that he's insecure about your love for him. He won't kill someone out of jealousy, he's from the FBI and knows better than to do that, but he can become more aggressive, and bitter if you don't show that you just care about him.

Along with his possessiveness comes absolute overprotection. Spencer is suffocating and ruthless when it comes to protecting you. He will go to great lengths to take care of you, being your own armed escort or having the FBI protect you. When it comes to your safety, he doesn't mess around.

He wouldn't be the type to kidnap you that quickly, no, it would take a lot of motivation for him to take you like that. Maybe you kept rejecting him or you were in a situation where you could have died, in both situations, Spencer would know that he would have to increase your protection. And the best way would be for you to move in with him, without your prior consent however.

Spencer Reid isn't the worst yandere to have, he's just very overprotective and a determined stalker. He will never hurt you, not on purpose at least, and he will make sure you are always well taken care of. He can become very smothering when he is jealous but he means well. Just don't hide anything from him and everything will be fine because Spencer can't stand the idea of ​​not knowing everything about you.

#criminal minds #Spencer Reid x reader #yandere criminal minds #yandere spencer reid #yandere spencer reid x reader #yandere spencer reid headcanons #x reader #yandere headcanons #headcanons #yandere x reader #criminal minds x reader #dark!spencer reid

[antiporn-activist]

I thought y'all should read this

I have a free trial to News+ so I copy-pasted it for you here. I don't think Jonathan Haidt would object to more people having this info.

Tumblr wouldn't let me post it until i removed all the links to Haidt's sources. You'll have to take my word that everything is sourced.

End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

By Jonathan Haidt

Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond. By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likelyto live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly––if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations––then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

As a social psychologist who has long studied social and moral development, I have been involved in debates about the effects of digital technology for years. Typically, the scientific questions have been framed somewhat narrowly, to make them easier to address with data. For example, do adolescents who consume more social media have higher levels of depression? Does using a smartphone just before bedtime interfere with sleep? The answer to these questions is usually found to be yes, although the size of the relationship is often statistically small, which has led some researchers to conclude that these new technologies are not responsible for the gigantic increases in mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood––including adolescence––and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

1. The Decline of Play and Independence 

Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhoods are extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills—physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal’s brain can “expect” to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions––exacerbated parental fears. Meanwhile, rising competition for college admissions encouraged more intensive forms of parenting. In the 1990s, American parents began pulling their children indoors or insisting that afternoons be spent in adult-run enrichment activities. Free play, independent exploration, and teen-hangout time declined.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

2. The Virtual World Arrives in Two Waves

The internet, which now dominates the lives of young people, arrived in two waves of linked technologies. The first one did little harm to Millennials. The second one swallowed Gen Z whole.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn’t hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn’t access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult––they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007)—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent, and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives. It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.

3. Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood

The phone-based childhood created by that second wave—including not just smartphones themselves, but all manner of internet-connected devices, such as tablets, laptops, video-game consoles, and smartwatches—arrived near the end of a period of enormous optimism about digital technology. The internet came into our lives in the mid-1990s, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. By the end of that decade, it was widely thought that the web would be an ally of democracy and a slayer of tyrants. When people are connected to each other, and to all the information in the world, how could any dictator keep them down?

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn’t sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns, even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet’s ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people––widely referred to as “digital natives”––were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

4. The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” It’s an elegant formulation of what economists would later call the opportunity cost of any choice—all of the things you can no longer do with your money and time once you’ve committed them to something else. So it’s important that we grasp just how much of a young person’s day is now taken up by their devices.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average. The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent’s day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of “friends,” “followers,” and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it’s a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s, and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media. Exercise declined, too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn’t much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn’t that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features—typical for hundreds of thousands of years—that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.

These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.�� These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

5. So Many Harms

The debate around adolescents’ use of smartphones and social media typically revolves around mental health, and understandably so. But the harms that have resulted from transforming childhood so suddenly and heedlessly go far beyondmental health. I’ve touched on some of them—social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. Here are three additional harms.

Fragmented Attention, Disrupted Learning

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They’re certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it’s easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly—one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

It even happens in the classroom. Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer. This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and around the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit.

Addiction and Social Withdrawal

The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. “Internet gaming disorder,” which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am addicted to pornography”—and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called “problematic social media use,” which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of “problematic use” are higher for girls.

I don’t want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning 

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that’s when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why videos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden’s thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn’t add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today. 

Durkheim’s observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.

6. Young People Don’t Like Their Phone-Based Lives

How can I be confident that the epidemic of adolescent mental illness was kicked off by the arrival of the phone-based childhood? Skeptics point to other events as possible culprits, including the 2008 global financial crisis, global warming, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting and the subsequent active-shooter drills, rising academic pressures, and the opioid epidemic. But while these events might have been contributing factors in some countries, none can explain both the timing and international scope of the disaster.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I’ve looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: “It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.” She continues:

Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind, writes,

"The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop—desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for … 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier."

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens,” an internal document said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

7. Collective-Action Problems

Social-media companies such as Meta, TikTok, and Snap are often compared to tobacco companies, but that’s not really fair to the tobacco industry. It’s true that companies in both industries marketed harmful products to children and tweaked their products for maximum customer retention (that is, addiction), but there’s a big difference: Teens could and did choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use, in 1997, nearly two-thirds of high-school students did not smoke.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes––58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.

8. Four Norms to Break Four Traps

Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.

No smartphones before high school  

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if, say, only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study, these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

No social media before 16

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Phone‐free schools 

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes––times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.

More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

9. What Are We Waiting For?

An essential function of government is to solve collective-action problems. Congress could solve or help solve the ones I’ve highlighted—for instance, by raising the age of “internet adulthood” to 16 and requiring tech companies to keep underage children off their sites.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we’re going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.

There are now hundreds of organizations––most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children––that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org, suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students––with their parents’ consent––choose something to do on their own that they’ve never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Parents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children’s attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

The four norms I have proposed cost almost nothing to implement, they cause no clear harm to anyone, and while they could be supported by new legislation, they can be instilled even without it. We can begin implementing all of them right away, this year, especially in communities with good cooperation between schools and parents. A single memo from a principal asking parents to delay smartphones and social media, in support of the school’s effort to improve mental health by going phone free, would catalyze collective action and reset the community’s norms.

We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

#phones are bad #childhood

[northgazaupdates]

Journalist Hossam Shabat responds to a problematic article about journalists in the west being unable to reach Gaza. Hossam writes,

The biggest problem is not Western journalists being unable to enter, but the fact that Western media doesn't respect and value Palestinian journalists. My colleagues and I risk our lives every day to report on this genocide. No one knows Gaza like we do, and no one understands the complexity of the situation like we do. If you care about what's happening in Gaza, you should amplify Palestinian voices. We don't need Western journalists to tell our stories; we are capable of telling and reporting on our own stories.

Context under the cut:

From the very beginning, Western journalists have neglected the people of Gaza. They focused on how resistance actions have impacted settlers, and mentioned Gaza in only the most reductive of terms. But now, as the scale of atrocities by the IOF finally becomes too great for them to ignore, these same journalists are crafting a new narrative: ‘We didn’t ignore Gaza because we don’t care, or because it was politically convenient to do so. We just couldn’t get there to report on it.’

This is a lie concocted under the weight of ever-fickle Western guilt. They deflect their accountability for creating IOF propaganda by claiming they were kept from reaching the area. However, even more than a lie, it is an insult to Gazan journalists—those still living and those murdered by the occupation.

Gazan journalists often have contacts outside of Gaza who could help them evacuate, but they chose to stay. They chose to stay and document the genocide against their people, and did so at immense personal cost. Montaser Al-Sawaf was injured and lost 50+ family members in a bombing attack, before he was bombed again by the occupation and left to slowly die in the street. Mahmoud Ziad Aliwa and Mohammed Saber Arab are still missing after being kidnapped by the IOF while reporting from Al-Shifa Hospital during the latest siege. Eshak Daour lost his brother just a few days ago.

But as they tried to share their footage and words with the world, they were ignored, in north Gaza especially. The world had no interest in the words of Gazans, but especially if they were Arabic-speaking. Rather than undertake the relatively simple task of finding a translation for Gazan sources, or contacting Gazan journalists directly in English (of which many of them speak at least a little), they were flat-out ignored. Only English-speaking journalists with massive social media followings received any acknowledgment, and even then it was extremely minimal.

The journalists of Gaza have always been there, they have always been speaking out and asking others to simply share their words. The implication that only western journalism counts as “real” journalism is insulting, degrading, imperialistic, unprofessional, dishonest, and cruel.

This blog was created due to uplift the words of north Gazans, which were not and often still are not reaching the rest of the world. We will continue sharing from people in north Gaza, but we ask that you, reader, do so as well. Do what western journalists have refused, and uplift the voices of people fighting for their survival in all of the Gaza Strip.

Many journalists post partly in English, but for those that don’t, Arabic speakers will often leave English translations in comment sections. You can also ask for someone to do a translation in the comment section, and often someone will reply. If they don’t, you can copy and paste Arabic text, or take screenshots and upload them into Google Translate. These are not perfect tools, but they give you some idea of what is being said. It’s better than simply not listening.

#gaza #gaza genocide #gaza strip #north gaza #gaza under attack #free gaza #from the river to the sea palestine will be free #palestinian genocide #gaza journalists #text #hossam shabat #12 april 2024 #gaza under genocide #gaza under bombardment #gaza under fire #gaza update #gaza under siege #stop gaza genocide #stop genocide #stop the genocide #stop israel #end israel's genocide #gazan genocide #israeli war crimes #israel is a terrorist state #israel is committing genocide #palestine journalists #palestinian journalists #save north gaza #save gaza

[thesecretsofthedivine]

Pick a Pile Reading | Details About Your Future Spouse ⚖️💝

Business Carrd 🍶🧺

Paid Services 🍇⭐️

Tip Jar 🍾🎱

*Disclaimer: This is a collective reading — take what resonates and leave the rest. If this resonates with you, please show support by reposting (with credit), tipping, or booking with me! :)

*Exchanges with other intuitives/readers are available via dm’s

PILE 1 COLLECTIVE

[ old money ] [ athlete/athletic build ] [ family-oriented, especially with their mother ] [ fluffy, curly hair ] [ brown hair ] [ looks good in/often wears the color blue ] [ will enjoy making pinky promises or playing with your hands ] [ tall for their gender ] [ mediterranean or european background, possible greek or british ] [ charming ] [ talkative ] [ golden retriever ] [ PDA ] [ almost always wears sneakers/tennis shoes ] [ gets along well with your friends & feminine energies ] [ conventionally attractive ] [ notting hill movie ] [ spontaneous first meets, maybe during a trip abroad/after moving to a new place ] [ gemini, sagittarius, capricorn, leo placements ] [ is very knowledgeable about culture, wines, fine dining, etiquette, etc. ] [ woodsy scents/would love to drink alcohol by a fireplace somewhere cozy, especially scotch or something old school ]

PILE 2 COLLECTIVE

[ enjoys orchestra/classical/instrumental music ] [ creatively gifted, especially in singing or photography ] [ likes to stay organized/clean ] [ gift giving as a love language ] [ nicknames that make you feel like royalty, “princess/prince” or “god/goddess” ] [ playful teasing ] [ fire sign, scorpio, aquarius, libra, cancer placements ] [ enjoys writing & keeping a journal ] [ homebody but somebody with status/notoriety & success ] [ using you as their muse on social media/in careers ] [ dyed hair for people attracted to feminines, especially pink ] [ manic pixie dream girl complex ] [ “you’re different than the rest” ] [ opposite aesthetic as you ] [ the great gatsby movie, especially jay & daisy’s attraction ] [ an old soul ] [ cynical and reserved humor ] [ light hair for people attracted to masculines, especially dirty/honey blonde ] [ somebody that i used to know — gotye ] [ a person you share a past/past life with ] [ the letters a, e, r, t, i, l, and n ]

PILE 3 COLLECTIVE

[ spiritually gifted/self-aware ] [ 9h, 12h, 1h, 3h, 5h placements or synastry ] [ optimistic ] [ teaches you how to connect to nature ] [ sent to you by your guides/ancestors ] [ in touch with their feminine side ] [ empress in tarot energy ] [ roots for the underdog ] [ enjoys investments & humanitarian work ] [ well-spoken ] [ amicable ] [ compatible political affiliations, but they may expand your understanding of the world ] [ wears jewelry ] [ would love to get matching tattoos or wear matching clothes with you ] [ manifestation/spell work is a factor in this romance/one of their hobbies ] [ wants to build a home out of you ] [ provider ] [ sensual ] [ connected to their inner child & may like to watch disney/nostalgic movies, especially frozen ] [ a huge cuddler ] [ winter birthday for some ]

PILE 4 COLLECTIVE

[ flexible or enjoys dancing ] [ aesthetic hands ] [ a lover of the arts ] [ soft or quiet voice ] [ socially anxious ] [ remembers the small details about you ] [ impresses your family/mother upon first meet ] [ has a cat or younger sibling for some ] [ lets you paint their nails or practice makeup on them ] [ short hair, may sometimes get perms or curling techniques ] [ thin frame ] [ infp/infj/intj/intp/etc type of personality ] [ indie or soft pop music lover, especially clairo ] [ soft kisses ] [ prone to blushing or avoiding eye contact ] [ pale skin ] [ talks about you to their best friends ] [ karaoke/comedy clubs ] [ graham crackers ] [ strong perfume, especially floral/rose ] [ height difference/size kink ]

#law of assumption #pick a pile reading #astrology #pick a card reading #intuitive #divination #astro notes #astro observations #horoscope #future spouse #tarotblr #pick a pile #natal chart #leo placements #zodiac signs #birth chart #sun signs #psychic #free readings #witchblr #astroblr #love reading #pick a photo #spells #baby witch #astrology blog #subliminals #100% accurate #channeled messages #witch tips

[dailyrothko]

Scans ( a little long)

When I ask people not to steal my scans I assure you it has nothing to do with my ego. I have relationships with a number of people that trust me to provide full credits and copyrights and supervise, as much as possible, how things are used. And it gets a little complex, like some people will give me a photo I can only use on instagram. I have to honor these agreements.

And, Rothko paintings are copyrighted so, unlike some artists, if you make tee shirts or use it in a movie or something , it's actually illegal (without permission) They are not going to come after you for casual use of you own, but I know of many examples where people were hit with a copyright notice for trying to profit in the work.

It took me a long time to build these relationships and get all of these scans, including many i have done myself. I gave myself this Rothko job I do, and because of that I didn't have background to give me things or answer questions. It was only after years of doing it that people started to reach out to me in a bigger way and help.

The art world is strange, I was talking to a museum curator recently and there several questions I had that I was told they were not at liberty to answer. In the case of Rothko, there's nothing really cloak and dagger about it, it's just the family (who I think are great) fought really hard for these rights and spend a lot of time trying to control how the work is used and seen. It's a good thing because we get things like the Paris exhibit which took an insane amount of planning, loans, insurance etc. All the paintings had to be inspected before they were shipped over seas, in case damage was done to them over there. These paintings are BIG and in the hands of many different people, so it really took tons of effort and (sadly) money to do it, but it's something like (can't recall exactly) 179 paintings. The biggest Rothko show since 1978.

People on tumblr do sometimes (as we all know) take stuff from here or from my other social media accounts and I know it's typical social media behavior, as people like the credit and notes to their own blog, but I mention this now because I have some things coming up that almost no one has ever seen and I don't want to lose this privilege because I won't be able to show you cool stuff and big scans.

So, sorry for the ponderousness, I just thought a little background might explain that I'm not just being grumpy about it. I think people may see it as "It's the internet get over yourself" but I honestly feel a responsibility to do the best I can for people following these accounts and I am just trying to keep doing it and hopefully, expand as I go.

This blog started on out tumblr and it was the support of all of you that made me continue it, I will be 10 years in July. I can't take a lot of credit for it, it's not my art. My only idea was the once a day aspect. However, I try to do my homework and striving for accuracy is part of that, including copyrights and credits.

So thanks for everything too, people participating in this has been very valuable and educational for me.

#mark rothko #markrothko #rothko #daily rothko #dailyrothko #abstract expressionism #modern art #abstraction #colorfield #ab ex #colorfield painting #mid century #personal

[mightdeletelater]

A speech made at the Academy Awards by Jonathan Glazer, along with the subsequent reactions, sheds light on how people tend to distort others' words to portray themselves as victims and, more concerning, their willingness to reside in a dystopian bubble as long as it doesn't affect them directly.

Rather than idolising Hollywood, I've previously posted about the complexities of my evolving parasocial relationships. But to disregard the influence wielded by these elites would be naive. It's frustrating to witness those in power facing backlash when they attempt to bring attention to pertinent issues.

While the Oscars' prominence in Western pop culture is waning, the ceremony and the fervour surrounding the nominees and winners, especially in the major acting categories, still hold significant sway in film culture and the broader world.

So when such a speech is delivered at the Oscars, it's bound to garner attention:

All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, “Look what they did then,” rather, “Look what we do now.” Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the — [Applause.] Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist? [Applause.] Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, the girl who glows in the film, as she did in life, chose to. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance. Thank you.

Glazer highlighted in his speech that victims of the ongoing situation and the last 75 years, whether Palestinian and Israeli, all stem from the occupation and are casualties of entrenched ideologies like Zionism. But when he said this on stage and was immediately misquoted online on social media and by reputable news sources, alleging that he simply renounced his Jewish identity.

He also faced considerable backlash from those indicating a persistent conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. It really parallels previous speeches of resistance at the Oscars. Boos rang loud and clear during Michael Moore's opposition to the Iraq war (which we know was a colossal failure by Geroge Bush and the US Government who perpetuated and pardoned multiple war crimes in the region after lying to their own people about evidence of weapons of mass destruction).

There was also Sacheen Littlefeather's advocacy for Native American representation and the direct of attention to the Wounded Knee Occupation, a speech that had bodyguards having to restrain people from getting on the stage and attacking her.

And, of course, Vanessa Redgrave's aim at “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behaviour is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression”, which still feels relevant today.

Turning to Glazer's film, I am baffled at those who vehemently objected to it: Did they actually watch it? Because if they had any negative feelings towards Glazer's speech, especially after watching his film, it suggests, to me, a deficiency in critical thinking.

Glazer's film portrays a chilling atmosphere where genocide becomes normalised, echoing real-world situations like the ongoing conflict in Gaza. The film serves as a stark reminder of humanity's ability to coexist with atrocities, often turning a blind eye for the sake of comfort.

The horrors adjacent to the characters' lives evoke contemporary parallels, particularly in regions like Gaza. With over five months of relentless violence, Israel's defiance of international court orders, and Western governments passively reprimanding while fueling the conflict with arms shipments, the spectre of genocide looms ominously. It risks becoming a mundane backdrop to daily existence. It is a stark portrayal of how affluent lifestyles can be linked to neighbouring atrocities, challenging the notion of denial and complicity.

The film doesn't centre around the Holocaust (Glazer's own words), with its specific historical context. Instead, it delves into a more universal theme: humanity's ability to coexist with atrocities and even derive some form of reconciliation or gain from them. The discomforting reflections are on purpose. It prompts us to acknowledge that the threat of annihilation of any people is always closer than we might imagine.

One of the most poignant moments in the film occurs when a package filled with clothing and lingerie pilfered from the prisoners of the camp arrives at the Höss household. The commandant's wife decides that everyone, including the servants, can select one item. She claims a coat for herself and trys on makeup discovered in one of its pockets.

How can the people who are so staunch against Glazer not draw parallels with Israeli soldiers who have recorded themselves rummaging through the lingerie of Palestinian women and slut shaming them? (Why are Israeli soldiers obsessed with Gaza women's underwear?) Or proudly displaying stolen shoes and jewellery for their partners back home (Israeli soldier loots Palestinian homes for his engagement party). Or celebrating International Women's Day with a photo of women soldiers posing for selfies against the backdrop of destruction (How an AP photographer made this image of Israeli soldiers taking a selfie at the Gaza border).

The film is rife with these parallels that it feels like a documentary. It is a grim reality: the potential emergence of the first live-streamed genocide, captured by its very architects.

Gaza doesn't mirror the systematic mass murder machinery of Auschwitz, nor does it approach the scale of Nazi atrocities. However, the entire purpose behind establishing the postwar framework of international humanitarian law was to equip us with the means to collectively recognise practices before history repeats itself on a large scale. And disturbingly, some of these practices – such as the construction of walls, creation of ghettos, mass killings, openly stated intentions of elimination, widespread starvation, plundering, gleeful dehumanisation, and deliberate humiliation – are recurring. And have been long before October 7th.

How do we disrupt the cycle of trivialisation and normalisation? What actions can we take? There are persistent protests and acts of civil disobedience to "uncommitted" votes, disrupting events, organising aid convoys, fundraising for refugees, and creating radical works of art.

And as genocide fades further into the background of our culture, some people grow too desperate for any of these efforts. I am certainly one of them.

Yet, these efforts seem insufficient, particularly when those in positions of power remain indifferent. It's insufficient when I watch a video of a little girl saying that the violence has made her feel less beautiful before she talks about her father being kidnapped by Israeli soldiers or of the orphans visiting their mother's burial spot in the street. It is insufficient when the death toll rises to exceed the daily death toll of any other major conflict of the 21st century.

Perhaps it's unfair of me to prioritise one tragedy over another, given the multitude of suffering in the world – the ones that are in the news cycle and the ones that are not. Yet, my connection to Palestine and its plight feels as personal as it can be without me actually being Palestinian, fostered from childhood teachings and further enriched through my own research. I have loved ones directly impacted by this conflict: friends in the diaspora grappling with survivor's guilt, friends in the West Bank enduring the daily hardships of occupation. And my friends in Gaza are all either dead, dying or being pushed straight into the arms of death.

The realisation that my efforts to help them are insufficient fills me with frustration. I'm angered by the indifference of those in power and by the hostility encountered by those attempting to bring the truth to the forefront.

#palestine #free palestine #gaza #anti zionisim #academy awards #oscars #jonathan glazer #the zone of interest #geopolitics #politics #i hate doing tags #Youtube

[agentstarkid]

SAUDADE ✦ DR3

“Saudade” is a Portuguese word that carries a profound and complex meaning, often described as a deep emotional state of longing or nostalgia. It transcends mere language; it's a state of being, an emotion that seeps into the soul and lingers like an echo in the heart. It encompasses a mix of emotions, including melancholy, yearning, and a sense of emptiness, often accompanied by fond memories of past experiences or relationships. In the context of love, "saudade" captures the bittersweet essence of missing someone deeply, even when they are physically present or long after they are gone. It is the ache of the heart that comes from loving and losing, a poignant reminder of the depth of connection and the enduring power of love's impact on our lives.

✦ pairing: daniel ricciardo x famous!latina!reader

✦ type: social media au

✦ fc: becky g

✦ warnings: female!reader, latina!reader, age gap, language, lots of angst, heartbreak, drama, internet meanies, mentions of mental health struggles, assholes.

✦ pit wall live: uh holi, loves 👀 sorry for the delay, but I hope you guys enjoy this chapter 👀 it's a little short but as present for not posting in March, I present to you: a bonus chapter hehe okay, byeeee *runs away as fast as she can*

─── The Joker & The Queen (Masterlist)

JANUARY 1, 2022

yourinstagram

📍 Latinoamérica

liked by danielricciardo, badbunnypr, rubendias and 2,145,873 others

yourinstagram Starting the New Year on a bright note! ✨ Wearing yellow to channel optimism and positive energy as we dive into this new year. 💛 I'm so so so grateful for all the love and support you've shown me throughout the past year and I'm excited to continue this journey together in 2022. Here's to another year of growth, laughter, and cherished memories! Siempre para adelante, mi gente! 🎉

───

View all 952.512 comments

───

danielricciardo Mi reina ❤️‍🔥

user1 I wanted to take this space to thank you for the happiness you have brought me over the years. Your music or your works of art have been a constant company in moments of joy, sadness and everything in between. Your talent is enormous, but so is your ability to connect with your fans in a unique way. Your humility and gratitude show that, despite the success, you are still a close and authentic person. Thanks for all that you do!

camila_cabello Good god woman have mercy

kylieminogue you are sensationally exquisite 💛✨

xtina my angel ❤️

user2 jawline could cut a diamond 🥶

user3 muy buena artista pero sobrevalorada respecto a su belleza, y no digo que no sea guapa sino sobrevalorada

user4 you could wear the rainbow if you wanted and that would still not make you relevant or give you any talent

user5 she always tries too hard

user6 watch out for Regina George in sheep's clothing

anitta Feliz ano novo para você Rainha 😘

diplo 💛

user7 the fact that they spent new year's day apart and on different sides of the world speaks volumes

user what? that they both wanted to see their families? grow up

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yourinstagram has added to their story!

⥂ translation: Everything I do and comes out of me it's because I'm feeling it, it's okay if no one else feels the same way. Two people can never ever feel the same at the same time.

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JANUARY 16, 2022

danielricciardo

📍 Perth, Australia

liked by yourinstagram, heidiberger_, natalie_pinkham and 1,562 others

danielricciardo Back seat baby seat bangers 🎶

tagged: yourinstagram

───

View all 256.254 comments

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yourinstagram this is all anyone needs to have a great day ❤️ please send me his manager's contact, I've been looking for a male backing vocal for my next album and I think he can be the perfect choice 😌

danielricciardo yourinstagram ah, you see, he's a really sought-after artist so he's super busy. But I know his uncle and he's interested on the job, only thing is that he likes to be paid with kisses 💋😏 yourinstagram danielricciardo tell him to contact me, I think we will be able to work out the payment details soon 😌

yourinstagram btw how is it possible that he's that big now if I saw him like yesterday and he was this 🤏🏽 small 🥺❤️

user1 is the copying the hand movements for me 😂❤️

user2 so this is how Y/N's future is gonna look like 👀

userA all that's missing is the ring 👀 userB yeah danielricciardo stop being lazy my friend 👀

user3 you're gonna be a great dad one day ❤️🥺

♥ yourinstagram has liked this comment

user4 siempre dije que no quiero ser mamá, pero después de ver esto... yourinstagram mi reina quién pudiera ser vos 😮‍💨

user5 coisa mais linda! ❤️

user6 Daniel really sang his heart out to that song lmao

user7 you have really shit taste in music mate

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FEBRUARY 4, 2022

yourinstagram

liked by danielricciardo, keleighteller, natalie_pinkham and 1,238,562 others

yourinstagram Te amo con el alma, porque el alma nunca muere ❤️ happy 2 years, mi Danielito 🥰

⥂ translation: I love you with my whole soul, because the soul never dies ❤️

───

View all 19.598 comments

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danielricciardo My forever partner in crime ❤️

user1 cuide a ese hombre yourinstagram, que tu y yo no somos amigas 🫡

user2 oh God I'm so single 😩

mileycyrus so much love and happiness for you both ❤️❤️❤️

user3 THAT LAST PHOTO IT'S GIVING I'D MARRY YOU WITH PAPER RINGS 😭 SO 1 + 1 = THEY ARE GETTING ENGAGED‼️‼️

userA I'm so calling it, it is happening 🤩

user4 LIL BLAKE SIGHTING 😍😍😍

hermusicofficial favs

user5 she was talking seriously when she recorded A mi me gustan mayores 😅

userA será que aplica el "A mí me gustan más grandes. Que no me quepa en la boca..." con él?? 👀👀👀 yourinstagram userA los besos que quiera darme? 👀 sí, aplica 🤭😈 userB OMFG Y/N???!!! LMAOOO iamdannaschwarz yourinstagram that's enough internet for you today 🙅🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️

chloestroll did he really cook? 😂

yourinstagram chloestroll he did! and it was really good actually 🥰 I felt ✨spoiled✨

oliviarodrigo mom and dad 💜

user6 the first pic is making me feel something. i don't know how to put that something into words though 🥵 *bi panics*

userA JUST A BIG FUCKING OOF I GUESS 🥵 userB they served cunt as per usual userC I grunted and groaned and moaned 🫠😩

user7 I'm so tired of them omg yeah, you're "in love", we see you, now stop shoving it at our faces every chance you have 🙄

fioamato congrats Sandy and Danny 😜💖

iamdannaschwarz Baby and Danny 😜💖 itsvittoriasousa nah, more like Troy and Gabriella landonorris Belle and the Beast 😜 yourinstagram landonorris aww did littol landow nowis just called me beautiful? 👀😊 landonorris nvm I take it back. Fiona and Shrek* 😌 yourinstagram landonorris well that makes you the donkey 😂

user8 every time I remember that there's a 9 year gap between them I wanna puke 🤮

───

danielricciardo

liked by yourinstagram, martingarrix, landonorris and 1,562 others

danielricciardo happy 2 years mi vida ❤️

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View all 2.689 comments

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user "mi vida" brb gonna go chew on a live wire 😭

yourinstagram let's do this for a lifetime ❤️♾️

danielricciardo you have yourself a deal, Chip ❤️

user2 hey God, it's me again...

martingarrix ❤️❤️❤️

user3 these adorable videos ending with daniel squeezing y/n's butt is so dan-y/n core 🥹😝

marcusstoinis congrats, lovebirds ❤️

user4 did they leave their own love lock on the fence? 🥹😭

userA I don't think we'll ever find it, but I'm sure they did 😭

landonorris congrats on putting up with him this long yourinstagram ❤️

joshallenqb 🍾❤️

user5 somethin something "find a beautiful love, make sure they know they are your morning light" playing while the sunset iluminates her and cutting to "and that you'll never let go till the day that you die" while he has his arms around her 😭😭😭

userA THIS HERE IS LOVE 😭 THIS HERE IS LIFE 😭 userB something something he's got a tattoo of that song's title 😭 userC somebody get me a fucking doctor I feel like my heart is about to burst

scottyjames31 my favorite celebrity couple 😌

caamp we love you guys ❤️

user5 grandpa copping a feel 🤢

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FEBRUARY 10, 2022

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FEBRUARY 22, 2022

yourinstagram has added to their story!

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MARCH 8, 2022

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MARCH 9, 2022

danielricciardo

liked by mclaren, georgerussell63, heidi_berger and 584,981 others

danielricciardo Better this week than next… Unfortunate to miss the test, but I’m starting to feel better. I’ll stay isolated and just focus on next weekend. Big thanks to Lando & McLaren for the heavy lifting, I owe you some beers (milk for Lando). Appreciate the well wishes from everyone as well.

───

View all 164.254 comments

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landonorris get well soon mate!

georgerussell63 speedy recovery danny ric 💪🏻

user did you and Y/N broke up??? please tell me it's a lie

user2 Y/N hasn't liked nor comment yet and it's been 2 whole days since he posted this

userA why whould she? they are quarantining together, she doesn't need to comment or liked every single post he makes. They are probably sitting side by side right now userB userA there's actually rumours that she was seen leaving the hotel in a rush yesterday and fans are already speculating if they broke up

user3 I hope you feel better soon Dan! I know we all wish to see you in action next weekend!!

user4 "milk for Lando" lmaooo i love them your honor <3

user5 this is your year mate don't let any setbacks bring you down 💪🏻

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MARCH 18, 2022

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MARCH 25, 2022

f1wags

liked by 3,474 others

f1wags It seems Danny Ricc has moved on quickly 👀 Just after a week since the confirmation of his break up with Y/N, a few fans have reported sightings of the driver with actress Heidi Berger —who has been linked to him a few times these past months— around Monaco.

The blonde is the daughter of former Austrian F1 driver Gerhard Berger and former Portuguese model Ana Corvo.

This love triangle drama just keeps getting juicier and more complicated! 🔥 What are you thoughts, did the Aussie cheated on his ex-girlfriend as some people say? Did he moved on too fast? or did he do the right thing? Let us know in the comments!

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View all 55 comments

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user I actually feel bad for Y/N, not a fan of hers at all but it must be hard to see the man you were talking of marriage with a month ago, move on from your relationship so quickly and easily. if it were me in her shoes, I know it'd really mess my head up 😕

user2 idc if he'd not been with Heidi physically while being with Y/N, it's still treason to be emotionally involved with someone else while you're in a relationship. I believe he already had feelings for Heidi while still being with Y/N because how the fuck can you move on from a whole 2-year relationship in two weeks?? I only hope Y/N is doing okay and that she gets to heal and find someone better for her 😞

user3 you can try to defend him with all the arguments you can think of but at the end of the day, he is still just a rich man. It's funny how you've been all pointing fingers at the innocent while playing lawyer to the guilty.

user4 I'm a Danny Ricc fan but I think this was too fast too soon, at least have some respect for your ex who stood by your side through the highs and lows of the past years, smh so disappointed

user5 Get over it already! He moved on to someone better, as he should. Let the poor man alone! He's been single for weeks! He's allowed to see anyone he wants! Stop whining about it, Y/N just wasn't enough, as simple as that 🤷🏽‍♀️

user6 I'm actually super worried for him, he's not himself lately. Just a few weeks ago he was calling Y/N the love of his life and now this? All jokes aside, I think he's self-sabotaging. He looks like a shell of his old-self, he is not smiling as bright as before, he's super quiet now and if you pay attention to him during interviews, he fidgets a lot and sounds so insecure when asked about his driving. GO TO THERAPY BABE!!!

userA you are reaching, babe! lmaoooo he's fine, he just got tired of that snake 🤪

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APRIL 2, 2022

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APRIL 4, 2022

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APRIL 22, 2022

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MAY 3, 2022

danielricciardo

liked by corey_wilson, michaelitaliano, mclaren and 269,852 others

danielricciardo Miami. We made it.

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View all 658.214 comments

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user i guess this is the confirmation we've been waiting for

user2 how can you move on from a 2 year relationship so fast??

user3 ugh men are so fucking unbelievable

userA jokes on all those whiny fangirls of his, turns out it wasn't he who deserved better, it was HER.

user4 he is a joke just like his driving lmao

user5 Heidi is so much better than that wannabe singer, she was just a plaything for him 🤣

user6 I'm so glad you opened up your eyes daniel

user7 so all those rumours have been true smh y'all were attacking Y/N nonestop for the smallest interactions with the opposite sex, and none of those rumours proved to be true but I'm not seeing the same energy directed towards him now that the rumours about him were actually true!

user8 I just know that the break up album is gonna be a banger 🔥🤪

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MAY 10, 2022

yourinstagram has added to their story!

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JUNE 19, 2022

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⇥ youtube search: falling (harry & y/n's duet version) - love on tour, london night 1

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JUNE 22, 2022

yourinstagram

liked by markhoppus, phoebebridgers, rubendias and 2,145,873 others

yourinstagram burned other memories just to make room for these ones 🎞️❤️‍🔥

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View all 75.364 comments

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user HI MOTHER!! WELCOME BACK WE MISSED YOU ❤️❤️❤️

user1 we love to see you living your best life!!! 🥰

user2 Can't wait to listen to the full version of the song she plays on the last slide 🤩

userA Daniel Ricciardo is shaking in his boots right now 🤪

machinegunkelly 🖤🥀🤘🏼

user3 🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍

markhoppus kid what are you holding on your lap and why it isn't on my liquor shelf yet? 🤨

yourintagram sorry dad 😔 it's on its way to your doorstep right now 🤪 skyehoppus yourintagram make sure you are also included on the package arriving at our door, it's been too long honey ❤️ userA “dad”??? she knows mark hoppus?? what did i miss?? 😳 userB userA they have an on-going joke that mark found her wandering around and adopted her as one of the few blink-182's children along alex gaskarth and jack barakat from all time low 😂 she's super close with his family, too! I remember she collab on a song with him, but they didn't released it and then it got leaked, she did play it at a couple of concerts tho userC userB is it 'thank you & goodnight'? 👀 userB userC YES! I miss her pop-punk era 😔 that version she did of 'little lion man' was soooo good!!

user4 Baby Iza is on her way to hit a bitch (Daniel)

alexalbon I like pizza too 👀🍕

lilymhe sorry baby, bad bitches only 💅🏻

user5 OMG OMG WE'VE GOT HARRY, TAYLOR AND Y/N IN ONE POST?! THE HOLY TRINITY RIGHT THERE 😍

harrystyles ❤️

user6 I've got my two mothers in one photo 😭❤️

taylorswift Ms. Falls-a-lot 👻❤️

yourinstagram I swear I'm gonna scare you too next time 🙄😂

lilymhe walking among legends on this post 🙇🏻‍♀️ #blessed 🙏🏻

user6 I'm so happy that she's finally back ❤️ we need to flood her comment section with love 🥰

user7 Drama queen of this generation. Always playing the victim & tricking people into thinking that she's a mental health advocate. You're way too far from that. Cancel her 👍🏻🐍

user8 the caption: ICONIC 🔥

userA the taxi driver is twisting on his grave 😂🤪

user9 the old Y/N can't come to the phone right now, why? Oh 'cause she's DEAD! 😎

user10 most untalented celeb ever

fioamato where was my invitation? 🤨 yourinstagram iamdannaschwarz

iamdannaschwarz you got one, you just decided to ditch us for mr. i-have-an-art-gallery 🤨 yourinstagram iamdannaschwarz yessss expose her, dannita! 🤭 No te hagas de la víctima, mi corazón. We've got the receipts 😎🧾 fioamato I hate you both 🙄

user11 you should be ashamed to post a photo holding a tequila bottle when so many young people follow you. You should be a role model to them, not another alcoholic celebrity 🙄

user12 babygirl I hope you are doing better and feeling great! You deserve so much more ❤️

userA she's as fabulous as ever while he's floping big time, I call that karma 💅 userB not many people know how to truly appreciate the unique sazón and sabor of a Latina 🔥 homeboy couldn't handle the heat 🤭

user13 I know that album is gonna be 🔥🔥🔥

user14 attention seeker no wonder you always get dump for someone better

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JUNE 30, 2022

Video — CLEAN SHEET KINGS | STONES & DIAS

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─── Please don't forget to reblog and/or comment! ♡

#the joker and the queen fic #daniel ricciardo x reader #daniel ricciardo x you #daniel ricciardo social media au #daniel ricciardo instagram au #daniel ricciardo imagine #f1 x reader #f1 imagine #f1 social media au #f1 instagram au #latina!reader #daniel ricciardo x female reader #( agentstarkid's works )

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

Hello, acclaimed YA author John Green! I have a question about the coffee. (Coffee is one of my favorite tastes)

As I understand it, you "are" the company inasmuch as you are marketing for it, not like you literally own or run it, is that approximately correct? So I don't know how much executive influence you wield within the corporation, but I'd like to run this by you: Fair Trade coffee is great for uplifting the local economy, but it can still be (and unfortunately, often is) grown unsustainably. I didn't see much in the way of specific environmental claims on Awesome Coffee's site... What do you think about Awesome Coffee sourcing coffee that meets environmental certification reqs, like Shade Grown or Bird-Friendly? Is this something the company might be interested in pursuing?

Thank you for your question.

My official position is temporary unpaid CEO and social media marketing intern of the awesome coffee club. (This means I do very little of the actual work, which is in keeping with both interns and CEOs.)

Coffee supply chains are very complex! And environmental impact is very complex! And it turns out that you can kind of SAY anything on your coffee packaging. You can say it's fair trade without carefully defining that term, or environmentally sustainable or bird friendly without carefully defining that term. There are folks who are trying to establish standards on these fronts, but it varies so much from community to community. Is it better to shade-grow coffee in extant forests, or better to increase yields on land that has been coffee trees for decades? The answer to that question may be different in Indonesia than in Colombia. So what we've tried to do is work with farmers and small co-ops that maintain and own longstanding well-established coffee groves. But just to be clear, no coffee is carbon-neutral or eco-neutral. It's a form of consumption, just like corn and wheat, which are often grown in deforested regions of the U.S. But I think our partners at Sucafina are doing a good job genuinely working to minimize the impact that Awesome Coffee has on the environment, while maximizing the impact it has on the farmers we work with.

#coffee company #everything is more complicated the more you zoom into it