The first third of this article was very off-putting and I almost didn't keep reading. Mostly, it sounded like the author was embracing a medicalization of what at worst i would term as environmental irritants. But then!

we might be seeing a broader pattern not of mental illness but of psychological adaptation.

I have no doubt that the prevalence of internet-usage is changing me. I don't think it should be pathologized, but it probably is worth talking about.

We acknowledge that our digital environment is changing our perception—I’m hesitant to use a phrase like “rewiring our brains,” however true that may occasionally be—but we treat the resulting changes as individual medical conditions requiring personal intervention.

I can see how this is true. Doubtless, there are many parents who, confronted with the way the internet changes behavior, seek an authority (like a doctor) to help them bring their children's experience back into something more familiar.

Millions now happily and enthusiastically take stimulants for ADHD symptoms they themselves believe were “internet-induced.” We are medicating ourselves to manage the cognitive demands of a digital-first life, but what if these “symptoms” are necessary adaptations to our environments?

And now we're getting into even more interesting territory. I often feel that our medical system does it's best to suppress symptoms rather than address causes, but in the digital realm, the author is taking it even further: perhaps we shouldn't suppress the symptoms because they are actually adaptations.

It’s as if we’re living under water but treating gills as a disease. The fight is between two ecosystems that require different survival skills. Do we live under water, or do we live on land? And is there a path forward that will enable us to thrive in both environments?

The rest of the article is spent trying to develop a taxonomy of different kinds of adaptations to internet life. And to be honest, I didn't find these very compelling. But the core idea, that we certainly will develop adaptations to life where the internet is everywhere and that those adaptations might often get treated as symptoms is interesting.

123 sats \ 0 replies \ @magnolia_mayhem 6h

It depends on how you define pathology as to how you classify these adaptations. In a world without sleep, losing consciousness for eight hours every night with no memory or capacity to defend yourself would seem pathological, but it evolved for some reason anyway. It's so pervasive that even bacteria have a circadian rhythm. I still despise sleep; I would really like to have those eight hours back. Regardless, I sleep and resent losing it.

We exist in a world where our psychology evolved for hunting/gathering in Africa, a society that evolved for working ten hours per day in a factory, and technology that evolved for TikTok. This all reaps havoc on our definitions of pathology.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @itsrealfake 3h

necessary adaptations to our environments

There's an argument to be made that it's possible to have adaptations which are non-biological, but I would suggest instead that these are responses to the environment and not adaptations because we haven't had long enough to actually adapt evolutionarily.