The Phone-Based Retirement Is Here

Adult children across the United States are increasingly reporting that their aging parents have developed what looks remarkably like the smartphone addiction [non-paywalled source] typically associated with teenagers, a phenomenon The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel has dubbed "phone-based retirement." A 2019 Pew Research Center study found people 60 and older spend more than half their daily leisure time -- four hours and 16 minutes -- in front of screens. Nielsen reported this year that adults 65 and up watch YouTube on their TVs nearly twice as much as they did two years ago. 40% of adults aged 59 to 77 reported feeling anxious without device access in a 2,000-person survey.

Ipsit Vahia, chief of geriatric psychiatry at Mass General Brigham's McLean Hospital, cautioned against treating all older adults as a monolithic group. The COVID-19 pandemic drove significant tech adoption among seniors as Zoom became essential for family gatherings, church services, and telehealth. Some research suggests device use may be linked to better cognitive function for people over 50, and Vahia noted that technology use in older adults appears to protect them from isolation and loneliness -- the opposite of its effect on teenagers.

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[clovis]

That got me to wondering what did my grandparents not have.
What did not exist or was not commercially available for ordinary people when my grandparents were young.
Automobiles
Telephones
Broadcast radio
Electric lighting
Refrigerators
Antibiotics
Airplanes
Women voting
They were big major city people.
It was mostly their parents that invented or engineered most of these things

What I remember about them that is different from today was they had prodigious memory capacity.

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[clovis]

Typo above. They were not big city people, but rather rural .

phone is the new TV

[iwulinux]

Really, what's the difference between watching slop and playing games on your phone vs watching TV and playing solitaire with actual cards, like my great-grandmother did in her late retirement? As someone who is taking a self-funded career breaky, I can confirm that just figuring out shit to do itself becomes a job after a while.

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[ubungy]

Your TV doesn't have an addictive feedback mechanism. All of modern history is 'here's this next great thing' followed by mass profiteering adoption. And years or decades later we say stuff like 'Oh, that depletes the ozone layer'. We're in the mass profiteering adoption phase of 'phones' (what percent of usage is as a phone lol), and we already know that the profiteering comes from increasing engagement (addiction). We don't even know the extent of the negative effects of this technology but if you say

Re:phone is the new TV

[unixisc]

Good point. My mom, who's in her 90s, used to talk to her friends and others, but after all of them passed on, she these days is a complete phone addict. While being critical of the phone addiction of others. She's not into games, but she is a very heavy Facebook user

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[dfghjk]

Oddly, my mom is also in her 90s and does not use a cell phone at all, or social media. I think my mom is pretty normal and the narrative being pushed here is bogus.

Guilty as charged but is there a problem?

[Bruce66423]

So these days I spend a lot of time in front of screens enjoying myself with Facebook and Slashdot as well as computer games. Before I retired I spent a lot of time in front of screens programming. One of the attractions of programming is that it gives you feedback and a sense of achievement when you get the beast to do what you want; now I get that from games... And I'm doing something almost every evening; six or seven evening of socialising is quite enough for any serious introvert.

So let's get some perspective here!

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[JThundley]

I noticed my retired parents spending a lot of time on their phones now, sometimes playing dumb games, sometimes scrolling instagram feeds and talking to people they know. I only very lightly tease them about this because I've seen the alternative firsthand; I'm extremely grateful they're not just watching Fox News 24/7.

retirees learned how to socialize before internet

[Somervillain]

The difference between developing brains and senior ones is the seniors learned how to engage with people long before the internet. They can use the technology as tools to augment their social lives, not replace them. Most are comfortable sitting at a table with friends playing cards without devices, just like your parents did...and from all I know, they can pull out their phone and easily keep up with the kids, technology-wise. Kids?...they're not as good in groups without their device crutches, especially Gen Z and younger millennials. Of all the older people in my life, they have no problem putting away the phone from dinner...unless it's really needed, typically to look up something for fun that's related to the conversation at hand (for example, "what was that movie Paul Rudd was in?..."). However, I keep hearing stories of Gen Z kids who take phones on dates and end up looking at them for half the dinner...not sure how much of that is an urban legend.

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[misnohmer]

Not necessarily no damage to developed brains. Observing my parents spending a ton of time on the internet, I realized a few things. For one, they find their own political or philosophical echo chambers - that alone has thinned their circle of friends (friends who subscribe to different echo chambers have disconnected from their crowd, even some family members no longer talk to each other as they are part of different political camps). Two, the internet serves fast paced headlines ready to consume with conc

Smartphone addiction, huh?

[zephvark]

Yeah, let me know when they start injecting them.

If, by "addiction", you mean "people like it", I confess that I too enjoy smartphones. I have not yet gotten to the point of snorting them, let alone injecting them but, y'know, it could happen any day now.

Up to a certain age that is...

[rklrkl]

My Dad was indeed a "silver surfer" - had a desktop PC (for Web surfing, e-mail and online shopping) and a phone (mostly used for WhatsApp to keep in touch with family) until well into his 80's. However, old age eventually caught up with him (early signs of dementia - memory is poor now and he's doing and saying strange things) and he can't use tech any more. He's now in a care home watching BBC News 24 continuously (he even struggles with the remote control!) and it's sad to see his rapid decline.

screen is tiny

[sudo]

I mainly use my phone as a podcast/audiobook player, hotspot, taking piccies, notifications and making calls (funny that)
I dislike looking at the screen more than a few minutes at a time, and hate looking at tiny fonts/images.
So I carry my 16" laptop everywhere, and browse online (how god intended the internet to be used)

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[Visarga]

Oh yes, I can't understand why people would spend time on the phone unless you are on the shitter or in a bus. For any civilized context you better use a laptop, or a laptop + external screen + mech kb + decent mouse. As god intended.

Old and keyboard based

[AntronArgaiv]

I very much dislike screen keyboards. I use a tablet to read books and for very limited browsing, but never browse on my iPhone. That's for phone calls, texting and the various apps I use.

Browsing on an iPhone is a pain, because no ad blockers. My fingers are far too fat for the keyboard, autocarrot chooses poorly and the multiple keyboard mode switches to enter numbers and symbols is wearisome.

Give me my IBM Model M and a full size screen any day.

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[Visarga]

Initially I was skeptical of screen typing. Then I got like "maybe with practice", "maybe with swype or a smart LLM".. but no, it fights against you. After 19 years of refinement from Apple screen typing is still a horrible experience. I mistype 50% of the text and have to retype. It also doesn't implement the basic concept of "Select All" so you can't move a source context into a LLM. You can select an article by slowly scrolling 25 screens of text.

Normal

[nospam007]

"A 2019 Pew Research Center study found people 60 and older spend more than half their daily leisure time -- four hours and 16 minutes -- in front of screens."

Perfectly normal, the screen replaced newspapers, magazines of all kinds, health leaflets, fashion catalogues, novels, encyclopedias, TV guides, instruction manuals, recipe cards, crossword and puzzle books, printed timetables, maps, travel guides, church newsletters, hobby magazines, photo albums, letters and postcards, even things like stock tables and weather pages that used to be checked in print.”

The point is that older people didn’t suddenly become passive or distracted.
Their reading, browsing and light entertainment simply migrated from paper stacks on the coffee table to glass rectangles in their hands. The medium changed, not the habit.

Also, 2019? NEWS for nerds?

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[dfghjk]

"...in their hands."

Where did it say that?

Add n to x...

[kellin]

Missed this post since busy yesterday, but I thought I'd add to it.

I'm in my mid-50s. I've always been attracted to electronics/computers/etc. Was customizing my own computer builds from roughly 1990 on, always been into video games. My wife who is ten years younger than me thinks I'm more married to my phone than her.

I mostly play two mobile games that have a "social" aspect to them in that there are teams. In both games, as I've gotten to know some of the details of the team members in both games, and a