It’s not the part where it’s your “third place”. It’s the part where you’re not you anymore.
Expressing yourself is fine. It’s the other side that’s unhealthy: consuming other people’s thoughts for hours means you are not thinking for yourself. You have a thought and boom a TikTok now lives in your head instead of your own thoughts because you searched for something about that topic.
That is creating armies of drones. True, counter-culture kind of died in the 2000s with globalization and late stage capitalism but still.
These days to conform is the end result of individual use of pocket computers because everyone is watching the same things and have to be like others. It’s heartbreaking because personal computers were invented by mavericks, hackers and hippies who wanted to empower the individual, unleashing creativity and whatnot. And it did that, for generations.
But now it just creates drones: people just roaming around neck down on their devices, obsessed with fitting in.
Because of phones, living with the results of other people’s thinking is encouraged, and very efficiently funneled to today’s 20-year-olds, the decade where you’re supposed to fail and go back at it, where you’re supposed to do all this well, work to become you.
Now we got boring drones with poor analytic skills. Not a fan, y’all.
And yup, the people who created this paradigm are the first human beings who grew up with computers. Who were supposed to be “creative” with them.
It be your own people. Always.
(for you my young friend, one thing to do and sustain: detox by not using your phone.)