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The story
The Yomiuri Shimbun reported on the reality facing second-year junior high school girls in Osaka who keep scrolling social media, only to find hours have slipped by before they notice. Overseas, there’s a growing movement to restrict minors’ social media use, amid concerns about the effects on mental and physical health. The 5ch thread reacting to this report was full of confusion over the unfamiliar term “dopa-gaki” (“dopamine kid”), alongside comments like “people in their 50s are more addicted than middle and high schoolers” and “we were the same way back in the old flat-rate dial-up internet days (Telehodai).” Many posters argued that social media addiction isn’t a generational issue but a problem with mechanisms built to trigger dopamine release.
They keep scrolling social media, and before they know it, hours have passed. The number of young people with this kind of “social media addiction” is rising. Concerns about the impact on mental and physical health have sparked moves overseas to restrict use by minors.
Junior high school girls, phones in hand, say they “end up watching social media for way too long” (September, Kita Ward, Osaka)
In mid-September, in Chayamachi, Umeda — an Osaka district lined with fashion buildings — three second-year junior high school girls from Osaka walked by, phones in colorful cases in hand.
Source: yomiuri.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
I'm an old guy now, I can't keep up anymore
Sounds like some delicious oyster dish (pun: "gaki" vs. "kaki," oyster)
Before smartphones we were glued to the computer all day anyway
We were the pioneers
Honestly, people in their 50s are more addicted than the kids
Even someone with a solid grounding in advanced math — I can't imagine anyone mastering traditional Japanese mathematics (wasan) in a single day
Even if more flows past, brain capacity hasn't changed since the Edo period, so the amount we can actually process is the same
In other words, most of it just flows by and disappears
Yeah, that happens
I meant to watch for just a few minutes…
Apparently watching shorts before bed is bad for your sleep, so you should stop
In other words, same as you guys
That's pretty pathetic
I'm an old geezer with 3 years left till retirement 🤣🤣🤣
I've already graduated from dopamine
I'm running on serotonin now
If you want to use SMS, just find an old hand-me-down used smartphone somewhere for a few thousand yen and sign up for Povo (a cheap Japanese mobile carrier) or something.
Adults need to step in and do something about that mindset too
I don't think you can really flex status with just a phone these days
Sounds like some guy with a massive complex who's still using a budget phone himself
Grown adults walking around staring at their phones
And right in their 20s and 30s, the years they should be learning their jobs the most
What's causing that?
There's no way a kid can manage their own impulses
They're guaranteed to turn out useless
They'll be fluent in English in just a year though
Is this really okay?
People stopped working because the need to work decreased
When the need to think decreases, more people stop thinking
It's inevitable as long as the bar for survival keeps getting lower
Humanity's in trouble
That's normal if you're alone, but
people who keep fiddling with their phone even when they're with someone else
aren't actually that common even among teenagers
Like a friend, someone who pisses them off, or someone they're interested in
Hmm, what a grand waste of a life
Background and Key Points of the Discussion
The Yomiuri Shimbun’s report covered junior high school students in Osaka who say they “end up watching social media for way too long” on their phones, framed against a backdrop of overseas movements to restrict minors’ social media use. The article itself doesn’t go into specific age-restriction laws or name particular countries with regulations — its main focus is simply the “reality of addiction.” What split opinion in the thread was confusion over the new term “dopa-gaki” itself, and whether the addiction problem should be limited to middle and high schoolers at all. Posters who remember the dial-up internet era or the golden age of PCs repeatedly chimed in with comments like “we were the same way” and “people in their 50s are more addicted,” with many framing social media addiction not as a generational issue but as a structure where dopamine-triggering mechanisms pull everyone in regardless of age. At the same time, some worried about the cost burden of phones and in-app charges, tying the addiction discussion back to household finances. One point readers might misread is that “dopa-gaki” looks like a put-down aimed only at middle and high schoolers, but the overwhelming consensus in the thread was self-aware: “old guys are just as bad.”
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “Endless social media scrolling 👦🤳 — before you know it, 11 hours a day: ‘dopa-gaki’ second-year junior high schoolers.”
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