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The story
A Shueisha Online article about the term “dopagaki” — meaning “dopamine-addicted brats” — sparked discussion on 5ch’s News Express+ board. The term refers to young people whose attention spans have shortened from constant exposure to stimulating content like short-form videos, and the article featured experts discussing countermeasures. While the thread saw plenty of relatable examples, like kids who “throw tantrums in stores without a smartphone” or “watch anime at double speed,” there was also a steady stream of pushback arguing that “even the 1960 Crime White Paper shows the old days were more vicious” and that “things were worse before smartphones existed.” Opinion was split on whether today’s kids are really uniquely bad.
Published 9/13 (Sun) 8:30
Shueisha Online
In recent years, the term “dopagaki” — meaning “dopamine-addicted brats” — has started appearing on social media. It’s mainly used to describe young people who binge through one piece of highly stimulating content after another, such as short-form videos. Concerns have been raised about resulting drops in concentration, so we asked an expert what countermeasures actually work.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Just gotta brainwash kids into thinking being a "dopagaki" is a bad thing — tell 'em it's not cool.
Knowing them, they'd try to watch the brainwashing propaganda at 2x speed too.
Look around — even people in their 30s and 40s are walking around like zombies, mouths hanging open, necks craned forward, staring at their phones.
This.
It's not about age or gender anymore.
Those poor souls who've had their minds sucked into their phones
look absolutely ridiculous from the outside.
https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/2089710252522418176/vid/avc1/720×720/FZ_Lg8KNXJpAI-0L.mp4
There's probably been deaths from this too…
My 9-year-old nephew kept begging for a Switch 2 every time I saw him, so I finally bought one and brought it over — he broke it almost instantly.
My sister handed the busted thing right back to me.
That's just how it goes.
Your sister sounds awesome.
Yeah, you see it all the time at family restaurants and food courts — mom and dad glued to their phones while the kid's absorbed in a handheld game.
Impulsive: acting immediately and without planning to satisfy urges, without thinking things through — a result of immature adolescent minds.
Pleasure-driven: crimes used to stem mostly from economic hardship, but from the late 1950s onward the motive shifted heavily toward the pursuit of pleasure.
Group-based: guilt from committing crimes gets diluted through peer solidarity.
Aggressive: strong defiance toward adults and authority.
Excessive: killing people or animals even when just taking money would've been enough.
And here's the actual juvenile crime numbers since the postwar era
— the late 1950s stick out sharply.
And it's mostly sex crimes, too — so it's not about economic hardship.
↓
It's because so many adults instantly snap the moment a kid cries or makes noise —
adults are the ones indirectly manufacturing "dopagaki" kids.
And they're so busy chatting the whole time that they don't even notice when their kid gets bored and wanders off.
Compared to the Showa era, kids these days are pretty tame.
No question, kids used to run wild and be way worse-behaved back in the day.
When were the people saying "today's kids are the problem" even born?
Sure, kids used to act up, but they'd get smacked by their dad or yelled at by some random old guy and settle down. Now nobody disciplines them, they just let it slide, so it's a zoo.
And the kids know it, so they do whatever they want.
Plenty of parents back then were just as neglectful.
You're romanticizing the past way too much.
Feels more like parents are the ones being held hostage by their kids these days.
Kids just keep getting dumber and dumber lmao.
These days answer keys get handed out and kids grade their own homework at home, so copying the answers straight is faster than bothering with AI.
Ask a question, someone gets angry. You get a hostile reply. They only accept agreement.
Even when you get a reply, it doesn't function as a real conversation — it veers off into something totally unrelated.
This kind of pattern has become way more common, hasn't it?
Yeah, it's definitely gotten more common that it's not even a proper flame war anymore —
it's like people are just replying on pure reflex.
That's probably not kids doing that, lol.
With smartphones becoming so widespread, huge numbers of elderly people have flooded onto the internet.
If you look at the real world, kids are actually getting calmer year by year.
Older people, on the other hand, are just as quick to snap as they always were.
If you want to rebut something, your rebuttal should actually address what I wrote — but a lot of people just ignore all that, change the subject, and argue anyway.
At that point you should just stop watching it altogether.
From what I can tell, your comprehension drops to less than half.
You barely grasp what's actually going on.
If you're just half-watching anyway, why not normal speed?
I don't get the point of lowering your comprehension even further when you're already not paying full attention.
There's just too many anime, so I speed through them, and in the end I'm not even looking at the screen — half the time I'm not even listening to the audio.
This, exactly…
Studying 2 hours every day and still getting that score? Isn't that kind of bad?
There's definitely robotic-sounding audio out there that's brutally hard to understand.
I try slowing it down, but it's still hard to make out, lol.
Also, there's content that's only barely watchable AT 2x speed to begin with.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
“Dopagaki” is slang that’s spread on social media over the past few years, mockingly describing the drop in concentration that comes from continuously binging on intense stimuli like short-form videos. As with the 1960 Crime White Paper quoted in the thread, laments about young people’s “decline” are nothing new — it’s an argument that recurs generation after generation. What stood out in this thread was that it didn’t stay confined to a simple “kids these days are hopeless” narrative. Opinion split between those who called watching at 2x speed a “smart choice” and those who argued it means “failing to actually understand the content,” and some pointed out that the parents who let their noisy kids run wild are themselves addicted to their phones. On top of that, a poster who criticized young people got called out and attacked as an “old geezer” in return, so the generational back-and-forth ended up playing out within the thread itself. Reading the “dopagaki” phenomenon as a problem unique to children misses this dynamic.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “[Is your kid a ‘dopagaki’ too?] “They throw tantrums in stores without a smartphone,” “They watch anime at 2x speed” — the ‘changes in kids’ parents fear, and the countermeasures experts recommend.”
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