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The story
5ch picked up on a Sankei Shimbun article about minors dubbed “dopamine kids” (ドパガキ) who can’t tear themselves away from the stimulation of social media. Reacting to data showing that half of ninth-graders spend more than three hours a day on SNS, the thread split between “TV brain and game brain were the same back in the day” and “smartphones are different because they combine phone, games, and manga all in one device.”
At the same time, plenty of posters turned the joke on themselves, noting that “the old geezers on 5ch criticizing this are the real ‘dopamine geezers,’ glued to their screens for hours” — with many pointing out the discussion conveniently ignored adults’ own smartphone and SNS addiction.
I can’t live without SNS. A growing number of minors, dubbed “dopamine kids,” are unable to stop scrolling their smartphone screens, hooked on the endless stream of stimulating content pouring out at them.
Sankei Shimbun
Source: sankei.com / Original article here
What people said
Mobile games are still better since there's at least some room for thinking involved.
Short-form video literally requires zero brainpower, that's exactly why this happens.
What a joke.
TV brain, game brain, MMO brain…
and now "smartphone (lol) brain" too?
SNS addiction? Give me a break.
Says the middle-aged guy addicted to 5ch.
I get that the point-scoring "studying" taught at school isn't really useful, but…
honing your skill at swiping a phone screen to play mini-games and scroll through junk posts isn't exactly useful either.
Doing boring schoolwork and sticking with it — that's what academics is about.
The ones who can't do that are the ones who fall behind.
Then again, maybe most of us were dopamine kids ourselves and just don't realize it.
The ring of it is off.
It's like "Dragoboo" — a clunky nickname nobody actually uses; 5ch regulars just won't say it.
More to the point, Ice Age generation (氷河期, Japan's "employment ice age" cohort) parents used to mock PC-addicted singles, but now their own kids have become smartphone addicts — that's pretty dumb.
And on top of that, smartphones build way fewer real skills than PCs do.
5ch is basically a hellscape of dopamine geezers bashing dopamine kids.
Games and manga eat up time too, so of course study time drops relatively and grades fall.
Stop spinning it like smartphones are uniquely the villain.
In every era, dumb kids are dumb kids.
The problem with smartphones is that one device does games, manga, TV, and phone calls all at once.
There's never been anything before where people stumble around staring at their device while walking and still can't put it down.
I'm gripping it even while I sleep.
I've got several devices on my bed too, but the radiation exposure worries me.
The closer it is, the bigger the effect probably is, and sleeping for hours with it right next to your head can't be good for you.
What about Gen Z, who aren't even smart to begin with (lol)?
Serotonin kid
Opioid kid
Adrenaline kid
Noradrenaline kid
Anything else?
Oxytocin kid — a kid who loves dogs and cats.
They sing it while absolutely trashing the subject — love it (lol).
Get on a train and it's packed with passengers staring down at their phones. Looks just like a horde of zombies.
Anyone NOT looking at their phone looks like the suspicious one these days.
True, but it's especially bad for kids to be steeped in smartphones during the years their brain and mind are still developing.
Today's 40-somethings and up didn't even have smartphones when they were students.
When I see a kid sitting properly and quietly on a train seat, next to a parent sitting up straight with their knees together, I'm genuinely impressed.
It's become a truly rare sight.
But kids naturally run higher on dopamine than adults do, so forcing them into adult values doesn't really work.
It's normal for kids to shout at the top of their lungs and run around.
What matters in the end is self-motivation — not doing something just because a parent says so, but wanting to do it because you look up to your parent.
The reason people can't stop using their phones comes down to being unable to suppress their thirst for knowledge and curiosity.
Back before even flip phones existed, let alone smartphones, kids would turn summer homework into a plaything — that's how much kids hate doing nothing.
That just means summer homework is unnecessary now.
You can ask AI on your phone and get taught anything, so memorizing quiz questions and answers dreamed up by some bureaucrat is a waste of time.
Even the foreign countries pushing that opinion are getting divided on it now.
Maybe people are just getting tired of dealing with the whole SNS issue.
Only those who can go without 5ch for even a single day have the right to criticize dopamine kids.
One week off the internet.
Honestly, I'm surprised I was able to make it this far myself!
Times really do change.
Who'd have thought 5ch would end up looking sane compared to endless short-form video…
Middle-aged and older people are exactly the same.
There's like 5% of people who can't put their phone down even on a packed train.
Weekly magazine and manga magazine sales started crashing hard around 2010, and the explanation at the time was "the baby boomer generation, who bought them to read on the train, retired en masse."
But it seems more likely that the bigger factor was people switching over to smartphones.
Background and Key Points
The Sankei figures being discussed come from Japan’s own surveys of chugakusei (中学生, junior-high students), and “ninth grade” here means chusan (中3), the final year before the high-stakes high-school entrance exams (juken). That context matters: Japanese education culture already treats the years before those exams as sacrosanct study time, so any data showing half of chusan students logging 3+ hours a day on “SNS” reads as a crisis specifically because it collides with exam anxiety, not just general parenting worry. It’s also worth knowing that in Japanese usage “SNS” is an umbrella term covering LINE messaging, YouTube, and TikTok alongside Twitter/Instagram-style posting, so the “3 hours” figure likely includes passive video-watching and chat, not just active social posting — a distinction the thread never unpacks.
The thread didn’t actually split over whether phone use is bad; nearly everyone agreed it is. The real fault line was whether smartphones are a new category of problem or just the latest name for a decades-old moral panic (terebi-noh/TV brain, geemu-noh/game brain, MMO addiction) — with the counterargument being that a phone uniquely bundles calls, games, manga, and video into one always-in-hand device, unlike any single prior medium.
What goes unmentioned is the irony most posters raised about themselves: 5ch’s own userbase, including the Ice Age generation (shushoku hyogaki sedai, the cohort who entered a brutal job market in the 1990s–2000s and are now parents of today’s teens), spends comparable or greater hours online, meaning the generational criticism is largely self-indicting rather than diagnostic.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “Smartphone-Addicted Minors, the “Dopamine Kids👦”: Heavy SNS Use Tied to Falling Grades — Half of 9th Graders Spend Over 3 Hours a Day Online.”
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