[HN Gopher] Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
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Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
Author : memorable
Score : 1235 points
Date : 2022-05-06 15:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (zan.bearblog.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (zan.bearblog.dev)
| pythonb3sss wrote:
| I wouldn't say I'm addicted to them, but when I find myself
| bored, I open a meme site (which shall remain unnamed) and just
| look at mildly popular memes. Doesn't matter what they're about.
| I just like the occasional laugh I get out of them. I also like
| social topics being turned into dark, twisted humor which is
| sometimes captured perfectly in memes.
|
| But when I was going through a rough patch of my life
| (depression, suicidal tendencies), I would doom scroll said
| website every free second I could. I just didn't have anything in
| my life that gave me joy, apart from dark, twisted memes. I'm
| doing much better now and even though I am an extreme introvert
| with social anxiety, I find that I have replaced my time that I
| would spend on that site with time I spend with my colleagues. I
| still don't have friends, but Rome wasn't built in a day.
|
| Why did I waste so much time on the Internet? If I hadn't, I
| wouldn't be here. It gave me that much needed laughter every once
| in a while that kept me from going over the edge and I would just
| keep scrolling, looking for one more laugh that will make my day
| a bit more bearable.
|
| Just my experience though. IMO, generally speaking, people are
| spending more and more time on the internet because the products,
| or rather the content factories, have become so good at capturing
| and keeping our attention on them, that in comparison the real
| world seems bleek and bland.
|
| EDIT: Fixed some grammar. English not native language
| s5300 wrote:
| > Why did I waste so much time on the Internet? If I hadn't, I
| wouldn't be here. It gave me that much needed laughter every
| once in a while that kept me from going over the edge and I
| would just keep scrolling, looking for one more laugh that will
| make my day a bit more bearable.
|
| Battling long term physical illness here that is an absolute
| fucking slog. Can very much relate to this sentiment.
| davesque wrote:
| Well said. Internet is a very good coping mechanism.
| darioush wrote:
| Usually this happens when I am bored or blocked at work or I am
| in a meeting where there is nothing for me to say or do 90% of
| the time.
|
| Slack creates a culture that is built around response time but
| often topics on slack are low urgency and of little long term
| value. Heavy use of slack requires people to be around
| synchronously and inevitably people will be blocked on others.
| This is inefficient.
|
| Daily stand-ups are a similar routine that provides not much
| value in terms of unblocking people.
|
| I greatly look forward to tech companies who prefer written
| documentation (eg, Notion) over Slack.
| satsuma wrote:
| > I greatly look forward to tech companies who prefer written
| documentation (eg, Notion) over Slack.
|
| this is (at least how i'm reading it) a similar issue i've seen
| in hobby spaces that have moved from forums to platforms like
| discord for support. discord is great for right now
| collaboration but the archival process is like pulling teeth.
| it leads to repeated questions being asked because threads
| aren't often used and one problem's solution is mishmashed in
| with ten other conversations.
|
| sometimes there are links to a wiki in the discord, which is
| nice. but it's still only sometimes, and if you have a problem
| that hasn't come up yet, you're stuck navigating discord.
| minroot wrote:
| For having zero people to spend time with
| paulcole wrote:
| Got nothing better to do. Don't care about being "productive."
| Get through the other things I want to do - exercise, eating
| healthy, watching TV, reading, and then internet is left.
|
| It's not wasting time, it's how I choose to spend my time.
| spir wrote:
| I am addicted to twitter and reddit. Especially reddit. It often
| takes the place of reading, hobbies, quiet moments, improving my
| home, talking with my spouse, and playing with my baby.
|
| When reddit records a click or an upvote, it thinks it has been a
| Good Product, and created Engagement. Reddit then takes those
| feedback loops and tunes the algorithm and feedback loops to
| create further engagement.
|
| But in reality, there's almost no positive relationship between
| my engagement with social media and my personal human
| flourishing. I think these products are mostly poison for my
| soul.
| comboy wrote:
| > I think these products are mostly poison for my soul.
|
| You spend time on reddit because you want to. It seems
| unproductive to tell yourself that you don't.
|
| You have a cognitive disonance, logical contradiction that you
| just need to bring to the surface and follow through. When you
| are about to reddit ask yourself whether you want to or not.
| Not some idealized version of yourself in your head. Just what
| do you want right now.
|
| Then debug, introspect. Eliminate wishful thinking and accept
| reality - more time on reddit less time for other things. Do I
| want that?
|
| Answer yes is perfectly fine. You do what you want anyway, but
| in my case simply bringing these contradictions to my conscious
| mind (and sometimes looking for a moment where it is exactly -
| like, I know that it's A or B I can't be spending time on both
| things at the same time, If I want to learn X it requires time)
| is enough to eliminate them.
|
| I still spend time on reddit (not that much), but I don't think
| I'm doing anything I don't want to do or that it would be
| better to do anything else.
|
| We are always doing what we want to. Telling ourselves that we
| don't is needless suffering.
| ebingdom wrote:
| > You spend time on reddit because you want to. It seems
| unproductive to tell yourself that you don't.
|
| This seems like a mischaracterization of how addiction works.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Replace "reddit" with "heroine" and not much changes,
| except to the same effect.
|
| I like to think of it as "I _can 't stop_ scrolling Reddit
| despite knowing I'm _not enjoying_ Reddit ". I deleted the
| Reddit app, and blocked reddit.com (which I found myself
| using next) to 0 minutes on Digital Well-being (on stock
| Android).
| comboy wrote:
| Addiction is just a pattern, a framework of looking at
| reality. You could say you are suffering addiction
| withdrawal when you are away from somebody or some place
| you love.
|
| Addiction framework and associated solutions seem to be
| pretty effective for things like stopping heroin usage.
|
| Quite likely it can work for reddit too, but I'm guessing
| PC already tried it.
|
| I'm just offering a different framework and way of looking
| at things, which works great for me - or to be even more
| precise, removes some suffering. One may just decide she
| wants to spend a lot of time on reddit, but being honest
| with oneself and trying not to hold logically contradicting
| things in one's head seems like a good thing.
| neuronic wrote:
| Addiction isn't "just a pattern". Stop treating people
| like logic-driven robots.
| comboy wrote:
| Its just your association with the term pattern. Or maybe
| mine. To me, love, death and myself are just some
| patterns too.
|
| I mean just something that we name. If we look at a tree
| and I say its crown forms a nice sphere, I'm not treating
| trees like geometric objects and I can still appreciate
| its beauty and marvel.
|
| Observing the same reality you can see it through
| different frameworks consisting of different patterns.
| The same tree can be seen as color palette for a
| designer, bunch of areas with different living conditions
| for microbiologist, shapes for painter, material for
| woodworker etc.
|
| Once you divide reality to some patterns in a certain way
| (what I call a framework) when somebody suggests
| different division we usually don't throw away existing
| one, so we subdivide our patterns based on what's
| somebody is saying instead of looking at a whole thing
| and then the other framework usually seems like a detail,
| not important, worse, less useful.
|
| Being able to abandon your preferred framework for a
| moment allows too see the same things differently.
|
| E.g. I can have a long conversation with somebody who
| deeply believes in God, (we skip the church bit for a
| moment) and if I substitute just a name of the pattern,
| if I do s/God/Universe, it turns out our worldview is
| virtually identical despite me being an atheist.
| [deleted]
| jholman wrote:
| I think there's some value in most of what you're saying.
| Your overall proposal, etc etc.
|
| But when you say "You could say you are suffering
| addiction withdrawal when you are away from somebody or
| some place you love", you demonstrate that you have _no
| idea_ what addiction is. No idea.
|
| With respect, I strongly advise you to not say things
| like that. It's super wrong (which is okay but sub-
| optimal), you look dumb (which is bad for you), and it's
| hurtful to other people (which is bad for other people).
|
| I hope you can continue to be naive about addiction for
| your entire life.
| comboy wrote:
| I have seen some forms of addiction up close, but I think
| the term is more general and we shouldnt taboo every with
| which some people have extremely bad emotional
| association with.
|
| IMO I should be able to say I was forced to do some work
| even if I wasnt in a concentration camp myslef. Or that
| it bugs me that something is messy even if I dont have
| extreme OCD.
|
| Internet addiction is a normalized term and I think
| withdrawal fron losing somebody you love or even a place
| can be more accute.
|
| Also I'm sorry about whatever you had to experience
| related to addiction.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > You spend time on reddit because you want to. It seems
| unproductive to tell yourself that you don't.
|
| "Just stop being depressed" - Psychiatrists hate that one
| trick.
| comboy wrote:
| That's not what I'm saying. If you want depression analogy
| it would be more like
|
| "You are suffering most of the time. It seems unproductive
| to tell yourself that you aren't"
| guerrilla wrote:
| You spend time on doing heroin because you want to. It seems
| unproductive to tell yourself that you don't.
| comboy wrote:
| Yes.
|
| We are always doing what we want to.
|
| Perhaps I should have added "given restrictions of
| reality"? I mean you can have diarrhea and be currently
| shitting your pants. And you may not want to do that. Seems
| like a stronger argument than equaling heroin to reddit.
| But in both cases your options are limited. From those, you
| choose what you want. And you are then doing what you want
| to do (with or without telling yourself that you don't
| really want to do that - whether that's shooting heroin,
| going to rehab or changing your pants). If your argument is
| that what you want was not available as an option, then
| your problem is wishful thinking. Reality is what it is.
| You are here now.
|
| As far as I understand it, a heroin addict, at times when
| he's not craving and has some choice, has a choice to
| continue doing it or to go through hell and then some. I
| doubt there is much cognitive dissonance before dosing. But
| I just don't know this context enough (except for the fact
| that random dude view's on life are very unlikely to help).
|
| But in general yes, if you murder people you can apply this
| thinking too. You will either decide that's not what you
| want or have less cognitive dissonance while doing it.
| Happily slashing without thinking that you don't really
| want to do that.
|
| I'm not selling any cure, just suggesting that there seem
| to be no need to ever think "I don't want to do this" and
| then do it. And I mean it. From cleaning up shit from the
| floor, through putting your dog down to going to a funeral.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I would encourage you to not think of this in an addiction
| framework. Instead think of this as a self medicating
| framework.
|
| Why are you choosing reddit over spending time your baby? Do
| you fear handling the baby? Does handling the baby make you
| feel uncomfortable thoughts or feelings?
|
| Is there something, like ego, that reddit gives you?
|
| This is a good problem for self journaling, working with
| someone, or whatever your preferred form of self introspection
| is.
| blacksmithgu wrote:
| Chronic media consumption is not always based on avoidance.
| It is very easy to open social media during genuine downtime
| "for 5 minutes" only for an hour to pass before you know it.
| That is just bad self control due to dopamine addiction.
| Llamamoe wrote:
| It gives a constant stream of novelty and instant
| gratification, two things the human mind is deeply biased to
| crave, delivered through an interface produced by decades of
| A/B testing and applied behavioral psychology.
|
| It absolutely is an addiction machine.
| asddubs wrote:
| I weaned myself off reddit by blocking everything except
| i.reddit.com in my hosts file. if i blocked everything,
| inevitably there would be some post that I'd need to read
| because i stumbled upon it on google or what have you.
|
| Now, if I really want to read a reddit post, I can. but half of
| the links break unless you manually change the url to include
| the "i." subdomain again, the interface isn't so great, but I
| can access all the content if i really want to, it's just
| inconvenient enough that you're not going to mindlessly scroll
| for all eternity
| imperistan wrote:
| I totally blocked Reddit in my hosts file. If I really need a
| post work purposes I go to Google translate, load the post
| and click 'see original'. Such a hassle that I hardly ever do
| it. YMMV.
|
| I think its funny that we both stumbled on a similar approach
| rr808 wrote:
| I'm addicted to reddit too. But before that I was addicted to
| newsgroups and other web forums. I dont think I can blame
| Reddit app, I think I just love talking with people online.
| What I've learned is that most people really dont care about my
| opinion. I now only comment on stuff that I have something
| useful to bring, and its a topic that is really relevant to the
| board/thread. Those rules can cut back commenting a lot.
| bogwog wrote:
| I had a similar addiction to reddit a couple of years ago,
| especially while I was in college. It just became something I
| did as part of my routine. In hindsight I don't know why, since
| I rarely had a good time on there. It felt like everyone was an
| asshole, the content was all repeats of the same shitty jokes
| and fake stories from people desperately trying to farm
| internet points. It all felt pathetic, and I knew it at the
| time, but something kept bringing me back.
|
| So one day I decided to just delete my account, and that was
| it. As soon as the account disappeared, so did my interest in
| the site. It was like a switch flipped in my head. I guess it
| was the internet points that were tickling the addiction part
| of my brain?
|
| Next time I find myself wasting too much time on a social
| network, I'm just going to delete the account and move on.
| Unfortunately, I don't think HN lets you delete your account,
| so I'll need to get creative if I decide to drop this site too
| (maybe do something to get myself banned?)
| Crabber wrote:
| >In hindsight I don't know why, since I rarely had a good
| time on there.
|
| Someone told me once that addiction is built more strongly
| with _negative_ experiences and it blew my mind. I think it
| 's probably true.
|
| Addiction isn't built by you getting a reward, it's built by
| you desperately chasing a reward you never quite reach. We
| call a book a "page turner" not because it's a satisfying
| book, but because every chapter ends in some bullshit cliff
| hanger. Same applies to TV shows.
|
| I would suggest that maybe you weren't addicted to reddit
| because it was actually giving you what you wanted, but
| because you were chasing some satisfaction that you never
| quite got. Satisfied users leave a site happy after 5 minutes
| and get on with life. People who have spent 2 hours opening
| 200 threads and still haven't got the happy feeling they came
| there for stay around to open "just one more thread" another
| 50 times.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > But in reality, there's almost no positive relationship
| between my engagement with social media and my personal human
| flourishing. I think these products are mostly poison for my
| soul.
|
| This is why "engagement" is something only corporate f---splats
| say under normal circumstances. Either they secretly know it's
| a form of psychological enslavement or they're oblivious to the
| problems inherent in trying to measure it.
| tayo42 wrote:
| my problem with reddit (and here i guess?) is idk what else to
| do with like 5-30minutes of down time. I dont really have my
| life optimized for constant activity and idk what else to fill
| that with now.
| hackernewds wrote:
| start a hobby. exercise. music. a side hustle. something that
| has a positive reward loop
| dchuk wrote:
| Be bored. I'm not good at this yet, but I'm practicing just
| sitting there in those idle periods. It's what we evolved to
| do, and what our phones are breaking us about
| desas wrote:
| Something like Duolingo? Read a book?
| otikik wrote:
| I logged off from Twitter and Reddit and blocked it with
| Leechblock NG [1] on my computer. That took care of 50% of the
| problem. I would still browse them on my phone.
|
| When I switched phones I decided to not install Twitter or
| Reddit on the new one for a week.
|
| After getting over some FOMO on the first week, I decided to
| extend it for 1 month.
|
| I have been "clean" for ~7 months now. Except for the
| occasional direct link from my mobile phone, and fortunately
| thanks to the ingrate mobile experience their webs provide, I
| will probably keep doing this for a while.
|
| I find other ways to distract myself, though (other websites,
| doing random queries in google, etc). I _am_ working on the
| underlying problems I have. But for me getting the distractions
| out of the way first was easier than the alternative.
|
| [1] https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock/
| psyc wrote:
| I'm the same, and I've been struggling with it for a couple of
| years. I've even addressed it in therapy, and it hasn't helped.
| The only thing that has helped at all is a site blocker.
|
| Twitter and HN _mostly_ fill me with frustration, loathing, and
| angst. Like the cigarettes I smoke fill me with tar and
| carcinogens. Reddit at least I occasionally find something
| interesting, due to carefully curated subs.
|
| It's just addiction, nothing more.
| darkerside wrote:
| Unfollow everybody on Twitter.
|
| Why does HN bother you like that?
| chrsig wrote:
| There are a lot of incredibly frustrating, problematic, and
| exasperating opinions and personality types to be found on
| HN. The particular members of any of those sets will differ
| based on the eyes of the beholder.
|
| There's no shortage of passive aggression, angst,
| oneupsmanship,virtue signaling, dogwhistling, etc. It just
| so happens that there's a sufficient about of incredibly
| useful opinions and comments from subject matter experts
| that make it worth consuming in spite of the fact that it's
| a forum on the internet, and all of the baggage that
| entails.
|
| (side note: this isn't intended as a dig on HN moderation -
| you probably all do a better job than most other venues.
| kudos.)
| darkerside wrote:
| I find HN with its moderation to be night and day
| difference from many other forums.
| dazc wrote:
| Most rely on volunteer moderators who also happen to be
| active members. The two roles are not exactly compatible.
| darkerside wrote:
| Then maybe those models aren't as good?
| hackernewds wrote:
| 100% agree, which I do not take for granted. Niche
| communities in reddit used to be that way. Not it's an
| overwhelming abundance of low effort content like "me
| too", "tree fiddy", "and then I took an arrow to the
| knee"
| darkerside wrote:
| I think there are still don't good niche subreddits. They
| just may not be the ones they used to be. Like Twitter,
| Reddit benefits from grooming.
| jansan wrote:
| Site blocking helps. For about two weeks. I do not even
| remember why I removed twitter again from my router's
| blacklist.
| dazc wrote:
| A moment of madness, perhaps?
| IntFee588 wrote:
| For me, reddit is the one that gets me angry. It's addicting,
| but also seems like teenagers and bots arguing with it each
| other. Instagram is increasingly inundated with ads, but at
| least I get to see thirst traps and cute animals.
|
| Youtube is the only social media site that I think is a net
| positive on my life, because I learn so much, but I've
| started going for runs again because I really need time away
| from a screen and the constant dopamine hits.
| rr808 wrote:
| > seems like teenagers and bots arguing with it each other
|
| Yeah that helped me with getting over the addiction. Most
| people dont care about your opinion, you aren't going to
| change anything, if some dumb teenager thinks they're smart
| (even though they're wrong) just let them be.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| That's the exact reason I've been Twitter-free for five
| years.
| rvbissell wrote:
| I almost never regret time spent reading a book. But I
| frequently regret time spent on Reddit/Youtube/Twitter, even if
| I enjoyed the content at the time.
| wrycoder wrote:
| I'm more likely these days (as the decades pile up) to
| deliberately stop reading a book, if it hasn't engaged me by
| the time I've read 20% of it. Of course, many never get
| started, once I do a quick scan.
|
| I estimated how many more books I would likely read before I
| die, and it's a shockingly small number, even though I read a
| lot! So - choose wisely.
| codq wrote:
| I am absolutely caught in a loop between refreshing reddit,
| hopping to twitter, hopping to Instagram, and then back to
| reddit -- a cycle that takes just long enough for all three
| platforms to re-popluate with more content.
|
| It's not healthy, and I feel bad about it.
|
| They have got me exactly where they want me.
|
| And like you, it's very clear that this is not conducive to
| human flourishing. Unfortunately, I've been caught in this, and
| similar loops for so long that I have a hard time knowing what
| flourishing even looks like anymore.
|
| EDIT: One thing that did help me, for a time, was finding a
| REALLY good book, one that completely sucked me in--in this
| case it was David Mitchell's latest, 'Utopia Avenue'. It's been
| a long time since I found a really fantastic book, when you do,
| there's nothing better.
|
| And I realized that the next morning, when you wake up after a
| long evening of reading a good book, you remember it. You
| remember it as being a great use of time, something you can be
| proud of.
|
| An evening spent scrolling through social media is _never_
| memorable. It 's never something you're proud of, something you
| want to tell people about.
|
| A good night with a good book is a good use of time.
|
| I need to remember this more often, myself.
| hackernewds wrote:
| that is the distinction.
|
| I scroll reddit obsessively but I don't enjoy it.
|
| I read books obsessively but I enjoy it.
| nvusuvu wrote:
| As a married husband (almost 20 yrs) and father of five kids,
| allow me to share some wisdom. Spouse time is vital to a
| healthy, strong, vibrant, lasting relationship. Reddit doesn't
| care about you like your spouse does. And kids grow up way too
| fast. Treasure every moment.
| v-erne wrote:
| >> Spouse time is vital to a healthy, strong, vibrant,
| lasting relationship
|
| Hear! Hear! This cannot be overstated.
|
| >> And kids grow up way too fast. Treasure every moment.
|
| And this on the other hand ... works only if You somehow like
| children (and who does not like small psychopats with
| dictatorial aspirations). For the others (I believe most of
| people who lives in my housing estate can be counted) I
| observe that the moments they really treasure are those when
| their children are is safe distance from them taking care of
| themselves.
| [deleted]
| TimWillebrands wrote:
| Interestingly, not caring about your children will likely
| result in little dictators. You might not want to give them
| attention, they do want it, and they'll get it one way or
| another.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Yeah it seems like with my own children good behavior is
| proportional to attention. They don't ask for much, but
| they don't like feeling like they're in my way. If I
| treat them decently, they'll let me do the things I
| _need_ to do, and they know I 'll come back to finish up
| with them later.
| b555 wrote:
| could not agree more with this. social media exists out
| there, but spouse and kids are right in front of you each and
| every day. when done correctly, seeing the growth of your
| family and spending time with them can be extremely
| rewarding, even more than the dopamine produced by
| interacting with the social media
| bombcar wrote:
| The danger is that the social media provides a moderate
| dopamine hit but at nearly no "risk" - whereas many other
| situations provide a higher hit but at a much larger risk:
| the kid may be cranky, your spouse might be having a bad
| day, etc.
|
| We tune our activities for the minimization of risk.
| Perhaps adding a random chance to ban you for browsing
| would help add some risk back in.
| m463 wrote:
| > And kids grow up way too fast.
|
| what seems like an instant, they are gone.
| strogonoff wrote:
| I find time passing subjectively much faster when there are
| close long-term daily social connections (even remote),
| although maybe that's just me getting older.
| urthor wrote:
| I find time goes extremely fast when I'm not doing deeply
| engage work that requires 100% of my brainpower.
|
| Want to slow time down? Maxwell's equations have you
| covered.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| Others have said, but spending time with your spouse is
| important. But, equally important (and it's a big part of
| having a good relationship) make sure you're stepping up and
| pitching in around the home with the chores.
|
| Nobody likes them, but if you're not doing 50/50 (or at least
| something mutally recognised as fair) and you don't
| occasionally overachieve to give your spouse a bit of a break,
| it can be a big issue. If Reddit/Twitter are prioritised over
| getting the basics done, get that sorted out.
| pde3 wrote:
| A possible experiment to try: what happens when you only browse
| Reddit through an anonymous, not-logged-in browser and IP
| address? And then only use your account when you are actually
| sure you want to post something?
| recursive wrote:
| For me, it's enough just to log out. The friction of logging
| in is just the right amount of friction.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I do this,I find my self scrolling a lot still. Though its
| helped avoid alot of the stupid back and forths I used to let
| me self get into.
| bvinc wrote:
| Everyone else replying to you is trying to convince you with
| arguments that reddit isn't a good use of your time. As you
| already know, this won't work. You're already convinced.
|
| The only thing that works is a site blocker. It actually works.
| Convince yourself that the block is permanent. Delete the app.
| This of course won't completely stop you, because you could
| always unblock yourself. But it'll stop you from mindlessly
| pulling up reddit.
| asdff wrote:
| If you can't control your reddit consumption already I'd
| expect that the site blocker will end up disabled before
| long. I'd try to involve a therapist if the goal is getting
| to the bottom of this beyond even reddit or websites in
| general.
| bombcar wrote:
| Even just blocking everything but old.reddit was enough to
| help cut it out, though I suspect HN has replaced it now as
| the "waste time machine"
| hackernewds wrote:
| Start a habit tracker tracking # of days not browsed
| reddit. you can trick your brain, since it loves streaks.
| also tie it to some reward mechanism so it seems like
| you're earning something by not browsing vs a punishment.
| neetle wrote:
| Sometimes a simple "pattern interrupt" can break the cycle.
| If you've a habit of opening the page whenever you hop on
| your phone, that extra effort may be enough to push back
| against the potential incentive
|
| Anecdotally, a lot of digital addictions come down to ease
| of access vs dopamine hit. As soon as your access method is
| "futz with a hosts file" or "ask your wife to unlock the
| blocker" (I was pretty bad), it becomes easier to break the
| cycle.
|
| More people need to utilise their tendency toward lazyness,
| I swear
| swayvil wrote:
| everybody likes to put their reddit down.
|
| but we are just good friends.
|
| reddit man.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| The dangerous thing about reddit is the fact that it has these
| wonderful nuggets of information. Some really thoughtful
| opinion, or some unique perspective on things. I always use the
| example of someone writing essentially an essay on how to make
| neapolitan pizza [1], including a list of references, one of
| them being a scientific article. Where would I find this in a
| book or on the internet? Blog sites and similar things usually
| are only there to sell ads or something else, are padded with
| fluff or simply wrong. Here I have someone anonymous without
| any ulterior motive, without fluff, just exactly what I want:
| pure information in a useful structure.
|
| Similarly you can sometimes find really cool answers on
| /r/askscience or /r/askhistorians.
|
| Of course, this is in stark contrast to the vast amounts of low
| quality posts from people posting thoughtless one-liners while
| they are waiting on the bus, sitting on the toilet or about to
| fall asleep. Not to mention many toxic comments. But every now
| and then I find these little nuggets which keep me hooked.
|
| [1]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/neapolitanpizza/comments/h8llnp/fre...
| operon wrote:
| I am compulsively curious.
| ulisesrmzroche wrote:
| Because you're avoiding something. What "that" is depends on you,
| so that's why there's no clear answers. But it's usually some
| giant shit sandwich you're gonna have to eat and there's nothing
| you can do about it.
|
| "If you gotta eat shit, do it first thing in the morning." like
| Albert Einstein used to say.
| bricemo wrote:
| The simple answer is machine learning algorithms. AI are very
| effective at this, it is the same thing at YouTube, Instagram,
| Tiktok. They will optimize to get you to want to come back
| whycombinetor wrote:
| I read another techno-dystopian rambling within the last 24 hours
| that this text strongly reminds me of. It even has spelling
| mistakes too (stratergy).
|
| "i swear its always the days where i cannot help but fall asleep
| during the day, which always starts as a nap that is supossed to
| take no more than 20 minutes but ultimately takes more than 2
| hours, where i learn something great about myself and feel giddy
| and silly the rest of the day or utterly destroyed by my own
| previous obliviousness.... i gott lucky today i took a nap today
| and feel extremely silly, goofy, and content, the euphoric high
| of a drained and noided individual..(corny i know but whatever) i
| swear all the computer generated music and single-wavelength
| light i see looks and sounds a bit better today.... i think the
| zuck has infiltrated my brain but i kinda like being online idk
| about yall... i think i have reached the zenith of what consumer
| culture and the mall aesthetic inspires in people... i feel as if
| i have traveled back to the extremely-early 2000s and also
| simultaneously 50 years in the future..." From the description of
| this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCSMaKWzz8Q
| davesque wrote:
| I love how this very rough but very honest and relatable
| expression of despair over the loss of self control has won out
| over all the other tech news right now. That says a lot.
| chooma wrote:
| I spend too much of my life behind a computer screen, which I
| only notice when I take a long break. Working remote doesn't help
| either.
| neriymus wrote:
| I have the EXACT same problem. Constantly refreshing and
| refreshing insta, reddit, hackernews, etc etc. Shameless plug, I
| built this to try to curb my addiction ->
| https://github.com/neriymus/Fetcher, maybe it'll help someone
| else.
| buntha wrote:
| As a husband & father, forcing myself to do some core household
| activities every day keeps me away from the Internet. Every
| weekend, cooking is my responsibility and every day I make sure
| to walk with my toddler outside the home WITHOUT a phone.
| albertTJames wrote:
| Because I have absolutely nothing else than work in my life.
| Staying connected constantly is the only way I excape the dread
| of the abyss.
| andi999 wrote:
| It just makes you feel slightly better. Same reason why the TV
| was on 15 years ago. Or the radio 40 years ago.
| mescaline wrote:
| Ads, mostly. If you work on ads, or support ads, fuck you.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| It's when you have an power cut for a number of hours do you
| realize what a waste of time it is. When you have no electric
| then there's many other things to think about.
| willchis wrote:
| I downloaded Duolingo and now every time my finger itches for
| reddit/instagram/YT at quiet point, I force myself to do a few
| exercises on Duo instead. I'm not going to master a language like
| this, but it feels a bit more worthwhile.
| juanani wrote:
| kshacker wrote:
| Why do we?
|
| I am currently in a 25+ people weekly sync up that is completely
| meandering. I can't do anything productive since it is hard to
| focus but I can read hacker news or Reddit because it does not
| strain the mind that much.
|
| Do this 9 times a week, and pretty soon it is a habit.
| galgot wrote:
| I think there is a kind of zapping effect with that. The internet
| is a constantly changing thing with informations constantly
| added, and our brain is rewarded with a bit of dopamine each time
| we find a new interesting stuff for us (even very small, and can
| be completely unconscious) . Not that we will keep our attention
| to the new found stuff very long, it's just the fact of finding
| something new that becomes an unconscious reward, thus this
| endless zapping.
| johnvega wrote:
| Attention hijacking becomes micro-habbits that become a rourtine.
| After just a few days, it becomes very difficult to undo, even if
| being aware of what's going on. This is what I understood from
| Tristan Harris several years ago and it's still happening today.
| oofnik wrote:
| One strategy I've found helpful in my own life for addressing
| that hopeless drowning feeling brought on by doomscrolling or
| other mindless activity incentivized by The Algorithm is to
| actively intervene and remind myself that this is noise. All of
| it is ephemeral, meaningless noise. It is not important. It is
| not nourishing my soul, and now is the time to turn the dial to a
| different station. Attention is a limited resource that I am
| currently squandering, and I better go find something else to do.
| And then I do it, and just like that, the hopeless drowning
| feeling subsides.
|
| I too once felt aimless and demotivated like the author. But the
| desire to own things and have friends, as the author put it -
| this is Nietzsche's will to power, and it is one of the most
| profound insights into the human condition expressed in modern
| times. This desire was ultimately what drove me to move across
| the world, channel my energy and curiosity into learning a
| productive and marketable skill and ultimately make something of
| myself.
|
| Humans have evolved over millions of years to be a goal-seeking,
| load-bearing species not content with mere survival. Our
| predecessors who were cool with hunting and gathering and
| spending all of their waking moments trying not to die have by
| now been largely subjugated out of existence by nations,
| civilizations, and religions / ideologies expressing a moral
| obligation to have dominion over the earth. In a world with
| unprecedented surplus for the select few of us who are privileged
| enough to complain on the Internet about feeling lazy but not
| quite knowing why or what to do about it, is psychologically
| debilitating to focus all or most of one's attention on
| meaningless noise. We need more than that to achieve a life worth
| living. All of the world's major wisdom traditions contain this
| grain of truth, either expressed implicitly or explicitly. I
| believe that there is an evolutionary reason why these traditions
| have persisted for the thousands of years they've been with us;
| adopting them has clearly bestowed some advantage, over many
| generations, in adapting to one's environment - and, perhaps more
| importantly, molding it to one's desires.
|
| Best wishes for the author in finding their passion and purpose
| in life that will propel them out of the realm of survival and
| into the realm of thriving.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| We are sensory creatures. The brain used to have to move the body
| along to see new things, but now it has realized that it is far
| more efficient (calorie-wise) to sit and bring sensations to the
| eyes (mind's eye as well).
|
| If you weren't reading/viewing with your eyes/ears, what are you
| missing?
|
| Taste, but you can eat while viewing.
|
| Touch, this is missing, but the negative survival/health feedback
| loop is slow, so we ignore the loss of touch i nour lives.
|
| Smell, this is missing, but we can smell our food.
|
| Basically it is inevitable that the future of humanity will spend
| more and more time stationary while enjoying the internet.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| I dunno man, why do you waste so much time working?
| gerash wrote:
| The Tiktok, Instagram feed or YT feed (or even HN feed or any
| other news feed) feel like snack food. They taste more delicious
| than other food but at the same time we aren't evolved to consume
| them in huge amounts so too much consumption is harmful.
|
| So we always need ways to constrain the amount of snack food and
| snack media we consume
| lazyjones wrote:
| Because you don't have important goals and the discipline to
| focus on them.
|
| If the Internet didn't exist, it would be TV or something...
| antipaul wrote:
| I have started hiding my personal laptop behind a drawer. Phone
| too
| oldinternet wrote:
| The internet is where we learn, create, express, communicate, and
| be. The internet is the most interconnected part of our world.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Because large companies have built the most popular places on the
| internet to intentionally be addictive (but call it engagement
| instead).
|
| Their massive wealth relies on converting engagement into ad
| spend.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Addiction. I've been addicted to the internet since a teen. I
| have worked to moderate my time on it for the last 5 years and
| have changed my life significantly.
|
| Technology is beautiful, but there's more to life than sitting in
| front of a screen doing exactly what the author mentions.
|
| I'm writing a book right now that is talking about this challenge
| and the various things I had learned to find balance.
| habosa wrote:
| I have come to believe that the algorithmically curated personal
| feed should be illegal. It's too powerful and we can't handle it.
|
| Any social network should either have: a) One feed for everyone
| (like news website) b) A personalized feed that only contains
| things you've explicitly subscribed to in chronological order. No
| recommendations allowed or suggestions of "you might also like"
|
| Yes we'd still waste a lot of time online because there's an
| infinite amount to see in these glowing little boxes. But at
| least we'd be in control and we'd stop letting these big
| companies have complete control over our emotions
| jbirer wrote:
| I have done it all, from large amounts of money from online
| businesses, to travels, to drugs, to sex (not trying to brag
| here). Nothing really stimulates me except interesting articles
| and weird technology blogs, I really just want to learn new
| things and drink coffee.
| FoolishOne wrote:
| Because it sucks my brain away from the real world to the virtual
| world!
| chrsig wrote:
| The author's post aligns with a lot of ADHD narrative. If the
| author is reading, consider getting evaluated.
|
| That said, why do we spend so much time not being productive?
| Because we're not obligated to be productive 24/7. It's ok that
| you're browsing youtube instead of being productive!
|
| You're demanding too much from yourself -- not because you can't
| live up to it, but because the expectations are too damn high.
| rhizome wrote:
| My therapist asks me the same question.
| mrkramer wrote:
| I spend many hours on the internet because it is endless source
| of information plus I listen music when I'm doing research. I can
| also say I'm not enjoying it 10/10 but I'm addicted to
| information and I'm in pursuit of knowledge.
| qiskit wrote:
| Why not? What should we waste our time on instead?
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| RSS was better. You could mark feed items as read and save time.
| Feeds that do not implement mark as read are an waste of time.
| davesque wrote:
| I think we'd all be spending more time doing things that are
| "worthwhile" if we felt like they were worth the while. As it
| stands, I think the vacuousness of modern day life is hiding in
| plain view. Why put more effort in at work if it just amounts to
| a lifetime of toil for only the chance at a few years of rest far
| outside of your prime? Why bother learning something when you
| have the keen sense that a thousand other people are already
| working on it who are more talented and resourced than you? Long
| story short, we live in a world now that doesn't much value
| people but rather strives to capitalize on the value that people
| represent. Corporations and institutions have been given
| relatively free reign to kick people below the belt of their
| attention and to try and squeeze another ounce of effort, however
| misdirected, out of them. It's all a numbers game.
| dcatx wrote:
| The folks building the internet are very, very good at exploiting
| our weak points to keep us scrolling.
|
| I've recently gotten way more aggressive about managing my screen
| time because I realized I had become incapable of just sitting in
| silence and peacefully focusing on a single task -- even while
| working I was constantly using my phone to open Reddit or Twitter
| or Discord, for reasons that I couldn't explain. My brain needed
| constant dopamine hits to function and spending more than a few
| minutes on any particular task was extremely difficult.
|
| I've had a lot of success recently by leaving my phone in another
| room and replacing as much of my non-work screen time as possible
| with slow, screen-less activity -- writing in a notebook, reading
| real books, walking through the neighborhood (with my phone left
| at home), gardening, cooking. Basic stuff, but all things that
| had gradually disappeared from my life as my smart phone and
| laptop took over every part of my brain.
|
| The first few weeks of this were pretty tough, I was constantly
| looking to where my phone normally would have been and I had to
| relearn how to just focus on one thing at a time. Now that I'm in
| the groove my brain feels dramatically more clear and calm and
| the urge to grab my phone every 30 seconds has mostly faded away.
| I'm getting more comfortable feeling "bored" again. As a bonus,
| I've regained my ability to read novels -- I've read more fiction
| this year than I did in the last 10 years combined.
| ggregoire wrote:
| Broader questions for the author:
|
| - Is entertainment a waste of time?
|
| - What's "too much" when we talking about entertainment
| consumption? Where is the limit?
|
| - Do you consider YouTube/Instagram a form of entertainment? If
| not, why not?
| jhugo wrote:
| When I read stuff like this I feel a huge disconnect from the
| modern world. I have never enjoyed social media other than HN. It
| all seems like a vapid waste of time. Sometimes I start to scroll
| Instagram to see what I'm missing out on, and by the second
| interspersed ad I'm bored and mildly disgusted, so I close the
| app. Maybe it's just that the algorithm isn't giving me the
| content I really want/need, so I'm stuck in some kind of social
| media purgatory, but I really don't understand how people get
| addicted to it.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > Maybe it's just that the algorithm isn't giving me the
| content I really want/need
|
| (Don't) try TikTok.
| whomst wrote:
| To be fair almost all of Hacker News is a vapid waste of time
| too
| jhugo wrote:
| But the 10~20% that is very high quality is worth it. The
| link to something interesting that starts a meaningful,
| nuanced discussion that often includes people close to the
| topic at hand. I've never seen that kind of content on other
| social media.
| whomst wrote:
| There are meaningful things on other social media that make
| them Pareto distributed too and I disagree that the SNR of
| HN is higher than elsewhere
| inafewwords wrote:
| 1024core wrote:
| My habit of scrolling through my FB feed endlessly went away
| after I unsubscribed from every "friend"'s feed. I had random
| people in there, people I had met just once, or people I had
| dated just once, or even one-night stands and FWBs.
|
| One day I scrolled through the feed and for every item in the
| list, I clicked "unfollow". Soon, my feed was practically empty,
| except for the feeds of a couple of cooking pages I follow, and
| friends who rarely post.
| dghughes wrote:
| For me I've found over my 27 years of browsing (I'm 53) for each
| decade there is less substance and more fluff. There's far more
| stuff out there on the Internet for sure but much I find is vapid
| and that seems to be attractive. Like fast food it's empty
| calories but satisfying.
|
| Years ago it took effort to be on the Internet you made sure the
| phone was available, you started a program, a dial-up modem
| connected (or not), you opened up Internet application not a Web
| application. It took work just to get to step 1 now it's instant.
| More and more interactions but no substance just people trying to
| be witty - so much witticism, memes, echo chambers, anger.
|
| Now I find I am to the point where most times I just use a mouse
| or tap on an icon very little typing and I seem to stick to the
| same ten websites.
|
| I think it's basic stimulus, response, reward. Just seeing two
| vertical arrows one pointing up and one down has a visceral
| effect on me. We've conditioned ourselves to be like this. The
| bell rings and we salivate.
| Vladimof wrote:
| Why do I waste all my time on the internet?
| [deleted]
| juanani wrote:
| rnd0 wrote:
| Dopamine?
|
| Dopamine.
| ahallock wrote:
| The why is easy. I mean, you basically have infinite
| entertainment and information at your fingertips. And it's all
| tailored to your interests. This is unprecedented. I don't think
| anything comes remotely close in human history.
| coolhoody wrote:
| My excuses:
|
| 1. No free will.
|
| 2. Bad parenting.
|
| 3. Witches.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Right now it's because I don't want to go and do the thing that
| makes me sad to even think about. Sometimes it's because I am
| frustrated with the thing I'm supposed to be doing. Well, now I
| will go make food and tell myself I will do the sad thing
| afterwards.
| fabk wrote:
| There is something in the animal brain that enjoys _variable
| reinforcement_ more than other kinds of behavioral reinforcement.
|
| I am not an expert, but if something gives you a reward
| _partially randomly_ -- e.g., the one cool (or otherwise
| captivating) post on Facebook that sometimes comes out of the 200
| you scrolled through -- this kind of reinforcement produces the
| behaviors most resistant to extinction.
|
| See "Effects of different types of simple schedules" on
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement.
| chefandy wrote:
| This sounds like a major depressive episode. A very experienced
| psychologist recently told me that even folks with no hint of
| mental health trouble started having a hard time with motivation
| and mood in the pandemic, but many with existing tendencies
| towards depressive states were plunged straight into oblivion.
| Talk therapy and medication can be a big help, but CBT exercises
| can also help if you're against using medication and can't
| imagine going into a deep dive about your feelings with a
| therapist. Even if it's not depression, this poster should talk
| to a psychologist. They're not able to right the ship themselves
| which doesn't bode well for it improving on its own. Finding a
| therapist sucks but telemedicine is more accessible than ever at
| this point.
|
| As an aside-- folks love dismissing mental health concerns by
| saying things like "everybody has a hard time getting motivated."
| That completely ignores the scope of the problem-- it's no
| different from telling someone their motorcycle accident is no
| big deal because kids fall off their bikes all the time. There's
| a boatload of peer reviewed research out there that discusses the
| debilitating effects of depression. Go read it if you're
| skeptical-- I'm not your research assistant.
| motoboi wrote:
| For those who didn't get the memo:
|
| Be warned, folks! Depression is not about sadness, but about
| not being able to do things.
|
| If you are feeling incapable of doing things, like physically
| siting in front of the computer and not being able to do any
| work, you are probably depressed.
|
| Sometimes you'll sit in front of the computer, try to start
| some task but somehow end opening hackeer news, digg, youtube.
|
| Seek help as soon as possible, do not wait until you are fired.
| chefandy wrote:
| The opposite of depression isn't happiness-- it's vitality.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| > Sometimes you'll sit in front of the computer, try to start
| some task but somehow end opening hackeer news, digg,
| youtube.
|
| I have to strongly disagree.
|
| If that kind of behavior gets out of control it sounds like
| typical adhd. One still wants to do stuff but unable to get
| oneself into actually doing it.
|
| Depression IMO is when one starts losing motivation and
| ability to derive pleasure from activities that were normally
| pleasant.
| hypefi wrote:
| What about "Depression" is a sign that something deep down
| is shifting or needs changing. After introspection, my loss
| of motivation is a lot of the times me knowing that I want
| to work on problems that I dare worthwhile for the future
| of humanity and earth like climate change, environmental
| work, planting trees and social work..., and being obliged
| to not work in that triggers the lack of motivation unless
| obliged by survival. I am very skeptical of medication to
| solve these kind of issues.
|
| 'Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct
| your life and you will call it fate.'
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| I think that the issue of deriving meaning from one's
| work (and life) is as old as humanity.
|
| It looks to me also that there's a bit of idealization
| going on on your side. In any case you'll work with other
| people and I bet you won't feel too good if you'll be
| doing env. work with total assholes. So I would also look
| at that angle -- being among people you like/appreciate
| and who reciprocate also kind of eases that existential
| thing (IMO).
|
| Now I am working in the field and organization which
| definitely are worthwhile / good cause (imo). But it
| comes at a price, I wouldn't mind to work in a less
| meaningful place (subjectively) for a few years with a
| significantly higher comp.
|
| Also good cause is a motivator but the not the most
| immediate one. Used to work in a slightly dysfunctional
| company but my responsibilities were (mostly) so well
| defined and managed day-to-day that just getting stuff
| done was satisfying.
| chefandy wrote:
| It's not that cut and dried. Comorbidity of ADHD and
| serious depression or anxiety is something like 80%.
| Depression also affects your ability to focus. Either way,
| you should get help if it's negatively impacting your life
| in ways serious enough that you've made concerted efforts
| to stop. That's especially true if you haven't been able to
| improve it yourself.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Besides the obvious (pay a doctor to do real diagnostic
| tests), how can you differentiate between depression causing
| the inability to do work and ADD dragging you straight to
| Reddit?
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| Also burnout. Burnout shares a lot with depression though
| (and may even basically be a type of depression), but with
| the difference that it can usually be fixed with sufficient
| rest and holidays and lifestyle changes.
| statquontrarian wrote:
| I'm taking intermittent internet & phone fasts.
| leodriesch wrote:
| Could you expand on that?
|
| Does it mean you don't use your phone till 10AM or not after
| 9PM or something like that?
| statquontrarian wrote:
| I'm still experimenting; so far, it includes:
|
| 1. Turning off my phone at night. This removes the risk of
| looking at my phone in the middle of the night after going to
| the bathroom.
|
| 2. Consciously waiting to turn on my phone until I'm ready,
| which usually means after breakfast. I want to lead my phone,
| not the other way around.
|
| 3. Intermittent fasts of addictive computer behavior; in
| particular, I found I was checking news sites and HN
| addictively throughout the day, so I take some days off from
| that, completely.
| praptak wrote:
| "Procrastination Monkey" series from waitbutwhy is the best
| treatise on this that I know.
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| A big part of the problem: brain plasticity. (Which, ironically,
| I read about on the internet....)
|
| But the idea is if you're doing a lot of one thing, your brain
| adapts. So if that one thing is "quickly scrolling headlines" or
| "consuming bursts of updates," over time your brain just atunes
| itself to that form of stimulation.
|
| If that's true, who knows how far it will lead? I was on jury
| duty, and spoke to the prosecuting attorney afterwards. And his
| complaint was that over the years, "juries have gotten dumber" --
| that he'd consistently seen the attention span of a typical juror
| getting shorter and shorter....
| danenania wrote:
| The positive side of plasticity is that your brain can also re-
| adapt fairly quickly to a lower (healthier) level of
| stimulation if you can get over the initial hump.
|
| My understanding is that most of this is regulated by dopamine,
| and your dopamine system needs time to reset in order to adapt
| to new patterns. In the meantime, it's normal to feel bored or
| lacking in motivation; that's part of the reset process and you
| just need to wait it out.
|
| Personally, I've found it's easiest to change habits and
| patterns via some sort of healthy distraction that takes my
| mind off whatever I'm trying to change. Travel, getting into a
| new hobby/project, or starting a really good book are all great
| for this.
|
| Andrew Huberman goes into this stuff in depth in his podcast,
| especially this episode:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU
| [deleted]
| pigtailgirl wrote:
| it's cheap - i could go for a walk - go to the gym - call my
| mother - clean the house - na - clicking the same 3 buttons in a
| different order on youtube - hoping for something new and
| amazing-- is "cheaper" - it's easy - & very occasionally - I win
| something amazing-
|
| think this has always been true tho - mum used to buy the sunday
| times then read the same pages multiple times throughout the week
| - not sure she thought she would get something new out of them
| each time - it was just something cheap to do -
| stnmtn wrote:
| > clicking the same 3 buttons in a different order on youtube -
| hoping for something new and amazing-- is "cheaper" - it's easy
| - & very occasionally - I win something amazing-
|
| You just made me realize that these algorithmic feeds are quite
| literally a skinner box because you're exactly right.. once in
| a blue moon there is a recommendation, a video, or a tweet,
| that really is amazing and can change your perspective or give
| you huge amounts of enjoyment
|
| So we click on, waiting for that next payout of gold.
| pigtailgirl wrote:
| and if that is indeed true - do we control the algorithm - or
| does the algorithm control us? :=)
| davesque wrote:
| Feels kinda pathetic to lay it out like this, but the one thing
| I wish I could do is call my mom. But she's gone.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| That's the last thing I wanna do, and she's alive (and calls
| me). D:
| burntoutfire wrote:
| ... what else there is to do? The days are 14 hours long
| (assuming healthy 10 hours of sleep), but I have energy for maybe
| 4-8 hours of activity on average. Rest of the time needs to be
| filled with some form of "time wasting".
| layer8 wrote:
| It's an addiction. The internet works like loot boxes -- the
| randomness with which you find something that gives you a quick
| dopamine kick keeps you scrolling/refreshing and keeps you coming
| back.
| mmlkrx wrote:
| The only times in my life where I stopped "wasting time on the
| internet" was upon returning from a 10-day Vipassana meditation
| retreat. Especially after the first one this lasted for around
| 3-5 months. There was no effort involved on my side. It simply
| came very naturally to me to not check reddit/hackernews/fav blog
| first thing in the morning or during idle time (or at all
| really).
|
| Some of that I can probably attest to the disruption in my media
| routine for 10 days, but that doesn't explain that it lasted for
| 3-5 months. During the first 3 months I overwhelmingly felt very
| peaceful, good, and even joyful at times, with negative emotional
| reactions being a very rare occurrence. I can't help but think
| that this was the main driver for my lack of habitual "wasting
| time on the internet". I just didn't need it.
|
| If I could choose, I would prefer how it used to be instead of my
| current routine of checking reddit/hackernews/youtube multiple
| times a day. I think it's mostly not nurturing the mind in a good
| way. But I'm not beating myself up about it, and that's good.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Why not continue the practise to a greater degree? My social
| media use negatively correlates with my effort put into zazen
| avereveard wrote:
| Can we stop the hustle culture and the productivity guilt?
| Consuming entertainment is just fine.
| synergy20 wrote:
| 811 points 428 comments so far and staying at the top at HN for a
| full day, that alone explains "why do you waste so much time on
| the internet?" :)
|
| I spent about two hours online daily for job-unrelated stuff, on
| average: 30 minutes youtube, 30 minutes twitter, 30 minutes HN,
| and 30 minutes email/general news etc. Half of the time is
| wasted.
|
| As software developer we're trying to optimize our code for the
| CPU all the time, but we're wasting our own CPU, the brain, which
| is ironic.
| santa_boy wrote:
| Seriously! Now, I will end up spending 3 hrs trying to figure
| out why `807 points and 426 comments` for such a trivial and
| common experience!
| bigthymer wrote:
| It is one of those experiences people ruminate about on their
| own about but this post has given us an opportunity to talk
| about it with others that experience the same.
| ohcomments wrote:
| Because it's my job... I search for answers that others are too
| lazy to find, so I can help them fix their stuff. Can't do that
| without internet... Sadly. Also, Twitch's a drug and YouTube's my
| dealer...
| XCSme wrote:
| > Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
|
| Because our brain doesn't like to get bored. We need to
| constantly do things. Also, the brain doesn't really like to
| start doing the right thing because that feels too much like
| work, even though once we start being productive we do feel good
| and enjoy it.
| bikamonki wrote:
| Don't say the Internet. There are tons of good
| information/tutorials/reads/etc on the Internet.
|
| You have a social net addiction. You spend so much time on it b/c
| it is designed for that: catch your attention, sell ads.
|
| I already see the parallels between social nets and tobacco. We
| are at the stage where we realize it is harmful. Eventually, it
| will be regulated.
|
| But then again, you do not need to wait for it to be regulated.
| Quit now. Be disciplined. Find a hobbie that is offline. Become a
| maker.
| jbjbjbjb wrote:
| Unless you're at work, on vacation or meant to be spending time
| with others at dinner or some social event it's ok to waste time
| on the internet.
|
| You were not going to do something useful anyway. Before the
| internet people watched too much tv, played video games, read the
| newspaper, watched the news on repeat, read crappy books, ate
| crap, drank, smoked. We need downtime stop the self-flagellation.
| tester756 wrote:
| Partly?
|
| because I feel like I should learn stuff, get better at computers
| and then translate it to bigger total compensation - I'm young,
| later I will have less desire to put effort into that or other
| things like kids and stuff
|
| but very often it ends on HN/9gag or similar :D
| ineedasername wrote:
| About a year ago another HN commenter really helped me out with
| this and recommended an application called Cold Turkey [1].
|
| It lets you lock yourself out of specified websites and
| applications for a scheduled period of time. You can break out of
| it by either rebooting or setting a long string of random text
| you have to enter, but it basically stops impulsive browsing.
|
| It helps me a fair bit to stay on task at work. I whitelist only
| the sites I need for work and take away the ability to randomly
| alt-tab into a browser "just for a minute".
|
| If your looking for a way to discipline your computer habits, I
| highly recommend this program. It's not a cure, but it does help.
|
| [0] https://getcoldturkey.com/
| purplerabbit wrote:
| What has helped me immensely is intermittent fasting from the
| internet.
|
| Setting a time to put away my phone and laptop every single day
| and sticking to it has rewired my brain and allowed me to
| rediscover old, slower, richer ways of thinking that I used to
| engage in. I cannot recommend it enough.
| dudebro420 wrote:
| a version of this i do (and am obviously failing at currently)
| is to avoid sites with comments, and avoid search engines
|
| sites with commenting trick your brain into thinking you are
| having social interactions, at best it's a waste of time, at
| worst you end up legitimately feeling worse than you did before
|
| the feeling of wanting to look up some random factoid and not
| being able to feels unsettling at first. this is how you know
| your brain is getting fucked up by this. whenever is stick to
| this for a couple days my brain feels much more normal and i
| feel more relaxed
| carlgreene wrote:
| For me it's a busy brain with any information it wants to consume
| at my finger tips. This is something I'm working incredibly hard
| to combat, but my brain is constantly going a million miles a
| minute with the most meaningless and out of my control crap. The
| way I can "close" the thought is by looking stuff up on the
| internet related to that thought, or just distracting myself with
| some garbage.
|
| A calm mind to me at this point is one of the most valuable
| things. I seldomly experience it, but thankfully it's been
| happening more often lately now that I'm conscious about it.
| peter_retief wrote:
| You need more coffee.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Recovering from eye surgery. Nothing else I can do.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Has anyone tried?:
|
| * Using an apple cellular watch and leaving your phone at home
|
| * Using a smaller phone like an iphone mini
|
| * Using a lower tech feature phone
|
| * Using screentime
|
| And found success that way?
| dbalatero wrote:
| Yes, I use an Apple Watch for maps/subway directions and a flip
| phone for my phone. Works well, best of both worlds. Apple
| Watch is hard to waste time on due to the cramped UI.
| criddell wrote:
| Do you also have an iPhone that you just leave at home?
| [deleted]
| Tade0 wrote:
| My previous phone died on me suddenly and at that time I didn't
| have spare cash for another one, so I got an old Nokia 3600
| classic from a friend and spent 9 months using it while I was
| working my way to get my finances in check.
|
| The moment I bought a new phone all the old habits came back,
| so I guess the answer is "nope".
| windowsrookie wrote:
| I tried an Apple Watch. It had a couple of issues that
| prevented it from working for me. When it's on LTE the battery
| only lasted me about 5-6 hours. It's just not designed to be
| used away from an iPhone for more than a couple hours. So you
| have to carry an Apple Watch charger with you, and it can only
| charge if you take it off your wrist. Also while iMessages
| would come thru, text messages would not reliably get sent to
| the watch while it was on LTE only. Another issue is you can't
| send/receive messages from social media apps like
| instagram/snapchat. 80% of my communications with friends is
| through Snapchat. Maybe there's a Facebook messenger or
| telegram app for the watch but I don't use those apps. Also,
| there's no way (that I know of) to stream music to your car
| radio from the watch, streaming music over LTE to your
| headphones drops the battery life to 2-3 hours.
|
| I then tried the light phone 2. https://www.thelightphone.com
|
| Similar to the Watch it has short battery life. Maybe ~8 hours
| with sending some texts and listening to an hour long podcast
| or music. It uses Micro-USB so you have to carry one of those
| around because everything is USB-C now. It can receive texts
| but no images. So anytime someone sends you a picture in a text
| you have to ask them what it is. Again no way to send messages
| in social media apps. Also there is no way to stream music from
| any streaming service.
|
| I then tried an iPhone SE. It can do everything you need, but
| not very well. It's screen was often too small, and too dim
| outside. Compared to high end phones the camera sucks, and
| again it has bad battery life. I eventually came to the
| conclusion that if I'm going to carry a full smartphone It may
| as well be a good one.
|
| So after all that I'm back on an iPhone 13 Pro Max. Not using a
| smartphone for a few months did seem to "reset" my brain tho. I
| don't really use any Apps on the iPhone aside from safari,
| camera, YouTube music, and Snapchat for messaging. Having a
| good camera on you at all times is really hard to give up.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The original iPhone SE from 2016?
| mfgs wrote:
| Once you have an internet connected phone or PC (as we all do)
| then the cost in physical or mental effort, time, or money to
| click another link or watch another video is basically zero. It
| also gives relatively high levels of dopamine as you're
| constantly seeing or learning new things.
|
| So with practically no barrier to sitting there longer and a
| constant stream of stimulation the cost to benefit _ratio_ is
| incredibly low, arguably lower than anything else we're likely to
| do regularly. Any real world activity, which all require time and
| mental or physical effort, yield likely a much higher cost to
| benefit ratio.
|
| Wasting time on the internet is basically just the path of least
| resistance and the best "deal" in your own mental economy.
| [deleted]
| stevecalifornia wrote:
| Install a scheduled host blocker and block all your time wasters
| until the hours of 10PM until midnight.
|
| Don't be afraid to admit that the moment you feel a touch of
| boredom you reflexively type 'reddit'. Tools like 'Freedom.to'
| block these time sinks and you don't even realize how frequently
| you visit these sites until you get the block notification.
|
| After a week or two your cured.
| laurex wrote:
| I think an underappreciated aspect of this phenomenon is
| loneliness.
|
| Many of the things that suck us in (including HN) have this
| aspect of being with other people, though they don't actually
| lead to us feeling actually known or cared about in the same way
| as our bodies/minds evolved for.
|
| Thus, it's very easy to feel an ambient loneliness, go online
| where there are other people saying things, sharing things,
| sending us emails (even if they are not actually "to us" like
| newsletters) and getting sucked in, then feeling like "where did
| that time go" because it was not really an investment in any of
| those top-of-pyramid needs, but instead 'empty calories' of
| socializing.
| kabdib wrote:
| A week ago I deleted my Twitter account. Today I'm deleting my
| Reddit account. I'm keeping Facebook simply to stay in touch with
| family and a few friends, otherwise it would _definitely_ go. I
| 'm on the fence about HN, but it will probably go as well.
|
| These online communities are a net negative in my life, and I'm
| done.
| fbrncci wrote:
| I deleted Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other social accounts
| five years ago. Now I am refreshing HN all day, and other sites
| too. This problem really not about the platform, its about the
| consumer here.
| b555 wrote:
| when folks talk about going cold turkey like this, I have a
| question for them - do you think they were a net negative or
| our capability to moderate our use of these social media was
| not controllable?
| kabdib wrote:
| I think that platforms like Reddit and Twitter have been
| designed and tuned to keep people in "violent agreement". I
| found myself engaging in conversations that ultimately were
| just a time sink.
|
| I have better things to do with my time. I think I wasted two
| years of my life doom scrolling. Time to be done.
|
| We'll see about HN. This might be my last comment here.
| aaron695 wrote:
| sarsway wrote:
| Because we humans have a lot of idle time.
|
| We feel like we're wasting it, and we feel we should instead
| spend time archiving goals, to better ourselves, to do something
| more meaningful. But that is not how life works. You are just
| unnecessarily burden yourself with guilt. Thinking you should be
| doing something else. There are so many things to learn about, so
| many things to experience, right? We fear on missing out on life,
| chasing something, but what exactly we don't really know.
|
| But maybe you just don't need to? Most of us are exactly fine
| with where we are. Of course you should always strive to improve,
| but truth is "killing time" is a big part of life. Especially for
| top of the food chain animals like humans. Watch some livestreams
| of lions on youtube, what do they do? 99% of the time they just
| sit under a tree doing absolutely nothing, and I bet they don't
| feel guilty about it. People used to walk labyrinths for hours
| and hours, just to kill time.
|
| This whole notion that you need to make the most out of every
| moment, live life to the fullest, see all the places, chase the
| uncomfortable! - I don't think it's necessarily the best advice,
| the happiest people I've met tend to have very simple boring
| routines.
| warabe wrote:
| agreed. We are not a robot, but a living creature.
|
| However, I think key part is how to shorten that idle time.
|
| I am trying meditation for now, but I cannot see any
| improvement, unfortunately. Maybe I am missing something.
| zyemuzu wrote:
| Return to monke. That is the solution.
| frankus wrote:
| I think most people would like if they could be productive 24/7
| (or more realistically, consistently productive during their
| waking hours), but I think there is some amount of "waking
| rest" that humans need, or at least that modern human existence
| makes it hard to avoid.
|
| This same post could have been written 30 years ago, but it
| would be about mindlessly switching channels on the TV,
| watching vapid sitcoms interrupted by a handful of commercials
| you've seen dozens of times.
|
| Maybe before that people would read the local fish-wrap
| newspaper or same stupid book they've read dozens of times.
| pugets wrote:
| Maybe that's true, but it doesn't provide me with any comfort.
| I'm only going to live once. When I'm old and bound to a chair
| (hopefully due to frailty and not because a psychiatrist
| strapped me to it), I want to feel like I achieved something
| more than a passive human existence.
|
| All these hours spent consuming forgettable garbage on Reddit,
| YouTube, Facebook, and in video games... these are hours not
| spent learning recipes, making music, writing programs, lifting
| weights, or practicing Spanish. If I could channel my energy
| towards these things, then the long-term payoff would be much
| more enriching. Not only that, but I'd probably be a happier
| person if I was disconnected from whatever daily drama social
| media wants me to care about.
|
| If I spend the next 10 years of my life the way I spent the
| last 10, I'll approach my midlife with no discernible talents,
| ambitions, or meaningful lived experiences.
| hattmall wrote:
| You should spend as much time as possible on your phone / the
| internet. When you die you won't have access to it.
|
| There are plenty of people who consider the alternative
| activities you listed just as meaningless.
|
| But if you ACTUALLY want to do those things and you don't
| because of internet addiction. Then you need to break it.
|
| Positive and / or negative reinforcement.
|
| By some snack or drug or something you really like and set a
| goal of no scrolling for whatever is a reasonable time limit.
| If you achieve it have the treat. Gradually up the time limit
| and increase the reward.
|
| Negative reinforcement would be harder. It has to be
| something you actually don't like and drive no sense of
| purpose from. A lot of people will do something like pushups,
| but then they just see it as the cost.
|
| Possibly since your fear is wasting time, when you catch
| yourself doing it. Then purposefully waste time without
| scrolling. Like time out.
|
| Your positive reinforcement can't be related to the addiction
| though.
| paulcole wrote:
| You're saying one thing and doing another.
|
| It's not on anybody but you if you end up living a passive
| human existence. Either change what you're doing or accept
| that your dreams will stay dreams.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Their comment doesn't blame anyone for their situation.
| paulcole wrote:
| If they see their comment as a negative thing (which I
| think it's clear that they do), then lack of blame is
| exactly what you _don't_ want to see. They need to be
| blaming themselves, not nobody.
| Daishiman wrote:
| > All these hours spent consuming forgettable garbage on
| Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and in video games... these are
| hours not spent learning recipes, making music, writing
| programs, lifting weights, or practicing Spanish. If I could
| channel my energy towards these things, then the long-term
| payoff would be much more enriching. Not only that, but I'd
| probably be a happier person if I was disconnected from
| whatever daily drama social media wants me to care about.
|
| I do all those things and I still waste a ton of time on
| Youtube.
|
| And it's fine; your brain cannot dedicate all of its waking
| time to high-intensity intellectual endavours, you just end
| up burning out.
|
| I worked full-time and studied for a few years. Remarkably, I
| still had a share of free time, but I couldn't do anything
| "productive" with it as I had no mental energy to do perform
| these tasks. You _have_ to just hang out and do nothing.
|
| The most productive people I know waste a ton of time outside
| of their chosen specialty, and it's not a coincidence.
| minroot wrote:
| > People used to walk labyrinths for hours and hours, just to
| kill time.
|
| I walk and ride bicycle just to kill time to this days
| Sujeto wrote:
| I agree with this. Not to mention that being idle still
| involves complex thought processes, like treating traumas and
| understanding concepts.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| Excellent points and a fresh perspective.
|
| We should be happy we have a few hours to "waste". Enjoy it
| instead of punishing yourself pointlessly.
|
| If you wish to force yourself into a habit of doing something
| else instead -- take steps but also question the intent.
| Crabber wrote:
| >Watch some livestreams of lions on youtube, what do they do?
| 99% of the time they just sit under a tree doing absolutely
| nothing, and I bet they don't feel guilty about it
|
| Lions are at peace with the world. They sit around with clear
| minds, watching nature go by. They are content with the world
| and their place within it.
|
| This is absolutely not the same as a human who spends 4 hours a
| day doomscrolling through twitter and reddit and can't help
| checking their phone every 5 minutes.
| soared wrote:
| The point is that lions are chasing down prey 100% of the
| time, and so humans also don't need to be actively doing
| something 100% of the time either. Doomscrolling isn't a
| great example, but is comparable to the leisure of lions.
| Crabber wrote:
| The point I was trying to make is that even within
| "unproductive time" there are extremely healthy, and
| extremely unhealthy ways to spend it.
|
| Someone introduced me to the idea of "mental diet" a while
| ago. I find it to be an interesting concept. We know not to
| spend hours of our time eating junk food because it's not
| good for our physical health, why do we never consider our
| mental health in a similar way?
|
| Doomscrolling is just filling your brain up with mental
| junk. Most content on the modern internet is just mental
| junk honestly. And spending hours reading and getting
| invested in all of this crap really does affect your
| headspace for the rest of the day.
|
| Lions, by comparison, have a very pure and healthy mental
| diet.
| CapsAdmin wrote:
| Maybe they're doomscrolling the environment or their own
| mind?
|
| Do lions ignore prey if they're not hungry? I know younger
| cats usually want chase something if given the opportunity,
| regardless of whether they've eaten or not, or have access to
| food 24/7.
|
| Older cats tend to just sit around and watch the environment,
| perhaps waiting for something to happen?
| rchaud wrote:
| > Lions are at peace with the world. They sit around with
| clear minds, watching nature go by. They are content with the
| world and their place within it.
|
| Maybe for an adult lion at the peak of its powers. An elderly
| lion will end his days alone, cast out from the pack,
| surviving on its fading wits until....
| thomashop wrote:
| I feel like you are romanticising animal nature.
| goy wrote:
| And here we are, wasting time to write for the n-th time 'if feel
| the same". Someone even write it's refreshing ...
| senjin wrote:
| I know exactly why I do it and it feels impossible to stop. I
| scroll endlessly to avoid the pain of everything else in life.
| Doing work, doing chores, doing hobbies, talking to anyone,
| making decisions even about projects I'm excited to work on, it
| all causes a small hit of emotional pain. I don't really know
| where this pain comes from either. Maybe some childhood trauma
| that I can't even remember? I don't know.
|
| The 2nd part that cements this into what feels like an
| unbreakable habit is that I feel like I'm constantly learning.
| It's partly true, I'm constantly learning about things that have
| even benefited me and my team at work, but in general it's low
| quality garbage I'm learning about or just the surface of a
| good/useful topic.
|
| Like the author I have recognized this and done research on it
| and have no idea how to fix it. I remember finding the word
| akrasia [1] years ago that has stuck with me since but no help
| actually getting past it.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia
| _piyush wrote:
| I sometimes feel that it's because I'm not hanging out with the
| right kind of people. People with whom if I hang out I will be
| fun and they will be fun and I will be myself. But then I think
| when was the last time I was comfortably myself with someone.
| It was always either professional, or an acquaintance type
| friend, or a hiking group, or guitarist. Everywhere I'm a
| persona and not me and on internet I'm me and it's not bad.
| Don't know, something simpler perhaps.
| mise_en_place wrote:
| I'd recommend you get your testosterone levels checked. One of
| the symptoms of low total testosterone is depression in males.
|
| When I was checked I was on the lower end at 200 ng/dl and had
| the symptoms you describe. My doctor prescribed me first
| stanolone (DHT) and then switched me to regular testosterone.
| All I can say is it has changed my life. It may not be
| applicable to your situation but it might help.
| hipjiveguy wrote:
| thank you for your suggestion. I think talking to your doctor
| to see if it's reasonable, is a great idea. Much appreciated!
| mrmuagi wrote:
| Not to pew pew your suggestion, but apparently sleep, diet,
| and, exercise effect test levels as well, so more things to
| check at and rule out before committing to lifelong trt.
| Although I keep reading testomonials where people say they
| don't mind jabbing or applying creams.
|
| Also test levels vary drastically during the day in a two
| peak fashion, when you get tested can affect results in a
| misleading fashion.
| scaramanga wrote:
| Also genetic sensitivity to testosterone can effect test
| levels. So you really need a good doctor who is able to
| look honestly at your symptoms and who isn't running a
| testosterone mill which is just a modern day equivalent of
| snake oil (except more dangerous, since test is actually
| biologically active haha)
| amelius wrote:
| Gotta love internet diagnoses. Probably well-intended, but
| you don't even know if they are male or female :)
| mise_en_place wrote:
| As I had mentioned, it may not be applicable to their
| situation. But there is no doubt in my mind that
| testosterone mediates longevity in some fashion.
|
| The question is, at what level is that? And does it vary
| individually? Too much and you're at risk for adverse
| cardiovascular events. Too little and your bones will snap
| like twigs and your muscles will waste away.
| scaramanga wrote:
| Actually, the symptoms described are more to do with low
| estrogen (well, estradiol). And in males, estrogen is made
| by the action of the aromatase enzyme on free testosterone
| So tl;dr maybe OP is just menopausal? :))))
| dudebro420 wrote:
| tonguez wrote:
| maybe everyone in north korea or 18th century france is also
| low T. it's probably a chemical imbalance
| drpotato wrote:
| Mate, if you haven't already, go talk with a therapist. I've
| struggled with avoidance my entire adult life - avoiding
| awkwardness, pain, risk, "bad"emotions, difficult
| conversations, conflict - and talking with a professional has
| really helped me.
| mrmuagi wrote:
| Any tips on what type of therapist (psychologist, therapist,
| counsellor, etc.) and/or treatment you found effective?
| Sounds like talk therapy -- but did you go through other
| stuff as well?
| PKop wrote:
| Lift weights, run, get more sunlight/vitamin D, and go on
| walks in nature.
| grae_QED wrote:
| Talk to a licensed therapist with a PhD or PsyD that
| specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). There
| are masters level therapist, however most of them don't
| have as much training as people with PhD's or PsyD's (it
| can be hit or miss with masters level clinicians). But
| really it's about finding someone that you can connect
| with.
|
| CBT focuses on challenging behavior that goes against your
| goals and building an arsenal of cognitive tools to
| maintain behavior that helps you achieve your goals.
|
| It's what most people with these kinds of problems need.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| I recommend psychoanalysis. It's the only thing I tried
| that helped, and it helped a ton.
|
| AMA if you have questions.
| rchaud wrote:
| Much like making new friends past university, therapists are
| a crapshoot. Some simply aren't a good fit or have poor sofa-
| side manner or fail to develop a sense of trust.
|
| If the therapy is part of an employer funded benefit, you
| also only get a limited number of sessions, and only with the
| employer-approved provider.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Also, your employer funded therapist will likely have a
| specific mandate to basically help you get back to work,
| meaning no longterm solutions or help, only bandaids.
| mypalmike wrote:
| Do you know of examples where this was the case? I've
| never heard of therapists having any such mandates.
| kortilla wrote:
| That's not how that works. The employers don't directly
| employ therapists.
| chrisdave wrote:
| Maybe I'm lucky, I work for
| $LARGE_CORP_WITH_GOOD_BENEFITS and Aetna covers a non-
| tiny number of independent mental health practices with a
| small copay per session. Are there many companies with
| therapists on the payroll? I can't imagine feeling
| comfortable in that setting.
| eckza wrote:
| Plug for Lacanian psychotherapy.
|
| Lacanians are focused, disciplined, and smart. There aren't
| many of them, either.
|
| Dig around, read a little about Jacques Lacan; if it piques
| your interest, give it a shot.
| westoncb wrote:
| Interesting. Though I've got very little interest in
| Lacan's work itself, I could see this being a pretty good
| filter for finding smart/disciplined therapists who are
| able to address more... abstract concerns (then again,
| maybe it's better for some of us to be forced out of
| abstract territory for therapy).
| spazmoth wrote:
| Have you seen a Lacanian analyst yourself? If so--what
| are the sessions like?
| qiskit wrote:
| > I know exactly why I do it and it feels impossible to stop.
|
| The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind commands
| itself and meets resistance.
| jordanpg wrote:
| I believe the sociologists of the future are going to look back
| at this era and cite the manifest lack of meaning in human life
| as source of the ennui that is the subject of this thread.
|
| For a long time, religion filled this void, but for almost
| everyone, it no longer does. I don't even think most people who
| hold themselves out as religious _really_ find any significant
| meaning there -- not doubting their sincerity, only the
| compatibility of those beliefs with modern secular realities.
|
| It is simply true that it is a simple matter to learn enough
| about what we know about the universe to know, somewhere in the
| back of your mind, consciously or unconsciously, that none of
| this means anything. And the rest follows. It is garden-variety
| Camus' Sisyphus.
|
| I believe this results in a void in our primate brains that is
| inadequately filled by anything yet available. We are in a
| transitory period where we are looking for true secular meaning
| to replace what we evolved with.
| boppo1 wrote:
| >to know, somewhere in the back of your mind, consciously or
| unconsciously, that none of this means anything.
|
| But perhaps that is incorrect.
| anonydsfsfs wrote:
| People have been saying the same thing for over a century.
| Take the following passage from Fernando Pessoa's Book of
| Disquiet, written in the 1920s:
|
| > I belong to a generation that inherited disbelief in the
| Christian faith and created in itself a disbelief in all
| other faiths. Our fathers still had the believing impulse,
| which they transferred from Christianity to other forms of
| illusion. Some were champions of social equality, others were
| wholly enamoured of beauty, still others had faith in science
| and its achievements, and there were some who became even
| more Christian, resorting to various Easts and Wests in
| search of new religious forms to entertain their otherwise
| hollow consciousness of merely living.
|
| > We lost all of this. We were born with none of these
| consolations. Each civilization follows the particular path
| of a religion that represents it; turning to other religions,
| it loses the one it had, and ultimately loses them all.
|
| > We lost the one, and all the others with it.
|
| > And so we were left, each man to himself, in the desolation
| of feeling ourselves live. A ship may seem to be an object
| whose purpose is to sail, but no, its purpose is to reach a
| port. We found ourselves sailing without any idea of what
| port we were supposed to reach. Thus we reproduced a painful
| version of the argonauts' adventurous precept:* living
| doesn't matter, only sailing does.
|
| > Without illusions, we live by dreaming, which is the
| illusion of those who can't have illusions. Living off our
| inner selves has diminished us, for the complete man is the
| one who doesn't know himself. Without faith, we have no hope,
| and without hope we have no real life. Having no idea of the
| future, we likewise have no idea of today, because today, for
| the man of action, is nothing but a prologue to the future.
| The energy to fight was stillborn in us, for we were born
| without the fighting spirit.
| benlivengood wrote:
| To put a fine point on it, the problem is not that life is
| meaningless but that it has significant meaning and value and
| also death exists. Death is the antithesis of most human
| values and we're so far powerless to deflect it on a long-
| term basis, while religion gave hope or belief of
| circumventing or ameliorating death.
|
| I scoff at all of the "accept it as part of the natural
| order" rationalizations; death is the enemy and my goal is to
| push it as far toward the heat death as possible. That final
| end will be a defeat, but much less of a tragedy than the
| ~120 years we get now. If meaning and memory can exist for
| 10^100 years instead then that's a prize worth fighting for.
|
| I think all the proof anyone needs of this is the joy of
| children; death is unlikely and far from them and so they
| have nearly boundless ability to enjoy life and its meaning.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| Pretty sure the "fine point" on it is just your personal
| spin on the matter. The people who believe life is
| meaningless frequently demonstrate the sincerity of their
| beliefs by killing themselves early. A common adjacent
| belief is anti-natalism, the belief that their own parents
| and most other people should not have children because it's
| morally a net negative to introduce new agents of
| suffering. Nothing about "the joy of children" is as
| universal as you present it as.
| rchaud wrote:
| > For a long time, religion filled this void, but for almost
| everyone, it no longer does.
|
| Did religion actually fill this void? Or did enough people
| simply go through life not voicing any of their troubles for
| fear of exclusion or even institutionalization in a religious
| and highly superstitious society that didn't understand
| mental health?
|
| Religion didn't prevent alcoholism, out of wedlock
| pregnancies or domestic violence. It did however force
| families to take brutal measures to keep their missteps a
| secret from the rest of society.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| If you have no strong opinions on the meaning of your life
| , strong religions would come and greedily take any ground
| you were willing to concede. If you really had no idea what
| you want to do you might as well end up in a covent or an
| abbey.
|
| The presence of that extreme also allowed not being
| religious to be itself a strong voluntary choice.
|
| It doesn't prevent alcoholism or other human problems, just
| force filled the "why am I here, what am I going" gap
| whenever people found nothing else to fill it with.
|
| I think we are less religious overall for very good
| reasons, now we should pay more attention to the gap that
| is less empty and what would come to fill it.
| scaramanga wrote:
| They [religions] also took over politics, and made it so
| that you could go to prison for not attending church
| every sunday (at least they did in England). As they said
| at the time: no biship? then no king...
|
| Religion can only reasonably fill the gap in meaning if
| it isn't forcefully shoved into said gap. If shoved
| there, it's just another foreign body that miserably
| fails to heal anything as any number of other quack
| solutions: alcohol, social media, impulse purchasing,
| etc. In other words, it's just another opiate, but one
| which for a long time, was forced on people at literal
| gunpoint.
|
| Not dissing religion per se, I just think that when we
| say "we used to have religion, and psychological health
| was fine", then we're looking at it with insanely rose-
| tinted glasses... actually, veering off in to total
| delusion?
|
| But I am kind of guessing what historical periods we're
| talking about. Maybe we mean in prehistory, like the
| mesolithic? Because there's a lot less evidence about
| that so you have space to suppose that it was all very
| lovely, there were few tribes, they didn't have to
| violently compete, and internally they were all
| emotionally supportive environments in which a rich
| tapestry of mystical beliefs provided members with a deep
| sense of meaning and connection. But I would still be
| pretty skeptical about that. Not saying it didn't happen.
| But how widely and for how long?
| [deleted]
| JackFr wrote:
| No. I think you misunderstand.
|
| When you tell people there is nothing transcendent, that
| life is indeed meaningless - sometimes they believe you.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Isn't it best to tell people life is meaningless if
| that's where the evidence leads? After a few decades
| pursuing 'god' and sacrificing to ascend I think teaching
| false hope (with or without strings attached) is worse.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Telling anyone that life is meaningless is utterly
| different from telling them that you believe that there
| is no external agent or agency that provides a meaning
| for our lives. Asserting that life is meaningless is
| completely different from asserting that its meaning is
| personal and must be discovered by each of us.
| JackFr wrote:
| If it's meaningless what does it matter?
|
| Think about it.
| scaramanga wrote:
| Spoiler alert.
|
| It means the statement that "it's meaningless" is, in
| itself, meaningless. That liberates you to construct any
| system of meaning that you like. But that freedom can
| also be quite frightening and anxiety inducing.
|
| If that is the case, then you have a couple of choices
| (broadly speaking):
|
| 1. Soothe the anxiety away with opium, doom scrolling,
| religion, career, keto, multi-level marketing, or
| whatever. After all you are probably struggling to
| survive and assert ones own existence, against a backdrop
| of other fears which are much more realistic than
| abstract concerns about meaning (eg. losing one's job,
| income, looks, etc).
|
| 2. Rely on a social fabric of emotionally supportive
| family, friends, significant relations in a context of
| peace, freedom, financial and job security, your own
| physical fitness, and other stabilising, fear minimizing,
| forces which free up your emotional resources to let you
| focus on not just finding your own meaning but to create
| a collective meaning in connection with others who are,
| themselves, meaningful to you.
|
| To be clear, I am not dissing, opium, religion, careers,
| or even keto per se :) I think those things are all fine
| if enjoyed in the proper context.
| JackFr wrote:
| > It means the statement that "it's meaningless" is, in
| itself, meaningless. That liberates you to construct any
| system of meaning that you like.
|
| No. The idea that your life has no transcendent meaning
| does not free you to "create any system of meaning you
| like".
|
| It means your life has no transcendent meaning.
|
| Now the statement, "Your life has no meaning." is not
| knowable, but it is true or false. Personally I believe,
| but cannot, prove that it is false. My point is that if
| you believe it is true, any follow-up claim you want to
| make is moot.
|
| What's even the point?
| evanmoran wrote:
| Your point is beautifully made, but I think keto is
| probably on the wrong side of the ledger. Diets are the
| hard work that pays off into that better fitness and some
| of that fancy "stabilizing, fear minimizing" stuff you
| speak of.
|
| That said, if you mean doom scrolling r/loseit and r/keto
| and not actually doing it then you are totally right :)
| bowsamic wrote:
| That's why the only thing that really helped me was Buddhism,
| which directly tackles these questions and understandings
| noduerme wrote:
| Be that as it may, I was at peace with my existentialist void
| before the modern internet came along. I had companionship in
| smokey cafes with other people who saw the same lack of
| meaning in the universe, but were engaged in the making and
| building of things. All I see in this new paradigm is the
| desire of everyone to tear everything down, to destroy.
|
| Existentialism leaves room for humans to give meaning to
| their own lives, through acts of creation and bonhomie. It
| also leaves room for the Holocaust, for evil.
|
| Humans don't necessarily need a new religion. We need to
| learn to recognize evil when we see it without relying on
| dogma.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Hey pal. There are a lot of people giving you advice about how
| big of a deal this is. Here's my take: that all sounds pretty
| normal.
|
| Should you take care of it? Probably
|
| Should you drop what you are doing and schedule a bunch of Dr
| Apts? Probably not
|
| Any who... if it turns out to be a big deal, hit me up, cause I
| should probably do something, too ;)
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| The 2nd part is especially bad, lots of people (I'm an
| offender) justify bs reading with "learning".
| dalmo3 wrote:
| I'm on the same boat, but, without trying to rationalise it,
| I think exposure is a real thing.
|
| HN is mostly entertainment for me, but just absorbing tidbits
| of information from people I believe are much better than me
| in my field is extremely useful. It's not much different than
| passively attending a conference.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Oh. You just described like 95% on my HN activity
| JackFr wrote:
| From a philosophical perspective that Wikipedia article covers
| a lot. I truly want to do A, but I do B instead. How is that
| possible?
|
| The Wikipedia article offers a couple of classical and modern
| takes on the problem but I'd offer one more. That we
| misunderstand our own intentions. When I say "I'd like learn to
| speak Italian" that's not what I mean at all. What I mean is
| "I'd like to be able to speak Italian." and I haven't even
| considered the work involved.
| nostromo95 wrote:
| "We are I know not how double within ourselves, so that we do
| not believe what we believe, and we cannot rid ourselves of
| what we condemn." -Montaigne
| slkdk32 wrote:
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I love hearing things like this. It's not like it tells me
| something I didn't already know, but just saying it in a new
| way that gives me hope I may eventually find a strategy that
| works better.
|
| In my case it's carrying too much weight around. Even though
| I know objectively how much better it feels to be lighter,
| how much better I feel all around. I want to be thinner, and
| I want that even at the exact moment I'm eating something
| while I'm not actually hungry. I tell myself "You ought not
| to be doing this." as I actually put it in my mouth.
|
| So I end up asking myself repeatedly WTF, why am I sabotaging
| myself even in spite of conscious recognition that this is
| exactly what I am doing.
|
| Because as you say, I know I want to be lighter. I didn't say
| anything about wanting to eat less. You're a genius, thanks
| for giving me a new way to think about this. Even if it
| doesn't work.
|
| Off to the fridge... (I kid, I kid... or do I)
| boppo1 wrote:
| Another thing to try if you haven't: ask yourself if you
| will still be alive after not doing the thing you feel
| compelled to do. Focus at that moment on the version of
| yourself in 60 seconds or up to an hour who didn't [do
| compulsive thing] and the fact that they're still alive.
| The fact that it is physically possible to not [do
| compulsive thing].
|
| I find that often helps me. It's being in the habit of
| reminding myself I have more than one choice when dopamine
| cravings would otherwise cause me to forget.
| scaramanga wrote:
| I was just about to type "same reason I waste so much money on
| Heroin" but you pretty much beat me to it :)
|
| That hit of pain is just a small feeling of loss for part of
| your childhood self, when you were all potential and didn't
| have to make any real choices. With each choice made, with each
| position we commit to, we expend some amount of our potential
| and turn it to something actual. The reward for this is
| obvious, the development of an adult self, a self we have
| chosen. The cost is less obvious, what if the person that you
| become cannot possibly live up to the ideal image of self you
| had as a child? What if you don't like the person that you
| become/are becoming? In fact, what if you can't even decide
| whether to like them or not because you're unsure of what your
| own values are?
|
| The whole process of adulting can induce grief for the loss of
| an ideal, or anxiety over ambivalence towards one's self.
| Whether this happens or not probably is, at least partly, a
| result of what happened to you in childhood. Another part of it
| is probably genetic predisposition.
|
| Anyway, the mild form of this is just procrastination, you
| avoid the anxiety of dealing with choices by doing something to
| sooth "that small hit of pain", but the price of that is
| wasting time and letting problems mount, which leads to worse
| anxiety, which leads to more procrastination. In more severe
| cases, when soothing behaviours no longer work, you get in to
| substance abuse and there are a whole of other ills.
|
| Hope that helps in some way.
| noduerme wrote:
| Being a person who enjoys learning makes it a much nastier
| addiction. I just wrote this in my post.
|
| >> even about projects I'm excited to work on
|
| This. Let me lay a comparison here to alcoholism. One thing
| that happens when you're an alcoholic is you plan your time
| around when you're going to drink. Suppose there's something
| you really want to do after work, but you're going to get into
| it for 4 hours and not go to a bar. You get off work, and
| suddenly it feels like a really heavy lift, when it was
| something you actually wanted to do. So you make excuses that
| you'll do it on the weekend, but then you don't do it, and
| eventually it starts to feel impossible. Time gets chopped up
| and you never get the long-term focus that comes with settling
| in and losing yourself in a project that takes hours of
| concentration. You forget how to concentrate.
|
| All of these things are true for internet addiction as well.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Because I don't have a life.
| djsamseng wrote:
| Find something better.
|
| Don't quit social media. Don't restrict yourself by setting rules
| you'll break a few days later. Why? Because it doesn't work.
|
| Life can be and will be about what you are passionate about.
|
| So sure go ahead and enjoy wasting time on the internet. But
| after 15-30 minutes when it's no longer enjoyable but rather you
| are seeking that enjoyment you first had, get up and try
| something new. It might be awful (so one and done), but it also
| might be amazing. It might just become the activity you wake up
| excited to do every day that social media/web scrolling doesn't
| even compare to.
| aantix wrote:
| I wonder if this is because we're lonely..? Just wondering out
| loud here.
|
| E.g. Twitter - feels like many of the "thought leaders" I follow,
| their "friends" are also on Twitter. And they tweet/respond so
| much I often wonder if they're really ever "building a business".
| And are they ever interacting with their real-world friends or
| family?
|
| Or if their lives just consist of a constant refresh of their
| feed. Even at dinner, I wonder if they're even present?
|
| And I wonder if that's why podcasts have become so popular - it's
| someone talking to you. Someone having a conversation, albeit
| one-sided, but usually it's pretty interesting.
|
| For the same lonely reasons, I wonder if this is why public radio
| has been so popular with long haul truck drivers. Everyone wants
| to hear a human voice once in a while.
|
| The constant reading, listening and entertaining videos... The
| voice in your head generates a discussion, with itself. At least
| it's something.
|
| We work from home. It's quiet. With no one around. We're looking
| for a preoccupation.
|
| We're just desperate for any type of human interaction.
|
| "Likes", hearts, thumbs-up, upvotes, +1, PR merge, etc. - are we
| just clinging to anything that acknowledges our existence and
| humanity.
| donthellbanme wrote:
| It's loneliness in my case.
|
| I have no one to talk to that's close to my age,
|
| I do use it more when I'm depressed though.
|
| Books never did it for myself. I would read, but my mind would
| wander to negative thoughts, and my problems.
|
| That is fiction though. I have my 1000 plus book library of
| non-fiction books I thumb through every day. A book is usually
| right near my computer. I fall asleep with a non-fiction book.
|
| I also have a portable radio with me when walking, or waiting.
| I just need someone yacking in the background. Without it my
| mind wanders.
|
| When I was younger and had friends; I was never like this.
|
| When I'm done with the internet, around this hour; I don't want
| to think about the time I wasted on my devises until the next
| day.
|
| Would I rather be talking to people on a friday night--hell
| yes, if it's not get to know you speak.
|
| I'm tight on money, but I could go to a bar tonight, and talk
| to strangers.
|
| A beer is $8 bucks plus a dollar tip.
|
| I need a car to get to the bar.
|
| I need to white knuckle driving home because I have an old car,
| and cops love to pull over poor people. Cops know they are easy
| pickings. Plus--they think we all drink to excess like they do.
| If they can't nail you on a marginal DUI; they can find
| something wrong with your car. (If you are ever in Marin County
| after 10 pm, expect a pullover. 99% are for no reason other
| than profiling. Even you rich boys who look like Elon Musk
| sometimes get pulled over too.
|
| It's just easier to pull out the ipad in the end. If you work
| the internet right, you can avoid the negativity. Here, or on
| FB, I never come back to a post I commented on.
|
| I do use social sites, like this webpage, as a journal. I say
| what's on my mind, and it feels good some days. I never get
| into arguments because I never return to a discussion.
| pchristensen wrote:
| I miss working with you, Jim!
| aantix wrote:
| You're the best Peter! :)
| tayo42 wrote:
| I think pod casts just replaced radio. I don't think that's as
| interesting of a phenomenon as youre suggesting.
| agumonkey wrote:
| i don't know why everything old feels like it had more flesh,
| even with the limitation and flaws (conflict of interests
| etc)
| MetaApe wrote:
| That's kind of interesting. About 5 years ago I used to stream
| on Twitch. I did pretty decent at times up to 500 concurrent
| viewers.
|
| I came to a similar conclusion when asking myself "why do they
| even watch me?" The same answer came to me "Loneliness".
|
| Streaming close to 24/7 helps, because it means you are always
| available when needed. Having a schedule, means people can be
| there with you in the times when they are alone. Creating a
| name for your followers, the tribe, being open with people.
| These things play into it also.
|
| That's why people connect around specific games I think, to
| have something in common.
| reggieband wrote:
| People often say they will keep old TV shows like Friends, How
| I Met Your Mother or The Office on in the background. I think
| it simulates the feeling of having familiar social connections
| in ones life.
|
| In Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist's wife Mildred "finds
| herself more involved in the "parlor wall" entertainment in the
| living room - large televisions filling the walls" [1]. She
| frequently calls the entertainers that appear on the screen her
| family. So this satirical observation is at least as old as
| that fiction.
|
| I frequently wonder how AR/VR will play in this particular
| space. Cynically, I believe there is a killer app to be had
| there.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| > In Fahrenheit 451
|
| The rewriting of online history is going on right now, its
| like Fahrenheit 451 is a blue print.
| drivers99 wrote:
| I got really into watching Twitch for a while in 2020
| (especially IRL content such as a mechanical watch repair guy
| (relevant to yesterday's top post about watches), musicians,
| and other small streamers I could get to know and they'd
| recognize my name) and that scene often came to mind.
| reggieband wrote:
| I wanted to keep my post short so I didn't list all of the
| ways I feel we express this tendency. Others mentioned
| podcasts and talk radio but Youtube and Twitch are great
| examples. There is no denying that people who watch
| creators like Mizkif are feeling like they are part of a
| group of friends. Ludwig called it out most famously in his
| parasocial video [1]. It is so well known it is already a
| hackneyed meme.
|
| Sometimes I feel smug looking down on people who become
| obsessed with the latest Kardashian drama or the British
| Royal Family or whatever celebrity culture. But then I turn
| a critical eye on myself and I'll realize I spend a lot of
| time watching YouTube videos on woodworking, small engine
| repair and outdoor activities. I don't do any of these
| things and I tend to watch the same creators over and over
| again.
|
| Some people want to feel like they have hyper-crazy friends
| like Jake Paul who live wild fantasy lifestyles. I'm not
| certain that is different than me watching videos of some
| guy quietly building a log cabin on his own in the woods.
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzyQbfh4t_8
| pigtailgirl wrote:
| the risk is also low - you can feed your lonely without much
| risk of damage - the real world is harsh - the world you curate
| for yourself can be as you please - given we tend away from
| difficult human interactions[1] - this cure of the lonely is
| easy and "safe" - however - more difficult to assess - is this
| making us more or less lonely?
|
| [1]
| https://www.google.com/search?q=books+about+difficult+conver...
| seydor wrote:
| Many youtubers use youtube to reach out to friends or make
| friends. For younger generations using the media as antidote to
| loneliness is more common. Unfortunately all the media rot
| after a sweet period
| acwan93 wrote:
| I've read that the decline of religion also plays a role here.
| Aside from the religious aspect, the sense of community and
| regularity you get meeting the same people on a regular basis
| is lost.
|
| It's kind of the mix of a loss of "third place" (institutions,
| coffee shops, etc.) and the increase of social media bubbles
| that pushes us to be more polarized, I think.
| ehnto wrote:
| The only place I've gotten the regularity feeling of a third
| place was a really specific gym I used to both work and train
| at. Everyone knew who I was even if I didn't train with them,
| because I also worked there, so when I trained there it was
| my third place as well and I was always having great
| conversations.
|
| I haven't had anything like it since, and I've been
| relatively proactive too. I have hobbies, go to meets, and go
| to the same coffee shops and restaurants so often that they
| know my order, but there is always this barrier between
| everyone, like no-one needs eachother because they have their
| phones. I ride the same bike park twice a week and go to the
| gym every couple of days, but I moved on to a 24/7 gym and
| everyone is buried in their phones, and I don't see the same
| people twice at the bike park. Me and the cleaner always have
| a great yarn though, I appreciate that.
| Aromasin wrote:
| I always say to people that CrossFit is my church, and
| while I say it with mild sarcasm, internally it is true.
| Everyday I turn up, see the same people, build a community
| to the extent we do socials, help each other out with all
| manner of things, and honestly it gives me fulfilment more
| so than anything else I do.
| acwan93 wrote:
| Maybe that's why places like SoulCycle, Barry's Bootcamp,
| or yoga studios have also sprung up. People _do_ want
| connection, just not in the way it was before.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| I know next to nothing about crossfit and it definitely
| looks like religion to me. I'm not even sure where this
| impression comes from but it's probably first or second
| thing that comes into my mind when I hear "crossfit" (the
| other thing is that someone I vaguely know does it to
| keep in shape -- but we never discussed it in any
| detail).
| ehnto wrote:
| There is a level of passion and commitment to crossfit
| that other disciplines don't always have, and due to the
| way it's practiced it's really beneficial to have your
| own space for it so crosfit tends to happen at crossfit
| only gyms, at scheduled times amongst regular
| practitioners.
|
| To keep riffing on the religious theme, there was a fair
| bit of controversy around crossfit when it first arrived
| on the scene, to the point where even other fairly
| similar gym disciplines were pushing it out of their
| gyms. That kind of criticism tends to drive you back into
| your group (the same way door-knocking drives evangelists
| back to the warm embrace of the parish), and I almost
| never see crossfit happening in regular gyms, just
| crossfit gyms. As above that's partly practicality, but I
| think it's also fair to say it wasn't received well at
| first and that likely drove people to those specialized
| gyms instead of practicing it at their local.
|
| I do powerlifting/strength training and powerlifters had
| the same issue in mainstream gyms, and there are
| powerlifting specific gyms around. But that's gotten
| better over time with mainstream gyms having
| powerlifing/olympic lifting gear more often than not now.
| jumpkick wrote:
| On of the best "third place" locations I've had was a gym
| as well. This was about 15 years ago, before iPhones and
| Airpods, etc. existed, or were as prevalent, so it was easy
| and common for gym regulars to strike up conversations and
| get to know each other.
|
| I don't go to the gym anymore, but a few years ago when I
| resumed for a bit, everyone was on their phone, or dead-
| eyed while listening to music or a podcast, etc, and not
| interested in talking to anyone.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Boxing/mma gyms are good for this. Can't really keep
| headphones in if you get hit in the head!
| organsnyder wrote:
| The community of my church is probably keeping me there more
| than my faith is.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I'd probably be more into church if it was just a social
| club and didn't come with that expectation that you'd be
| worshiping an invisible sky daddy, adopting questionable
| morality/philosophies, and attending what's basically a
| Republican political rally every Sunday. My wife goes to
| hers and it's nice, socially for her, that it comes
| prepackaged with a ready-made group of friends, but as soon
| as the Bibles and Trump flags come out, I bounce.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Heck I would join a church for the community if the faith
| part and Trumpettes weren't involved. Unfortunately all
| of the churches around here have more red hats than not.
| hattmall wrote:
| If your part of a community that meets your social needs
| your world view changes and you become conservative. The
| exception is the groups that aren't directly opposed to
| conservatism but they typically lack the true community
| adhesion.
|
| This isn't a democrat or republican thing though, you can
| totally join a Democratic church, with a strong
| community, but they are largely minority churches.
|
| They are also still generally conservative.
| organsnyder wrote:
| I'm fortunate to attend a church that is socially
| progressive, theologically rigorous, and relishes honest
| questioning and debate. I don't think I would have
| maintained my faith without this environment.
| hstan4 wrote:
| It's sad to hear someone's view of church be similar to
| that of a political rally because that's far from the
| truth of all the churches I've been to. Of course, we do
| read the Bible and worship God, but this social club that
| comes with "prepackaged" friends that you refer to can't
| exist unless the people going agree on some ideas of
| morality and philosophies of why we're here on Earth.
| arcticfox wrote:
| That's a really good point... These days a lot of us work-
| from-home or independent contractor types don't even have
| much of a _" second"_ place.
| tejohnso wrote:
| A good church can be like group therapy. You see the same
| people. You have common issues. The core challenges are
| discussed. There is a guide book that everyone agrees is the
| best. There is a group counselor that helps everyone work
| through the book to heal together.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > I wonder if this is because people are lonely..? Just
| wondering out loud here.
|
| Discord has propped up my social life for years now. And I mean
| outside of the internet as well! I also engage in independent,
| more traditional social engagement and it usually ends in
| nothing more than a hangover.
|
| Not unexpectedly, the internet makes it easier to bring people
| with similar interests/believes/personalities together. There's
| also some weird demographic issue where apparently the internet
| is the only place where people my age seem to exist. I meet a
| ton of people irl m, mostly much older, with some only several
| years younger or several years older. In the past year for
| example, I've met maybe 2-3 people who were within a year of
| myself.
|
| Also I often find myself mindless swapping discord channels or
| refreshing HN or Twitter constantly, when I'm bored and want to
| talk/argue/whatever, typically at night.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Discord is most likely the most phallocentric large scale
| platform ever made. It is an abysmally terrible place to go
| to meet people, and particularly to go argue. Ever seen what
| the most popular politics server on discord looks like? 4chan
| is tame by comparison...
| gigaflop wrote:
| Deep rock Galactic is a video game that actually has a
| decent Discord integration, to the point where I feel like
| I gain value from being there.
|
| The general chats are whatever, but having a collection of
| people who may respond to an LFG call is great for when I
| want a higher-quality batch of compatriots for the more
| 'hardcore' parts of the game. Plus, they have a bunch of
| pre-made voice pods that cap at a game's player limit, and
| have built support for direct-in-Discord lobby invitations.
| ehnto wrote:
| The issue isn't discord, discord is in essence just IRC
| again. IRC wasn't exactly a bastion of intelligent
| conversation in all corners, but one of the biggest issues
| I think the internet currently faces is that everyone is
| here now. Every brain with a thought no matter how vapid or
| vile is now joining the conversation.
|
| But just like with IRC, it's all about the specific
| community you've joined, not the platform. You can
| definitely find good communities on discord.
| neuronic wrote:
| In the real world we have a natural protection from these
| idiotic or demeaning posts: shame. It is a very important
| component and mechanism in social connections that is
| completely missing online (unless your handle is tied to
| your real identity like VIP Twitter).
|
| How could it translate online where anonymity is like a
| shell protecting you from shame?
| ehnto wrote:
| In small online communities that is still how it works,
| people don't want to disappoint their peers and their
| handle is their identity with built up socia capital to
| lose, so they behave or get excluded in some fashion.
|
| The internet really enables large groups and strangers to
| join those without any kind of social capital buy in to
| the community. I think one of our biggest mistakes in
| online communities was thinking you could just open the
| doors, invite thousands of people in, and expect that to
| go well. That doesn't go well in the real world when
| there are real world consequences. Any concert or protest
| or big sporting event always has bad eggs in it. Think
| soccer fan riots or protests turned sour or concerts with
| heaps of assault going on.
|
| I think you're right in some sense it's just that the
| influences of social mechanisms are different online.
| Anonymity is often just psuedo-anonymity inside small
| online communities. People still don't want their online
| handle tarnished as they use that persona to be part of
| communities, and they would lose their social capital
| with that handle if it went south. But it's also possible
| for strangers with worthless handles to show up and be
| horrible with zero consequences.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > everyone is here now
|
| Maybe we need a communication medium that requires
| technical skills to operate again.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Cry about it somewhere else. Most of the servers I'm in are
| private servers with small amounts of users and a pretty
| good gender balance.
| Aurelius3 wrote:
| It started out as a pc gaming type thing, so yeah, most of
| it is men, but the choice of server matters and they have
| expanded and rebranded a lot. If you are going on political
| servers it's already not worth it and you missed the point
| with discord, stick to small servers made by friends,
| people to play games with, or communities dedicated around
| 1 thing like open source projects or some specific media,
| etc. Once servers become too general or inclusive the
| system breaks, but even then on large servers (political or
| not), 4chan is not tame in comparison.
| ehnto wrote:
| I have found that people who grew up on the internet tend to
| have a "third place" that's online, which it sounds like for
| you is discord. That kind of makes that your priority over a
| real-life third place like a pub or something, since it's
| where all the people you are super familiar with are it's
| easier just to stick around that.
|
| For me all my online third places disappeared (specific IRC
| chats and forums), and I never really found another. I'm on
| discord but they're very shallow places for me now. I spend
| most of my time online just on YouTube, and the rest of my
| time at work, with my partner or family, and doing hobbies.
| It's a very reasonable offline-life but I do find myself
| missing a third-place. Maybe I need to join a gaming clan or
| something.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Third place? What are the first two?
| pokey00 wrote:
| home and work?
| ehnto wrote:
| Home and work, the third place is somewhere you go
| regularly which helps form strong relationships with the
| people there. As some other people mentioned, church
| often played that role. University can be a third place,
| community centers, your local pub, sports clubs and so
| on.
| gigaflop wrote:
| It feels like a semantically-strained take, but I think Twitter
| is more of a place for people to say things, than it is for
| having conversations. Most people seem to use the site to
| broadcast something to their audience without really engaging.
| rchaud wrote:
| Exactly. Twitter is a broadcast megaphone that tends towards
| rewarding cults of personality, so it's no surprise
| celebrities, a president and self-important CEOs love it.
| aantix wrote:
| Maybe I interact with more niche audiences?
|
| The people I observe essentially live on twitter. They're
| everywhere. Both with tweets and replies.
| specialist wrote:
| FOMO
| amelius wrote:
| Solution: every day, make a list of stuff you found on the
| internet that you couldn't possibly live without.
|
| Chances are your list is empty all the time.
| specialist wrote:
| Good plan.
|
| What I did instead is break my laptop. Forced to use desktop
| for next week. Tada! Good so far. I might just get rid of the
| laptop, since I have such poor self control.
| georgia_peach wrote:
| Dear Bearblog,
|
| Coffee. Stimulants.
|
| A M P H E T A M I N E S !
|
| You're welcome.
|
| -GP
| yarg wrote:
| Because it has a significantly lower cognitive overhead than the
| more complicated shit that I'm working on.
| yarg wrote:
| And because I'm procrastinating when it comes around to
| learning the bloody rust borrow checker; but I need to know at
| least one WASM language.
| DavideNL wrote:
| This comes to mind...
|
| _"A restlessness has seized hold of many of us," wrote the
| American author Rebecca Solnit, "a sense that we should be doing
| something else, no matter what we are doing". It's the same
| restlessness that reminded Franzen of "what Marx famously
| identified as the 'restless' nature of capitalism."_
|
| https://benwajdi.com/2021/12/18/is-internet-addiction-eradic...
| LiquidPolymer wrote:
| I'm going out salamander hunting tonight. The target is the
| Pacific Giant Salamander. I've been a pro photographer and
| producer for nearly 30 years. If I'm successful, if I get
| interesting footage- you folks might see it. My Tik Toc record is
| 60 million. FB is 120 million. Instagram is 11 milllion. I have
| no idea if these stats are correct (I have trust issues with
| these services). Yet I don't engage with SM personally but make
| decent $$ from it. It all seems so shallow and fake. Yet here I
| am being paid for content.
|
| I'm looking forward to the adventure. Meeting people in person.
| Driving for hours, crawling around remote streams till 2AM.
| Getting wet in the rain. Feeling uncomfortable- either too warm,
| too cold, or too wet. Sleeping the sleep of the exhausted
| whenever I get to my bed.
|
| I've withdrawn from the internet more and more. I'm not clean.
| I'm not a purest. The internet is an incredible window to the
| world. I use it frequently. But it is more polluted by blatant $$
| and manipulation (which I profit from).
|
| But my 24 year old daughter is consumed by the online world. So
| many sedentary hours scrolling. Fearful of genuine human
| interaction. Fearful of the discomforts of the real world. I'm
| paying more and more for mental health care for her. I invite her
| to these adventures. She just went to Mexico with me. She had
| panic attacks followed by profound depression. It breaks my
| heart. She barely left the Airbnb.
|
| What are we doing? What am I doing? I used to think I was
| contributing to a better world.
| jmrm wrote:
| No one mentioned, but when we are here, looking anything at the
| screen, we aren't thinking about those thing we don't want to do,
| and this could be a coping mechanism to avoid doing those things.
|
| After a severe burnout I would also say that we need some time
| everyday to not do anything who require some mental or physical
| energy, and that could be browsing the internet, watching the TV,
| or just laying in the sofa looking at the ceiling.
| roguas wrote:
| The algorithm. It can offer you a very decent local maximum. So
| you keep riding the wave of decent local maximum. If you stray
| from this path you might find a better value but you also may
| find (more often than not) no progress at all. For the bigger
| journeys "career" and what not I do not recommend to follow local
| maximum paths you will go very on the surface and true fun is in
| the depth.
| ehPReth wrote:
| I don't like being alone with my thoughts. I always have
| something playing to distract me
| adra wrote:
| If you have social media apps, TURN off notifications, block them
| forever!
|
| I also tried using greyscale screen modes in accessibility and I
| found it cut my phone usage in half. Definitely a cheap win for
| me to the point that I barely ever use my phone for "idle" time
| anymore, and certainly not "the" place I go to satisfy my need to
| spend time.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| I don't get how people could have them on. I have a tendency to
| put my phone in absolutely silent mode so it's a pain to find
| at home -- simply calling doesn't work)))
| dailyplanet wrote:
| If it annoys you, then you're probably an extrovert.
|
| I am an introvert and I like being alone and being able to choose
| how much I self-express and communicate. In person, I do not have
| as much choice about my time and energy commitment in front of
| company if I want to be polite. It's just easier for me to manage
| my social bandwidth while being on the internet.
| II2II wrote:
| I am also an introvert and the computer is an easy escape after
| a day of what I can only describe as sensory overload. That
| said, the author's point was more about productivity than
| socialization. There, I can only agree.
|
| To offer a couple of personal examples: I have to actively
| avoid certain types of games since it is far too easy to
| explore virtual worlds, gather virtual resources, and build
| virtual things when I would feel more productive doing
| something real. That something real may be as mundane as
| learning how to develop software more sophisticated than toy
| projects, simply because the product is reflects reality rather
| than fantasy.
|
| The other example is my tendency to watch other people do real
| things, like embedded development or repairing electronics. I
| have the interest and I even have most of the tooling. Still,
| consuming is easier than creating. That is especially true
| after a mentally exhausting day.
|
| I can only conclude that technology has made some things easier
| than others, and that it doesn't necessarily correlate with
| what people value. It doesn't even matter whether those values
| are social or asocial.
| jansan wrote:
| I think he is more annoyed of being unproductive, i.e. wasting
| time on social media instead of getting work done. I am more of
| an introvert and love working alone, but I hate looking back at
| a day and realizing that I spent most of my time lurking on
| certain wensites instead of implementing that undo
| functionality which I had originally planned.
| Havoc wrote:
| I've personally focused on improving the quality rather than
| trying to push down the time.
|
| i.e. browse more /r/selfhosted and less /r/ukpolitics
|
| Leaves me in a slightly better mental state - less continuous
| outrage vibes.
|
| And same for twitter - I never post, and follow a handful of the
| hn gang basically.
|
| Not perfect but adjusting reddit subs and follows is a mechanical
| actionable action you can take and get done today where "spend
| less time" is a vague aspiration for the future that requires
| continuous motivation
| petercooper wrote:
| It's so often expressed it feels like a universal, but I don't
| feel like I do, at least. I spend a _lot_ of time on the Internet
| but I don 't think it's a waste because there's nothing else I'd
| rather be doing. Now, maybe my ambitions and dreams are set a bit
| low, but that's a different matter ;-)
| HoraceSchemer wrote:
| zackmorris wrote:
| For me it's because I come up with roughly 10-100 ideas per day
| that I'd like to do, but there is (and will never be) enough time
| to do them all.
|
| So I live vicariously through all of the other people doing the
| tiny handful of things that they manage to do in their entire
| lives.
|
| This brings me down periodically, but then I remember that time
| is an illusion, and our perception that we're wasting time on the
| internet would seem comical to people who had never seen it (as
| recently as 1995) and will be remembered with fondness when we
| near the singularity (as soon as 2035).
|
| Practicing non-attachment and understanding that this is not
| forever has really helped me rise above the downward spiral of
| depression, back to the upward spiral of gratitude for being here
| as part of the human experience.
| kurofune wrote:
| >sometimes i wonder why do i waste so much of time on internet
|
| I enjoy my time on the internet and I treasure it as a tool for
| reaching new intellectual heights but not in a straightforward
| fashion. I speak two languages more than my own native one thanks
| to the time "wasted" on the internet shitposting on imageboards &
| forums, watching JP vtuber clips and anime, playing CRPGs or
| MMORPGs, etc... and that's just the one quantifiable metric I can
| offer, cause to me it's pretty clear I would be a worse, less
| polished version of myself if I hadn't spend so much time on the
| internet running in circles.
|
| >not even doing productive work >back to that unproductive and
| mindless pithole
|
| What a tragic and servile mentality to think we are always meant
| to be productive to deserve enjoying our time on this Earth;
| guilt-tripping yourself back into the cog in the machine mindset
| to force yourself to become something you don't really want to be
| seems a terrible choice. That path will only lead to wearing you
| down, eroding your actual capability to be productive in the
| process.
|
| PS: Try to improve your experience on the internet by constantly
| filtering your information sources until you find you stay here
| useful.
| bradstewart wrote:
| I don't think OP is implying _all_ time on the internet is
| wasted. Or that we are meant to always be productive.
|
| Speaking personally, I think all of the time I spent gaming and
| "hanging out" in specific internet/gaming circles when I was
| younger was hugely valuable. I think some portion of the time I
| currently spend reading HN is valuable.
|
| But there are absolutely times where I _want_ to be doing
| something productive, to be accomplishing a task, but I
| mindlessly browse the internet instead.
| oliv__ wrote:
| This link should be pinned to the top of HN permanently: what a
| time saver!
|
| I've impulsively opened up HN at least 5 times today, then closed
| the tab feeling shamed by this link haha.
| praptak wrote:
| HN has built in antiprocrastination controls.
| rambambram wrote:
| Do you even lift? I mean that seriously.
|
| Lifting heavy weights helps one get rid of all that mental
| bullshit. It's a cornerstone habit. So lifting can form a base
| for all other beautiful stuff in your life.
|
| It's hard to care about trivial shit on Youtube or Instagram when
| you just lifted dumbbells until fatigue and did some good squats.
| keenmaster wrote:
| Or browse the internet between sets. It's big brain time. I'm
| not even joking, if you're going to waste time at least
| multitask and get stronger/healthier in the process.
| emadabdulrahim wrote:
| For that reason I never take my phone to the gym. I just
| enjoy resting between sets. I also try to make my workout as
| efficient as possible.
| gigaflop wrote:
| This is the sole reason I use reddit on my phone. I keep a
| tab for AskReddit, open something for later if the title
| seems interesting enough, and at least skim the thread within
| a few days. No app, no login, old-style UI.
|
| Since my brain is usually disengaged when lifting (gotta save
| those calories for what matters), I rarely bother with
| anything 'deep' between sets.
|
| One potential upside of this is that the threads are usually
| a few hours or days old before I actually read them, which
| means that I can expect no new content from them once I have
| my fill of a thread.
| almost_usual wrote:
| Or you start worrying about RPE / programming and comparing
| yourself to others.
|
| At least that's what happened to me. Got very strong over the
| years, didn't get much happier, and then would stress out about
| losing any gains that were made.
|
| Eventually I quit caring and started walking more. I feel the
| same.
| blueflow wrote:
| Might be some kind of addiction. I suspect because smoking works
| for me as substitute.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| As opposed to wasting so much time on ... ?
| gcheong wrote:
| " I even made a stratergy to stop this, but no matter what I do,
| it just...doesn't work. I will follow that thing for 2-3 days
| then back to that unproductive and mindless pithole. "
|
| You could view it as a failure or you could view it as something
| that worked for 2-3 days and go from there.
| giulio wrote:
| I don't. These days I try to be online only to do something
| specific: searching for specific, writing, email etc. I am online
| for 2/3 hours/day. I use Facebook Twitter etc. but not that much.
| Here's a trick: turn notifications off on all your devices and
| you'll be happier. The idea is to "consume" only the content you
| want and only at the time you want.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Try Daywise. It was developed in collaboration with Duke
| University, and I've at least in my anecdata found that most
| notifications even if relevant, can be addressed when sent in
| batches every X hours. Also has reduced my spending on "deals"
| online.
| modernerd wrote:
| For Apple users, iOS/iPadOS 15 support notification summaries
| at set times of day:
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/use-notification-summary/
| m463 wrote:
| I can't help but think - the people who don't waste time on the
| internet won't be replying to comments here.
|
| It's sort of like a self-unselecting population
| lowwave wrote:
| HN is one of the places online that is NOT a wast of time. It
| is full of useful informations. After using internet since
| mid 90's, and being one of first people that got the first
| gen iPhone, now days I try to NOT use smart phone or internet
| unless I need to. This is has significantly improved my life
| quality. Having more fun, I focus on the people around me and
| the 3d reality more. Then when I was using a lot of smart
| phone. Of course that is not the only thing, I had to do
| however it is a VERY good starting point. Highly recommend
| everyone who owns smart phone to try using it only in
| airplane mode.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Turning off notifications is extremely effectual. I did this
| years ago for FB and really all apps on my iPhone and it's the
| best thing I ever did.
|
| The point about consuming what and when you want is right on.
| jwmoz wrote:
| Next step is delete the fb app. Next delete the account.
| Profit.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Middle ground.
|
| Delete the app.
|
| Browse on mobile-web. Facebook unfortunately is still
| important to maintain real world connections. Once you stop
| letting Facebook monitor your usage, the feed is not as
| tempting either.
| degosuke wrote:
| Worked only partially for me. I still go to aggregate sites and
| just browse when I'm bored (or anxious, or both).
| breadcake wrote:
| Mindlessly reading news or watching videos you would get
| dopamine, while making effort for studying, exercising and
| programming can give you endorphins
|
| Endorphins can make you calm and feeling peaceful and truly
| satisifed, it is meant for long term while dopamine is for
| short term gratification
|
| I'm unsure whether the English definition of these two hormones
| are correct or not, but in my native language, it is as how I
| describe above
| terr-dav wrote:
| Like any other addiction, it's a way of coping with painful
| emotions that you (and I) are hiding from (consciously or not).
| I've been in therapy for several years now and I'm still
| struggling.
| dudeDDRrulez wrote:
| Top answer IMO.
|
| Substituting drugs, alcohol, shopping, cutting yourself, etc,
| it's all the same root cause which is hiding somewhere deep
| inside yourself. Either do the work to find out what that root
| cause is or be held hostage by it. Took decades for me to
| figure it out for myself. Well, the process took decades to
| play out. Once the root cause was dealt with, improvement was
| instantaneous.
| geniium wrote:
| So I can reply to that kind of question
| leksak wrote:
| For me, ADHD. I don't have a solution for OP.
|
| I'm going to go out of bounds with regards to the original
| question and maybe overstep but I would suggest that the mindset
| that this statement hints at
|
| > A person who i would envy and want to be like or someone who no
| one cares about and is pathetic
|
| is going to detract far more from life than idle Internet-
| browsing would.
|
| I used to make similar judgement statements with regards to
| myself and my future but once I realized I don't devalue anyone
| that spends a lot of idle time online I shouldn't allow myself to
| devalue myself.
|
| I strive to direct my attention to where I want it to go, and I
| fail routinely. I've attached my self-worth more to the fact that
| I strive to direct my attention, and while I do allow myself to
| take it seriously when I fail I do not allow myself to take it
| personally.
|
| Attaching my self-worth to if I succeeded or failed was a too
| fickle and shallow well from which to derive something so
| important.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| > Its not like I enjoy them 10/10. So why do I do this?
|
| I'll push back on this. I think we have such a deep inbuilt
| instinct to lie about the things we enjoy that we often delude
| ourselves. Humans are social creatures, and the things we say,
| especially the things we say about ourselves almost are heavily
| biased by what we think will make others like and respect us.
|
| You know this as well as I do. When people ask you what your
| favorite music, movies or foods are you'll almost always
| prominently declare the high status things you want and omit the
| low status. It doesn't even feel misleading. Of course my
| favorite food is sushi and not french fries, even if truth be
| told and I spent a minute introspecting I'd have to admit that in
| the moment I probably enjoy McDonalds more than Nobu. Why would
| it be any different about the moment-to-moment activities we
| enjoy?
|
| Note this is very different that what produces a sense of
| fulfillment on a broader, zoomed-out level. If I think of any
| abstract weekend a year in the far future, of course my far mode
| self-image tells me to say I'd prefer to spend it doing a cool
| hobby like hang gliding than binge watching reality TV. And
| afterwards, I'll have fonder memories of the hang gliding
| adventure than the 9th season of The Bachelor. But in the actual
| day itself, I'm almost certain binge watching is more enjoyable
| on a moment-to-moment level than hang gliding.
|
| There might be some short exhilarating intervals that slightly
| edge out the dopamine peaks of the reality TV reveals and drama.
| But the day of hang gliding also involves a ton of boring
| monotony and sweaty gruntwork. The medians and especially the
| lows are much more enjoyable vegging out on the couch.
|
| What even is the point of driving this home? Because I think the
| lying is counter-productive to actually changing the behavior.
| Like the drunk who paints a romantic narrative about how the
| reason he drinks is to numb the pain, when in reality he's just
| lazy and undisciplined and really genuinely enjoys getting
| loaded, especially compared to applying to jobs.
|
| If you've deluded yourself into thinking you don't even like some
| habit, then you've also deluded yourself into how easy you can
| change that habit. "I don't even like endlessly mindlessly
| scrolling through my YouTube feed, so all I have to do is build a
| better system and remove the triggers and it will be a problem".
| But if you really, really enjoy mindlessly scrolling YouTube,
| that won't work. Little, arbitrary barriers aren't going to stop
| you. The only fix is to do the deep psychological work it takes
| to build discipline and impulse control.
| zelias wrote:
| Hits a little close to home. I'm sure I'm not the only one, and
| anyone who speaks out about this should be applauded.
|
| Years from now we will still be examining the after effects of
| years spent at the mercy of addictive user engagement algorithms.
| dan12ha wrote:
| Well done, you have condensed and encapsulated the problem into
| a single line. This is evil corps motto, "Keeping you at the
| mercy of our addictive user engagement algorithms since 20xx".
| alephnan wrote:
| > haven't achieved anything in life, but i want to, i want to own
| things
|
| Funny this is actually when you've "achieved" financial* success
| you kind of don't want to own things.
| gverrilla wrote:
| Generational conflict.
| ruined wrote:
| sometimes i wonder why do i waste so much time high, not even
| doing productive work. Just drinking and smoking and sometimes
| doing lines. Its not like I enjoy them 10/10. So why do I do
| this? I even made a stratergy to stop this, but no matter what I
| do, it just...doesn't work. I will follow that thing for 2-3 days
| then back to that unproductive and mindless pithole. I haven't
| achieved anything in life, but i want to, i want to own
| things...i want to have friends...i want to have fun....but
| this....something is just holding me. I could simply just say i'm
| lazy, but is that a good reason..why would i even need a reason.
|
| I would like to think its not laziness, but then what even is it?
| And again i will search on the internet about this, find some
| videos that talk about this, then some people in the comments
| will say the "i suffer from the same things",,,and then? then i
| will feel better that there are people that are similar to
| me....and? guess what? back to the same routine. I am sick of
| this...its like i know i will not have these comfortable days,
| these days where i just sit down and stay sober. But what will be
| at the other side of it? A person who i would envy and want to be
| like or someone who no one cares about and is pathetic
| kraf wrote:
| I feel you! What helped me was Mindfulness meditation, this in
| particular: https://wakingup.com/. You can get at least one year
| free there.
| DerekBickerton wrote:
| I'm not sure about wasting. Most of my surfing consists of
| unearthing gems, and I have to wade through a lot of noise and
| muck to find those gems, but the gems are there. If I could
| automate it, I would, but it wouldn't be the same.
|
| A piece of code that crawls the net looking for something I would
| really enjoy is a hard problem, and I would have to code in my
| own biases to the program to make it work properly, and this
| means I couldn't share the program with others since it would be
| very personal and context specific.
|
| I am aware of confirmation bias and filter bubbles, but it
| doesn't mean I don't like my own bubbles. It's just plain
| psychology afterall and we're all human, although I do try to
| break out of my comfort zone in terms of what content I consume,
| and regularly scout for different places to get my content
| besides The Bird Site, Reddit, FaceBuck etc
| IntFee588 wrote:
| The quality to noise ratio on mostly social media platforms has
| become obscenely low over the past three years or so. I do
| think social media can be a force for good but it seems like
| the algorithms are best at perpetuating the lowest effort,
| spamiest content.
| medicalman wrote:
| Completely agree with this - it's those gems that keep us
| addicted. If the internet were 100% time wasting garbage, I
| think it would be easy enough to quit completely. But that tiny
| percentage of good content, which can often be _very good_
| (some of the best and most worthwhile writing I have ever
| encountered has been posted on obscure forums), keeps you
| searching for the next "hit."
|
| Personally, I would love to subscribe to a paid service that
| would produce a "daily briefing" of sorts with well curated
| highlights of the internet. Content aggregators have tried to
| get at this, but the signal to noise ratio is still way off. If
| someone could produce this product, I actually think it could
| be quite successful.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Can you give an example of such a gem? Normally I just rely on
| HN to provide me with interesting links, but lately it doesn't
| seem to give me the same kick it used to.
| mdoms wrote:
| I'm not the person you asked but I try to keep my gems in
| bookmarks, would love to share some. Obviously I don't know
| your interests so take it for what you will. I have many more
| than I'll post here if you want some.
|
| Some of this came from HN, some from elsewhere.
|
| This website lists the first references to some cultural
| icons on Usenet (for example the first time AIDS was ever
| discussed, first mention of a new TV cartoon "The Simpsons",
| etc.) http://www.eightyeightynine.com/culture/80susenet.html
|
| The Public Domain Review, a collection and analysis of
| interesting stuff in the public domain
| https://publicdomainreview.org/
|
| David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. I have spent many
| hours browsing the incredible content here.
| https://www.davidrumsey.com/
|
| Artvee. Free, high quality art. https://artvee.com/
|
| Restoration Mustang. A high quality long term journal of the
| restoration of a classic Mustang. Think like an /r/diy
| project but with way more detail and over a longer time
| scale. https://restorationmustang.com/
|
| The Renegade Gardener. Highly opinionated no-bullshit
| gardening advice. I especially love the "Don't Do That"
| section. https://renegadegardener.com/
|
| Garden Myths. There's a lot of misinformation and old wives'
| tales in gardening, this website cuts the crap.
| https://www.gardenmyths.com/
|
| Million Short is a search engine that lets you cut out the
| million (or 10,000 or 100,000) top results from a search,
| really good for finding gems. It also has an option for
| removing e-commerce websites from search which is a godsend.
| https://millionshort.com/
|
| This one is relevant if you live in New Zealand and love the
| outdoors: Can I Light a Fire?
| https://www.checkitsalright.nz/can-i-light-a-fire
| DerekBickerton wrote:
| Sure. Some links I just bookmarked and will use:
|
| https://highbrow.se/ (Alternative search engine)
|
| https://cora-pic.com/en (Meme generator)
|
| https://www.mightyapp.com/ (New upcoming cloud browser)
|
| https://ossdatabase.com/ (Database of OSS)
| gpm wrote:
| My own list, which is pretty different in character than
| Derek's.
|
| Gankra's work on a useful rust memory model is both
| fascinating and useful:
| https://twitter.com/Gankra_/status/1509335163045650436
|
| This tool to convert low-complexity rust tests to proofs is
| interesting and something I'm glad I know exists:
| https://model-checking.github.io/kani-verifier-
| blog/2022/05/...
|
| I'm using this code I found out about via reddit in a side
| project, probably less interesting to you though:
| https://github.com/setzer22/egui_node_graph
|
| (Warning, videos from here on out):
|
| Cool product demo of a futuristic debugger:
| https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/debugging-by-querying-a-
| datab...
|
| These people also have a cool demo of splitting a single
| program across two different computers (frontend and backend
| webserver in their case). Maybe a bit less convincing than
| the previous one, but something I intend to watch:
| https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/uis-are-streaming-dags
|
| These people have some really cool work on automatically
| solving physics problems (just linking to one of their talks
| as an example): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHhDgxkiR9c
| shortstuffsushi wrote:
| > code in my own biases to the program to make it work properly
|
| Isn't this, in theory, what the "algorithms" are trying to do
| for you? They see what you interact with and try to optimize
| for "similar" content to surface these gems for you
| automatically, since it will keep you in their platform longer.
| eimrine wrote:
| Where to spend my time else?
| daenz wrote:
| I waste time on the internet when I am "compiling" My thoughts.
| Being in knowledge work, like many others here, means that most
| of the work is performed by thinking about a problem. After the
| problem has a good solution or set of solutions, there's only so
| much active thinking you can continue to do about it. I like to
| take a break and screw around while the solutions percolate some
| more. I usually see something I didn't afterwards.
| sdo72 wrote:
| I think the internet just feeds what most people want or our
| minds want. It can be in a form of happiness, agreement,
| entertainment, etc... It's just part of spending time on things
| that we like to do. It may be considered as wasteful to some, but
| may not since that's what we want.
|
| There are many people who have tried to quit and eventually
| gotten back because life out there may be boring, at least to
| their mind temporarily.
|
| Until there're some serious conditions that cripple our physical
| bodies, then we consider some changes.
|
| I think it's all a part of living things. We don't normally say
| "why does human waste so much time on earth?"
| lbriner wrote:
| I suspect lots of different reasons but for me I think it is
| simply catharsis to engage with something that doesn't require
| effort or reaction unless I want to, I can just consume. This
| helps my brain recover from the focussed deliberate work I do
| during the day.
|
| Of course, this does beg the question, if we took steps to stop
| doing it, would it give us more time to do useful focussed work
| or would we instead just watch TV, read a book, go to the part or
| whatever.
| gravypod wrote:
| Well if you want friends the first step is to find them. Wish
| there was an easier way to do this but messaging people from
| HN/Slack/Discord has been a great option
| modinfo wrote:
| Honestly I have the same problem, but I found a very simple
| solution to be productive.
|
| The problem is not the internet itself, but a fast internet that
| allows you to watch videos.
|
| A simple and yet very effective solution is to have 64kbps
| internet, at first sight it sounds absurd, but actually it's a
| very good solution for people who want to be productive, with
| such internet you can easily browse the most important sites like
| Stackoverflow/GitHub/HN, download packages from npmjs or use
| IRC/SSH.
|
| I've been working on 64kbps for two years now and if it wasn't
| so, I wouldn't get as much as I did thanks to the low speed
| internet.
| thingification wrote:
| The mechanism of https://www.beeminder.com/ is unreasonably
| effective at limiting this kind of thing.
| hussainbilal wrote:
| It sounds like their habits are influenced by your environment.
| Just tie the habit to a new productive habit. Make it work for
| you.
|
| Example 1: start learning a new natural language, and also switch
| all your social media feeds to only provide content in that
| language. You'll either lose interest in learning the language
| and start withdrawing from social media, or your unbreakable
| habit will sustain your new language learning habit.
|
| Example 2: I listen to a lot of music. I don't feel right unless
| it's running in the background. So I tried learning french and
| listen to only french pop. It worked for a few months, but then I
| hit the problem of not being able to pick up spoken (not written)
| french and parse its grammar while also trying to pick up the
| phonetics of native speakers. But I then learned about creole and
| its more flexible and simpler grammars and phonetics. I was able
| to start thinking in the language using french vocabulary. So I
| pivoted my habit to learning Haitian Creole and listening to
| Haitian music.
| hawksprite wrote:
| This sounds like a methodology I'd like to try. I've not heard
| of it before. Do you have any suggested Haitian musicians or
| artists?
|
| Thank you for sharing.
| nonstickcoating wrote:
| Another key factor is, that YouTube interleaves really well made
| educational content with fun and stupid videos (these have their
| own merit, of course). I think this leads to people hunting for
| new videos about topics that really interest them, those can be
| insightful and stimulating. At the same time, the next 20 minute
| TikTok compilation is one click away, as well as numerous click-
| farmy videos with no real substance but the appearance of depth
| and knowledge. This is simply not possible if you, for example,
| get your knowledge and entertainment from e.g. books. To click a
| funny video after watching a good video essay or educational
| content is somehow simpler than putting away your textbook and
| searching for your favorite comic in your bookshelf.
| langsoul-com wrote:
| I don't think it's bad to spent so much time on the internet.
|
| Let suppose you have a 9-5 job, after travel and basic hygiene,
| cooking etc, there's around 2-4 hours before needing to sleep
| (8-10 hours).
|
| So what's wrong with spending time on your favourite leisure
| activities?
| llaolleh wrote:
| It's the hedonic dopamine treadmill. It's not the content that
| drives this endless dopatrain, it's the nice UI and interactivity
| of the spinning window and flashing pages.
| NanoWar wrote:
| Really: What can you do?
| [deleted]
| n_ary wrote:
| Loneliness. We don't have meaningful social connections anymore
| like our parents or their parents geeration had. We are so
| scattered, that I am unsure how many of my friends are actually
| friends and how many are just professional contacts. Everytime I
| switch job, almost 70% of my friends suddenly fall out of
| contact. Heck, I don't even know the people who live in next
| apartments both left, right, up and down on the same building.
| Socializing with my friends mean, setting up an appointment weeks
| ahead to see if we can align on a free-slot and this often
| involves all of us commuting to somewhere and disbanding by 22:00
| hours because family, work next morning, chores to do, doctor
| appointment and other human things.
|
| Interestingly, in this rat race, a lot of people suddenly
| inherited significant wealth and managed to use those wisely to
| have enough return to maintain a minimal lifestyle without
| working a primary 9-5. Some of us also achieved significant
| wealth by our early youth that we can afford to chase our hobbies
| for long time without worrying about the rents and bills and
| other responsibilities. Add social network to this, and these
| people cumulatively pursue things like world travelling,
| elaborate vacations, own businesses, YOLO etc.. , an endless
| stream of "other people doing YOLO" while us being worried what
| did I achieve so far?
|
| So, yeah, we feel lonely, go to social sites(which is appearently
| the whole "internet" to non tech-savvy groups) to see how others
| are having it good. Then suddenly we realize we wasted a lot of
| time on watching others having fun and decide that, we need to
| get better hobbies and stop this. But the loneliness never goes
| away as hobbies are extra toppings when we have a complete social
| life, so we are again pulled back to the cesspool, because at
| least there we can get some connection in forms of comment, likes
| and we can post our opinions as well or get into hours of
| comment-wars(which counts as social connection too).
| zhdc1 wrote:
| > Loneliness
|
| I had to read through your comment a couple of times. From the
| sound of it, you're likely in a better position than many other
| people here, and what worries you isn't the lack of social
| contact but the depth and quality of it.
|
| This is a common issue that a lot or even most people face as
| they get older. I think that a lot of us have been able to fill
| this gap by finding significant others and starting families. I
| wonder if the trend towards settling down at later ages and
| holding off on having a child - or forgoing it altogether - is
| also part of the issue.
|
| Social media doesn't help, but the answer to that is to stop
| using it, or, at the very least, to keep yourself from using
| platforms that encourage comparisons.
| bradlys wrote:
| Family and significant others have become harder to find. Out
| of wedlock births went from 3% for your parents generation to
| 40% today.
|
| 40%. _That_ is insane to me. I'm all for getting rid of the
| legal institution of marriage but I know that's a niche idea
| and not what a bunch of people are doing.
|
| Whatever the cause may be for people not being together, not
| having kids, or having kids out of wedlock (stable
| relationships - essentially)... we need to address it because
| it definitely is a key ingredient for happiness and health.
| (Especially so for men - the stats show this quite clearly)
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > This is a common issue that a lot or even most people face
| as they get older. I think that a lot of us have been able to
| fill this gap by finding significant others and starting
| families. I wonder if the trend towards settling down at
| later ages and holding off on having a child - or forgoing it
| altogether - is also part of the issue.
|
| I doubt this is all of it. It may have intensified recently,
| but the American obsession with the nuclear family predates
| the internet. Your wife and children should not be the
| entirety of your social circle. Likewise, your (man)children
| and other mothers should not be your mother's entire social
| circle if you are a child. Loneliness would be greatly
| reduced if more people were able to force their circumstances
| to be favorable to forming lifelong platonic friendships.
| squishy47 wrote:
| i think i fair ammount of it is that it's difficult to do
| things spontaniously anymore. when i was little, my parents
| friends just used to show up and see what was going on, hang
| out, have a drink, whatever. and i think this kinda builds
| that friendship, as it's the random shit ppl do together that
| builds the bond (best example is the Friends tv show) or when
| you're a teen and there's nothing to do so you just hang out
| with your friends. (that 70's show)
|
| it seems really difficult to do that anymore because you can
| stay friends with someon on socials but then they live 2hr
| drive away. also it seems less accepted to just show up at
| someones house, also lives are really busy, so everything has
| to be scheduled now, otherwise you'll be interrupting things.
|
| (sorry for the poorly structured brain dump.)
| Toine wrote:
| 100% this, I miss it so much.
|
| Everything having to be scheduled is so depressing and
| stressful to me. I wish we could go back, but we can't.
| rewgs wrote:
| Well...why can't we? What is the mechanism driving this?
|
| It seems to me that social media, increased ease of
| communication, etc, should _enable_ spontaneity, because
| now you can at least confirm that someone is home as you
| drive over.
|
| I think two things contribute to this situation:
|
| 1) Social media enables us to not lose track of people
| from past lives or who live far away. Before social
| media, you had to make friends IRL or you didn't make
| friends. Now, most of my friends don't even live in my
| city or even time zone.
|
| 2) We all work more. Everyone does. I don't have any data
| to back that up, but my best estimation is that, while
| literal working hours have stayed roughly the same in
| light of increased productivity, we're all so available
| all the time that we are kind of always working.
|
| I've attempted to remedy both lately, and it's tough.
| I've had to establish extremely firm (and I think totally
| sensible) boundaries with work and yet I constantly feel
| like I'm just barely reinforcing them. It's mostly
| worked, though, and I'm not sure what to do with the
| extra time, seeing as everyone else I know is in the same
| "always working" mode.
| squishy47 wrote:
| few randoms thoughts on this. yeah but if everyones
| friends don't live close by then everyone is always out
| visitng far away friends. we're forever stuck in the
| cycle.
|
| also it's way easier to say no to someone online, (as
| people are lazy and don't feel like going out right now)
| vs a friend showing up and being like lets go do this fun
| thing #insert peer pressure here#.
|
| also clear work life boundaries are super important. i
| treat work as if i were in the office, once i leave i
| ain't checking it until i start againt tomorrow. also no
| slack or email on my personal devices, eww.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| We have some rather close friends who live nearby and had
| a spontaneous dinner with them more than once. It's
| refreshing and fun when done in moderation.
| foxtrottbravo wrote:
| That's me but evermore so I'm stuck between a rock and a
| hard place.
|
| As one sibling comment - I too have noticed this: I can
| remember friends of my parents showing by having a good
| time completely spontaneously. I liked it very much.
|
| On the other hand I'm one of those people who get
| irrationally upset by random visits especially when it's
| from family.
|
| I guess that's one reason why it's so hard for me to be
| happy.
| gedy wrote:
| My observation is that this used to be much easier because
| someone was usually home, typically a wife who did not
| work. Now everything is planned to the last minute because
| everyone is focused first on working, with family and
| friends getting the leftover time.
| dazc wrote:
| Just showing up is something that has definitely gone out
| of fashion. I have family I barely see because meeting up
| requires advanced notice. Even then it feels like an
| inconvenience, hence, other than weddings and funerals, I
| don't bother.
| ratww wrote:
| Even phone calls need advanced notice these days
|
| I personally have an arrangement with some friends: they
| can call me or pop over any time... but they have to
| accept I might be busy, and vice versa. So far it has
| worked because we're all too lazy to be doing anything
| other than hanging out.
| pushpankar wrote:
| It is not that work friends can not be long term friends. I met
| one of my closest friend when we were working for a startup.
| There is something about big companies which prevents people
| from making true friends. And I think it is the collective
| belief that "work friends are not true friends". People don't
| want to share their mind freely with each other and there is
| good reason for that. We fear that we might speak something
| which is inappropriate. We are trying to be politically correct
| all the time. I am pretty sure I have offended people during
| college but that didn't not matter in long term. One can't
| always be just neutral or positive.
| rr808 wrote:
| I think its a good time to take the initiative and invite a
| neighbor around for dinner or even dessert one night. I'm not
| sure why Parents and Grandparents were better at this but the
| younger generation maybe isn't as good at realizing social
| interaction is important and you have to initiate at least 50%
| of the time.
| mch82 wrote:
| Your answer is a good one.
|
| I'm optimistic that remote work can help society reverse course
| on the constraints that have trapped people into loneliness. We
| got into the habit of commuting during our free time, working
| far from home. We sometimes move cities to get a promotion at
| the corporate HQ or to keep a career at a company that
| relocated. If we don't move, our friends may to get ahead in
| their careers. These constraints imposed by office work
| separated us from our families, communities, and friends.
|
| With acceptance of remote work growing, hopefully fewer people
| will feel they must move to have a career. If that happens,
| people will live more places. That will improve the odds that
| people who can't work remotely can, at least, work closer to
| home. It's possible clubs and activity groups will make a
| comeback. I've observed signs of this already, having recently
| met people that are joining clubs or arts groups to replace the
| pure social aspects of the office. I've also met early career
| people who are excited to be living near their high school
| friends and families. And I know others who are happy to be
| able to move away, but keep a good job.
| scubakid wrote:
| It's almost like the platforms were designed and optimized to
| keep you on them ;)
| [deleted]
| est wrote:
| I am so used to Internet since young, and sometimes feel guilty
| of the time wasted on it. So I spent sometime completely cut off
| from the online world, go back to books and in-person
| interactions.
|
| Ironically, books and people kept telling me: why r u hearing
| this now? It's already _all over the Internet_.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _why do you waste so much time on the internet._
|
| Because it's better than your regular life and what you have to
| do at work. And nothing realistic will give you the means to go
| beyond those.
| seydor wrote:
| What is there left to do?
| caffeine wrote:
| There is a great episode of Jocko podcast with Andre Huberman
| that just came out where he carefully addresses this specific
| issue. Worth listening to (it's in the first hour or so, I
| mention it because it's 5 hours long!!)
| oicU00 wrote:
| Because my career has curved away from solving problems to
| find/replacing parameters in template repos
| noduerme wrote:
| I'm in my 40s. I've been online since dialup BBS's in the 80s. I
| _never_ had this kind of addiction to screens before the pandemic
| took away all my other outlets for novelty and interpersonal
| communication. I loved to travel, to go out every night, meet
| people in person.
|
| It's terrible. It's a terrible world we've created. I'm really
| scared for the generation of kids who are growing up with no
| memory of what human interaction was like before this. I think
| it's lowered my IQ significantly. And I think it's worse for
| people with curious minds, people who are formatted to absorb
| information. When I was a kid, I read the encyclopedia for fun. I
| was on the debate team. I ran forums. 90% of my interactions were
| offline. There was a gradient between real life and online life
| that made online life a _tool_ , not a _habit_. The current
| modality of endless scrolling harnesses both the debating impulse
| and the information-gathering impulse in the most harmful, least
| useful, most meaningless way possible.
|
| I'm an alcoholic, and I smoke cigarettes. I am sure the modern
| internet is worse than both those things for my health and mental
| well-being. Having struggled with other addictions, I'm really
| only just starting to recognize it for what it is.
|
| I think I need to find some kind of AA for internet junkies.
| Sitting around with a bunch of sad sacks and drinking bad coffee
| can't be _worse_ than whatever I was doing at 4am last night.
| uvu wrote:
| I am also in similar situations. Currently, I stopped using all
| social media. This video help me https://vimeo.com/97415346 in
| some way as well. I think its a habit and addiction combination.
| danuker wrote:
| Relevant: http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
|
| > Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new
| things. [...] It took a while though--on the order of 100 years.
|
| > Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're
| all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it.
| Apreche wrote:
| Just speaking for myself, I've noticed that my habit is to eat
| what is in front of me, and clean my plate. I mean this both
| literally and figuratively.
|
| If I have dessert in the house, like a bag of chocolate, then I
| eat one after dinner. If I don't have it in the house, then I
| just don't eat dessert.
|
| If I have a social media feed full of content, then I'll scroll
| through all of it until there's nothing else that's new.
|
| So what I've been doing is not entirely quitting Internet stuff,
| but instead I just massively unsubscribing, unfollowing, and
| filtering all the feeds. Sort of a Marie Kondo thing. I go
| through every subreddit I'm in, every RSS feed, every account I
| follow on Twitter, and i strongly consider "is this really
| providing lots of joy and/or value?" If not, it gets the chop.
|
| I've cut out at least 2/3s of the stuff I was following since the
| peak, and it's only going down. Now when I doomscroll it's only
| for a few minutes. I hit the end of new content very very
| quickly. When that happens I start to look elsewhere. I've been
| reading a lot more actual books, done more chores, and been more
| productive overall.
|
| As for the things I unfollowed? They clearly had no value because
| not only do I not miss them, I can barely even remember what they
| were.
| fma wrote:
| Switching Twitter to timeline mode rather than their poor
| excuse of an algorithm helps. Learned that from HN....but I
| have a browser plug-in that also removes all their recommended
| and "Joe also owed this tweet" junk.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Which browser plug is this? It sounds amazingly useful.
| fma wrote:
| https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter/
|
| If you need it for mobile, on my mobile (Android) I
| downloaded Kiwi Browser so I can install that plugin.
| Braini wrote:
| Funny enough I have the opposite opinion regarding twitter:
| If I use it in timeline mode I have the urge to read through
| all of it until where I stopped last time as the OP described
| (same with my Feedly RSS feed) In algorithm mode its more
| like a "don't care, its garbled anyway, just a sea of stuff".
| That being said I am still mostly using timeline mode.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| In weight watchers (yes, weight watchers), we classified
| certain foods as "red flag foods"; these were foods that we
| _knew_ we could not control ourselves around. The kind of food
| where you have one, and then suddenly you've finished the
| bag/box.
|
| I tend to agree with you: if it's there, you're going to go for
| it. We all have things like this. "Cleaning your plate" is a
| good metaphor, but I'm betting you don't "clean your plate"
| when it comes to exercise or other things that may be less
| enjoyable.
|
| Identify the things in your life that are red flags, and
| consciously keep them out of your life. It's hard at first, but
| soon, you don't even miss them.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| So many threads on HN are basically "What does neurodiversity
| look like?"
| grvdrm wrote:
| Are there entire feeds that you've deemed too wasteful? I get
| that you can slash much of what you look at on Twitter and
| still get what you want.
|
| But what about things like Instagram, TikTok, etc. - did you
| delete those apps altogether or also aggressively trim (if you
| use them)?
| SamBam wrote:
| I cut out Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
|
| Facebook I left a decade ago, for its ethical issues.
| Instagram I left because I felt the performance aspect was
| unhealthy: even in my only-friends-and-family circle, I'd
| still care too much about picking out the perfect photo of my
| kid or wherever.
|
| For Twitter I realized it was way too easy to get sucked down
| political/angry feeds. One day Twitter said my account has
| suspicious activity (maybe a bot tried to log in) and I
| needed to reply to an email to re-enable it. I never replied
| to the email. Somehow this meant that _every time_ I followed
| a Twitter link, I 'd get that alert, so I could never see
| content. I felt so much happier.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| I think a corollary to this is the relatively modern idea that
| life needs purpose in the form of measurable accomplishments.
|
| Looking back at how most people lived their lives, it was
| sustenance, interspersed with things like family, religion, and
| friendship (if you were lucky). Nearly nobody owned much,
| nearly nobody 'did cool things,' nearly nobody was famous.
|
| They all just had a part of life (surviving) that they knew was
| bad and hard work, then they tried as hard as they could to
| escape that briefly.
|
| Now, we expect work to be fulfilling _and_ non-work to be
| fulfilling. For the majority of people where that isn 't true,
| it feels really depressing, which is compounded by the fact
| that society pushes you to spend more time on improving the
| work side of things (which again for most people will not be
| intrinsically fulfilling no matter how hard they try), so they
| end up feeling lonely and sad.
| hinkley wrote:
| In the world of food it was a watershed moment for me in
| controlling my waistline when I stopped checking the unit price
| on items at the store.
|
| The brain invents its own portion sizes that are more dependent
| on the size of the container than the total supply. I don't
| know how you introduce portion control to the Internet, but we
| definitely need it.
|
| Some people have strategies for avoiding a shopping cart full
| of junk food. I wonder how far you can stretch that into media
| consumption before the analogy tears.
| number6 wrote:
| Interesting, I had the same thought about the size / price
| ratio recently. I want most bang for the buck but it kills my
| waistline
| jimbokun wrote:
| There was a study with a soup bowl that would automatically
| refill, and found people ate a lot more than they would if just
| given a regular soup bowl.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15761167/
|
| It strikes me the Internet is now a bottomless soup bowl of
| content, and we have know indicators to tell us when we should
| stop.
| spupe wrote:
| It's a good analogy, but that study was retracted:
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-
| quarters/2018/feb/1...
| [deleted]
| barbazoo wrote:
| This is great advice. Unsubscribing, especially from the stuff
| that triggers me, helps me not to waste too much time.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Yup, dashcam videos / crashes is a huge time sink which I
| have to ruthlessly unsubscribe from. It's one of those things
| where you can feel your blood pressure increase as you watch
| it.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I noticed the same about myself and have been doing something
| similar. I haven't been as focused on cutting down things I
| follow (actually even increasing), instead just paying
| attention to what I find valuable and aggressively cutting out
| everything I either dislike or find superfluous and spammy (eg
| if I see the same post multiple times on my reddit feed, I'll
| quickly check the poster's profile, if they spam the same
| content on several subreddits regularly I'll block them even if
| the content is something I enjoy).
| baby wrote:
| On the other hand I started following only "teaching chinese"
| accounts on instagram. Whenever I go on instagram I just watch
| stuff to learn chinese because it's in my feed.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| That happens when I'm depressed, almost word by word.
|
| I also treat it in the same way by cutting everything. That
| doesn't fix the problem though, and eventually I replace the
| bad habits with new ones.
|
| For a proper fix for that you need to solve the underlying
| causes of your depression.
| fdsfdsafds wrote:
| You're on the path, and the end is almost inevitable - no
| social media accounts at all, and no smartphone. It's
| wonderful.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| Haven't been using social media for more than five years and
| it doesn't feel like I'm halfway there.
|
| Now I am using my smartphone pretty much in the same way I
| was using my PC when smartphones didn't exist (e.g. 20 years
| ago): quite a bit of browsing and few comments here and
| there.
|
| It's not that I can't do without smartphone: on holidays I
| can totally avoid using it for browsing. But that inevitably
| comes back to "normal".
|
| And I'm pretty sure I was distracting myself with literature
| in a similar way when I was even younger (e.g. 25 yrs ago). I
| read very fast and hardly retain anything:) Is it in any way
| healthier? Not so sure, it feels like binge reading is as
| addictive and unsatisfying -- I do that nowadays (rarely)
| too.
| Vladimof wrote:
| > If I have a social media feed full of content, then I'll
| scroll through all of it until there's nothing else that's new.
|
| I could never do that with Facebook as it is mostly all useless
| crap and ads
| gigaflop wrote:
| I used to spend a lot of time on youtube, in part because I had
| the free time to spend on it, and had gaps in my schedule that
| were convenient for watching certain content creators.
|
| Since moving into the workforce, my free time is no longer
| segmented into so many pieces. I don't get as much value as I
| used to from 10 to 15 minute chunks of entertainment, so I stop
| keeping up with the sources, and just lose touch.
|
| It isn't that the content I'm leaving behind is bad or 'cheap',
| it's just that I don't have the time and attention to keep up
| with most of it. My entertainment time is better spent on stuff
| that takes longer to engage with/consume, since those bigger
| things are often more valuable as entertainment.
| uoaei wrote:
| I'm coming to a realization across all facets of my life,
| where I am interested or engaged in many more things than I
| have time for. I am starting to prepare myself for the
| uncomfortable process of sacrificing a few (in fact, many)
| things I've previously mentally and emotionally invested in,
| but I know it's going to be a big shift and the dread causes
| my feet to drag. There's just not enough time... and I don't
| believe that the solution is "improve focus and productivity"
| because that's a fast track to burnout and disengagement for
| all but the most obsessive of minds.
| gigaflop wrote:
| Curiosity can be a curse, and has killed several cats.
|
| I may have been on psychedelic mushrooms at the time, but
| something I took away from the trip was an acknowledgement
| of a feeling of 'shedding' in life, in terms of hobbies and
| interests.
|
| Stuff will get boring and be forgotten, or fall to the side
| and be ignored while it collects dust. This is something
| that I should expect to happen, and be prepared for. So
| long as you derived some value from those once-great
| things, it hasn't been a waste, and is just a symptom of
| time passing.
|
| Maybe you pick those things back up later, and maybe you
| don't. For myself, I think my 'best life' would be one
| where I had the space and tools to be able to pick up or
| put down whatever ideas come to me.
| uoaei wrote:
| > I may have been on psychedelic mushrooms at the time,
| but something I took away from the trip was an
| acknowledgement of a feeling of 'shedding' in life, in
| terms of hobbies and interests.
|
| I had a very similar feeling in a similar setting, like a
| large part of the process of life is scrubbing crusty
| exteriors off so that new capacities can emerge. Like
| continuous molting.
|
| Thanks for the reminder.
| u2077 wrote:
| > my habit is to eat what is in front of me
|
| This! I often let my phone run out of battery and avoid
| plugging it in so I can do other things.
|
| From a similar thread, someone mentioned that phones are only
| good for content consumption. When I'm on the computer, I'm at
| least somewhat productive and the distractions aren't quite as
| strong.
| haxiomic wrote:
| It's what's keeping me running an old phone; short battery
| life has its advantages!
| Dave_TRS wrote:
| I'm the same way, keep me away from buffets, cupboards
| containing sweets, and any newsfeed.
|
| One thing I've founds success with was getting a digital
| Economist subscription (confession, just a shared password).
| Having a steady stream of high quality content without paywall
| nonsense helped me replace my regular trolling around internet
| with something more useful and less addictive. Perhaps paying a
| bit for something high quality can help fill void for those
| dopamine seeking internet impulses.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| >I just massively unsubscribing, unfollowing, and filtering all
| the feeds.
|
| Nothing has been more effective for me than this, as well
| unfriending/following people or accounts that actively make me
| angry. Had to unfollow like 10 people tops and the quality of
| my feeds got noticeably better.
| uoaei wrote:
| "Out of sight, out of mind" works great for me too. It's
| staying occupied so that your thoughts don't meander back to
| that thing, that makes the trick.
| toyg wrote:
| A lot of addictions are borne and sustained out of boredom.
| When you find something else to fill time, they can be
| removed relatively easily.
| haliskerbas wrote:
| Thought this was just me and it's so refreshing to hear. I can
| never eat just part of a bag of chips. Or save the really good
| sandwhich for later. Or not drink another coffee because I
| already had one. Etc. etc
|
| Do lots of other folks experience this? I seem to only have
| self control when it hurts my job or income, and even then,
| barely.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| An easy way to have self control is to switch to a keto-like
| diet. You don't even have to count calories and carbs in most
| cases. There's a variant called lazy keto, where you just
| stick to approved foods and don't need to count. It's
| surprisingly hard to overeat on things like cauliflower and
| pork chops.
|
| Be wary however of the more "extreme" advice on keto-like
| diets. You don't have to stuff yourself with fats, or put a
| stick of butter in your coffee.
| thoughtpeddler wrote:
| 100% this. People often ask me "How do you stick with keto?
| It's such a strict diet." I always answer: "It's actually
| one of the easiest diets: the answer to most 'can I eat
| this?' question is 'no'."
|
| There isn't a persistently high cognitive load on deciding
| what you can eat, once you master the foundational
| knowledge of eating low-carb.
| riekus wrote:
| I really want to follow it, but what about the bad
| breath?!
|
| It's definitely a thing, you can smell when people are in
| ketosis
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| isn't that ketoacidosis not ketosis? (i'm genuinely
| asking )
| uuyi wrote:
| This is terrible advice. Any fads are. Ketogenic diets are
| not good for you in any way.
|
| Bad behaviour starts with acknowledgement and the best way
| to do that is to track what you eat and learn to adapt
| slowly and develop self discipline. Use a tracker app and
| set a reasonable daily break even nutritional target and
| start thinking about what you eat. Slowly substitute better
| choices in. Eventually you will develop self control.
|
| People want quick fixes but keto just breaks other things.
| dawidw wrote:
| What is so bad about keto diet?
| reportingsjr wrote:
| The key thing you do in a keto diet, entering a state of
| ketogenesis, can cause massive complications for diabetic
| people due to ketoacidosis.
|
| Unfortunately a lot of people who would be interested in
| dieting and trying out a keto diet are diabetic. It's not
| always dangerous, but it's generally not a good diet for
| diabetic people because of this.
| tomca32 wrote:
| This is incorrect. I'm a Type 1 Diabetic and in my
| opinion keto diet is probably the healthiest diet a
| diabetic can be on.
|
| Ketoacidosis is a result of extremely high blood sugar
| for a prolonged period of time combined with ketosis. The
| reason this happens is that without insulin your body
| cannot use the sugar in your blood so your blood sugar
| keeps going up and your body doesn't get any energy out
| of it.
|
| What happens when your body is out of fuel for a couple
| of days? It enters ketosis and starts to burn fat. Ketons
| mixed with sugar in your blood will acidify blood, this
| is ketoacidosis. It's an extremely dangerous condition.
|
| However, if a diabetic is on keto diet they will have low
| blood sugar and their body will enter regular ketosis
| almost eliminating the need for insulin and ensuring a
| stable healthy blood sugar.
|
| In other words, a diabetic will end up in ketoacidosis if
| they're bad at controlling their blood sugar, regardless
| of their diet. However, if they are on keto diet the
| chance that their blood sugar will be very high is
| extremely small. High blood sugar is the killer, not
| ketosis.
|
| I've been doing a keto diet on and off for a number of
| years. When I'm in ketosis my blood sugar is steady in
| 80-100 range and I don't need almost any insulin.
| uuyi wrote:
| Not going to list them here but I suggest you go and do
| some research of the side effects and risks from actual
| medical research not HN users.
|
| For me it ended in a few days in hospital.
| incrudible wrote:
| How?
| aurizon wrote:
| https://www.ndtv.com/health/top-10-reasons-why-you-
| should-no...
| incrudible wrote:
| This is a very low effort, unsourced listicle, that is
| probably wrong on several points. Disregarding that, I
| was more curious about how this particular person managed
| to get hospitalized.
| aurizon wrote:
| True enough, but it does outline the potential
| nutritional shortfalls of extreme food regimes, most of
| which I was aware of. It seemed to sum up most of the
| obvious shortfalls - I was only passingly interested and
| this was a low hanging answer. I have seen numerous
| extreme diets. Many of which are OK in the short term -
| but not in the longer term. Unless the OP replies - I
| have no idea in detail what befell him?
| uuyi wrote:
| Perforated bowel.
| incrudible wrote:
| How did you get to that point? Diverticulitis?
| scruple wrote:
| > Do lots of other folks experience this?
|
| I don't think we're alone but I doubt that we're "normal."
| newbamboo wrote:
| I'm normal.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Anybody want to define "normal" ?
| scruple wrote:
| I'm Joe, nice to meet you.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I think a lot of people with ADHD would relate, or have been
| able to at some point.
| evergreyskies wrote:
| ADHD here. Kids are ADHD. My Malinois has to be ADHD. Being
| ADHD like I am with almost two decades of IT under my belt
| has felt weird. I crave my YouTube channels and certain
| news sites since the content creators I watch/read put out
| daily content. Ditto my insane amount of caffeine and
| nicotine consumption, which I learned from having my kids
| diagnosed, is me self medicating in lieu of something
| pharmaceutical. I'm also OCD, so that doesn't help. People
| with ADHD/OCD need closure something fierce, so when I feel
| like I'm not getting it, I feel the world is not right.
|
| On the professional side, my ADHD/OCD makes for some clean
| code and pedantically-set up servers. Nothing says ADHD/OCD
| like taking two days to crank out code which some of my
| colleagues can crank out in half the time. I'm told I'm too
| pedantic sometimes. Too much of a perfectionist. ADHD can
| do that to you. I'm happy with my lot in life.
| jotm wrote:
| I don't know why this comment feels like a punch in the
| face... I have severe ADHD, it's been getting worse and
| only medication helps, and I cannot get it.
|
| I have failed my whole life, I cannot start shit, I
| cannot finish anything, I'm just an impulsive monkey who
| is unfortunately aware of their own situation, stuck
| inside a body, forced to watch a deadly trainwreck in
| slow motion.
|
| The little I've achieved has taken me 10x as much time as
| it would've a normal person. And I'm pissing it all away
| anyway.
|
| This is hell.
|
| And then I see "everyone in my life is ADHD lolkek" "I'm
| happy".
|
| Sorry. Glad your case is mild enough.
| tlokas wrote:
| I don't have ADHD, but I have family with ADHD.
|
| Wouldn't you say that ADHD affects the person, and
| therefore the type of personality would change the
| outcome? (In contrast to ADHD defining the person)
|
| Edit:spelling
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Hey, I feel your pain. It's important to consider though
| that you can only do your best with what you've got. So
| long as you're doing your best, your honest best, what
| else can you do?
|
| I know the urge to beat yourself to for it is pretty
| strong. But the only thing you can do is regroup and try
| to make the rest of today better. Then start again
| tomorrow.
|
| You've achieved something, right? Maybe it took ten times
| as long. That's fine. Just keep at it. Don't compare
| yourself to other people, just yourself yesterday. That's
| all that can count.
|
| It's easier said than done. Don't hate yourself though.
| Life isn't easy, you just make the most of it. Take care.
| s5300 wrote:
| Why can't you get medication? Is it because of the
| country you live in?
| XCSme wrote:
| It's common.
|
| We tend to keep doing what we are already doing (an inertia
| of sorts). If we are eating, we keep on eating (even if we
| are not hungry anymore) until an external factor stops us
| (e.g. the food is over).
|
| Changing states (starting/stopping) is the hardest part, but
| if you trick yourself somehow to stop it's easy to just put
| the food aside. The question that remain is how do you stop
| yourself from doing what you are currently doing? Some people
| use an "1,2,3 technique", where you just count to yourself
| and once you reach three you start doing what's needed.
| Mindfulness also helps, where you take a breath and think
| exactly what you are doing and why (I am eating, I am putting
| my hand in the bag of chips, I am bringing the chip to my
| mouth even if I am not hungry and don't even enjoy it that
| much, this would just make me feel fat afterwards).
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I think it's pretty common. I personally call it "Goldfish
| syndrome", although apparently that's caught on with another
| informal meaning according to the internet.
|
| Eating and drinking delicious high calorie things rewards
| your brain. On an evolutionary time scale, delicious things
| were relatively rare and often required expending a lot of
| energy to acquire. In the last 100 years or so, modern
| technology has shifted the typical diet to be primarily
| cheap, processed high calorie foods.
|
| If you want to change your behavior, I would suggest calorie
| counting with a phone app. Do it every meal or snack, before
| you eat it. Even if you don't restrict yourself, it will make
| you consciously aware of your intake. You'll naturally start
| thinking in terms of energy intake rather than sensory
| intake. You'll also start to be able to correlate your
| emotional state to your current level of hunger rather than
| the other way around. "I am so hungry I could eat 300
| calories of potato chips!" I did that for a few months
| recently and lost 8 pounds. I stopped doing it more recently,
| and have gained 3 back.
|
| If you're a hipster at heart and have free time, you could
| also start doing more of your own food processing at home.
| Rather than order a pizza ever again, learn how to make a
| really good hand stretched pizza dough from scratch. If you
| really like good coffee, buy a hand grinder and whole beans,
| or figure out how to roast your own beans.
|
| If you think you're eating unhealthy and having external
| pressure would help with your self control, maybe just go see
| a primary care physician and request a cholesterol check and
| to be screened for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. If you
| have indeed been too indulgent and lethargic over an extended
| period of time, your cholesterol will probably read high, and
| you probably have fat in your liver that may be causing
| slightly elevated enzyme levels. A Dr. telling you to try to
| eat healthy may not be motivating, but quantitative data may
| be.
| crdrost wrote:
| If you want an altogether nerdier name maybe call it
| Wittgenstein syndrome?
|
| Drury reports a conversation with the famed philosopher:
|
| > So the next day when we were alone I asked Wittgenstein
| to tell me more about Kierkegaard. Wittgenstein:
| "Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the
| last century. Kierkegaard was a saint." He then went on to
| speak of the three categories of life-style that play such
| a large part in Kierkegaard's writing: the asethetic, where
| the objective is to get the maximum enjoyment out of this
| life; the ethical, where the concept of duty demands
| renunciation; and the religious, where this very
| renunciation itself becomes a source of joy. Wittgenstein:
| "Concerning this last category I don't pretend to
| understand how it is possible. I have never been able to
| deny myself anything, not even a cup of coffee if I wanted
| it. Mind you I don't believe what Kierkegaard believed, but
| of this I am certain, that we are not here in order to have
| a good time."
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > Rather than order a pizza ever again, learn how to make a
| really good hand stretched pizza dough from scratch
|
| This is good for different reasons, such as less additives
| in your food which might be healthier in the long term,
| taste, and the pleasure in the activity itself, but is
| unlikely to help with weight loss. There is little
| difference in calorie content between two similar pizzas,
| home made and from a restaurant (assuming you're not eating
| Domino's cheese-stuffed crust style pizzas).
| nebulous_two wrote:
| If you compare the same pizzas restaurant vs. homemade
| then sure, but learning to do it well allows you to
| modify everything to suit your needs. A really nice thin
| crust can be made with quite a bit less dough, which may
| then need a lot less cheese to saturate the dish. Just
| like that you've knocked down two of the most calorically
| heavy parts of a pizza!
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Neapolitan style pizza baked at high temperature is
| actually extremely sensitive to excessive topping. Too
| much sauce or fresh mozzarella, and there will be too
| much liquid for the center of the crust to cook properly.
| I'll typically only use maybe 3 tbsp of tomato sauce, and
| aim for 50% of cheese coverage by area if using hand cut
| mozzarella cubes, or 80% coverage if shredded.
|
| My typical dough recipe has 150g of flour and 5g sugar
| per pizza, which is about 550 calories. Let's say 250
| calories of cheese. Raw tomato sauce isn't even worth
| counting. So 800 as a baseline for one pizza. Fully
| loading it with pepperoni might bump it up to 1000.
|
| A few months ago I was trying to restrict myself to 1800
| calories per day. We had friends over for pizza one
| night, and I decided to just not worry about it and gorge
| myself. I counted it all up before going to bed, though,
| and my daily intake worked out to be about 1900.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| My point is it's good to make lifestyle changes that lead
| to healthier choices on average. Pizza is inherently
| calorie dense, and easy to eat too much of. You might as
| well make it a relaxing hobby that requires some effort
| and forethought, rather than something you order out for
| several times a week because you're stressed out and
| exhausted. Good dough takes 24 hours to optimally
| ferment, and requires at least a few minutes of kneading
| by hand. Stretching the dough, topping it, and then
| baking it require some focused attention. It's not a big
| time commitment, though. The activity, mindfulness and
| the delayed gratification are the healthy part.
|
| Neapolitan style pizza in particular is very thin crust,
| and the emphasis is on carefully chosen high quality
| ingredients rather than quantity. It is significantly
| less calorie dense than typical American pizza. Eating a
| whole pizza with toppings might be 1000 calories, while a
| single slice of cheese pizza from Costco is around 800
| calories.
|
| It's also very informative to see for yourself the
| ingredients going into what you're eating. Buying a can
| of cake frosting at the store gets you roughly the same
| outcome as making it from scratch using a whole stick of
| butter and several cups of sugar, but the latter seems
| more likely to influence the size of the piece you take,
| or at least make it obvious why you feel bleh after
| eating it.
| [deleted]
| dazc wrote:
| I think it's a common problem.
|
| My default method of weight control is not to have unhealty
| food and alcohol in the house except for weekends. In the
| office I only have healthy food available. It works and I
| have gotten used to it - mainly because my anything goes
| weekends act as a great pressure release valve.
| criddell wrote:
| For me it depends on how my day is going.
|
| When I first read about willpower being an exhaustible
| resource, it totally aligned with my experience. A few years
| later I read that those ego depletion studies had been
| invalidated and that surprised me. Running out of willpower
| seems like something I experience.
| tlokas wrote:
| That is my experience too.
|
| But it might be something that is subjectively felt, and
| people then attributed it to be something that depletes.
| Even if the depletion is invalidated, the subjective
| feeling might however still be valid. --- If I should
| suggest another possibility on the spot, I would suggest
| mental fatigue. You get tired of denying yourself things
| the same way you get tired of denying your kid pestering
| you for a treat.
|
| It's not directly depletion, but I could subjectively
| describe it as a resource getting depleted.
| nebulous_two wrote:
| It might be worth thinking about what it is that is being
| depleted, exactly. When I "run out of willpower" it
| doesn't really feel the same as when I "simply cannot do
| it anymore". If I lift a weight enough times, eventually
| I simply can't anymore, no matter how much I will it.
| It's not a decision, like a decision to stop working on a
| problem. That would be a lack of willpower to
| continue...?
|
| Is there really a mental equivalent to physical
| exhaustion that leaves us beyond the ability to make a
| decision? Is that what running out of willpower would be?
| riekus wrote:
| This is me so bad. I have it in the good and bad ways.
|
| In the good I will run couple marathons a month and in the
| bad I will eat whatever I can find.
|
| I always felt like an outcast, good to hear I am not alone :)
|
| For media consumption it is exactly the same. The good is
| that I get to the nitty gritty of technical problems. But I
| also read the unless crap till no end.
|
| I have been able to ditch Twitter, reddit, Facebook and
| Instagram but I just substitute it with hackernews and
| YouTube.
| xkbarkar wrote:
| Haha. Same here. I have gotten back into reading though.
| That took a while because I lost the ability to concentrate
| on books as I grew more dependent on streaming and social
| media. Its been about a year now, since I left all the
| major social media hubs, got incredibly selective on daily
| news (only one local media outlet and a couple of polar
| opposite international ones that I pay for) and cut down on
| watching streaming services, that I started to be able to
| concentrate on reading books again. I grew up reading
| everything I could get my hands on. I missed it terribly.
|
| HN and youtube still stick. Mostly tutorials, workouts or
| info videos ( Andrew Huberman, justforfunc, 3blue1brown
| etc. ) on youtube though.
| riekus wrote:
| Same, but with books and audiobooks I just misuse them in
| the same way, feels like consumption addiction, even
| though, like you, it is all in the selfhelp / tutorial /
| learning space.
| joaomacp wrote:
| It may be a common trait in programmers, since we're rewarded
| by getting to the bottom of things: "why is this function
| failing? who calls it? in which possible states?"
|
| Most programmers have experienced being so immersed in code
| that we don't notice time is passing, forgetting to eat or
| sleep.
|
| It's similar with immersion in social media / food /
| whatever. We become lost in the activity and lose our sense
| of self.
|
| I've recently heard of the concept of conscientiousness as a
| personality trait. People with low conscientiousness tend to
| procrastinate more, and it's tied to ADHD. Apparently it can
| be trained. I'm trying (though not really succeeding) to make
| pauses, take a deep breath and think about "what am I doing
| right now? What should I be doing instead?". Seems so basic,
| like I've regressed to being a child who has no self
| control...
| trash_cat wrote:
| It's worth mentioning that conscientiousness is a
| personality trait that's part of the "big five"
| personalities traits. It's a personality trait brouping
| that is supported by evidence [1] unlike Myers Briggs [2].
|
| [1] https://www.simplypsychology.org/big-five-
| personality.html
|
| [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-
| flapping/2013/mar/...
| bityard wrote:
| I identify with all of this, but this:
|
| > to make pauses, take a deep breath and think about "what
| am I doing right now? What should I be doing instead?".
|
| this too can have its pitfalls. In my case, I always feel
| like I have BOTH too many things that I WANT to do and too
| many things HAVE to do and whenever I step back and try to
| look at the bigger picture, I realize that I don't feel
| like I'm making tangible progress on any of them. And then
| the anxiety sets in and I feel like, "well, if I'm working
| this hard and not even keeping up, why am I working at
| all?" And so I sort of "give up" for a few days or a week
| and feel even MORE guilty because literally nothing is
| getting done and I'm getting even further behind.
|
| A lot of the comments I write here may sound like I really
| have my shit together, but that's just because I have a lot
| of generalized experience that just basically comes from
| lots of introspection and time being alive. But I have yet
| to figure out the one weird trick to being both productive
| (making progress toward future life goals) and happy
| (enjoying what I have in the present).
| billti wrote:
| I joke about my procrastination with my team: "I looked
| at my TODO list for the day and there's no way I can get
| to 90% of it, so I might as well just not get to 100% of
| it". Sometimes there's a lot of truth to the joke,
| however.
|
| As much as I know I should prioritize it based on
| urgency, highest impact, what I could delegate etc., if
| the willpower required to do that is more than the
| ramifications or not doing it, it can be a losing battle.
|
| On days when I push through a ton of work, I'm energized
| at the end of the day. Compared to the feeling of guilt
| that I just wasted a day when there's so much to do and I
| achieved little. Yet knowing that still just doesn't
| provide the necessary motivation some days. I've yet to
| figure out a reliable solution for it.
| [deleted]
| robocat wrote:
| Perhaps try to distinguish where your wants and pressures
| come from?
|
| So many of our "wants" are social status goals, or social
| expectations.
|
| I find it very hard to discriminate my own desires from
| my unconscious programming by others.
|
| Whenever you feel pressured, try and find the root cause
| of the pressure?
|
| Just an idea - perhaps damaging but hopefully enabling.
| stult wrote:
| Yes indeed, many of us do. Nearly everyone I've ever dated
| gets mad at me at some point because I can't keep cookies in
| the house or I will eat them all. You are far from alone, and
| in fact I suspect the overwhelming majority of people are the
| same. Hence the obesity epidemic.
|
| Personally I find that my self-control is limited to the same
| extent that my time and energy are limited. If I'm tired,
| it's harder for me to be disciplined, and the place that I
| most often tired is at home at the end of the day, when
| temptation to over eat is at the greatest. I believe there is
| a fairly substantial body of evidence that shows I am not
| unusual in this regard. This phenomenon is why groceries
| stores put candy in checkout lanes, when you are mentally
| tired from exercising discipline by not picking up the
| delicious-looking tray of cupcakes in the bakery aisle and
| thus are most susceptible to temptation.
|
| I think some people can just use willpower to maintain their
| discipline in every situation, but those people are extreme
| outliers. Like Navy SEALs or Olympic athletes or other
| extreme high performers, and not even all of them. Those who
| can are experts at delayed gratification and are able to
| visualize what they want and then never deviate from their
| plan for how to achieve it, regardless of their current
| emotional state or energy levels. But that is vanishingly
| rare and often their behavior is a result of some deep trauma
| (eg someone who is super disciplined about their diet because
| their dad died early from an obesity-related illness) rather
| than a positive focus on a certain outcome. The truth is that
| the vast majority of people just follow their natural
| inclinations and do whatever is easiest for them. The path of
| least resistance.
|
| As one such weak-willed person, my approach has been to
| structure my life to remove temptations, much as the GP
| comment above described their approach to curating their
| internet content. For example, I have lived almost
| exclusively in big cities for my entire life until the last
| year, when I moved to the middle of nowhere. Which means I
| can't get takeout food delivered and it's much harder to go
| out and get ice cream on a whim. Compared to living in a
| major city where I could get Michelin star restaurant food
| delivered in a matter of minutes, the temptation is just
| much, much less powerful. I order my groceries online too,
| which also dramatically reduces the tendency to impulse buy
| anything unhealthy (I get to skip the checkout lane with the
| candy, for one thing). On the other side of the caloric
| equation, I set up a home gym so that travel time to the gym
| doesn't become an excuse not to exercise. Basically I add
| barriers for bad choices and remove them for good ones. I am
| in the best shape of my life as a result.
|
| I guess what I'm saying is that most people achieve good
| behaviors in part because of their intentional discipline and
| in part because their environment is conducive to those
| behaviors. The real trick is figuring out how to
| intentionally structure your environment to match whatever
| behaviors you want. It's effectively borrowing motivation
| from your peak-energy level periods to provide discipline
| during periods when you don't have the energy to generate it
| yourself. It can be incredibly hard to figure out, because
| you need to know how to change your environment and how you
| will actually react to that new environment, which isn't
| always predictable.
| [deleted]
| eterm wrote:
| I'm similar, but I'm far from neurotypical, so I can't say
| whether it's typical or not.
| hemreldop wrote:
| bsder wrote:
| > I can never eat just part of a bag of chips.
|
| To me, part of it is being _mindful_. Don 't open the bag of
| chips and then watch a movie or surf the net while munching
| on them. You will eat the whole bag.
|
| If I mode change from sitting in front of the computer to
| standing in the kitchen eating the chips and then mode change
| to back in front of the computer, I don't _mindlessly_
| consume the whole bag. But I will still sometimes consume the
| whole bag.
|
| One thing I have also tried to do is differentiate between "I
| want chips because I'm hungry" vs "I want chips because I'm
| craving _salt_ ". It's not easy for me to tell the
| difference. I coat some baby carrots in salt or Old Bay
| seasoning and munch a few--if that keeps the munchies away,
| my body wanted salt. If I'm hungry again 15 minutes later,
| well, my body wants calories.
|
| Nevertheless, I'm mostly in the camp of "Just don't have
| chips/cookies in the house". It also helps that I learned to
| bake as a child. I like _tasty_ desserts, and most of what
| now exists is mostly sugar overload with no flavor. So, a
| dessert easily sets off my "Is this dessert tasty enough to
| merit skipping two entire steaks <or insert whatever main
| course you like> to compensate?" And, if my that activates,
| the answer is almost always a resounding "No." and I skip
| dessert.
|
| Unfortunately for me, I found a middle eastern place that
| does homemade Baklava with a cream filling. It's right next
| to a Mexican restaurant that I also find quite nice. This is
| a bad thing for my waistline.
| amelius wrote:
| > If I have dessert in the house, like a bag of chocolate, then
| I eat one after dinner.
|
| I think for most with social media the equivalent would be to
| eat the entire bag.
| helpm33 wrote:
| Yes, he eats one. Bag :)
| kixiQu wrote:
| https://tokimeki-unfollow.glitch.me/
|
| Presents the Twitter accounts you're following so you can
| decide whether they "spark joy"... pairs well with
|
| https://opml.glitch.me/
|
| Which looks at the accounts you're following, looks at the
| links in their bios, sees if there's an RSS feed indicated at
| that link, and puts the whole thing together into an OPML feed
| (the standard XML-of-RSS-feeds format used for RSS reader
| import/export, among other things).
| dewey wrote:
| I just spend the past 20 minutes in the unfollow tool. Thanks
| for helping me waste so much time on the internet!
| higgins wrote:
| this tool is great, thank you!
|
| i would love if a tool like this were made based on
| interactions I've had with authors. generally, i like comment
| or retweet content that "sparks joy".
|
| would be a good first pass filter
| kixiQu wrote:
| Glitch will let you fork ("remix") and modify -- I don't
| know if the Twitter APIs are real friendly anymore for that
| open-ended of use, but it'd be worth trying :)
| jbverschoor wrote:
| We are just monkeys smashing buttons in front of us
| leodriesch wrote:
| Doing the same, but this does not really apply for algorithmic
| feeds.
|
| When you open YouTube the recommendations are always the first
| thing you see, same for TikTok and Twitter (although at least
| you can configure it there).
|
| Sure you can say "just don't use recommendation systems" just
| as you can say "just don't go on YouTube".
| eimrine wrote:
| > When you open YouTube the recommendations are always the
| first thing you see
|
| There is a brilliant hack to YT's urge to show you some BS.
| Make a bookmark of YT submissions on HN. Clear cookies. Click
| on any few random vids. Voila! Now YT considers you enough
| smart person to be shown a decent recommendations!!! (But the
| magic quickly disappears if you will click any BS from main
| because my hack does not affects the main page).
| eulgro wrote:
| I just block the recommendation and comments section with
| uBlock. No dessert, no temptation.
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| True, but I exclusively watch YT on laptop and have the link
| to my subscriptions. It really does help.
| kradeelav wrote:
| You can follow Youtube channels via RSS feeds, though, which
| removes the issue with recommendations.
| alexktz wrote:
| This is the way.
|
| https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist
| madars wrote:
| I use the following user stylesheet to hide YouTube
| recommendations for exactly the reason you mention:
| /* hide main page */ ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"]
| { display: none; }
| evergreyskies wrote:
| Nice. I'll have to incorporate this little gem for the
| Linux laptop. Thank you. When I'm home, I primarily watch
| YouTube on my TV, but I don't use YouTube. Rather, I use
| SmartTubeNext, which grabs the same videos as YouTube, but
| has no ads, tracking, kills sponsored content in the video,
| as well as no YouTube recommendations. I'm very happy with
| it. I run it off my Amazon Firestick. If you're interested,
| here is the how-to: https://troypoint.com/smarttubenext/
| strifey wrote:
| I find it relatively easy to use YouTube without exposing
| myself to their recommendations (not that they're ever
| particularly good, in my experience).
|
| My bookmark for YouTube is directly to my subscriptions, and
| it's also possible to create a android shortcut link directly
| to subscriptions. Occasionally, a flow will direct me to the
| homepage, but that's rare and I usually organically bounce
| back to my subs without even thinking about it.
|
| There's always recs below a video, but again, those are
| rarely very interesting to me or they're things I've
| subscribed to anyway.
| cturtle wrote:
| I've been using a really nice extension the past couple
| months called unhook [0] that gives a lot of control over
| the YouTube UI. I've disabled shorts, the homepage, related
| videos, comments, etc. and now I only see videos I have
| subscribed to. Much more useful (I subscribed for a
| reason!) and much less time wasted. Just thought I'd share
| in case it helps anyone!
|
| [0]: https://unhook.app/
| phatfish wrote:
| That looks good, thanks.
|
| I block recommendation sections on some site with the
| ublock element picker (like the "recommendations"
| stackoverflow puts in the right column from their other
| sites, completely unrelated to the current page or search
| terms).
|
| I never got round to trying that with Youtube, this seems
| a better solution.
| [deleted]
| aeternum wrote:
| The recommendation algos can be quite good but you need to
| give them good signal. I doubt many people do this, but
| clicking 'not interested' on the clickbaity vids and thumbs-
| up high-effort content can very quickly tune your
| recommendations to be very high quality.
| orbit7 wrote:
| I recall life before smart phones either feeling bored or being
| looked at strangely for sitting on a laptop at a bus stop, not
| that I cared.
| ge96 wrote:
| Can't afford to move out to some place with land yet.
|
| Otherwise I'd spend a lot of my time tinkering with stuff
| outside.
|
| I always have something playing whether it's music or tv (form of
| YT or some Netflix-type place mostly YT though). Also my friends
| are not in the same state as I am so I don't really have a life.
| gdubs wrote:
| There's actual science on this. Evolution wired our brains to
| place a VERY high value on novel information. Something out of
| the ordinary could mean you were about to get attacked by a lion.
| Or, could be something useful to your survival. Technology places
| novelty at our fingertips, and can be very alluring. Also, the
| more time we spend multitasking -- something we're not actually
| capable of doing in a truly parallel sense -- the more energy we
| expend, weakening our ability to focus, making the lazy cycle of
| endless scrolling even more appealing.
|
| There's a pretty simple way to break the cycle: go for a walk,
| spend time in nature, have an old fashioned phone call with a
| friend...
|
| Source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/distracted-mind
| awsrocks wrote:
| omalleyt wrote:
| Variable reward schedules. Like slot machines.
| taurusnoises wrote:
| I'm repeatedly amazed by what makes it to the front page on HN.
| I'm not judging, really I'm not, but this is the first post on a
| blog (so, basically unknown) and is essentially two paragraphs
| asking "why is it so hard to not stare at the internet all day?"
| I'm stoked for the author to be getting some HN love, but what
| about this deserves such an esteemed placement on HN??? It's
| literally the same question every single person is asking and has
| probably posted a thousand times before.
| metadat wrote:
| We like thought provoking discussion.
| [deleted]
| taurusnoises wrote:
| As do I. I'm just genuinely curious how this caught people's
| eye. There's no way through the sea of "content" that these
| two paras could stick out without an artificial boost.
| cyranodeshell wrote:
| I find it interesting that most of the top replies here skew
| philosophical - death of religion, boredom due to being at the
| top of the food chain, and so on.
|
| In my opinion my relationship to wasting time on the internet
| more resembles what I know about chemical addiction.
|
| I want to quit it, but I can't, and it's because when I turn away
| from it I crave the feel-good juice I get from mindlessly
| scrolling through twitter.
|
| I have concluded that I am not mentally strong enough to quit -
| and I consider myself to be reasonably happy and fulfilled in
| life other than the outrageous amount of time I spend online.
| epalm wrote:
| Something that really helped me with YouTube was installing the
| Unhook browser extension https://unhook.app/
|
| Unhook can remove all 'suggested' videos. The home page will just
| be blank, and when watching a video, there will be no other video
| links on the page. This means I can still use YouTube, but I have
| to search for what I'm looking for. This alone has completely
| solved the endless video merry-go-round sessions.
| ericskiff wrote:
| Thank you! Just installed
| epalm wrote:
| No problem!
|
| The real problem is "The Feed", the never ending infini-
| scroll. I don't think it's a coincidence that usually the
| item you're looking at in The Feed is shorter than the frame,
| so you can always see at least part of the next item, and
| when you scroll, you see part of the next item, and so on.
|
| I need Unhook for Facebook and Reddit.
| Decabytes wrote:
| I waste so much time on the internet because it's easier than
| doing anything else. Binging YouTube videos and peoples post
| mortems gives me a dopamine hit akin to being productive without
| actually putting any work towards my goals. I hate it.
| belkarx wrote:
| The modern internet, with ever-refreshing recommendations, is
| fully intended to be addicting. Possible mitigations: make it
| very inconvenient to repetitively view social media. Examples:
|
| - Create UBlock rules to remove recommendations, only keeping the
| search bar on the youtube home page so if you want to watch a
| video you have to explicitly seek it out
|
| - Redirect an address like reddit.com in /etc/hosts so it is
| inaccessible
|
| - Seek out more productive forms of social media, and set loose
| timers for accessing them so you don't get caught in infinite
| scrolling
|
| - Do not have social media apps on your phone
|
| - Turn off internet when doing productive work if possible. Or
| employ context switches - one browser for fun, another for work.
| [deleted]
| cute_boi wrote:
| Same here :(. I understand the consequence, but still I spend all
| my time watching useless news, reddit & hackernews. IDK why I am
| getting so much addicted on internet... And, I believe this is
| also why I haven't been able to achieve great things in my life.
| mikotodomo wrote:
| I only use it for 1 or 2 hours a day. But this was one of my
| worries about becoming a programmer. Will it cause me to spend
| ten hours a day on the computer?
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| When I was a child, my father decided to convert from Catholicism
| to Evangelical Protestantism. For reference, both sides of my
| family have been Catholic going all the way back for at least 300
| years. So a schism occurred. My dad dragged me to his church
| services and wasted my entire Sunday mornings, and my sisters
| remained in the Catholic faith. My mom told me on the day that I
| was to first go to his church service that if I went with him,
| that she was not my mother anymore. So I went with my dad,
| because even at that age, I didn't do emotional terrorism.
|
| Because this was in the 80s and we only had one television, books
| were my refuge. I was a voracious reader. In standardized
| testing, I went from having a 1st grade reading ability in 1st
| grade to college level by 3rd grade. That tapered off because I
| wasn't a huge fan of reading fiction and I had basically read all
| the interesting non-fiction in the local library by 5th grade.
| Being an 80s kid, I had a lot more personal autonomy than kids
| since and started spending a ton of time outdoors, riding my bike
| to go fishing and playing sports outdoors. When it got really
| cold, I'd write code in GW-Basic, but that was mostly to enter
| competitions to miss school (state science fair for the win).
|
| So then I got to college, and was able to browse the web on NCSA
| Mosaic. And there was just TONS of new things to read. My ADHD
| went full blast reading article after article and my grades
| suffered a bit. Every new day is an attempt to avoid falling down
| the rabbit hole.
| rocky1138 wrote:
| I experience this and go through periods where I get away from it
| all by setting Reddit and other sites to 0.0.0.0 in my hosts
| file.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| Feeding your identity?
| u2077 wrote:
| Stress for me is an equation.
|
| When # things I need to do > # things I want to do, I become more
| stressed.
|
| Although each task has a weight to it as well. Needs are weighted
| on importance and wants are weighted on desire.
|
| This allows the "stress scale" to tip with many tasks or a few
| larger tasks.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I'm approaching my 50s, and for me, it's because I am still
| astounded by the achievement of a global, low-cost,
| communications network.
|
| When I was a child, international phone calls were still rare,
| expensive, and unreliable things, and if you left your home
| country, staying in touch mostly involved getting newspapers from
| home (24 hours late), or maybe getting lucky and receiving
| shortwave radio broadcasts like the BBC World Service or Voice of
| America.
|
| First getting internet access seemed amazing, and for me it's
| _still_ amazing. Even when you were first tethered to a copper
| phone line, that line seemed like a pipe to the entire world.
| Cellular internet blew my mind, and satellite technologies like
| Starlink are blowing my mind again.
|
| What an absolute privilege to be living in an age of almost
| universal global communication.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Yes, I remember that early thrill of a chat room or forum where
| I was communicating with someone on the other side of world.
| And not only that, the marginal cost to do so was practically
| free once I already had a cheap second hand computer and a
| dialup connection, and during college my school ran a free
| dialup ISP for times when I was at home.
|
| The shine has worn off though. The fact that you might be
| 10,000 miles away or even typing you comments from the
| International Space Station no longer thrills me. It's all
| become mundane. (Well, if it was the ISS then I suppose that
| would still be pretty awesome)
| sevenstar wrote:
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| grayscale your phone. Its subtle psychology that keeps you coming
| back
| spark3k wrote:
| When I was a kid my parents had a big physical encyclopaedia set.
| I used to lose myself in those things just as much as I scroll
| through stuff now. Just because in both instances, it's
| "interesting".
|
| But my brain doesn't necessarily discern between "good"
| interesting and "bad" interesting without me trying to work it
| out and guiding it.
|
| Which I normally fail at.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I only have a certain amount of energy to be creative or
| productive so I spend my other hours somehow on tradional media
| (music, movies) or consuming internet content or videogames. I
| don't fool myself that it's anything but. I could spend more time
| IRL but my patterns haven't changed back since lockdowns even
| though largely lifted. Maybe this summer will be the time.
| sedatk wrote:
| Dopamine addiction. Thank you for attending my TED talk.
| abramN wrote:
| I've been around since the birth of the internet, and just have
| been amazed with how much stuff there is to do and see and learn.
| Granted, there's a lot of cesspools, but lots of good wholesome
| stuff too. I mean, think about it - when in the history of
| mankind have we had so much information at our fingertips?
| archhn wrote:
| I didn't read the article. My response is addressed to the
| headline.
|
| I waste so much time on the internet because I'm alone. I'm an
| atomized worker drone spawned from a pipeline designed to service
| corporations and governments.
|
| I have very little personal human contact. Sometimes I walk the
| streets at night. I see a glowing box in almost every window.
| Almost everyone is extracting parasocial interactions from their
| TV sets as they mostly lay alone at night.
|
| I crave human interaction. The internet is the only place where I
| can feel connected to others. That's why I'm here, that's why I
| waste so much time on the internet: it makes me feel more
| connected, less alone.
| sidcool wrote:
| I think it's akin to addiction. Internet secretes the pleasure
| chemicals in brain. And it's fun.
| tOUSSia wrote:
| finally a hackernews article I feel qualified to have an opinion
| on...
| dcchambers wrote:
| My completely unprofessional opinion is that almost everyone that
| uses the internet throughout the day has developed some form of
| undiagnosed ADD/ADHD.
|
| The modern internet has broken our slowly evolved brains. We are
| not built to cope with these types of attention destroying
| activities and media. At least 20 years ago you had to sit down
| at a specific place and use a chunky computer. Smartphones have
| made it 1000x worse.
|
| There's no easy solution. I don't think becoming a digital
| luddite is the answer...but we all need to be more intentional
| with our time.
|
| It's not the only answer, but Cal Newport's book Digital
| Minimalism^1 is a good read for anyone that finds themself
| feeling this way.
|
| [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40672036-digital-
| minimal...
| the_only_law wrote:
| I remember years ago being a teenager and having limited access
| to computers and the internet so when I did have them I used my
| time to learn as much as I could.
|
| When I didn't, I got bored, and I picked up books. I remember
| reading books on history, biology, psychology, electronics,
| programming, etc. and learning from them, often just by
| flipping pages and reading passages that looked interesting. In
| fairness, even nowadays, it's not uncommon for me to have a
| dozen Wikipedia tabs opened about random stuff that piqued my
| interest.
|
| Nowadays I can't get bored anymore. My phone is rarely out of
| arms reach and I own every steam game I ever wanted and a
| computer that can handle them.
|
| Recently, I recall trying to work on a side project when I got
| stuck on a design aspect. My power went out later and with all
| my devices dead and I remember being bored to death, pacing
| around the apartment when the solution came to me.
| heavy_machinery wrote:
| I recently uninstalled the social media apps on my phone and
| I have been noticing the number of times I reach for my phone
| are quite many. These are times I am just seeking stimulation
| of some sort, not trying to communicate or research
| something. Since I no longer have the apps, I just head over
| to settings or photos and then get so bored I just end up
| reading a book instead.
| Crabber wrote:
| Someone introduced me to the same idea a few years ago and it
| really stuck with me, "the only time people in the modern
| world experience boredom is in the 15 seconds before they
| pull out their smartphone".
|
| It's in moments of boredom that you start having deep
| thoughts about the world, start thinking through solutions to
| problems you have, start thinking about changes you can make
| in your life.
|
| I got rid of my smartphone and now the 20 minutes each day on
| the train where I'm "bored" are one of the most valuable
| parts of my day. And my mind feels much fresher after it,
| rather than being crammed with 20 minutes worth of mental
| junk food from the internet.
| v-erne wrote:
| >> I got rid of my smartphone and now the 20 minutes each
| day on the train where I'm "bored" are one of the most
| valuable parts of my day. And my mind feels much fresher
| after it,
|
| Thats interesting - I think I lost ability to be bored even
| if I do not reach for phone immediately. My mind somehow
| switches to a strange mode where I reply random events from
| my life and try to come out with different plays for each
| interaction. And I cannot do this if I feel discomfort -
| its too hot or too cold etc. And I used to think that this
| was boredom but now I think this was because I was
| distracted by environment. The real boredom is something
| that I vaguely remember from my early childho hit`od and I
| cannot get there now - my mind is to full of past
| interactions. The smartphone age can be somehow at fault
| here - maybe my brain thirsts for dompamine hit so much
| that it creates its own mental junk.
| 30944836 wrote:
| >I got rid of my smartphone
|
| Teach me! How do you keep in touch with people on the go?
| This is the only thing that has stopped me from dumping my
| iPhone altogether. I sometimes leave home without it but I
| end up relying on others for coordination, etc -- which
| means I haven't liberated myself so much as fobbed off the
| responsibility to others.
|
| I don't have social media (besides HN), so my main contact
| with people who aren't in my immediate vicinity is through
| sharing photos directly on iMessage and the odd article-
| inspired rant.
| Crabber wrote:
| I just use a PS15 nokia phone (they still make them). It
| calls, texts, and plays snake.
|
| Texting on a T9 keyboard is slow but I've come to
| consider that a feature. Before I had a smartphone I
| would just text everyone, now that texting takes actual
| effort I find myself calling people more, or asking to
| meet up in person. And I find myself forming much deeper
| personal connections with people as a result.
| boppo1 wrote:
| What model?
| Crabber wrote:
| Nokia 105, which still works in europe where we have 2G.
| If you are in the US I believe options are more limited,
| but they do have some 4G ones.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > The average shot length of English language films has
| declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds
| today
|
| https://www.wired.com/2014/09/cinema-is-evolving/
| 30944836 wrote:
| I think it's much shorter now, that article is almost 8 years
| old. With the ubiquity of digital cinema, I suspect the
| average shot length is 1.x seconds.
| muwtyhg wrote:
| What movies are these? An average shot length of less than
| 2 seconds sounds like it would give me a massive headache.
| 30944836 wrote:
| Here's a list I stole from Quora:
| https://www.quora.com/What-films-have-the-lowest-average-
| sho...
|
| ASL 1.55 - Doomsday (2008) : 4052 shots over 105 minutes
|
| ASL 1.72 - Transporter 3 (2008) : 3360 shots over 96
| minutes
|
| ASL 1.73 - Domino (2005) : 4046 shots over 116 minutes
|
| ASL 1.83 - Quantum of Solace (2008) : 3198 shots over 98
| minutes
|
| ASL 1.84 - Crank: High Voltage (2009) : 2718 shots over
| 84 minutes
|
| ASL 1.92 - Transporter 2 (2005) : 2524 shots over 81
| minutes
|
| ASL 2.01 - Band of Ninja (1967) : 3424 shots over 114
| minutes
|
| ASL 2.01 - Moulin Rouge! (2001) : 3594 shots over 120
| minutes
|
| ASL 2.03 - Gamer (2009) : 2502 shots over 84 minutes
|
| ASL 2.03 - The 6th Day (2000) : 3418 shots over 116
| minutes
|
| ASL 2.08 - Hot Fuzz (2007) : 3304 shots over 115 minutes
|
| ASL 2.10 - Dark City (1998) : 2982 shots over 104 minutes
|
| ASL 2.15 - Armageddon (1998) : 4025 shots over 145
| minutes
|
| ASL 2.17 - The Transporter (2002) : 2420 shots over 87
| minutes
|
| ASL 2.17 - The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) : 2910 shots over
| 105 minutes
| rchaud wrote:
| Who knew that random passersby on Sunset Blvd that got
| pulled into a Hollywood film screen test had this much
| power?
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| I'd expect that some films, at least, have an uneven
| distribution of cuts. Action scenes will have more cuts
| than non-action scenes etc. Still, it's interesting to
| watch these films with the shot length in mind, it can
| definitely be unnecessarily frenetic.
| ochoseis wrote:
| The article kind of says this, but I suspect the process of
| editing films and composing shots has gotten easier over the
| years as the industry has refined tooling and techniques. Not
| just CGI, but the ability to arrange and view scenes is
| probably much more fluid today than it used to be. This also
| seems like something where incremental editing improvements
| lead to incremental changes in shot duration.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| Not exactly. It's definitely not ADHD if there's no prolonged
| and debilitating impact. Being distracted an hour there and a
| couple there is not like ADHD.
|
| ADHD would be like more like falling in a pit where one
| basically cannot do anything meaningful for days and days
| despite willing to do so (if the motivation is lost, in turn,
| we are talking about depression-like states).
|
| I doubt that many of normal smartphone users get into such pits
| despite they appear distracted and might have an urge to get
| into one's smartphone.
| tobylane wrote:
| Agreed. We may have a lack of practise/comfort with the
| slower pace, but I think it call it ADHD is to understate the
| disorder.
| ketzo wrote:
| ADD/ADHD are very much a spectrum. If someone is having
| trouble focusing for a few hours a day, even if it's not
| literal days on end, I don't think it's crazy to investigate
| ADD/ADHD as the cause/name of the problem.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| Agreed. Especially if slacking for days would quickly lead
| to negative consequences. ADHDs are often distracted until
| the very last moment when the failure becomes imminent --
| and then work to avoid it.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Some times I go through periods where I do that
| repeatedly. Distracted and unproductive, to the point
| where it _physically hurts_ , until there's no possible
| alternative but to work hard or fail.
| 30944836 wrote:
| I found Newport's book to be so surface level for anyone with
| even a passing familiarity with the problem that it wasn't
| worth my time.
|
| What really helped me was these two books:
|
| (1) The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu (2) The Age of
| Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshanna Zuboff
|
| and the nextdns.io installed on all my devices. I literally
| blocked Reddit, et al to break the cycle of "I just woke up so
| I'mm scroll until I'm fully awake" and then oops -- an hour
| went by.
|
| The thing that ended up motivating me to change was reinforcing
| for myself the fact that I'm in this mess because very smart
| people have designed systems to exploit me. Fuck that. I'm in
| control of my attention.
| RSchaeffer wrote:
| Can you share more about the habits you built to break that
| cycle of scrolling for an hour in the morning?
| jordanpg wrote:
| See also Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann
| Hari.
| almost_usual wrote:
| I would not be surprised if we have permanently damaged our
| brain's reward centers.
| AnonC wrote:
| I'd also recommend Nicholas Carr's 2011 book "The Shallows:
| What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains". I read it a long
| time ago and was impressed with its insights on attention (or
| the lack of it) and the usage of the Internet.
| iamhamm wrote:
| I have diagnosed ADHD and I can waste just as much time on my
| amateur radio as the Internet. I guess we get a pass due to the
| technical neediness, but I spent 3 hours yesterday listening to
| static trying to hear a specific station...
| safog wrote:
| I spoke to a fairly well respected psychologist about exactly
| the issue OP was describing. He felt that the issue was really
| poor impulse control and suggested introducing delays between
| action -> reward.
|
| He thought it wasn't ADHD because I don't otherwise get
| distracted if I'm engaged (watching a movie in a theater,
| cooking etc) and can generally see the task through to the end.
|
| Note: watching a movie in a theater is, for me, a totally
| different experience to watching it at home. At home there's
| always an option to pick up the phone in the middle or walk
| away and do something else whereas at the theater I don't have
| that option. I can very easily watch a full movie at the
| theater but it's been a fairly long time since I was able to
| watch a full movie at home in one go.
| agumonkey wrote:
| There were a few points in my life where:
|
| - I forgot how time could pass outside of internet. Days were
| flying in-house.. yet everytime I walked to anything 5mi away..
| suddenly I felt like I lived a whole life yet only 1 hour had
| passed.
|
| - It reached a point where when my ISP was failing, seeing the
| internet box being solidly offline dilated time in the blink of
| an eye. I had a giant "oh god yes." screamed by my brain
| because I felt free.. no more F5/refresh of stuff that only
| satisfied me shallowly and forbid mind wandering or in-depth
| activities. Stunning effect an electronic pipe..
| senectus1 wrote:
| information/stimulation addiction is a thing....
| vorpalhex wrote:
| No, it's not. This "X is addictive" where X is
| porn/videogames/making popcorn view is based on a flawed
| understanding of brain circuitry.
| ChrisFoster wrote:
| ADHD is a developmental condition which is highly genetic and
| relates to neurotransmitter brain chemistry (Dopamine /
| Norepinephrine). People with ADHD have it their whole life,
| it's not something you can develop in adulthood. However,
| people can be (commonly are) diagnosed in adulthood, especially
| for the inattentive subtype which has less outward symptoms.
|
| What _can_ change or develop over time is the life
| circumstances that a person with ADHD finds themselves in.
| Circumstance can make the difference between ADHD being a
| disorder with significant impairments vs a joyful and creative
| existence.
|
| Situations which demand executive function, like putting down
| that mobile phone or closing youtube in favor of doing
| something more productive are _much_ harder for people with
| ADHD. The market built by the tech industry to transact human
| attention for profit certainly hasn 't helped here.
|
| Here's a good brief overview of ADHD:
| https://www.adhdbitesize.com/post/understand-what-adhd-is-re...
|
| Or a bite-size youtube version
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMWtGozn5jU
|
| An online ADHD test which is relatable and seems fairly
| accurate: https://totallyadd.com/do-i-have-add/
| ativzzz wrote:
| > it's not something you can develop in adulthood
|
| I disagree, from my own personal experience.
|
| According to the CDC/DSM-5, people with ADHD simply have
| enough of the described ADHD symptoms, and most importantly
| "interferes with functioning or development."
|
| We don't yet know enough about the brain besides that people
| have different brain makeups and respond to different stimuli
| differently. We don't quite know what causes ADHD but we can
| group the overall symptoms together to try and treat them.
|
| That said, plenty of the criteria in the DSM-5 can be as a
| result of our modern lifestyles. I talked to multiple
| psychiatrists/therapists who had consensus that I had ADHD. I
| tried all the different meds, none of them really helped. The
| only thing that did was changing my lifestyle. Completely
| eliminating some addictive habits that wrecked my
| response/reward circuits (porn and addictive video games)
| (still a work in progress but it helps). Structuring my life
| for more consistency and setting up a system that would
| prevent me from dropping into the negative ADHD habits.
|
| I recommend reading ADHD 2.0 by Dr Halowell. Everyone's
| journey is different and I don't want to take away from
| people who get serious improvements from traditional ADHD
| treatments. But ADHD is a spectrum, and it's unfortunate that
| many of the traits that come with ADHD cause negative
| outcomes for our modern society, but it's really just a
| different functioning of the brain. Some activities
| exacerbate the negative outcomes, and some can reel them in.
| Like most other things, I believe ADHD is partly genetic and
| partly behavioral. The weight differs from person to person.
| One of those you can't control, and one you (sort of) can
| alisonkisk wrote:
| is it ADD or is it just a common pattern of human nature?
|
| Is eating sugar when it is offered a disease, or an environment
| that is toxic to instincts that usee to suit us well?
| dcchambers wrote:
| > Is eating sugar when it is offered a disease
|
| It's not, but it will lead to some (obesity, diabetes, heart
| disease, etc).
|
| In the same way, consuming infinite amounts of quick-hitting
| and dopamine-inducing social media is not a disease, but it
| can damage our brains and lead to "disease" in the same way
| that sugar damages the rest of our body.
|
| Again, I'm not a doctor and I have no facts/evidence to
| share. Just my own thoughts on how things are going.
| brimble wrote:
| I'm reminded of Scott Alexanders musing re: whether someone
| "has ADD" if they have trouble focusing on things that are
| simply boring as fuck, like looking at spreadsheets (or
| code...) all day every day, week, after week, after week.
|
| But then if all their peers are in fact outperforming them,
| because they're _already_ all self-medicating for ADD
| symptoms, or have a prescription for ADD meds, so they can
| focus on something that _most_ ordinary people would have
| trouble focusing on... what then?
|
| What's normal in a work environment that's fundamentally and
| extremely _not normal_?
| rhizome wrote:
| There will always be performance-enhancing drugs.
| makeworld wrote:
| Got a link to that post?
| cipheredStones wrote:
| Not the GP, but it's
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-
| much-mo...
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Given enough time abnormal becomes normal and everyone who
| couldn't fit in is selected out. Several thousand years ago
| agricultural societies were abnormal, but they allowed high
| population densities and were better at war so they
| dominated (except on the steppe).
|
| When Henry Ford popularized the assembly line he had
| extremely high employee turnover. People didn't like
| working that way.
| dbetteridge wrote:
| The spice is life...
| elihu wrote:
| I think the last couple years have been especially bad. We've
| had a pandemic that isn't 100% over that removed a lot of the
| non-Internet interactions from most people's lives, we have a
| major land war in Europe now that could turn into a
| civilization-ending nuclear war at the drop of a hat, we had a
| contentious election in the U.S. about a year and a half ago
| that culminated in the Capital being ransacked, we've had
| ongoing droughts, wildfires, and heat waves that will probably
| just keep getting worse, we have supply chain disruptions, and
| so on.
|
| It's really no wonder people are paying attention to the
| Internet, because at any moment some new calamity will be upon
| us. (It was kind of also true for me during the Trump
| presidency: I felt compelled to check the political news
| multiple times a day as if somehow my personal supervision and
| online comments would keep Trump from doing anything too
| crazy.) I've started to wonder if I'm exhibiting ADD-like
| symptoms, and I'm also wondering if it's not just me, that it's
| happening to most people at the same time.
|
| Maybe things will go a little bit back to normal as in-person
| social interaction ramps back up. (I'm in the Portland area.
| Here, Covid restrictions are basically over but a lot of people
| are still operating in a pandemic mode. We've just now been
| allowed to work from our cubicles again, and only a couple of
| my coworkers actually do it on kind of a once-a-week cadence.)
| I don't think things are going back to anything like what I'd
| like to think of as normal, though. The world's just a really
| turbulent place right now.
| pde3 wrote:
| Split this into two questions:
|
| (1) Why do we procrastinate? (2) What is it about various
| Internet platforms and patterns that makes them so addictive, and
| good for procrastination?
|
| For me, (1) turned out to be about not having a clear picture of
| what exactly I needed to do next for my goals, and sometimes not
| having enough social reinforcement and accountability for the
| things I'm working on; (2) there are lots of tricks and accidents
| that have made modern platforms really addictive, but one of the
| big ones is uncertain reward. I reload all sorts of things hoping
| for something new and interesting. Noticing that pattern is the
| first step to damping it.
| smeej wrote:
| I had to reach a point where I admitted to myself that, as much
| as I may wish I were a person who could handle having a
| smartphone in my pocket, I'm not. If I have one there, it will
| suck up time I don't want to give it. I tried putting all kinds
| of guides in place until I just...got a flip phone that, yeah,
| can run Android apps, but absolutely sucks to use. It doesn't
| have a touch screen, so I have to navigate with a D pad and type
| with T9. It's awful.
|
| That's paired with a color eInk device that can also run Android
| apps. It's wonderful for reading things that have discrete pages
| (ebooks), but awful for anything that moves or requires
| scrolling.
|
| My personal computer sucks too. This happened totally by
| accident, but I wound up with a machine that won't sleep
| properly, so I have to shut the thing all the way down every time
| I'm done using it. It's a pain to use.
|
| When I reached the point where I actually wanted to change, I had
| to make it suck to do the things I used to enjoy. I kind of envy
| the people who can add smartphones to their lives and have their
| lives get better. Mine got worse.
|
| But at least now, when I'm looking at some free time, I don't
| want to pull out my phone (I hate using my phone), I might want
| to read an ebook, and I don't want to pull out my computer. I
| wish it didn't come to this, but at least it works.
| secondcoming wrote:
| T9 was great. Back in the day, I and others could send SMS
| messages without ever taking the phone out of our pockets;
| purely from muscle memory.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| I am much the same way. I use more of a half measure than you,
| which is to physically remove the phone from my proximity as
| much as possible unless I'm intentionally trying to zone out.
| So if I'm working, the phone is in another room on silent. When
| I'm done with work, I do a hard "screens off" time for family
| time from 6-9 or so. That, combined with deleting fb/ig and
| logging out of twitter (still sometimes useful for news so I
| haven't deleted it), has helped me exercise more control over
| my habits versus just sheer willpower.
| smeej wrote:
| I think you're in that category of people whose discipline I
| envy/admire! Half measures are so much better at mitigating
| the downsides of any tradeoff. I totally recommend them for
| anyone who can use them and make them work!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| nolist_policy wrote:
| What phone do you have and can it run osmand? There aren't many
| android flip phones...
| smeej wrote:
| It's the Kyocera DuraXV Extreme. I downloaded F-droid through
| the browser, and since I was coming from a GrapheneOS phone
| anyway, was already pretty used to a de-Googled setup. I
| haven't tried OSMand on it, but it probably can.
|
| I did need to install Apps4Flip Mouse[0] to be able to use
| some apps that aren't D pad friendly, like Signal and Waze.
|
| You might have some luck finding devices on other carriers
| with Jose Briones' Dumbphone Finder[1]
|
| [0] https://www.apps4flip.com/apps/ [1]
| https://josebriones.org/dumbphone-finder
| Crabber wrote:
| I agree completely, the only reliable way to quit using a
| smartphone is to stop carrying one.
|
| I don't know why we apply such different thinking to digital
| addictions than physical ones.
|
| You would never tell someone who was trying to quit smoking
| "just carry a pack of cigarettes and a lighter everywhere but
| don't use them".
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Because we still need certain utilities on our phone, like
| Maps and Music and Search and Camera. Those aren't the
| problems--we still want those things, which are not addictive
| and fruitful, but we want less of things which are addictive
| and fruitless, like Twitter and Reddit. Cigarettes have no
| such essential and positive utility.
| smeej wrote:
| That's why I like this phone that _can_ do those things,
| but I really have to be sure I want to do them.
|
| It's surprising how often I actually don't, though. Rarely
| am I going anywhere I actually don't know how to go. Rarely
| do I actually _need_ to take a photo of something (though
| to be fair, I 've never really been into photography; this
| would be different for people who are). I prefer quiet to
| music (although again, admittedly, I know I'm not the norm
| here). And not being able to search the answer to any old
| thing whenever I want? Turns out I forget most of those
| things by the time I get to a computer, so I guess they
| weren't terribly important. I make more of a point of
| trying to learn things now.
|
| I don't distract myself as much as I used to. I feel like
| I'm actually more present when I'm present because I don't
| have anywhere else to be.
|
| YMMV, but there's no perfect solution. Everything has
| tradeoffs. You just have to choose which set you care about
| most.
| Crabber wrote:
| >though to be fair, I've never really been into
| photography; this would be different for people who are
|
| Anyone who is seriously into photography will be carrying
| a proper camera. The idea of professional photographers
| using smartphone cameras is just pure marketing bullshit
| IMO. Smartphone cameras are severely limited by physics
| and always will be.
|
| As someone who used to be heavily into photography, my
| smartphone may as well have not even had a camera because
| if I wanted to go out and take pictures I would bring my
| DSLR.
| spopejoy wrote:
| Plenty of photographers have admitted that phone cameras
| often are "the camera you have" when the great shot
| arises unexpectedly, at which point the unreasonable
| quality they offer given their constraints comes in
| handy.
|
| They are also excellent B-stock video cams in live
| settings etc.
| Crabber wrote:
| >Because we still need certain utilities on our phone
|
| You don't "need" any of those things, humans got on with
| life just fine without them for 100,000s of years,
| smartphones have only existed for the last 15.
|
| >Maps
|
| Look it up on a computer before you go, or ask someone on
| the street for directions. The only "benefit" having maps
| on a phone gives you is that you can completely avoid
| talking to people and just stare down at a screen instead.
|
| >Music
|
| MP3 players still exist. Or just ditch the music and be
| present in the moment.
|
| >Search
|
| I have never spontaneously needed to search something that
| couldn't wait 30 minutes until I was back at a computer.
|
| >Camera
|
| If you're going somewhere you know you're going to want to
| take pictures then take a proper camera. Otherwise you
| probably don't need one. I can't think of a single instance
| in the past 2 years where I needed to take a picture of
| something that actually mattered without knowing
| beforehand.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| Randomly reinforced dopamine hits.
|
| Same reason some people play slot machines all day.
| hathawsh wrote:
| Sometimes I also spend too much time on mild entertainment. The
| solution, for me, has always been to identify what I'm afraid of.
| For me, procrastination always seems to be rooted in some hidden
| fears, and if I bring those fears to the forefront, I can
| understand them better and work on them. Once the fears are
| quelled, progress is no longer difficult.
|
| Therapy helps you get out of a funk. Therapy takes many forms. As
| another poster suggested, volunteer work can be one of the best
| and most effective kinds of therapy. The important thing is to
| recognize that while you can very likely achieve many of the
| things you want to do, you probably need help to do it. People
| really do enjoy helping you (especially if you are grateful for
| their help.)
| dt3ft wrote:
| This thread should be our collective start page. Whenever you
| open a new tab, this should be the first thing we see :)
| Nasreddin_Hodja wrote:
| > Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
|
| Why not? It's not a problem. Before internet era people spent
| much time on useless things like reading books (mostly fiction),
| watching TV, playing video games etc.
|
| Internet is just a communication tool people use to exchange
| information.
| dgunay wrote:
| For me it feels like at some point, I stopped feeling like I
| could throw myself into hobbies that require real engagement.
| Long video games, deep dive coding, instrument practice sessions,
| etc.
|
| Once I got a job, partner, and pets, at any moment something can
| demand my attention. Enough times of having to abandon a
| multiplayer game, break concentration, break my flow, and at some
| point I just started choosing to do things that have zero
| commitment. I still play games, but only ones that I feel I can
| drop at a moment's notice and don't require practice. Music is a
| faint echo of the presence it used to be in my life. The only
| thing I still get to do every single day is code, because I have
| to do it in order to live.
|
| I also feel the loss of the "third spaces" in my life. It used to
| be a few select hangout spots with my friends, then it was the
| rest of the college campus. I've lived in a car dependent
| hellscape my entire life and it only got worse when I moved to
| the US capital of suburban sprawl for work. None of my friends
| live within ten miles of me anymore.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| I feel almost lucky that I consciously never chose to use
| twitter, I don't use instagram nor facebook, and - and this is a
| major one - since a few months I only ever browse in incognito
| mode just so my sessions and logins are never saved. I.e. I'm not
| logged into YouTube anymore -> I don't get distracted by new
| video uploads of the 100s of channels I'm subbed to. I just don't
| care anymore, I even miss out on lots of "important political
| news" but I don't care anymore. It's not worth my time and
| attention, and most of the stuff out there is 1) negative and 2)
| I can't do anything about it. So why bother? I think this has
| helped me save some time, even though sometimes it makes you feel
| oblivious and like you're living in a bubble, and friends/family
| will make you feel almost guilty but ... I don't care anymore.
| annadane wrote:
| I think the problem is I don't waste enough time on the internet
| (where 'waste' is a loaded word) - there's so much on there and
| yet I'm relegated to the same 5 or 10 pages I always go to
| 65 wrote:
| If you live in the boring suburbs where you have to drive
| everywhere to do things and see people, then yeah there's
| basically nothing to do except watch television and browse the
| internet.
|
| My general theory of existence is that your environment makes up
| a huge portion of your overall wellbeing. Boredom, happiness,
| depression, anxiety - it all comes from your environment.
|
| If you set your life up in such a way that the only thing to do
| is browse the internet, then yeah... you're going to waste a lot
| of time on the internet. Trying to block the sites, to resist the
| temptation, etc. is not going to work if there's nothing else to
| fill your time with.
| rakejake wrote:
| +1. I came to the same conclusion. The pandemic sped up the
| timeline of my mental processes and illustrated all the holes
| in my model of the world. That way, I am glad this lockdown
| happened before I made any life-altering and hard-to-reverse
| decisions.
| davesque wrote:
| This comment sums up what I was trying to say in another
| comment quite nicely, except in a more direct and practical
| way. Sometimes, I feel like this boring dystopia you describe
| is found in so many places as to seem inescapable. It's
| something intrinsic to modern life. Every building looks the
| same. Every road looks the same. Everyone's clothes and
| haircuts look the same. Everyone has the same attitude. Why? As
| Steve Ballmer would say, "Corporations, corporations,
| corporations, corporations." What do we get when the entire
| world, both physically and mentally, is shaped by the same
| style of hierarchy whose sole purpose is to extract human
| effort from the population for cash while ignoring the long
| term cost?
| Geee wrote:
| There is no bottom to it.
| sidcool wrote:
| This thread is golden. It has the answers to the questions raised
| in the post.
| grozzle wrote:
| The Answer, the thing that Helps, might be just around the next
| click.
|
| I know, rationally, what I have to do, but the part of myself
| with all the neurotransmitters is convinced there must be an
| easier way, and it'd be more efficient to keep looking for it.
| leodriesch wrote:
| I've been thinking about this for some time, since so many people
| (including me) seem to struggle with this, even while being
| completely aware of our behavior.
|
| I think legislation should force social networks to:
|
| - have a reverse chronological timeline for your network
|
| - optionally disable any algorithmic recommendations
|
| Social Media companies are mostly unrestricted in the current
| legislation system while they are trying their hardest to
| maximize user engagement.
|
| Just like the use of certain drugs this something some people
| can't responsively deal with themselves, hence it should be
| regulated.
|
| And probably my idea is not very fleshed out, but I think
| something has to be done, and it has to come from states as the
| companies themselves can't be held responsible.
| greggman3 wrote:
| I find myself wasting too much time on the internet and I don't
| spend any of it on social media. I waste most of it on HN.
| ngamboa wrote:
| escapedmoose wrote:
| I used to spend an embarrassing amount of time on the social
| media, not really enjoying myself. I tried taking breaks for a
| month or so at a time, but would get sucked right back in because
| of some dumb meme or hype train or something.
|
| Then after a while something snapped. I realized everything I saw
| online was extremely boring and shallow, and I had no desire to
| see it. I didn't log out of any of my socials, and I still have
| the apps installed, I just have 0 desire to use them. Same goes
| for news sites and blogs (I used to read an article or two a day
| on at least a dozen sites). I don't know what in my brain
| changed, but I'm glad it did because now I get about 4 hours of
| every day back.
|
| Most of what's online is just so pointless, but even worse, it's
| not very enjoyable, and is often anxiety-inducing. I'd rather
| literally stare at the ceiling and just let my mind wander.
| Hacker News is the last site I still frequent, but even this has
| seemed extremely dull lately.
| swah wrote:
| Do you still have interest in other things like reading, movies
| or exercising? Or its a general dullness?
| escapedmoose wrote:
| Not a general dullness. I've gotten really into things I've
| never been interested in before, like gardening, bike-riding,
| and strength training. And there are several old nerdy
| hobbies I still enjoy--the internet is just very suddenly not
| one of them.
| Drblessing wrote:
| https://hmpg.net/
| [deleted]
| bloaf wrote:
| Why do you feel like not being productive all the time is a moral
| failing?
| kataklasm wrote:
| For me at least I feel like there's a difference between being
| unproductive due to doomscrolling $socialMedia and being
| unproductive due to a more 'traditional' way of "wasting" (as
| in not being productive) time. Spending time on a grassfield in
| the sun is just as unproductive as doomscrolling, yet it feels
| a whole lot different. One feels abusive and abrasive to the
| soul; the other is relaxing and soothing. All while being
| unproductive. There may be a lot more layers to this
| productivity conundrum than being just a productivity boolean.
| LigmaYC wrote:
| Do you not feel bad when wasting time? Especially if you're
| just refreshing youtube and instagram, as the blog states.
| hintymad wrote:
| The cure does not come from discipline but from finding things
| that are more fun to do.
|
| I'd rather read a book or tinker with a program instead of
| wasting time on the internet, but somehow my phone alone still
| recorded at least more than three hours of use and usually
| sometimes more than four. Reflecting upon this, I identified two
| reasons for such irrational behavior. First, I was afraid of
| getting carried away from reading a book, while checking timeline
| of twitter seems non-committing. Second, this little dose of
| dopamine from reading a short update from the internet seems
| really addictive.
|
| Luckily, I find a treatment that seems working:
|
| 1. I realize that reading a book or a long article is not as
| addictive as before, for whatever reason. In addition, I use a
| timer to remind myself just in case.
|
| 2. I surround myself with many types of books, videos, articles,
| magazines, and some exercise routines and equipment. Whenever I
| have an urge to take a break, I first ask myself if I really need
| to get distracted. It's amazing how awareness itself can reduce
| the urge to check updates from the internet. If I do want to take
| a break, I pick the book/video/article/exercise that's most
| appealing at the moment. This little trick works quite well. My
| phone usage has been consistently below 2 hours, with nearly half
| of them coming from reading Kindle and Apple Books. I finished
| multiple books in the past few months, including tombs like
| Programming Rust, and Isaacson's Leonardo Da Vinci.
|
| I wish I could spend even less time on social media, but at least
| I can see concrete improvement now.
| holyknight wrote:
| Everything on the internet is made to be as addictable as
| possible. Anyways i don't "love" social media, but I just want to
| have free time to spare, but between my job and my wife only
| Friday nights are the only time i can really enjoy and i mostly
| don't enjoy it as much because I'm exhausted from the week and I
| just want to sleep. I use social media in between my daily life
| as a guilty pleasure to feel free to waste some time in some
| mindless shit without having to plan anything.
| DanHulton wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody's mentioned ADHD yet. It's not clear-cut or
| anything, but I recently just went through diagnosis and testing
| and mentioned this behavior. For me, I tend to resort to this
| behavior when I can't summon the focus to work on things I know I
| SHOULD be doing, so I end up scrolling for hours instead, because
| there's so much less inertia to overcome there.
|
| It may be worth talking with your family doctor about. If so,
| there's medication and/or targeted coaching that can help
| significantly.
| devmor wrote:
| I am addicted to absorbing information. Always have been. I had
| textbooks about random subjects as a kid (my favorite was a
| geology book mainly on Groundwater), and my most used computer
| program before my family got internet access was an interactive
| encyclopedia.
| emadabdulrahim wrote:
| I'm curious, do you feel the motives for your voracious
| information digest are positive or negative? By that I mean, do
| you feel you're making up for something by wanting to learn as
| much as you can about different subjects? perhaps some kind of
| insecurity? Or is it just good old curiosity about the world
| and trying to be less ignorant each passing day?
| devmor wrote:
| I dont think it's either really. There's no rhyme or reason
| to it. It's the same feeling I get from binging a snack or
| spending hours on a video game.
| grappler wrote:
| I set a points threshold on what hacker news stories I see. This
| article broke through that threshold even though it is not worth
| my time, so the thing I'm going to do immediately after posting
| this comment is raise the threshold some more.
|
| That's the action that should always follow, any time something
| gets through the filter. Make the filter more restrictive. Over
| time, that should clear out the low value things.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what's your threshold?
| Frodo478 wrote:
| I think that there are remedies to overcome your situation.
|
| First of all try to remove the source of distraction and force
| yourself to take only one thing at a time. Open a webpage and
| read it entirely, read a book from start to finish (not necessary
| in a single day), try to work on your tasks without background
| music or podcast. Eliminating the distraction usually improve
| productivity.
|
| Second try meditation. You can think that is a "radical chic"
| rubbish, but it really works. Start reading "Zen and Japanese
| Culture" and "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" and try to practice
| meditation, maybe with the help of an expert. You will see an
| improvement on focus and clear thinking.
|
| Third, take time off your pc. If you understand that most of what
| you doing in front of the PC is not valuable, just close it and
| go out, or read a book, practice sport, cook, etc. Learn to
| recognise when you're waisting time and do something else. Try to
| make time at the pc more valuable. Use it for coding and
| research, not much more.
|
| Improvements take time and consistency. We're used to get
| everything fast, but your cannot buy self-improvement in a course
| or a book. So start with basic steps and stop complaining.
| goldenshale wrote:
| I wonder if this is why the internet hasn't led to the dramatic
| increase in productivity that one would have predicted a global
| communications network would have produced? Instead we are
| turning ourselves into mice with a dopamine feed on tap.
|
| Maybe we need to find ways to value creation far more than
| consumption. Missing new and cool ideas is peanuts in comparison
| to creating something from nothing, whether that be art,
| technology, or friendship.
| a_square_peg wrote:
| Perhaps it's just a series of dopamine hits but there is some
| strange feeling of being satiated from consuming new information
| while browsing. It's only when I switch off I realize that there
| is no substance to it or even worse, I have information embedded
| in my head that I would rather not know but even knowing this,
| when I'm back online, it's almost like I'm being hypnotized and
| in a trance, in a much weaker way, but one where it's become
| addictively comforting.
|
| It's become a real struggle for me.
| trophycase wrote:
| Addiction/Coping Mechanism
| swayvil wrote:
| Sometimes I have intelligent conversations about stuff that
| matters to me. I really like that.
|
| Admittedly, it can be like sifting a public beach for pennies.
|
| And 99.999% of the time I end up talking to people who can't see
| a paving brick if it's wedged under their eyelid.
|
| But I suspect that a really eloquent style can penetrate even the
| thickest. Well, I suspect it less lately.
|
| And I just like talking to people.
| fleddr wrote:
| When you're past the denial stage, you're already halfway there.
| Glass half full and such.
|
| From the blog it is clear that the real problem is a lack of a
| meaningful physical/social life, as the person indicates they
| have no friends, hobbies, etc.
|
| Therefore, none of the tips on cutting down screen time are
| likely to address the fundamental issue. If you free up time this
| way but have no better purpose for this time, you still end up in
| the same spot.
|
| So you need to rebuild your physical/social life and I have a
| solution at hand: volunteer work.
|
| An animal shelter is incredibly fun and rewarding work. Another
| thing I tried is to help out the elderly. Where I live you can
| volunteer to "walk" them. You can chose the commitment in hours
| per week. These people are very old, typically lonely, and
| immobile. So I go outside with them, push the wheelchair whilst
| chatting with them.
|
| I figured this would actually kind of suck, a job nobody wants to
| do. I was totally wrong, it's awesome. They are so incredibly
| grateful and the chats are tons of fun. They're full of stories.
| In case you're socially awkward (I personally am not), this is a
| safe way to practice just making casual conversation.
|
| The great thing about volunteer work is that you will be
| universally accepted and LOVED, there's no anxiety of being
| rejected like you might have in making new friends.
|
| The reward is infinite. I'm a stoic but truly there is nothing in
| this world more rich and rewarding than the response you get from
| helping others. You can see it in their eyes. This tiny
| commitment from your side means the world to them. A beacon of
| light in darkness.
|
| Your work changes lives and you get to feel good about yourself.
| Your time has meaning and you have meaning. Volunteer work is
| also a great proxy to get to know the community, make new
| friends, etc.
|
| Do it. Look it up in the local directory and just try it.
| [deleted]
| rossjudson wrote:
| During the pandemic I realized that I love power outages, and we
| should have more of them. Make them long enough that all the
| phone batteries run out.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| I waste time on the internet because I don't have enough
| contiguous blocks of time to do anything productive or
| interesting outside of work (which is boring and repetitive and
| not automatable). I'm hoping to retire early so I can spend time
| on better things.
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