[HN Gopher] How to stop being "terminally online"
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How to stop being "terminally online"
Author : memorable
Score : 242 points
Date : 2022-08-07 05:51 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nights.bearblog.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (nights.bearblog.dev)
| city17 wrote:
| Some interesting thoughts, but an excellent example of why we use
| capital letters. Uncomfortable to read in all lower caps.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Not quite sure what "terminally online" really means...
| zach_garwood wrote:
| It's as if to say, "being online so much it will kill you,"
| like having a "terminal disease."
| the_only_law wrote:
| > what is your life philosophy? what do you believe in? do the
| communities you browse online reflect this in some way? did you
| learn about these from people online?
|
| If anything, there's a better chance of finding this online vs
| irl.
| timellis-smith wrote:
| Honestly, I'm an information addict. I'm online far too much
| mainly reading news etc.
|
| I think I've forgotten how I lived without a constant stream of
| information. I'm seriously tempted to get a dumb phone to remove
| temptation to browse when I have a few minutes to spare.
|
| The stupid thing is for all my reading, I don't feel any wiser or
| even knowledgeable. At the same time I think I'm less able to
| engage in normal conversation.
| nicbou wrote:
| Instead, try cutting the triggers with an ad blocker and a few
| changes to your settings.
|
| I hide recommended content, unsubscribe from everything,
| unfollow everything, and generally have a "don't call me, I'll
| call you" approach to information.
|
| I went as far as removing pagination buttons on websites I tend
| to browse too much.
|
| I also use Pocket to save more interesting articles. Combined
| with a "things I don't understand" to-do list, I spend more
| time reading about practical things instead of just browsing. I
| don't regret that sort of reading.
| raptorraver wrote:
| I was like you few months ago. When summer started I decided to
| stop reading news from online. It was hard at first but quite
| fast I started seeing the benefits. More focus, more happiness,
| not being so worried all the time. Now I only read HN (way too
| often of course :)) and I ordered a newspaper to my home which
| is published 3 times a week. I get distilled look on whats
| going on in the world but it's not eating my focus.
| crims0n wrote:
| I tried to do this as well... bought a year subscription to
| the local paper. Unfortunately I live semi-rural and it is
| written so egregiously its only worth is feeding the firebox
| each week.
| Calamitous wrote:
| If it makes you feel any better, I did the same thing, but
| I live semi-urban, and it was similarly egregious.
|
| I don't have a firebox, but I suppose it kept the recycling
| man in business.
| rendall wrote:
| I have a few rules and habits that helped me kick. They might
| help you?
|
| Never to walk down the street looking at my phone. Eyes on the
| road. If I need to look at my phone, I stop somewhere out of
| the way of foot traffic.
|
| All notifications are silent except calls or text messages from
| specific people. Calls from people I don't know and text
| messages get only a slow blinking light. Social media get no
| notifications.
|
| When I am with someone or a group in person, phone goes away.
|
| If I wouldn't allow someone to interrupt a conversation, the
| phone doesn't either. I won't answer it if someone is talking
| to me, especially something important. When there's a pause in
| the conversation, I'll ask politely to check to see who called.
|
| Finally, and this might be the biggest, I am constantly
| listening to audiobooks and podcasts. It scratches that itch of
| needing constant stimulation, but I can still be aware of
| everything around me.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Do you listen to audiobooks and podcasts while working? I
| code for work and I actually find myself increasingly doing
| this. Sometimes when I really have to focus I stop it but
| ultimately, it doesn't feel so bad.
| rendall wrote:
| I do too, but if I have to learn something new or step
| through complex logic, then I have to pause.
| crims0n wrote:
| Something that really helped me was a smartwatch. I picked up
| an Apple Watch (cellular) a few weeks ago so I didn't have to
| carry my phone around, and subsequently, would not be tempted
| to mindlessly use it. I think the experiment has been pretty
| successful. For the most part my phone stays on the charger all
| day, and I don't feel like I am missing out on calls or texts
| since they come to my watch. Being able to leave the house
| without a phone is a particularly freeing experience.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Same symptoms as you and was also on the Nokia website a few
| days back looking at dumb phones. Others also mentioned the
| Apple watch also was a good alternative.
|
| _> The stupid thing is for all my reading, I don 't feel any
| wiser or even knowledgeable. At the same time I think I'm less
| able to engage in normal conversation._
|
| 100% if I spent all the time I spend online reading actual
| books, I'd be much better off.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"I think I've forgotten how I lived without a constant stream
| of information. I'm seriously tempted to get a dumb phone to
| remove temptation to browse when I have a few minutes to
| spare."
|
| Up until few month ago my phone did not even have data plan. I
| ordered it now but purely for business needs. I use my phone
| strictly for phone calls and as GPS (I have offline maps). I
| use another phone to control gizmos like drone. For everything
| else I use PC and since I spend enough time doing various
| physical activities I consider my life balanced.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| You realize a problem so you are on a good path. Two things
| that help me: prefer not carrying an iPhone and rely on my
| Apple Watch. Also, instead of spending over an hour a day on
| YouTube watching alternative news commentaries from people like
| Matt Taibbi, etc. I try to cut down on that substituting
| YouTube channels on philosophy, Thai Chi exercises, etc.
|
| Also, having a library card at your local library gets you
| books to read, both physical books and eBooks through the Libby
| book reading app.
|
| Anyway, congratulations on recognizing the problem: you are
| ahead of the game compared to most of my friends in real life
| and family.
| sidcool wrote:
| I am listening to the audiobook "Stolen Focus" and it has some
| good points on internet addiction. Most importantly, it's useless
| to blame yourselves completely for the addictive behaviours. The
| tech industry is spending billions on experts to get you hooked.
| In a way, tech industry is like Purdue pharma. But the
| responsibility is still individual's.
| scaramanga wrote:
| The way I like to think about it is that lots of people or
| places might be responsible: society, big industry, governments
| failure to regulate, so on and so forth. Those are interesting
| academic, or political discussions if we're talking about
| collective political actions that we might take.
|
| On the other hand, understanding that you are addicted, and
| why, are the first steps towards individuals feeling empowered
| to quit. Which, in many, if not almost all, cases - they
| absolutely are able to do. And it certainly improves their odds
| if they have a network of supportive friends, family, and the
| like.
|
| For someone who isn't an addict, taking a non judgemental and
| understanding approach to get the addict to ask him or herself
| those questions or set themselves on the path to recovery may
| be a way to meaningfully help them. But it can only really work
| if they're already open and receptive to that. And that
| depends, to a great extent, on what your relationship is with
| them and how much they trust you.
| Zababa wrote:
| I think the article would be better if it started with a
| definition of terminally online. It doesn't have a strict
| definition that everyone agrees on.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| I think "chronically online" would be a better fit
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > if you find it hard to ditch tiktok, instagram, twitter, or
| some other similar site, going "cold turkey" will be even harder.
| try to gradually reduce your usage
|
| YMMV but my trick for Facebook was a hard commit to "I'm going to
| take 2 weeks off". Cold Turkey with a boundary. I think I check
| it once for five minutes every month or two now.
|
| HN is trickier because I don't have to login first to see it.
| When I start to think Im on it too much, I delete it from my
| password manager and don't supply an email. (Sorry, I know this
| is annoying to them what run this site)
|
| Another useful thing is to generally keep a "don't respond to
| first level replies" policy. Keeps you in discussions but out of
| knee-jerk responses. Might seem rude but it keeps you sane.
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| It works for some people. I always had more success just
| gradually stopping.
|
| I had massive issue with that, I always tried going cold
| turkey. Then I just stared to count hours, set high - but still
| - limits. And over time I found I feel that I don't have to,
| even if I'm withing the limits - I felt no need.
| [deleted]
| PebblesRox wrote:
| What worked for me with Facebook is doing "Facebook Fridays" -
| as much Facebook as I wanted on Fridays and nothing the rest of
| the week. It didn't take long to realize I was not missing
| much.
|
| With other sites like HN, I have short-term success with going
| cold turkey for a specific time-frame (e.g. a week). I can
| stick with that, and my use afterward is more moderate but
| eventually I come back to over-use.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I feel like I'm on online alot, but didn't really relate to alot
| of those questions.
| silisili wrote:
| One thing I've noticed about 'terminal online' is that people
| vastly underestimate how much it affects them. Myself included.
|
| It seems if I ever call out a loved one, whether my brother or
| wife or friend, for being on their phone too much, they
| immediately get defensive and argue they were just doing some one
| task. Even if this was initiated after them being zoned out for
| an hour or longer. And I've done the same when reading something
| super interesting and getting lost in time.
|
| Honestly, it doesn't seem much different than how addicts act in
| an intervention. We need to realize that this is an addiction,
| label and treat it appropriately.
|
| My wife finally relented when our kid asked me to do something
| while I was working because 'mom is too busy with Facebook
| again.' I think that really hurt her feelings, even if she never
| admitted as much.
| iasay wrote:
| My ex wife is an ex wife because she zoned out into Facebook
| constantly and stopped doing anything with the family. Then she
| went bananas and ran away with someone who ironically she split
| up with because he was always on Facebook. It can go pretty
| bad.
|
| I'm super happy though as the kids stayed with me :)
| Aromasin wrote:
| I'm struggling with this currently. My partner spends 3+
| hours a day scrolling Instagram (I know, I checked it in her
| Apple phone metrics).
|
| When we watch movies, it's me watching it and her scrolling.
| When we're in the car listening to music, it's just me
| listening to music and her scrolling. I'm starting to
| struggle initiating conversations because she's simply not
| paying attention. Whenever we're out, half her time is spent
| through the lense of her phone so she can take photos for her
| story.
|
| She refuses to admit its a problem, disregards any argument I
| put forward about how it's disrupting her life, and when I
| really sit down with her and tell her how it makes me feels,
| she attacks me about the time I spend at my laptop (which I
| track meticulously and know its at most an hour outside of
| work, so she is simply using it as a defense).
|
| I've dated girls with drug addictions before, and it was
| easier than this because they at least admitted it was a
| problem. I feel like I can't even initiate the first step
| with her. It's crushing, because besides this issue, she's
| pretty much perfect.
| dewclin wrote:
| I'm sorry to read this, I also have a similar same
| situation with my father.
|
| He's in his late 70's and a year ago bought himself an
| iPhone. He now spends ~4 hours a day reading a tabloid
| newspaper app, which has endless content. His attention
| span has fallen noticeably and he can't keep up with
| conversations that happen in the same room while he's
| "scrolling".
|
| When I visit he's on his phone, and we go out for a walk
| (in the beautiful countryside around us) he stops and
| disengages when his app sends him the latest notification
| about what's happened on "love island", or some other
| nonsense. When I leave he's on his phone.
|
| I tried to talk to him about it, and about how it's
| particularly effecting my mother, who I can see is lonely
| and lost a person she could talk to, important at their
| time of life. He just gets defensive and angry, which leads
| no-where.
|
| Will he spend the most of the rest of his life looking at a
| screen?
|
| Edit: wording of final sentence.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Similar with my father but he's got a dumb phone and
| browses on his laptop. When we have conversations with
| family he seems to always tune out after a few minutes
| and goes on the computer. His whole world view has been
| flipped upside down by conspiracy and hoax content. We've
| talked to him about not mentioning that stuff while we're
| over but it seems to be affecting his happiness
| nonetheless.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Mine too. It seems like every old father has fallen into
| the right wing conspiracy cesspool that has warped their
| mind. An entire generation lost. I really wonder what
| makes them so susceptible to that content. Internet
| illiteracy? Old age? It's just who they are? In other
| words, they want the conspiracies to be true, they want a
| reason to hate Fauci, Greta Thunberg etc.?
|
| And even more, I wonder if it can be cured. I think it
| ties into how socially isolated men are, especially old
| men. Once you retire and your work social network is
| gone, their only social ties are online. They need to
| identify with a community, and I guess there is something
| appealing to being in a conspiracy in-group. It's just
| impossible to pull them out, because you have to replace
| that group with something else. And there's just nothing
| there for them.
| iasay wrote:
| Ah sounds like my father. He's currently going through
| Musk is Jesus' second coming and covid is a hoax phase.
| WalterSear wrote:
| My father thinks Putin is just waiting for the right time
| to strike and set everything right in the world.
|
| We don't talk much, not because we fight but because he's
| always too busy with his phone when I visit him :(
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| Well, I'm 10 years younger than dewclin Senior and I
| recently switched to a Nokia dumb phone for the summer
| and I have been keeping a record of screen time and what
| I was actually doing on the laptop. Using a paper page a
| day diary.
|
| I'm not in the tabloid market segment, and perhaps I had
| the insight to self-diagnose? Did dewclin Senior do much
| before the iPhone arrived?
|
| Perspective: I remember that Uncle Dave spent most of his
| (long) retirement watching sport on the telly back in the
| 1970s/80s. Any chance of sparking an outside interest?
| oblak wrote:
| Sounds horrible. How did you even start dating a person
| like that? She must be really something special but I just
| can't wrap my head around it because in my experience only
| exceptionally dull and dumb people are like that.
|
| That said, I am a happily married old fart so it's only
| natural to not get some aspects of modern life.
| iasay wrote:
| People didn't always start like that...
| slim wrote:
| maybe she's not perfect. maybe you just don't know her well
| enough because she's not there most of the time and you
| don't have projects you both really care about
| [deleted]
| softfalcon wrote:
| I have a similar issue with my wife. The reason you can't
| initiate the first step is because they are in denial that
| it's a problematic addiction. Everything is telling them
| that social media is "sort of okay" even though the studies
| abound proving it's a nefarious addiction.
|
| It's easier with hard drugs cause society, government, and
| even business mostly agrees it's likely bad for you (except
| alcohol, that one still gets a free pass).
|
| For me, I still try to remind her to be in the moment.
| She'll ask to watch a show or movie and within 5 minutes
| her brain has pulled up her phone to read Reddit. I pause
| the show and then I'll ask, "do you want to stop watching?"
|
| She'll reluctantly put her phone away (sometimes I have to
| wait a whole minute for her to actually put it down) and
| then I'll resume the show on the TV.
|
| The addiction is very very real and their diminishing
| attention span shows in their behaviour in other ways as
| well.
| Feritioyyyyy wrote:
| Have you ever thought of making Instagram 'sliw' sometimes?
|
| Might be unethical or it might help her to get away from
| it?
|
| Perhaps talk to a therapist about how to approach it?
| BbzzbB wrote:
| sliw?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If you don't have kids with her, move on. She's made clear
| what her priorities are, or she needs the wakeup call that
| a failed relationship will bring.
| workingon wrote:
| Find someone who doesnt suck. She's probably really hot huh
| prawn wrote:
| This can be especially difficult for people who work online
| and particularly in social media where responding quickly
| to comments can be part of the role/expectation/defensive
| response.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Unfortunately you can't change a person. You can offer them
| an ultimatum, then whichever way it goes, so much the
| better.
| iasay wrote:
| Honestly looking back at my situation which paralleled
| yours, life's not worth suffering through. Took 7 years to
| sort it out here which was a big chunk of my life. If
| you're not happy, get out of the situation that makes you
| unhappy as soon as you can. The regrets hurt more than the
| relationship problems did.
| applobabab wrote:
| >mom is too busy with Facebook again
|
| That sent shivers down my spine, wow.
| bishopsmother wrote:
| Unfortunately it's not unusual: "I wish mum's phone was never
| invented"[0]
|
| [0]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-44224319
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's so sad, I wonder if we'll ever learn the full impact
| on kids from their parents' phone addictions. I recently
| took my daughter to a playground and watched in horror
| another young couple there. Their 5 year old was nearly
| crying for them to pay attention and play with her, but
| there were mom and dad: hunched over their phones, doing
| that zoned-out zombie stumble-walk that people do when they
| are addict-scrolling. Really heartbreaking.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| My mom's been lost to Facebook and gambling apps for years.
| At some point in the last couple years I told her I didn't
| love her anymore because being around her is only negative
| and her screen addiction has put my life in danger on the
| road my entire life, and caused her to completely skip out on
| providing for her children.
|
| Zuck, Zynga, all of them can be launched into deep space for
| all I care.
| papito wrote:
| Having done a fair share of substance abuse, I can tell you
| that screen and social media addiction is _exactly_ like any
| other addiction. The brain mechanics behind it are the same.
| "Just another hit and then I am done".
|
| The Power of Habit (the book) helped me identify my bad habits
| the moment they triggered.
|
| Also, what's fascinating is that addictions seem to bundle
| together. If I get off the sauce, start working out, etc, it
| becomes immediately easier to ignore the phone, social media,
| and other reflexive behavior, like snacking for no reason.
| wpietri wrote:
| I totally feel you on the bundling.
|
| One way I think about it: Marvin Minsky long ago wrote a book
| called Society of Mind, looking at human cognition as a
| series of semi-independent non-conscious agents. If I feel
| bad long enough, there's a collection of feel-better-in-the-
| short-term agents that work well together: mindless snacking,
| doomscrolling, playing video games, binge watching,
| overeating etc. Basically anything that helps me avoid being
| present in feeling bad. Even if in the long term they make me
| feel worse.
|
| But there's a competing set of agents, the ones that mean
| regular exercise and eating healthily and good sleep and low
| stress levels. That set not only works well when I'm feeling
| good, but they're what helps keep me feeling good in the long
| term.
|
| Either set can achieve a stable equilibrium, but the two sets
| aren't really compatible.
|
| Not sure if that makes any sense, but that's one way I think
| about it.
| t43562 wrote:
| Who really cares - 100 years ago you might as well have moaned
| about people living through books. We have to live and learn 2nd
| hand because:
|
| * Learning some things 1st hand has a high chance of being fatal
|
| * We cannot afford to live all possible lives but we do have to
| be able to understand each other and each other's motives to be
| able to get along - this means we have to imagine what it's like
| to be someone else.
|
| The internet is just the latest way to communicate and learn
| things from/about other people.
| keyle wrote:
| I agree with you but consider the following.
|
| There is gluttony and then, there is gluttony with junk foods.
|
| Books and Wikipedia addiction isn't quite like one more fetch
| of the Instagram feed. Update my story. See such and such
| latest story.
|
| Both are forms of escapes but one leads to a dangerous
| generation of waste.
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| A lot of people seem to care: everyone upvoting, commenting,
| and even you taking the time to comment.
|
| Internet-enabled pocket computers are vastly different than
| silent, dark, large, heavy, un-update-able, one-way, single-
| topic (more-or-less) sources of entertainment/distraction.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Eh, none of the bookworms I know ever had drastic changes in
| their personality consistent with anxiety or depression, or
| somehow became angry and bitter after binge-reading a 6 book
| fantasy series. It just isn't a thing that happens.
|
| I also don't think the internet itself--we didn't see this
| problem with blogs/wikipedia/trashy chain emails from your
| uncle.
|
| It's the feeds. Because everything is tuned for engagement, if
| there's a _type_ of content that 's going to mess with your
| head in particular, the algorithm _will_ find it and hammer you
| with it.
| toast0 wrote:
| > somehow became angry and bitter after binge-reading a 6
| book fantasy series. It just isn't a thing that happens.
|
| Some people will read the whole series when a new book comes
| out, sometimes in a single session. If there's something they
| really don't like in the last book, they might be bitter and
| angry.
| [deleted]
| blfr wrote:
| It's a good guide but it only addresses fairly vacuous and not
| that great online activities.
|
| My Twitter feed is a collection of funniest, most deranged takes
| on any subject. People IRL have no chance to compete, no one can
| outdo the best two seconds of 800 people.
|
| Same with HN. Conversations like these are rarely happening
| offline.
|
| And then there are communities I sunk into. Private forums I have
| been a member of for nearly a decade. I know the in-jokes, we
| follow the stories of more interesting (chaotic) posters, there's
| even some real emotional investment.
|
| All of that reachable fully asynchronously. Went to the gym
| alone? Read between the sets. Waiting for something? It's right
| there on your phone. Sadly, also, someone being boring... well,
| better stuff is in your pocket.
| neil_jetter wrote:
| > There is an insurmountable asymmetry that degrades any local
| event or exchange. Because of the infinity of content
| accessible 24/7, there will always be something online more
| informative, surprising, funny, diverting, impressive than
| anything in one's immediate circumstances.
|
| - 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep" by Jonathan
| Crary
| scaramanga wrote:
| If you like that, then can I interest you in some crack, it's
| amazing compared to sobriety. Whenever I have to engage with
| people, all I am ever thinking is, "this is rubbish, I have
| some crack in my pocket, what am I doing here?" How can people
| be expected to compare with crack? It's ridiculous :)
| slothtrop wrote:
| Whether my online activities are less vacuous or not, by the
| numbers I spend an inordinate amount of time on the computer or
| other device. Granted mostly for work, but even after I get
| through evening chores, I tend to want to go straight back.
|
| I think one mistake of perspective we have, when terminally-
| online and evaluating the alternative, is looking for other
| sources of passive constant stimulation as a substitute for
| social media feeds. Not bombarding your senses is part of the
| point. Daydreaming and thinking doesn't have to be boring, even
| just enjoying a moment of quiet.
|
| Saying that, I think most people lack social validation in
| everyday life and try to satisfy it virtually. Having
| interesting conversation is separate from that, but also a
| consideration. We seem to be disappointed by our offline social
| lives but don't do a whole lot to rectify. That would require
| change (scary) and effort.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Same with HN. Conversations like these are rarely happening
| offline.
|
| May I suggest that you might be looking in the wrong places
| offline?
|
| HN-style discussions are a staple of lunchtime banter at any
| number of tech firms. Likewise you can find similar discussions
| at any number of universities, or on the tech conference
| circuit. Not to mention your local nerd-leaning special-
| interest communities (be it tabletop, D&D, hacker space, BDSM,
| etc).
|
| The internet makes it really easy to find a community of folks
| who share similar interests, all without leaving your house.
| But unless you live in the middle of nowhere, one can generally
| find such a community IRL
| h2odragon wrote:
| "Lunchtime banter"? You mean ya'll don't use lunch as the
| daily progress reports meeting? So inefficient!
|
| The place that did that was a _bad_ work environment;
| shockingly enough the "working" lunches weren't the worst
| habit they had either.
| blfr wrote:
| The lunchtime banter at my (tech) company is mostly silence
| since few people come to the office.
| cyberbanjo wrote:
| Have you tried an amateur radio meetup?
| innocentfelon4 wrote:
| Recently I was arrested and had all my electronics seized by the
| police.
|
| The whole experience was a wake-up call, not just in terms of
| being arrested but being without a computer or any way to get
| online for a couple of weeks.
|
| It really made me realize how 'addicted' I was to the internet,
| and going cold turkey was horrible, time slowed down and I was
| sure I was missing out on everything.
|
| But I read so much more and all the days seemed longer (time
| dragged so much) and then when I finally got back online I hadn't
| missed sh*t.
| scaramanga wrote:
| That actually sounds like heaven :)
| eastbound wrote:
| Did they give it back to you? How do you get information about
| a lawyer without computer or mobile phone???
| rendall wrote:
| Yikes! Was this in the US? Did you get a lawyer?
| [deleted]
| XorNot wrote:
| > But I read so much more
|
| You're reading all the time on the internet, it's literally the
| foundational enabling skill of it.
|
| I find it very weird when people say the benefit of being
| offline is they "read more".
| tomxor wrote:
| The "more" is implying something of substance.
|
| Reading online doesn't feel like reading. Most offline
| material is long form and has a clear purpose, otherwise it
| wouldn't continue existing. When you read it you are more
| likely to come away fulfilled, with new thoughts and ideas to
| process. You can't usually say the same coming away from most
| social network type interactions on the internet - You might
| have satiated your FOMO temporarily, but otherwise will
| likely feel empty. Obviously it's not all like that, there
| exists long form content on the web, but that's not really
| what we are talking about.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| I really think much Internet content is more like cheap
| magazines/newspapers - small articles that can be read in
| under 5 minutes, ads and distractions peppered everywhere,
| and comment sections that are often large collections of
| short text. Social media is that experience on a higher
| scale.
|
| The experience is not the same as sitting down and reading a
| 300 page book cover to cover which is also the product of an
| author sitting down and spending months or even years writing
| it. Of course that experience is definitely possible on the
| Internet - ebooks/PDF. But someone "reading" social media is
| not the same as really reading.
| glitchc wrote:
| Online reading is all sizzle and no steak. It's akin to
| making a meal out of condiments: Each individual element is
| tasty but the overall meal leaves you dissatisfied.
| sneak wrote:
| Don't tell Project Gutenberg, or Wikimedia, or Codecademy.
|
| (Your assessment is an unfair and inaccurate
| overgeneralization. One can use the internet to read books,
| blogs, articles, courses, etc, but of course you know
| this.)
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| In general I agree with you. As interesting as stuff on
| Twitter (I follow some very interesting people) and HN is,
| I use https://freedom.to to time-box my access. I don't
| time-box my access at all for reading books.
|
| That said, I have some low quality conversations with
| friends in real life also. However that is a different
| dynamic because conversation does not have to perfect and
| periods of silence while, for example, hiking with friends
| is also good.
|
| I don't want to go off on a rant here, but our civilization
| is changing: more automation, less work required from a
| large fraction of the population. We need to get "being a
| human" in this new world right. Going on a Cal Newport
| style digital diet is just a part of a strategy for life.
| ElemenoPicuares wrote:
| I hate to throw a purely negative comment up as a naked response
| to a post, but this is really just a contemptful screed about
| people engaging in online interactions the author doesn't jibe
| with. It's not even like they're presenting their opinion to
| elicit other perspectives-- it's presented as an objective list
| of unhealthy habits and patronizing instructions to align your
| behavior with the author's values and priorities. Not sure if the
| author intended this to be publicly consumed in this form but
| I'll skip their other blog entries.
| cratermoon wrote:
| This is the problem with framing the problem of online harms as
| an aspect of individual morality. Blaming the victim isn't
| helpful, nor is excusing the victim on the grounds that the
| activities aren't immoral.
| [deleted]
| jayceedenton wrote:
| What does 'objective' even mean in this context? This is a post
| about what the author believes is healthy and positive for
| individuals and society.
|
| I don't see anywhere where contempt is shown, in fact quite the
| opposite. The post is written in a very empathetic way in my
| opinion, and I think displays a good level of insight into, and
| understanding of, the attractiveness of things that can do
| harm.
|
| I'd challenge you to entertain the idea that this post has some
| good advice, and follow some of it. I have no data, but I
| expect you'll be happier as a result.
| ElemenoPicuares wrote:
| If you don't see contempt in the author's evaluation of other
| people's behavior, you're either not looking, or not a great
| judge of it.
|
| > I'd challenge you to entertain the idea that this post has
| some good advice, and follow some of it. I have no data, but
| I expect you'll be happier as a result.
|
| Personally, I don't fit any of the implied criteria for
| "terminal onlineness," so your challenge isn't possible. You
| don't merely lack data, you lack a valid reason for assuming
| this advice applies to me or any other person whose habits
| you know nothing about. I recommend you entertain the idea
| that neither righteousness in your conviction nor confidence
| in your words transform your assumptions and personal
| experiences into broadly applicable maxims.
|
| Even if this advice addresses problems you, personally,
| struggle with, that's not necessarily true for everybody. I
| know brilliant, happy, well-adjusted people, like my wife,
| who engage in behavior this author deems undesirable. _It 's
| just not that cut and dried._ Perhaps the author's
| conclusions suffer from sampling bias? Regardless, I will
| still skip the rest of their blog entries.
| ehnto wrote:
| I think where you can see contempt, is in the
| characterization that the internet breeds a certain sense of
| humour and that it's an objectively bad one. Irony is not
| unique to the internet, nor is self-deprecating humour, or
| cynical humour, or are slang words. Usually when you hear an
| internet-slang used in real life it's a reference, not an
| earnest attempt to use the word legitimately. Like when
| people reference TV shows or movies, you've have to have seen
| it to enjoy the reference. If using it works for your in-
| group then that's great, you all understand eachother.
| wpietri wrote:
| For me in this context "presented as objective" means using
| the authorial voice of an expert. I agree it's a bad fit for
| me here, because it sweeps a lot under the rug.
|
| In contrast, I'd be interested in reading something on the
| same topic that was presented in a subjective way, where the
| author isn't hiding their personal relationship to the topic.
| For example, "I was terminally online and here's why and how
| I changed". Or "my friend was terminally online and I like
| that they stopped". Or even "here's why I am frustrated
| dealing with terminally online people".
|
| But for me, the pseudo-expert advice from somebody with no
| obvious expertise and no claim of it leaves me cold. I don't
| understand why I should care what they think, or why I should
| trust them.
| HealthNeed wrote:
| The lack of capitalization made me sprint through the text. I
| wonder if anyone else had this experience. I had to come up for
| air towards the end. Even after I realized I was doing it I
| couldn't slow down.
| helge9210 wrote:
| I wonder, if the lack of capital letters is a part of the
| message.
| gxs wrote:
| My biggest problem right now isn't online per se, rather it's a
| video game.
|
| Any ideas as to how to deal with it?
| throwaway1146 wrote:
| I don't know if HN is a good place for personal advice like this;
|
| I have grown severely paranoid about what has happened around
| social media. I watched.. a conversation unfold in 2012. I
| thought at the time that I needed to de-escalate it. It kept
| escalating as I kept looking for a way to talk to the people
| involved. And, to my own perception, it grew into and took over
| the entire 'national conversation' that was happening here in the
| years that followed. I now have panic attacks whenever I see the
| words / phrases / jargon / ideas I watched form 'here'. I often
| have severe enough psychological issues that I just disconnect
| from everything and repeat the question "who are you people" to
| myself. Especially as my suspicions of what it was that had
| spread from that day in 2012 grew to... everything people
| say/think/do.
|
| I'm not sure what way I could move forward. I've been trying,
| with minimal success, to write down in long form what I saw
| happen. I've largely lost the emotional wherewithal for it. I
| tried reaching out to old friends for advice, which shows I've
| lost contact with everyone enough that I can't. I was terminally
| online before this all happened, and don't really know how to
| meet people away from here. Or if I would find the same things,
| and shut down again. I do know that my paranoia extends to people
| I see in real life. The past 1 year has pushed me into a constant
| fear of everyone, online and off.
|
| Not sure if getting away from the internet would help now.
| picture wrote:
| I can't understand what you're saying, but I get that this may
| be a stressful topic so you are being vague. From what I see,
| it might be a good idea to look for some professional help if
| this is debilitating paranoia.
| throwaway1146 wrote:
| Thanks. I suppose I am being a bit too vague over all;
|
| In terms of what it is I've grown paranoid about, it's mostly
| subjectively / paranoid-ly that I said 'everything'.
| Resolving that was a major goal I had for trying to write
| personal journals about this.
|
| The other side of that is the more personal: I've lost
| basically all of my friends, and struggle to talk to my
| parents. While my emotional issues are getting in the way of
| trying to write out what I've grown fearful of, I also don't
| really know how to get in contact with anyone. That was where
| this post sounded relevant to me.
|
| Moving on from a rank paranoia via internet might require
| first rebuilding my personal / social life somewhat, so I
| have something to fall back on. And doing so is blocked by
| that very paranoia and emotional issues. Catch-22. Being
| terminally online as I am, may be a help or a hindrance to
| trying to escape that.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Author alludes to such, but the chief distinguishing factor I see
| is whether one prefers real life, or the unreal life offered by
| the Internet.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The internet stopped being distinct from "real life" some time
| ago.
| mxkopy wrote:
| This.
|
| Sometimes being "terminally online" is better than the
| alternative until life circumstances change.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I used to be much harder on people I perceived as being
| always online.
|
| Then I remember I was about as online as you could be in the
| late 90s.
|
| Sometimes, or even lots of times, people are just trying to
| get by.
| mouzogu wrote:
| it's simply more desirable than the alternative.
|
| being stuck with your thoughts, past regrets and future worries.
| scaramanga wrote:
| Yes, I think this is the least understood point about
| addictions. They kind of work. I mean, people do those
| behaviours because they are getting something out of it.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| It's a balancing act and for me, Internet use is an addiction
| like gluttony. Forgive my lack of empathy, but addiction takes on
| a whole other quality when you're addicted to some necessity of
| life.
|
| Food is, of course, a quintessential necessity, and someone who
| overeats or has an eating disorder needs to come to terms with
| temperance, moderation, and balance of lifestyle, rather than
| quit eating altogether.
|
| 15 years ago, it was realistic to hang up the modem, unplug the
| computer, get face out of screen, and get some fresh air for long
| stretches of time. But my reality today is that I use a device
| online to manage my household and do ordinary, everyday tasks,
| including working for my employer is 100% online. Implicit in
| this article is the fact that the Internet is no longer something
| to be avoided or removed from our lives; the article simply
| suggests that we can use it differently, improving our attitudes
| and our approach.
|
| So rather than a "kick the habit" strategy, we typically need to
| devise time-management techniques and ways to form better habits
| around good, productive use of our devices, while balancing that
| with actual needs to unplug and take a walk in the fresh air.
|
| That may mean that I don't obsessively check bank balances and
| twiddle my bill payments 3 times a day, 7 days a week. And it
| means that I'm not allowing every email and SMS to distract me
| from a task. And perhaps channels about home meal preparation and
| gentleman's grooming should be dominating my YouTube suggestions,
| above SNL and Avril Lavigne tracks.
|
| I also need to cope with being triggered. If I have an anxiety
| attack or fit of rage over someone who's Wrong on the Internet, I
| am guaranteed to suffer insomnia and all the rest. And so we need
| the skillsets to short-circuit and defuse those situations, and
| sometimes the situation is avoidable and sometimes we need to
| find a way to push through it without losing our heads.
|
| This blogger offers 15 pragmatic, common-sense strategies for
| coping. And it can get better. Do not believe that you can escape
| the Internet by avoiding it, nor can you escape real life by
| going online. Develop good hygiene, good habits, be productive,
| and learn to cope when things inevitably get difficult.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Health and online activity are inextricably linked at this point.
|
| Mental health. Cardiovascular health. Health of interpersonal
| relationships. Work life balance.
|
| I sincerely think we are at an equivalent situation as the
| tobacco industry in the 1970s. The decisions we make now will
| affect the lives of generations to come.
|
| Cal Newport's site has a Ledger of Harms [1] at the Center for
| Humane Technology, and I wrote what I hope is an accessible and
| lightly challenging overview of the problem of technology overuse
| in Digital Vegan [2].
|
| [1] https://ledger.humanetech.com/?ref=witsio
|
| [2] https://digitalvegan.net
| mlac wrote:
| I got part way through Digital Vegan, but admittedly haven't
| finished it yet.
|
| It's been a few weeks since I had to put it down for another
| book, but here is my main takeaway (so far) - it's all true,
| but in my opinion it comes across with very strong views and
| some extreme options as something to hand non-technical
| friends. It's also relatively expensive to obtain in the US.
|
| But thank you for your contribution to the discussion on this
| topic. I think you're probably closer to where we should end
| up, but I don't see a path to get there.
| codethief wrote:
| > Cal Newport's site has a Ledger of Harms [1] at the Center
| for Humane Technology
|
| Sorry, I'm not following. Could you elaborate on the connection
| between Cal Newport and the site you linked to?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I may be mistaken but Center for Humane Technology which
| compiled the "Ledger of harms" is an umbrella for critical
| thought on digital tech whose members include folk like Roger
| McNamee, Cal Newport, Jonathan Haidt, Max Stossel, Tristan
| Harris and others. Actually it would be fairer to call it
| Harris' site (since he is the "president" of it)
| night-rider wrote:
| There's another word/phrase for being 'terminally online' or
| Internet addiction, and it's 'Extremely online'[0]. Although
| whether one can be truly addicted to the Internet is debatable.
| There are extreme cases, like in Japan of gamers literally dying
| from prolonged & excessive playing of online video games.
|
| For me I dedicate a two hour window of time to being online, and
| typically come out of it enriched, not craving for more. It's a
| learning experience 99% of the time.
|
| > Extremely online (often capitalized[1]), also known as
| terminally online[2] or chronically online,[3] is a phrase
| referring to someone closely engaged with Internet culture.[1]
| People said to be extremely online often believe that online
| posts are very important.[4][5] Events and phenomena can
| themselves be extremely online;[4] while often used as a
| descriptive term, the phenomenon of extreme onlineness has been
| described as "both a reformation of the delivery of ideas -
| shared through words and videos and memes and GIFs and copypasta
| - and the ideas themselves".[5] It has been said that "'online'
| can be thought of as a way of doing things, not the place they
| are done".[4]
|
| > While the term was in use as early as 2014, it gained use over
| the latter half of the 2010s in conjunction with the increasing
| prevalence and notability of Internet phenomena in all areas of
| life.[1] Extremely online people, according to The Daily Dot, are
| interested in topics "no normal, healthy person could possibly
| care about",[1] and have been analogized to "pop culture fandoms,
| just without the pop".[1] Extremely online phenomena such as fan
| culture and reaction GIFs have been described as "swallowing
| democracy" by bloggers such as Amanda Hess in The New York
| Times;[6] who claimed that a "great convergence between politics
| and culture, values and aesthetics, citizenship and
| commercialism" had become "a dominant mode of experiencing
| politics".[6] Vulture (formerly the pop culture section of New
| York magazine, now a stand-alone website) has a section for
| articles tagged "extremely online".[7]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_online
| jader201 wrote:
| This article (and many similar articles often shared on HN) are
| written as if the target audience are adults. And maybe it is.
| But there are already plenty of articles about how we spend too
| much time online, and the effects of social media.
|
| But why aren't there more articles like this targeting teens,
| e.g. when -- or before -- the problem starts?
|
| Language like this:
|
| > _irony, post-irony, meta-irony, and whatever-irony are the
| lingua franca of the terminally online._
|
| makes it clear that this is not written with a general audience
| in mind.
|
| Are there articles that cover really good points like this in a
| way that really sinks in for a younger audience, to help them
| understand the risks and how to recognize the problem before it
| becomes a deep rooted and/or normalized addiction?
|
| As a parent of teens, it would be nice to find and share articles
| with them that are written in a way that really sinks in while
| not coming across as preachy/judgmental.
| haswell wrote:
| This is something I've been thinking about quite a bit. How to
| take these problems that a growing number of psychologists,
| psychiatrists and technologists understand to be problems, and
| repackaging that in a way that is palatable and effective for
| various audiences.
|
| I think articles like the one here need to exist to get
| communities like this one talking about how to expand the
| conversation.
|
| The trouble is, what _is_ the right way to reach someone in
| their teens, at a time in their life when they're probably far
| less worried about the "health" aspects of time online than
| they are about fitting in with their peers?
|
| I've wondered if the only way is to embrace the social media
| platforms people find themselves consumed with - to subtly
| deliver/grow the message that they should unplug.
|
| I'd say this conversation should start in schools, but am not
| optimistic that this would actually pan out.
| satokema wrote:
| It's entirely reasonable to read through this article and come to
| the conclusion that you have a balanced approach to being online.
|
| My hobbies involve a computer and the people I enjoy interacting
| with are online, not on a meetup site or at work.
|
| The important thing is being able to self-reflect properly on it,
| and not delude oneself. I can still put my phone away to have
| dinner with family or some other outing easily, as a point of
| trying to be focused on whatever it is I'm doing.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| I'm struggling with it. I have a website blocker on my Mac, but
| then I just turn it off eventually and go back to old habits, if
| I block hacker news, reddit etc, then I end up just having random
| thoughts and googling those and finding other sites to read
| through and of course sometimes reddit can have the answer for
| the thing i needed to google, so that can be annoying.
|
| I changed to a white list to try and solve this problem, but then
| I just keep finding little bits of websites i need access to, to
| do what I want, the minute I disable something or find a
| solution, I just get around it somehow or need to turn it off and
| end up at square one.
|
| I feel I tap into the " what is your life philosophy? what do you
| believe in? do the communities you browse online reflect this in
| some way? did you learn about these from people online?" this
| quite a lot.
|
| The internet for me, is not about watching cute cat videos, but
| trying to learn more about life, philosophy, how to be a better
| human, productivity porn etc, maybe it's a big insecurity of
| mine, but I think about this stuff all the time and the internet
| is a unending resource for all this stuff, I figure that a great
| resource in solving and thinking about all these things, must be
| other people and there own thoughts and experiences that I can
| learn from and then integrate with my own thinking and the
| internet gives me unending access to that, or at least in theory
| it does.
|
| So i'm reading through Hacking News, Reddit, blogs, watching
| youtube videos, podcasts etc, hoping to find those things and
| then I end up with a bunch of notes and documents etc, but it all
| kinda becomes overwhelming anyway, either from the content I am
| currently consuming or even all the thoughts and ideas I wrote
| down previous because I thought they where somehow useful.
|
| I honestly don't know what to do about this anymore. I'm trying
| to figure out a system for living more simply and internet
| consumption is part of it, but also there is the bigger issue
| that i mentioned which I think is the primary driver of that
| internet consumption.
| wand3r wrote:
| I use SelfControl App for Mac which adds the sites to your host
| file for a certain amount of hours. I find it to be very
| helpful now. Its also annoying to override it so while I could
| easily do it, usually it makes me delay until the "craving"
| passes.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Yeah, it's a good app that I have used in the past, the issue
| being I don't know how long I need to block everything for
| and I might need some of those websites randomly when I end
| up needing some info and the answer is on reddit etc.
|
| Also lack of scheduling, so every time I have to click to
| start, I often lose so much time in the morning just browsing
| before I get to work etc.
| vlunkr wrote:
| > trying to learn more about life, philosophy, how to be a
| better human, productivity porn etc
|
| IMO The internet is not usually a good way to learn this stuff.
| These are big life concepts that require deep focus and
| patience. The internet rewards the opposite of that.
|
| The Big Concepts require both study and application. If you're
| mostly spending time in the study phase, it's not working.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| You might be right, where is good though?
|
| I'm starting to just give up on it to be honest and consider
| more just trying to avoid this kind of information and figure
| out what works for me myself, my ultimate thought is to
| replace information consumption of this kinda thing with just
| more deep reflection and a bigger trial and error process.
|
| I mean who are the people producing this content that I think
| will help me anyway? There just people, so I feel like I can
| figure it out myself maybe.
|
| Even when cleaning i'm listening to these kinda podcasts etc,
| i don't know how much I get from it, I think I almost get
| more value from not listening to anything, as it allows my
| own thoughts to process.
|
| I don't know. I feel kinda stuck with it all and this
| generally leads to two things, 1) Trying to find / consume
| more information 2) Overthinking that leads me to feeling
| more stuck and back to 1, i'm not sure quite what to do /
| where to turn, but maybe that is the issue, the whole 'where
| to turn' thought, is that same idea, wanting to figure out
| what information source will somehow make things different.
| allenu wrote:
| Maybe the root cause is that your desire to "be better" or
| attain a goal is too strong. It sounds like you're aware of
| some of this already.
|
| I know that for me, I once tried to optimizing just about
| everything in my life. That led me to try to learn how to
| do everything better and better. At one point I realized
| that I was overthinking and optimizing everything, even
| which path I would take to walk to the bus to save some
| time. The stress of attaining perfection just got to be too
| much, so I just worked on letting go of trying to improve
| everything.
|
| So, maybe work on just being okay with things how they are
| and not striving too much to be even better. A lot of this
| requires being aware of your thoughts and moods so you can
| change in the moment. I've found meditation helps a lot
| there.
| vlunkr wrote:
| It's hard to name good sources when we're talking in
| generalities. But whatever topic your interested in, there
| are likely many experts on the subject that have published
| books or other long form content. That's a great starting
| point, then I think you need to figure out what works for
| you through experience and trial and error
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I think most people struggle with this if they recognize this
| as a problem. I use https://freedom.to to set up times of day
| when I can access social media. And yes, sometimes I shut this
| down when I want to cheat.
|
| For me the best life hack to avoid wasting even more time is to
| rely on my Apple Watch to get phone calls and text messages,
| and leave my iPhone at home. This is sort of like using an old
| flip-phone because it takes accessing social media off the
| table.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| That's good that you found something that works for you.
|
| My phone isn't actually the big distraction point for me, I
| don't have social media apps and barely use it, it's more my
| iMac and sometimes my iPad too.
|
| I guess I need to find something that works for me, i'm yet
| to figure that out yet though.
| hinkley wrote:
| People have had this problem figured out for a very long time
| and I guess there's just been too much else going on on the
| internet so it's been lost.
|
| You're the only really technical person in the house, you're
| the only one who can block you from doing things you know are
| bad for you, so you set up the software to do it, and then you
| have your spouse or a really good friend change the password.
| Now you can't get back in without talking to them first.
| rr808 wrote:
| Yup, its a nice Sunday during the Summer time and I'm here on
| HN.
| JanneVee wrote:
| Well it is a good message but a tad poorly researched and
| underdeveloped thoughts.
|
| Being stuck in a "compulsion loop" online is not healthy for your
| mind. It doesn't matter if it is Twitter, TikTok or even Hacker
| News. What I'm seeing online now and those around me. Online
| behaviours that take the form of addictions are not healthy and
| should not be a part of a healthy persons lifestyle. And I wish
| that it would become a trend.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| I try to write down what I'm about to use the internet for before
| I open the web browser. This way I can glance and see if I've
| gotten distracted and try to get back on task. This works wonders
| when trying to list something on FB Marketplace. In the past I
| would be three posts deep in my feed before snapping out of it
| and remembering why I opened FB in the first place. I can see why
| the feed was such a game changer for FB. Before you can use FB
| for anything you will be forced to glance at the feed :(
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| This could be an awesome extension. Something that asks you in
| a couple textboxes - what is your goal with this browser
| session/how much time do you think you need to accomplish it -
| and then keeps these items of info visible below the tab bar.
| dutchbrit wrote:
| I broke my phones screen the other day & decided not to install
| Facebook and other apps like Reddit on my "old" backup phone, so
| far I'm liking it.
|
| Certain communities on Facebook are quite interesting but my main
| feed is filled with so much viral junk that I end up scrolling
| through crap for hours a week.. Once I start, it consumes me for
| a while. Kind of sad really, I would rather spend time doing
| other relaxing things offline instead.
|
| Just came back from a 2 hour walk outside with my son through our
| local park and farm, usually I'd of checked Facebook at least
| twice, I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more without "having to
| check" this or that.
|
| I miss the simple days of just having forums and IM.
| InvOfSmallC wrote:
| I uninstalled every social app. The reason I don't go back to a
| Nokia 3310 is because I have a company phone and I do part of my
| work on my phone (although I'd argue it's because I can't refuse
| to wait for when I'm in front of a laptop. It's convenient to do
| it now on the phone rather than waiting and doing it later.)
|
| And I actually tried to go back to my mum phone this summer, she
| had an old unused Samsung Galaxy J3 (Android 5).
|
| I only installed Telegram and Whatsapp.
|
| It's totally doable but it's really slow. The positive thing is
| that most of the apps stopped working for Android 5. So even if I
| wanted to install them I cannot.
|
| Unfortunately nobody uses in my area nothing else but discord,
| telegram and whatsapp so I feel I don't want to be completely
| disconnected that way.
|
| I was thinking that, well, I could actually just wait to be in
| front of a laptop also for telegram and whatsapp but it seemed
| too much.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| What does `terminally online` mean precisely ? What's the
| definition ?
| jackvalentine wrote:
| It's the vibe, it's Mabo.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| I don't spend too much time online. Proof: I didn't read that
| blog post, because it is faaar too long.
| padolsey wrote:
| Hmm, this isn't really a "howto" post. It's the authors' disdain
| and insecurities masquerading as one.
| rco8786 wrote:
| A lot of good questions to ask yourself here. But,
|
| > have you ever used/applied "internet slang" (cringe, based,
| cuck, chad) in/to real-life situations?
|
| I take slight issue with this one. To me, there is no difference
| between "internet slang" and just "slang". The internet is
| ubiquitous and the language we use online and offline is largely
| the same now.
|
| Didn't always be this way. I still remember the first time I
| heard a friend say "epic fail" in really life circa 2005 or so,
| and it was like some sort of glass wall had been broken between
| our real lives and our internet lives. But that wall is long
| gone, and I think that's probably okay.
| wruza wrote:
| Not only gone, I've heard internet and/or local imageboard
| slang from people who surely never visited the source of it. It
| feels strange to conceal your own subculture from those who
| speak it freely.
| naillo wrote:
| There are actually a huge chunk of the population that just
| isn't very online, and genuinely don't know these terms. (Even
| many young people.) It was a real eye opener to meet some
| 'terminally offline' people and realize you can actually just
| escape and things are fine without being here constantly.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| I can be online constantly and escape whatever the flavour of
| the month is. The only time it bites me in the ass is when I
| get banned for not being up to date on whatever everyone good
| and decent has to agree with to be good and decent.
| athorax wrote:
| If you are getting banned regularly from online communities
| you might want to reconsider why that is happening
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Yeah, online communities reflexively "other" anyone who
| does not agree with their increasingly robust (aka
| fascist) political dogma, given that that sort of thing
| seems to be inescapably creeping into _everything_
|
| How many times have I walked by a table in a cafe to
| overhear someone complaining that it's impossible to be
| taken seriously unless you adopt extremeist left or right
| schools of thought?
|
| How many times have I witnessed adherents dismissing
| moderates or centrists? Accusing them of helping the
| "enemy"? What about people who think for themselves and
| have concluded something out of the mainstream? Throwing
| in some other unrelated political cause and accusing
| anyone who doesn't agree to be wrong?
|
| It's disgusting, and those communities should be ashamed
| of themselves
|
| I'm assuming, of course, that GP is a decent person and
| independent thinker, as those types tend to get
| railroaded in this glorious new dawn of political
| groupthink
| wpietri wrote:
| > glorious new dawn of political groupthink
|
| [citation needed]
|
| I don't see any reason to think that "groupthink", aka
| societal or subcultural values and beliefs, is at a
| notably higher level than much of history. In the west,
| look at the long dominance of the Catholic Church. Even
| after the rise of the Protestants, it was often more a
| set of competing orthodoxies, such that large groups were
| eager to cross oceans to get away from oppression. And
| when those people got to the US, quite a lot of them were
| eager to become the oppressors. Looks at the predominance
| of blue laws across the US. Look at who got tarred and
| feathered. Who got lynched. Who dealt with segregation
| and Jim Crow. Look at the Red Scare, the socially narrow
| dominance of mass media, or how eager and how violent the
| forces of conformity were in the 1950s.
|
| I think today people are generally freer that at any
| point. But two big things have changed. One, the rise of
| the internet means the one-way, conformist channels of
| mass media have given way to everybody talking to
| everybody. And two, cultural power is no longer
| concentrated in a narrow slice of society, such that
| people previously unheard are now having some things to
| say.
|
| I get why some people see that as "political groupthink".
| When you're in a dominant group, you're not used to
| getting challenged. But personally, I find it bracing,
| causing me to rethink a lot of things I took as givens
| because that's what the people around me believed. The
| death of old paradigms is always uncomfortable, but
| personally I'd much rather live in this era of ferment
| than in one where everybody believes the same comfortable
| old certainties.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| The past as you see it here doesn't exist, by my own
| perception. There were a lot more extremeist groups in
| the shadows, but that contained them and isolated those
| that sought to join them. With so much of this extremeism
| out in the open, people are now seeing social
| reinforcement where before they would have seen
| chastisement, and I think this is a bad thing. We were
| much better as a country as the great melting pot, than
| we are now as the salad bowl.
|
| I think its wonderful that so many oppressed groups are
| given opportunities at the podium, but the problem is
| that many of these oppressed groups are oppressed for
| good reason (like white supremacists), and there needs to
| be some sort of filter that keeps them sidelined.
| Unfortunately I don't see how to achieve that without
| some sort of orthodoxy, and right now the people that are
| trying to write that are fucking crazy.
| callalex wrote:
| I think you are meaningfully contributing to the
| conversation, but you don't get to drop a "[citation
| needed]" and then proceed to state your un-cited
| opinions.
| wpietri wrote:
| I do in fact get to do that.
|
| The parts that were my opinions ("I think", "I see", etc)
| were clearly cited to me. But a fair bit of what I wrote
| was pointers to things people can look up. If there's
| something apparently factual that you're having trouble
| looking up, let me know and I'm glad to give you a
| pointer. Because I'm happy to give citations when people
| ask for them.
|
| The reason I put a "citation needed" in was that was
| phrased as an objective claim, not a personal opinion. An
| objective claim I believe to be false. (And which I'll
| note that the author didn't give any further data on
| despite me asking.)
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Growing up I do not remember political associations to be
| so strong in folks. Twenty years ago, when 9/11 hit, we
| put aside our differences in a remarkable display of
| national unity. (Granted, not all good came out of this;
| a number of racial groups saw a ton of negative attention
| at the time. But even with that, the climate felt like
| one of unity, at least for me.) Comedians like Trey
| Parker/Matt Stone, Dave Chapelle, even Jon Stewart and
| Stephen Colbert would regularly poke the bear on a wide
| range of social issues without constantly sparking
| nationwide outrages.
|
| Now, we have... this: an endless cacophony of unqualified
| and undeserving voices spouting off whatever they want,
| for every purpose other than advancing productive debate.
| Where all get to be heard regardless of merit, yet
| original ideas suppressed because of pedantry (like
| "citation needed") and not having the backing of the
| melange of different social issues and media idols that
| we suffer under today. I don't think the political
| climate has been so stifling since at least McCarthyism,
| and for this I blame Twitter and social media.
|
| I don't understand how you think such flowery, subjective
| language constitutes an objective statement of reality;
| all of my input into this matter is pretty clearly stated
| as opinion and observations outlined serve to reinforce
| it.
|
| Besides, sitting there banging out "Citation Needed" like
| this was fucking Wikipedia is a crass, petulant move, and
| wholly inappropriate for something as counterfactual as a
| comment board. You can save the nitpicking for
| r/AskHistorians, where the rules clearly require it.
| wpietri wrote:
| > Growing up I do not remember political associations to
| be so strong in folks.
|
| Depends on when you grew up, but assuming the 1985 is
| your birth year, then political polarization has been
| asymmetrically increasing since well before you were
| born. Take a look at the DW-NOMINATE data for the US
| House: https://xkcd.com/1127/large/
|
| This asymmetric polarization mirrors doctrinal
| polarization among white US evangelicals, who have, for
| example, gone from having a plurality of views on
| abortion to treating it as an absolute doctrinal litmus
| test:
| https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/02/18/the-
| bib...
|
| I can believe that for you personally 9/11 felt unifying,
| but that wasn't the case for a lot of people. Not just
| including the Sikhs and Muslims lynched, of course, or
| all the people who saw that and got nervous. But also the
| notable percentage of Americans opposed to the Iraq war,
| which Bush began beating the drums for just months after
| 9/11.
|
| I also believe that you perceived American culture as
| more unified then. But based on what? Twitter didn't
| launch until 2006, and didn't really take off until 2010.
| If a bunch of people were upset about something, how
| would you have known? Especially if they were in some
| group that didn't get a lot of mass media attention, you
| wouldn't have. It's not that edgy comedians were any less
| awful then. It's that the people they were being shitty
| about generally didn't get the chance to express their
| feelings on it. I think the problem you're seeing is not
| differing views, but people with those different views
| finally getting their say.
|
| > political climate has been so stifling since at least
| McCarthyism
|
| Oh? Why don't you break that down for me with some
| examples. Go through the major harms of the Red Scare era
| and then some examples of people similarly harmed today.
| I think that's wrong, but I'm happy to learn something.
|
| > was fucking Wikipedia is a crass, petulant move, and
| wholly inappropriate for something as counterfactual
|
| I don't think you quite understand what counterfactual
| means, but I think take your point. Your notion seems to
| be that this is a fact-free zone, and that it's
| shockingly rude to ask if their claims have any basis in
| fact. I obviously think that's ridiculous. If you want to
| go entirely unchallenged, maybe get a talk radio show or
| something. But as long as I've been here, asking for
| evidence has been a popular activity.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Moderators are the most terminally online and have
| nothing better to do than ban people who they disagree
| with.
|
| The latest thing that got me banned from Reddit was
| calling Ukrainians Nazis. Something every western news
| paper agreed with before the war:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ukraine-
| turns-a-...
|
| That's fine. I'm old enough to have been banned for being
| gay in the 00s too.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Makes me think it might be similar to the "I don't watch TV"
| or "movies" or "sports" crowds. Just any pervasive cultural
| activity in which some don't participate but still carry on.
|
| I remember before I deleted my FB account (I've since created
| a new one), my buddy said to me that I'd be ok, just that I
| might be strongly disconnected from culture--not necessarily
| to tell me to not do it, but to be aware of the potential
| ramifications.
| [deleted]
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I have no Facebook, Instagram, Snap, or any similar
| accounts. In casual converstation, I sometimes notice meme
| references or slang that I don't know, but that's about it.
| Not a big problem or loss IMO.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| The importance of Internet memes is overblown by the
| always-online crowd. They are cultural phenomena, but not
| knowing them doesn't confer disadvantages.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > In casual converstation, I sometimes notice meme
| references or slang that I don't know, but that's about
| it. Not a big problem or loss IMO.
|
| It would be a loss if your cohort planned/converse using
| those methods of communication, and you valued doing
| things with that cohort.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's not nearly that severe. In cases where I don't
| understand some reference, it's often clear by context.
| If not, I say "what does that mean?"
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I should have written "exclusively planned/conversed". As
| in you simply will not know about outings or get
| togethers, and so you simply will not see them.
| keyle wrote:
| Agreed partially.
|
| You have to question what "culture" are you missing on.
|
| I'm still on Facebook and let me tell you, you're not
| missing much in the culture department.
| agileAlligator wrote:
| > I'm still on Facebook and let me tell you, you're not
| missing much in the culture department.
|
| guy above you might have deleted his fb account in the
| early 2000s. right now, the culture isn't at fb, it's at
| places like reddit and 4chan.
| bootlooped wrote:
| I think I remember reading a Reddit post once about a girl
| whose boyfriend would say things in real life like "can we get
| some f's in the chat boys". Things that were clearly very niche
| and would either be completely unintelligible to the audience
| or at best sound out of place. I think it's a matter of reading
| the room.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| "F's in the chat" doesn't strike me as a particularly obscure
| meme.
| bootlooped wrote:
| If you went to some public place with a fairly
| representative sample of the population, like a supermarket
| or something, and asked 100 people about that phrase, how
| many do you think would know provenance of it?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Never heard it before. After a couple of seconds of
| pondering, I assumed it meant "females" but I can see
| from other replies that is wrong.
| suby wrote:
| It's from a Call of Duty video game. The game had a scene
| where you were at a characters funeral, and a prompt came
| up saying "Press F to Pay Respects". This was widely
| criticized and mocked by players, and it spread from
| there to be used to either legitimately convey respect or
| to sarcastically mock something.
| zach_garwood wrote:
| Never heard it. What does it mean? Is it like a Slack
| shortcut?
| djangelic wrote:
| In one of the call of duty games, you attend a funeral
| and when you reach the casket, an onscreen prompt asks
| you to press F to pay your respects. This took on a life
| of its own, and now on Reddit threads you'll see people
| saying press f to pay respects when someone was
| figuratively killed.
| zach_garwood wrote:
| Wow, okay, and they claimed it's not an obscure
| reference, but you have to have played a certain level in
| a certain game AND been on a certain forum to know what
| it means? Maybe obscure doesn't mean what I think it
| means.
| callalex wrote:
| I would argue that there is a 100:1 ratio of people who
| know know what the reference means vs. having actually
| played the game. Maybe even closer to 1,000:1. Kinda like
| how lots of people know the "World Series" is a baseball
| tournament, but most people have never watched it.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| As with most idioms, most of the people who reference it
| have no clue what the origin of the expression is.
| Knowing the etymology of something is not a requirement
| for understanding what it means.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Wow, okay, and they claimed it 's not an obscure
| reference, but you have to have played a certain level in
| a certain game AND been on a certain forum to know what
| it means?_
|
| You just had to have played that game, and the game isn't
| obscure. Call of Duty is one of the largest franchises on
| earth and I would consider it akin to something like a
| Marvel movie in popularity. If someone referenced a meme
| from a marvel movie, I wouldn't describe it as obscure.
| zach_garwood wrote:
| I've played a Call of Duty game and watched several
| Marvel movies, and no one is claiming either is obscure.
| What I am saying is that just because you hang out in
| forums where this is a common phrase does not mean it has
| exposure to the wider world. It is unknown to 99% of the
| world, by definition obscure.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I've never played that game, but the F in the chat thing
| is popular on twitch. No wonder, since it's a huge
| (nonsensical) chat platform.
| celtain wrote:
| "Break the ice" was coined by Shakespeare, but the vast
| majority of people who use the phrase probably didn't
| read that play.
|
| I'm sure there are plenty of people who have used the
| "press F" meme without knowing the original context too.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It's a popular meme so you don't have to have played the
| game or even really be much of a gamer. You'd have come
| across it at some point hanging out on social media.
| swatcoder wrote:
| You may be surprised both by
|
| 1. how many people don't "hang out" in social media
| culture, and only circulate on there with family and
| peers using everyday idioms and emoji/abbreviation; if
| they use social media at all,
|
| 2. how many different, disjoint online cultures there
| are. Many things widely circulated on reddit and adjacent
| communities may never surface on some FB mom's group
|
| People maintain much more different lives from each other
| than you seem to assume, even among those that who are
| "terminally online" or that "hang out on social media"
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I was just pointing out that knowledge of the meme wasn't
| as obscure as having actually played the game, which
| would be a much more limited audience than even just
| reddit users.
| agileAlligator wrote:
| It's pretty safe to assume that almost all of genz and
| gen alpha has come across the "F" meme at least once.
| Can't say about older folk.
| mttjj wrote:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/f-in-the-chat
| collegeburner wrote:
| i'd still consider it cringe bc it's an outdated meme that
| suggests somebody is probably a reddit user.
| cratermoon wrote:
| idk my bff jill? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nIUcRJX9-o
| jchw wrote:
| Every day that goes by, the out group of internet slang and
| memes grows smaller. I don't really know if I'd consider this
| a good thing or a bad thing so much as just, a thing. But
| there's a lot of joking amongst younger internet folk about
| how they'll probably be talking internet slang in retirement
| homes in a few decades. It's a funny visual, perhaps because
| of the weird perception that we always think we will be like
| today's older people as we grow older for some reason.
|
| Those Reddit threads make for good entertainment today,
| however fake they probably usually are. But for better or
| worse, some day, I suspect it's going to flip around.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| 20 years ago, my mother heard me use the word "hack" in a
| casual context and panicked, assuming on the basis of the
| word alone that I meant criminal activity.
|
| 2 years ago, I was walking through Target and an
| advertisement came across the store loudspeakers touting
| "Mom hacks." Nerd culture has spread.
| samatman wrote:
| This shows that nerd _language_ has spread.
|
| I would posit that the Instagram "mom hack" "lifehack"
| crowd don't associate the word with computer programming
| or pwning boxen.
| agileAlligator wrote:
| Where I am, the F meme has pretty much become part of regular
| conversation, just like "lol". Granted, I exist in urbanized
| techie gen z spaces so ymmv.
| GrabbinD33ze69 wrote:
| night-rider wrote:
| I regularly say 'n00b' in real-life, and 'pwned', pronouncing
| the 'p'
| extheat wrote:
| I disagree, the difference is still there. It's gotten a bit
| smaller, but it's still there. Some people who are perpetually
| online on forums will say things like "that's based" in real
| life, but out of a diverse group of 100 people how many do you
| think would understand and say things like that? I'd wager a
| lot of people may have heard before but probably don't
| understand what it means. There's also lots of localized real
| life slang that people on forums won't get. You still might
| hear it on Instagram or places like that, but there is no
| ubiquity there. I don't think it's changed significantly beyond
| exposure with more people being on TikTok/Instagram/YouTube and
| similar networks.
| synu wrote:
| That's true for many words, but also sometimes you meet someone
| who talks like Reddit comments or in memes and it comes across
| really strange to me. It doesn't sound like how people
| generally talk to each other in real life otherwise, at least
| in my experience.
| Shared404 wrote:
| I believe that thwe strangeness there comes in the syntax and
| conversation flow - or lack thereof. I've met people who
| speak with the cadence of a comment section in real life, if
| that makes sense.
|
| In short - I think it's not what's said, as much as how it's
| said.
| iveqy wrote:
| During the piratebay trial, one of the founders got a question
| about if he had met someone IRL. He replied with that they
| don't use that expression but AFK (away from keyboard) instead.
| Becuase IRL (in real life) suggests that internet is not real
| life, but it is.
|
| What we do online effects our every day life even when we are
| offline.
|
| I thought that was very sane thinking
| whatshisface wrote:
| When you are running the Pirate Bay the internet is real
| life, and it also is when you have a business, but when you
| are on an MMORPG or Twitter it is real life to a much lesser
| degree. How can we distinguish between them? Well, the
| majority of relationships made on MMORPGs or Twitter go
| nowhere outside the platform, and the things that people
| discuss on them also tend to not involve anything that will
| still be there when the person logs off. That creates a
| pocket universe (with a few exceptions, I think some people
| have met their spouses on MMORPGs) unrelated to the real one.
| Operating Pirate Bay, or even talking about Linux kernel
| drivers on IRC, doesn't meet that criteria of being separate
| from real life.
| leetcrew wrote:
| plenty of "real life" places also fail this test though.
| most work/school relationships don't "go anywhere" outside
| of that bubble. what fraction of people you hung out with
| in school or ate lunch with at previous jobs do you still
| actually talk to? how much of the code you wrote still runs
| in production?
| whatshisface wrote:
| Hopefully the money you make at work bleeds out into real
| life. :-) Also, I think a lot of people stay in touch
| with their college friends.
|
| Besides that, the recognition that your school or office
| is a bubble universe in certain ways sounds like an
| important one. You sound like you're attempting to refute
| the idea but I think you're making a good point. Someone
| who implicitly thought their highschool was the whole
| universe would be in bad shape when they graduated.
| coldtea wrote:
| Perhaps that was the case for him, because he was already in
| the situation discussed by the author.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I take slight issue with this one. To me, there is no
| difference between "internet slang" and just "slang". The
| internet is ubiquitous and the language we use online and
| offline is largely the same now._
|
| Some yes, otherwise you'd be surprised... In many circles and
| communities it's not the same at all - and even developments
| the 'social media'-inmates take for well known, are not a thing
| discussed at all...
|
| It's like the "silent majority" of working programmers, who
| don't give a duck about HN, Rust, the latest trends in web and
| backend, and so on...
| BbzzbB wrote:
| I live in a French speaking place and I wager vast majority
| knows these terms (am millennial) and a lot even use them here
| and there, in their English forms. Tho of course not all and
| there are "deeper" slangs that are more for people online
| enough to share some web culture.
|
| IMO, Internet slang is accurate as it transcends geography
| while there is some locality to slangs and vernacular.
| gandutraveler wrote:
| I know someone who laughs by saying LOL instead of actually
| laughing. So there is a difference between slang and internet
| slang.
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| yeah my 13 year old brother occasionally does that too
| xwdv wrote:
| I heard someone loudly exclaim L O L at tech conference one
| time in real life and it just made me want to kick their ass.
| I had a low opinion of that person immediately.
| jacobmischka wrote:
| Seems like they're not the most immature one in this
| situation.
| gaws wrote:
| What do you expect from a user who claims to be "fighting
| for my life in the comments almost daily" on HN? el-oh-
| el.
| layer8 wrote:
| This needs a companion article "How to stop typing in lowercase
| only".
| cratermoon wrote:
| Simply quitting social media is the wrong response to the
| problems of the attention economy. Wrong also is adopting
| "calming" practices while uncritically embracing the ethos of
| social media companies. Resistance requires examining,
| questioning, and changing the underlying economic forces driving
| Silicon Valley.
|
| Publicly declaring abstention from social media demonstrates the
| abstainer's privilege and taste more than it does any higher
| purpose. The point is to be intentional about our attention, and
| decide what to focus on and how to do it. This requires
| discipline and planning.Discussions of the problems with social
| media must question the driving neoliberal economics, consumerism
| and the Free Market Fairy. Suggesting individuals should choose
| to abstain comes from a point of view where individual choice is
| elevated to moral dogma.
|
| Social media profits from human fallibility. Maintaining those
| profits under the pressures of capitalism requires the business
| to make people feel worse, and then offering them a palliative.
| In some respects, it's like the indulgences of the Catholic
| church in Martin Luther's time. The supposed values of social
| media in connecting and informing people, building communities,
| providing a medium of self-expression are warped by profit
| incentives. They no longer help. Instead, they exacerbate
| negativity. Social media have a vested interest in making things
| worse, or at less making them seem so.
| b3nji wrote:
| Why does it feel that more and more people aren't not using
| capital letters anymore? What is this, a trend, some kind of
| movement?
| zach_garwood wrote:
| e e cummings would be proud!
| derefr wrote:
| > find a hobby // i don't mean this derisively, i promise. if you
| use social media to kill time, try putting that time into
| something else - maybe something you've always wanted to do.
| always wanted to cook? look up a recipe and start.
|
| I believe the author (and many other people giving this advice)
| are naive to the difference between "free time with mental energy
| to burn" -- where a hobby is definitely the right answer -- and
| "free time where you've already used all your mental energy for
| the day."
|
| 50 years ago, someone who was mentally drained by evening-time
| would be "vegetating in front of the TV." Today they're
| "doomscrolling." In both cases it's not that they're addicted to
| a certain behavior, but rather that this behavior is one of the
| only pastimes available to them in their current environmental
| context that can be executed when fully cognitively fatigued, and
| yet not tired enough to sleep.
|
| I say "in their current environmental context" because living in
| certain places (e.g. most cities, suburbs) limits your options.
| In more rural areas, you can just go out for a long walk in
| nature, or spontaneously go fishing. In communities that are
| safe, walkable, and socially well-connected, you can go to a
| {cafe, park, mall, bar, community centre, church, ...} and run
| into friends rather than strangers, and just hang out shooting
| the breeze until you get tired. But many people alive today are
| in environments where they have none of those options. They have
| to come up with a braindead pastime that can be done both _alone_
| and _indoors_. We didn't evolve to do well in this situation!
| Anything you pick is going to end up not being very good for you!
|
| (Before anyone suggests "reading" -- you're underestimating the
| level of cognitive fatigue many people reach. If you have enough
| mental energy at the end of the day to concentrate on reading a
| _good book_ and getting the full effect of it -- as opposed to
| having a good book just slide past you, or reading "junk food"
| op-ed blogposts -- that's great for you, but that amount of
| mental energy would also be sufficient to cook or practice an
| instrument. Reading -- the kind that actually enriches your mind
| -- is a hobby, not a pastime!)
| thenerdhead wrote:
| These are great questions. The process of introspection can lead
| to many new discoveries beyond internet addiction. Why are you
| the way you are? Why are you in the career you chose? Why are you
| living the life you live today?
|
| Not that you should overly become self-aware, but when you are
| aware of something you are or do without knowing previously, you
| can change your life in a positive way.
|
| Some of my favorite reads this year about the topic of the
| internet are:
|
| Four arguments for the elimination of television
|
| and
|
| Amusing ourselves to death
|
| These are great books to help you introspect on your technology
| habits.
| lostNFound wrote:
| At 21 I've only recently started asking myself those questions,
| after having been "pushed" into a coding career due to some
| strange life circumstances, when I was actually interested in
| finance and medicine before. When I got promoted to Sr,
| colleagues going "wow, only 21", it felt good, and I never even
| stopped to ask myself if I really wanted it.
|
| In a lot of senses, introspection and thinking hurts; growing
| hurts, regrets hurt, dreams unfulfilled hurt, guilt hurts, what
| could've been hurt, and the future that awaits you, unless you
| change something, hurts.
|
| And distraction numbs the pain. Numbs the thoughts. I'll take
| an uneducated guess that a big chunk of cases of anxiety and
| depression are not caused by chemical imbalances, and are
| simply people's brains telling them "you're doing something
| wrong, correct course! Correct course! Correct course!". Kind
| of like the aircraft TCAS/GPWS "Terrain. Pull. Up. Pull. Up.
| _Terrain. Terrain. Terrain_ "
|
| I guess that most people, both around me and online, _never_
| ask themselves those questions, and simply go through life as
| it happens. For _some_ , that doesn't go so bad.
|
| Almost never does a successful, happy, fulfilled, healthy life
| come from a lack of introspection and suffering. "I carry the
| wounds from the battles I avoided".
| thenerdhead wrote:
| You're a very self-aware individual.
|
| I think there are many lessons in stoicism, taoism, and
| buddhism that have helped me understand these concepts on an
| individual level. Here's an excerpt from a book I'm writing
| about this topic:
|
| - Through Stoicism I found a sense of moderation, seeing the
| world for what it is and what it is not, and focusing on what
| I can control and having contempt for that which I cannot.
|
| - Through Taoism I had learned to let softness overcome the
| hard, appreciate my uselessness, and to flow along when
| appropriate.
|
| - Through Buddhism I had learned that my attachment would
| lead to suffering, appreciating the present moment, and how a
| trained mind leads to true happiness.
|
| I believe that pain doesn't leave the body until it's done
| teaching you. I know it's not the most sensitive thing to
| say, but after a complete year of crippling depression, I
| felt it lift once I understood what it was trying to teach
| me.
| lostNFound wrote:
| Thanks. I'm just starting on a long road of self
| improvement which began this month, after a metaphorical
| train of realizations (in the shape of sudden
| depression/anxiety) regarding my life hit me once my
| girlfriend left me and explained why she did.
|
| Those 3 points about those disciplines are really
| interesting, I'm going to have to read more about them.
|
| >I believe that pain doesn't leave the body until it's done
| teaching you.
|
| I've slowly been coming to the same conclusion over the
| last month, indeed.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > I'll take an uneducated guess that a big chunk of cases of
| anxiety and depression are not caused by chemical imbalances,
| and are simply people's brains telling them "you're doing
| something wrong, correct course!
|
| I've seen people educated in the field saying the same thing.
| Depression is nature's way to prod you to make a change in
| your life. Something isn't working. So you're probably not
| wrong, at least for some fraction of cases.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| This is what I believe. I wrote a book about it. A year of
| depression suddenly went away when I started to embrace my
| purpose further.
| ramigb wrote:
| Beautifully written with a lot of thought provoking paragraphs. I
| am a web developer who is working from home, also I make music in
| my free time and play online games. I relate highly to what was
| written but I don't see a way out unfortunately, at least not
| without shifting careers which is something I am not planning to
| do in the meantime.
| ZetaRicky wrote:
| The author mentioning "based" and "cringe" reminded me that meme
| culture ages poorly while endlessly recycling the same
| tropes/jokes. Eight years ago the dichotomy was "dank"-"normie",
| and Impact was used with way less meta-irony.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I recently re-read the first few verses of the LOLCat Bible[1].
| It did not hold up well.
|
| 1
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190327161227/http://www.lolcat...
| ben_w wrote:
| One more option to complement the rest: what I do is have the
| cheapest, smallest, mobile data package that lets me get done the
| stuff I actually value (3 GB/month, turning my commute into a
| focused time for various online learning courses).
|
| There's _some_ spare bandwidth for habitually chatting, but not
| much.
| oppofew wrote:
| I had a similar wakeup call a couple of years back.
|
| I'd become really invested in online communities on Twitter,
| Reddit and Discord. Like others participating, I was becoming
| increasingly radicalised to the dominant group opinions there,
| and my world view was being gradually reshaped by every
| interaction with these echo chambers. I was repeating what I read
| there to friends and family offline, much to their bemusement. It
| was addictive and consuming!
|
| My trigger point for escaping this was unintentional. These
| happened to be a series of 'left-wing' online spaces (though what
| I'm about to write could occur anywhere really), and I was
| becoming increasingly internally critical of some of the dogma.
| After a certain incident on Reddit, where a moderator of a high-
| profile subreddit was banned site-wide for linking to a critical
| article about a Reddit admin, I posed a question on the Discord:
| what if this admin wasn't really what they say they are?
|
| The reaction was swift and fierce - people I'd talked nicely and
| comradely with for months and years lining up to shout down my
| question, calling it offensive, sending me insults, calling me a
| bigot. I was then banned from the server.
|
| This surprised and upset me to begin with, but then I started
| questioning myself and my motivations. Why was I so bothered
| about this? Why had I invested so much of my time and energy into
| these communities? Why would simply asking a question cause such
| a calamity? Did any of this really matter? Was engaging with any
| of this having a positive effect on anyone, including myself?
|
| Over time, this led to two major changes in how I approached
| using the internet. Firstly, attempting to broaden my mind to
| consider other views and opinions, avoiding dogma and narrow
| thinking (this is still in progress!). Secondly, not being as
| tied to accounts and identities online - I deleted or deactivated
| all my social media accounts, and now just create throwaways
| whenever I get a desire to comment. This helps me feel that I can
| walk away whenever I want to or need to.
|
| That said, I've found I still can't give up entirely on consuming
| social media, it's too addictive. But I hope this is a step in
| the right direction.
|
| I hope my sharing of these insights provides some value to others
| who may be experiencing similar.
| cousin_it wrote:
| I think the internet has accelerated the evolution of "mind
| viruses". New arguments and rhetorical tricks arise and mutate
| very fast. If you jump off it, that'll be good for you, but when
| you get back on after a long time, you might have no "immune
| defense" against what the internet came up with in the meantime.
| Similar to how the USSR was outside Western cultural evolution
| for awhile, and when it broke up in the 90s, people turned out
| very vulnerable to colorful ads, bubblegum and Ponzi schemes.
|
| Maybe the fear of such "falling off the wagon" is part of what
| keeps us on the internet. We don't want to lose the world's
| thread of conversation, because in the end one way or another it
| will affect us anyway. It's like not coming to the forum where
| future laws are decided.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| I don't know if you're aware of this, but this "mind virus" is
| the original definition of the word "meme" (before it got
| adopted to mean a particular kind of image-based online joke).
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
|
| Besides that, I agree completely. Twitter is a sort of highly
| competitive petri dish in which only the most infectious
| viruses can survive, with "viruses" being 160 character pieces
| of text. These messages do not need to be true or actually
| informative to survive and spread.
| puttycat wrote:
| I have struggled with Internet addiction, and still do, for a
| long time, and so far the only thing that has helped to
| dramatically reduce usage time was the Firefox/Chrome extension
| News Feed Eradicator [1]. I didn't realize to what degree news
| feeds were attention black holes until I installed it. I still go
| often on social media, but thanks to this extension these visits
| now last a few seconds, to check messages and some specific
| people I check regularly. I highly recommend it.
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-
| era...
| Clubber wrote:
| So would you categorize it as "news" addiction rather than
| internet addiction? I put quotes around news because today's
| news isn't really news, just over dramatization of current
| events, IMO.
|
| I select "not interested/don't recommend channel" on all "news"
| type stuff on YouTube, and it's a much better experience. I
| learn more about all kinda stuff that I'm interested in. It
| took a few weeks for it all to filter out, but YouTube has a
| bunch of interesting stuff that's not news/current events
| related.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| Buried deep within the post there is self-platform shilling, lol.
|
| "Why not use our social media webshit instead? We are different,
| I promise".
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I think barring especially extreme cases this is just the
| "television is ruining the world" of our generation. I'd describe
| myself as terminally online as I spend most of my time using the
| internet in some form.
|
| Regarding use of internet slang, there's the fact that the Covid
| lockdowns helped accelerate a pretty massive shift in how we
| interact even with people we can meet in-person. Unless you're
| living with someone, the bulk of interactions with them are
| probably going to be online. Then, since you're online you end up
| using internet slang, which gradually bleeds into regular speech.
| There is nothing wrong with this.
|
| There's also the issue that you're going to want to share your
| hobbies with people, which is hard without the internet if your
| hobby is kind of niche. Most of my hobbies are very niche, I have
| only ever known 1 person irl and 3 people online who had a
| similar enough set of hobbies. Even programming and working with
| electronics, which started as a hobby for me when I was 13-14,
| only developed because of the ability to find like-minded people
| online, away from my irl 'friend' group who only saw it as
| something to make fun of me for and parents who didn't believe in
| anything but schoolwork and perfect grades.
|
| Overall, this post seems to be based on the assumption that
| people who are terminally online haven't put thought into their
| lives or that it's wrong to be okay with it. I can still unplug
| when having an interaction irl which I think is sufficiently
| important like with family (although somewhat ironically, the
| only way for me to interact with my family over the past 2 years
| was over the internet), but simultaneously, most of the people I
| enjoy talking to and can deeply relate to are only accessible
| online.
|
| I get the impression that to the author, "terminally online" is
| equivalent to being someone who spends all their time getting
| into heated political arguments on Reddit and Twitter. While I
| did go through that phase too, I realized how unhappy it was
| making me and the solution wasn't disconnecting but rather
| identifying sources of bad content and disengaging. I got rid of
| all the default subs on Reddit, sticking only to ones related to
| my hobbies and being very selective about following more subs,
| same with Twitter. I also got much more selective about replying
| to things (eg I'll usually just ignore replies to my posts which
| I feel might devolve into an argument). The result was that the
| content that made me "ragescroll" went away and I got happier.
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