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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

My 16-year-old self had to catch a bus and a train to get to a reference library in order to answer any but the most trivial questions.

My 20-year-old self got 90%+ of the information I needed to succeed from the internet. I taught myself coding, 3D graphics, game development, rendering, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

My present-day self still relies on the internet for a huge percentage of my information, and you know what? Having done it both ways, it's far more efficient and far more effective than catching a bus to the library.

Maybe you meant 'stay off Facebook'?

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IMHO it is not the Internet that's the problem. The constant connectivity is killing productivity.

Every morning I used to start my day with reading HN, on the bus to school I surfed the web. At uni, on every break I used to take out my phone and browse some more. After school I binge-watched TV shows and surfed more. My attention span got so divided that I couldn't concentrate watching a single episode, I constantly switched to a browser to surf more.

I learned a lot about programming, but my personal life suffered.

I couldn't meet deadlines, couldn't study for uni (studying law).

In the end I concluded that I had developed something like an internet addiction.

Furthermore, it wasn't just limited to internet. I stopped changing clothes, stopped keeping my already cluttered room in a somewhat liveable standard, stopped caring for my health, ate a lot of junk food, got hooked to TV-Shows.

Now, instead of constant short bursts of divided internet surfing, I am trying to set out a time for surfing. And outside those hours, I go offline.

It has been a though switch, but I slowly feel that I'm getting my impulse control back.

I recently started reading Deep Work by Cal Newport, I can recommend it to anyone trying to get off the vicious cycle.

Wow, good post!

I've also started to disconnect. I also find my productivity far higher without the Internet. Sometimes just a notebook and a pen are more than sufficient, and I can get some serious work done, manipulating equations, drawing diagrams, documenting ideas, even coding!

Although here I find myself, on Hacker News....

EDIT: This might be what I find troubling about Elon Musk's Neuralink project... I already find it very useful to disconnect from my "digital neocortex" (i.e. social media, Google, Youtube, Wikipedia, etc) to get work done... With a higher bandwidth connection that goes even directly to my limbic system and produces a more compelling experience than reality itself can... Would I just be stuck in a high tech opium den with no will to leave?

My main point is: Don't go online without a purpose. It's fine to use the Internet as a resource when you need it. Mindlessly consuming information, however, is not and I think it is more harmful then many people realize.

Likewise, it's only when you're hungry that your body is telling you what you need (e.g. you crave for some vitamins, something salty or meat ...) . If you're munching all day (no matter whether it's good food or junk food) then you don't get hungry and you don't really know what your body needs and chances are you have eaten more than what's healthy.

Do you realize that this is general advice? The exact thing you are proposing we avoid.

Yes, I see how it may come across as general advice. This may sounds delusional but I believe (which of course means I could be way off) that what I've described in my original post is rather a universal rule than advice. However, people who read what I've written will probably not get anything out of it because it's not what they need right now. It's just that what I've criticized: another bit of information to congest their brain with.

This reminds me of the 80s when my teenage self also had to get the bus to the library to borrow dusty old books on BASIC from its darkest secluded corners that were frequented by almost no-one besides by other dorks and the occasional weirdo looking for an entirely different type of entertainment.

I find that books are still a far superior way to reach proficiency in almost anything, technology included. The Internet certainly has many good features for learning things, but I'm not sure efficiency is currently one of them.

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