A tech addict who works in the tech industry | Hacker News Reader

A tech addict who works in the tech industry

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103 pointswallflower68 comments

I've always wondered if my form of computer use constitutes "addiction."

When I first got a computer in the house, I guess it was '92, I spent an inordinate amount of time reading stuff on the encyclopedia disks and using mac paint. When we got the internet in 95 or so, it was the same but on an entirely different level - geocities sites about everything, car forums, etc... Fast forward twenty years and I spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet...reading. Mostly I read science articles, CS/ML papers, wikipedia articles and watch videos from PBS, nerdwriter, 3blue1brown and the like, but I also comment here and on twitter, and surf memes on reddit.

I'm certain it's at an "unhealthy" level, but at the same time it feels like it's productive because it's about stuff I'm interested in and work. I find a lot of the reading and things consumed are useful and inform my other daily life and work so when you look at what addiction generally means its basically: "Negatively Interferes with life."

Maybe it would be considered addictive, but I've built my life around this way of doing things and it seems to be working out great, I suspect a lot of techies are like this too.

If you think about it, even obsession is very different to addiction. The key tenant of addiction is that it interferes with your life.

Doesn't "obsession" usually carry the connotation of "unhealthy obsession?" It's only in already begning contexts like work environments that it carries a more neutral tone. The first thing that popped into my mind was Ahab and his whale.

You'd be hard pushed to find any activity that doesn't interfere with your life occasionally.

The worst things with regards to potential for unhealthy use, IMO, are passive feeds which require no effort on the user’s part. These simply become a timedraining habit. Reddit, HN, YouTube, any social media.

How does the word 'unhealthy' apply here? How many people spend several hours a day watching TV shows? Or pinning 'new' butterflies to a board. Or 'obsessively' drawing cartoons?

Many people have limited options in life. I grew up in a small northern town with very limited options. I collected stamps all winter. Was that 'unhealthy'? Because I learned some world history, did that 'redeem' it from 'unhealthiness'?

As soon as I got to college, the stamp-collecting ended. HOWEVER... I also learned -organization of large amounts of random information-. Guess where that led (hint: it wasn't 'unhealthy')

I was using the word in a metaphorical sense. Also, you mentioned positive activities. I was referring to passive activities which can become “unhealthy” in the sense that the formed habits, which can in the extreme interfere with life, outweigh the information gleaned.

No, what you experience is not addiction. You are able to get your work done on time. You don't fail to handle basic life responsibilities due to internet use. You are enjoying yourself. As an internet addict, I get little joy out of most of my computer use.

How do you distinguish between addicted, and depressed and coping? Because nobody seems to be trying too hard to distinguish the two, and a lot of the time classify the latter as a subset of the former, which might be reasonable except that the two cases surely require different interventions.

One criterium for a psychological disorder is that it "must also lead to serious impairment in functioning that limits or interferes with one or more major life activities."

>Fast forward twenty years and I spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet...reading. Mostly I read science articles, CS/ML papers, wikipedia articles and watch videos from PBS, nerdwriter, 3blue1brown and the like, but I also comment here and on twitter, and surf memes on reddit.

Here's an exercise that's likely only useful once you are older than a certain age:

Look at all the time you spent in these activities in your life. Then ask: What have you achieved by it? Was it worth all that time? If you had spent only 60% of the time on it, what could you have done with the remaining 40%? Beyond a certain point, you run into diminishing returns.

I'm an information junkie too, and I occasionally use this to keep me grounded. I love learning new technologies, but how often do I apply them? How often is my goal to apply them, but I never start (or complete) because I go off and learn other things?

When you hit 35 (or 40, or 45) you may start thinking that there's no end to the knowledge you want to gain, and if you continue as you've always have, then your rate of progress will be the same till you die. That's quite OK if there is nothing else in life you want to achieve, but you really should ask yourself:

Are there things in life (unrelated to learning/reading) I want to do that I keep neglecting? Am I OK if I never get around to it?

When I think these things, I have a few guidelines:

1. I don't count knowledge I've gained as progress. I think of how that knowledge has meaningfully helped me, to the point that it is externally noticeable. The amount I've learned is no longer a metric for me. It's just that monkey that's trying to make me feel good. Don't give that monkey a chance!

2. When I read a nonfiction book, over 80% is forgotten within months. I promised myself a few years ago that I'll take notes, and put them on a blog, so I can review the book later on. This really slowed things down - I probably read only a fifth of the books I normally would. It is depressing at times, but so is realising that I've spent a lot of my life reading books that ultimately were of no use to me, even though they contained a ton of useful material. In retrospect, it was more entertainment than utility, and fiction is a much better way to entertain myself. If I just want to chill and relax, I'll read fiction.

3. At the beginning of 2018, I made a "Do-not-do" list. I wanted to focus on a few things, and did not want to get distracted. Most of the "do-not-do" list was technology related. I picked 1 or 2 that I hoped to do, and promised myself everything else on the list will be verboten until I accomplish the ones in the TODO. Sadly, I didn't consult that list throughout the year. I don't even know how well I did. I did keep the principle in my head, though, and actively forced myself to stop when tempted often during the year, so I'm sure I didn't do too poorly.

4. Keith Ferrazzi has a nice exercise that I never tried, but should. It's called the Personal Success Wheel. The basic idea is to separate your life into a bunch of categories. Examples: Professional growth, relationships, intellectual stimulation, physical health, spirituality, etc.

Then figure out how much time you want to spend on each. Assuming disjoint sets, the fractions should add up to 100%. For each category, split it up into concrete activities. Now comes the challenging part: Say you put 30% for intellectual stimulation. In a given month, that's 9 days. If you look at all the concrete activities you've listed for intellectual stimulation (e.g. learn Haskell, read tech blog, etc), how many have you listed? Say you've listed 9. So that means you can spend on average one day a month on that activity. That probably won't sound like much to you. Using his "wheel" keeps you honest about how much time you can spend on an activity, and how thin you'll end up being spread out. Likely then you'll prioritise and simply cut out lower value time gobblers. It's probably better to spend 3 or 4 days a month on something than one day.

I wrote the above from my memory, but here's a link from his site (I did not reread to see how well it matches my memory):

http://blog.mygreenlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/6-St...

Yea I'm 35 and I'm basically trying to figure this out.

It's hard because I end up using a lot of my casual reading in life and at work, so in that sense it has meaningfully helped.

So I think it comes down to deciding to make some some kind of life optimization around a bigger goal. I'm not sure I want to make that right now because I enjoy the information binging for it's own sake. I just did a startup where I was definitely not doing any info binging, and am in a cool down phase so I'm doing it more.

It's a good thought and an interesting approach though so thanks for writing that all out.

>It's hard because I end up using a lot of my casual reading in life and at work, so in that sense it has meaningfully helped.

So do I. However, ask yourself the following:

1. (For work) Do your peers who perform as well or better than you do spend as much as time as you do learning?

2. If you were to randomly throw away 30% of the knowledge you've read (keeping in mind you probably didn't retain it anyway) how much would it hurt your work/life?

3. (For work) Do people in other disciplines (or even ones not too far removed from yours) do fine/well at work without putting in all the effort you have?

I'm a SW developer, and mostly self-taught. I studied engineering in school and took only two programming courses, and mostly non-computer related courses. I do well because I have strong interests in computers. So I can certainly relate. Yet, all that time and knowledge has not given me a particularly great advantage. The idea isn't to stop doing it all together. It is that you're likely well beyond the peak benefit of learning - and the limiting factor in career/life are things you may be neglecting. You can probably afford to cut back some percentage on the knowledge and focus on other things.

And of course: If you value learning that much, there's nothing wrong with dedicating your life to it. I love it a lot, but I also do have other interests and goals that tend to get sabotaged. I know that if I wake up tomorrow at 55 with only my knowledge to show for it, I'll be very unhappy.

> the Personal Success Wheel. The basic idea is to separate your life into a bunch of categories. Examples: Professional growth, relationships, intellectual stimulation, physical health, spirituality, etc

I tried a variant of this combined with journalling; the idea was simply to write down each week what I'd done to advance my goals in each category. It's quite an effective tool for avoiding over-focus and unbalanced life.

> Am I OK if I never get around to it?

This is definitely an important and difficult one to wrestle with as we age. After a while you're probably never going to get around to everything - and that's OK.

OK, knowledge isn't progress. Why is anything else progress? Nothing lasts forever, is nothing progress?

Progress is whatever you want it to be.

For me, I delist it as progress because I feel I'm at the "diminishing returns" point. Extra knowledge isn't really doing anything for me beyond feeding an addiction.

If I had $10B, I wouldn't consider getting another $10M as progress. There are many who would, but not me. I would ask myself "I'm putting the effort to get $10M. What is that $10M going to do for me?"

Do you often wish that you had spent your time in another way? For example you want to start working out or spend more time with your friends but instead you just end up in front of the computer.

Does the rest of your life suffer by you sitting in front of the computer a lot? Your job, your relationships, your house/apartment, your plans for your future?

You might find a lot of people like this on HN. In fact I thought I was reading my own biography when you started mentioning the years.

The way I think of it, it's a slightly productive addiction. I keep a track of things that interest me, but are work related. So finance and coding topics mainly. And the inevitable economics/society stuff that's very broad.

But it helps a lot with my work. No one particular thing is super useful, but it's useful to know what kinds of things are floating around. If you're a tech person, you probably have a specific focus, but you need to know what else is out there. So that might be machine learning, serverless computing, or some language you never use at work.

Yeah ... you bet we're like that.

I'd bet that, back in the days of Oog, there were gals & guys who were always chipping away at rocks trying to make better spear-points. Even though the people around them were fat from feasting. For the edge cases.

And then there were people always trying to make better pictures of the universe, even though all that ever led to was better understanding of the Big Mystery. (Isaac Roberts famously imaging Andromeda in 1888.) (Who could ever care about that?) Or Prof. Goddard and his stupid rockets.

And it's too bad that people who started exploring solid-state electronics back in the mid-1800s (like Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1874, or H. J. Round in 1907) didn't get 'addicted' to playing with them. We might have skipped vacuum tubes completely if they had. Everyone's loss.

Some of us are cut out to obsessively explore the unknown, some aren't. Karl Jansky, for example, stumbled onto radio astronomy, but showed little interest in the topic afterward. Just not cut out. Grote Reber WAS cut out, but his efforts were largely ignored until decades later. Everyone's loss.

'Should' you feel better about learning about computers, or would you get more social approval by obsessing about the private lives of dozens of celebrities?

Most people seem to do what they like with their free time, and don't worry about whether it has any value. So, who's a fit judge of what 'addictive behavior' is? ( And why are they so obsessed with other people's behavior anyway?)

I find the definition of addiction by mainstream media really weird too.

I was addicted to games at one point, then to partying, then to soccer.

Partying 3 times a week has affected other areas in my life a lot more than gaming, my life basically disappeared outside of partying/recovery; and soccer has lead to many injuries, some permanent.

Yet I don't see people calling out people addicted to partying, or to sports. It's almost as if those editors/writers are seeing the world through their own limited/biased lenses.

When you say partying/recovery do you mean heavy drinking/recovery?

There is definitely a concept of "overtraining" in sport, and people do talk about it being caused by an addiction to exercise (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtraining#Cause, https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/the-dangers-of-exercise-a...). It's a problem because it results in a lack of progress (e.g. it's hard to build fitness/strength when overtrained), and it increases a person's susceptibility to injuries.

Strava even has a built in feature to warn users if they appear to be overtraining (I think you need a heart rate monitor though, and possibly the paid version too).

But I would guess that this isn't well-known amongst the general public, since it doesn't affect much of the population - most people live sedentary lives and overtraining/exercise addiction is only a problem for a subset of active people.

I presume by "partying" you mean "drinking", otherwise there wouldn't be much recovery involved. In which case that's an addition that is well-known and often talked about.

While a fashionable self-diagnosis, actual overtraining is essentially impossible for the average person to do. They’ll end up with soreness or other minor injuries that will prevent exercise before actual overtraining sets in.

While I agree with your sentiment I believe that body builders and strength trainers do experience this as they reach semi(pro) levels. It is extremely hard to do and is often an incorrect self-diagnosis. Please let me know if there has been some research on occurrence rates.

Semi-pro athletes aren’t average people.

What definition are you using? Wikipedia:

Overtraining occurs when a person exceeds their body's ability to recover from strenuous exercise.

This is not hard to do. The average person will recover at a slower pace than an athlete. Many dedicated people underestimate how much food is required (very common in professional athletes too). But more common among average people I'd guess is overtraining certain parts of your body, because it isn't hard at all.

I think he is using a definition closer to the one used in this paper:

>Athletes experience minor fatigue and acute reductions in performance as a consequence of the normal training process. When the balance between training stress and recovery is disproportionate, it is thought that overreaching and possibly overtraining may develop. However, the majority of research that has been conducted in this area has investigated overreached and not overtrained athletes. Overreaching occurs as a result of intensified training and is often considered a normal outcome for elite athletes due to the relatively short time needed for recovery (approximately 2 weeks) and the possibility of a supercompensatory effect. As the time needed to recover from the overtraining syndrome is considered to be much longer (months to years), it may not be appropriate to compare the two states. It is presently not possible to discern acute fatigue and decreased performance experienced from isolated training sessions, from the states of overreaching and overtraining. This is partially the result of a lack of diagnostic tools, variability of results of research studies, a lack of well controlled studies and individual responses to training.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00007256-200434140...

So it is not the normal aches or reduced performance you get from training a lot in a short time, sleeping too little or anything like that.

Probably something closer to RED-S: http://insights.annaboniface.com/post/102eqza/the-red-s-flag...

While a fashionable self-diagnosis, actual overtraining is essentially impossible for the average person to do.

That isn't true. Overtraining can really be thought of as under-recovering, and if you aren't getting enough sleep it can set in after a week or so, on a training load that you could otherwise have managed.

I knew a regular looking, young woman (mid 20s) who had both her knees give up from running too many miles a day. Just snapped. Required extensive surgery and she lost some mobility / dexterity whatever you wanna call it even after recovery.

That is a knee injury not overtraining.

Yes you can, and you don't need to be sport professional

https://medium.com/@ericrobertson/crossfits-dirty-little-sec...

"Self harm" is my catch all phrase. Addiction, neglect, denial, etc. are all just facets.

If by partying you mean clubbing, possibly with drugs, I think it’s fairly common for people to get super into it at first and then gradually pull back. But I suppose it’s usually presented as an underlying addiction to whatever drugs rather than the whole alternate lifestyle.

In the UK injuries from football (soccer) are a significant reason for time off work I believe.

This may sound silly but I think I have my first Macbook to thank for removing me from the world of addictive gaming.

If I wasn't gaming, I was reading or watching movies. Like the person in this article, I would ignore friends and largely spent much of my childhood and teenage years alone. It's hurt my ability to relate and converse with people. I don't know if it's the main reason for my depression and social anxiety diagnosis but there does seem to be a correlation if not causation.

I ultimately stopped my serious gaming when I moved completely into the Apple ecosystem. Nothing ran well and those that did weren't in the genre I was interested in. It was a roadblock.

That didn't do anything for the other aspects of internet consumption (which I'm still working on) but one down, a few more to go.

I can totally see that. Once I went to college, I stopped watching TV because my roommate and I were both too lazy to get one for the dorm room. I haven’t had cable since (5 years later).

> That didn't do anything for the other aspects of internet consumption (which I'm still working on)

Have you considered getting internet service from CenturyLink?

Also, my strategy for progressive change in habits is to make a simple pair of lists, which I call “do(s)” and “don’t(s)”. Every day just focus on avoiding the don’ts. If time allows and you are willing, do a do, so to speak. After ~8 months (anecdotal) you will kick the bad habits and hopefully replace them with better ones.

I had the same experience. I got badly into League of Legends in 2009 and don’t think I’d have weaned myself off of it as quickly if I didn’t buy a used MBP in 2010.

God, my roommate punched a hole in our wall when he lost once back in college. That’s the behavior of an addict, I assume. Then of course he paid our greedy landlord who demanded the whole apt be repainted.

I got into League of Legends pretty bad as well. Unfortunately for me, the MacBook Air I got in 2013 ran the game on low settings perfectly in OSX.

This is a nice subtle side effect of owning Apple.

- non tech friends stop asking you for tech advice once you have a MacBook because people assume you're dumb as a door knob carrying apple products.

- you rarely from them once you advise someone to buy an apple product because things generally work in the ecosystem.

And let's not forget that Apple premium leaving you with little more left to spend.

No doubt. Current price increases may be unsustainable.

Only extremely competitive insecure gadget geeks think only dummies use Apple.

I used Windows + Linux heavily until Vista came out and it forced me to Apple to run XP, ironically.

The most popular Apple devices, iPhone + iPad are designed for the average user in the masses first, and not the power user. One is a much larger group of sales.

Most of the non-tech people I know with an iPhone do so because "it just works" and they "aren't very good with tech". A lot of these users buy an Apple laptop for an overpriced but reliable web browser, again for ease of use and not being a power user, and not having to fight with a historical windows OS that will slow to a crawl.

It's the same people that before an iPhone would have a window laptop and always be asking for help with it. I think a segment of these users are being well served by chromebooks too.

I've been attempting to do this by weening myself off onto Linux dual booting so I can get more things done. Unfortunately I find so many issues with UI/UX that I just get tired of looking at it and fiddling with countless distributions. I never considered a Mac for the same purpose.

The most productive I've ever been was when I had a junk HP laptop with only Arch and no internet at home.

I switched to linux in 2010 for this reason. Removed my dual boot this year. Unfortunately curiosity and boredom got the better of me and I was able to get Star Craft 2 running in wine recently.

Hm, I guess games don’t work that well without a graphics card? On a desktop computer you could physically remove it so you’d have to plug it back in when you want to play games.

Funny thread of comments with all the ways people go about things! Here’s one, perhaps: do nothing. Set a timer on your phone, then just lie down and close your eyes and do nothing until the timer is over. Could even satisfy your information desires by mulling over old information to think of new things or remembering forgotten information!

I have some bad news for you then...

Valve has made it easier than ever to run some Windows-only games on Linux with Steam Play, which uses a special version of Wine with better graphics support.

It has been hit-or-miss for me when I wander off of the pre-approved game list, but it does make it easier.

Someone else said it's an addiction if it interferes with your life.

But for me, it's all my life is really.

I don't have friends, relationships, etc. and haven't since I was a teenager (I'm in my thirties now). As such I don't have hobbies or whatever.

I just go to work (programmer) and come home and browse reddit, hn, youtube, etc. until the next day.

I can relate. I was in a similar place. Just know it can get better.

Best thing I ever did was find a therapist that I really clicked with. The accountability and lack of judgement really helped me make progress.

And a bit of progress can be really encouraging.

Support is really important. I wouldn't have made it on my own. My email is in my profile, so please don't hesitate to use it.

Before prescribing something that is "better" you might want to find out if the OP considers their situation worth improving. I can't find any hints on if they are happy or unhappy about it.

I get that you are acting in good faith, but at the same time I get the feeling you consider the OP to be in "a sad place" based on nothing but social norms.

based on biological norms - humans are not wired for that kind of life.

I wouldn't be wired for that kind of life either, but the only thing that allows me to make that statement is my own experience as an individual. Which does not apply to anyone else but me.

50 years ago many people would have told you that homosexuality is not something people are wired for based on biological norms. Luckily, this has changed.

Maybe you have never made the experience yourself, but being told you need to change something about yourself that you are happy with just because it is not "normal" is a pretty terrible thing.

Yeah, I don't want to come across like that.

We threw out what we were wired for 12,000 years ago when we developed agriculture.

It's a disorder if it interferes with your life. It's an addiction if you are unable to separate yourself from an (external) source of disorder (like alcohol). (We don't say people with internaly manifested neurochemical/ behavioral disoi rders (depression, OCD) are addicted to their imbalances)

What would you like to see changed about that situation?

I think the second question after interference is if you're happy. I can't fathom having the social life I had in my 20s. I rarely see anyone except my girlfriend and cats. I'm happier than I've ever been... mostly due to a few years of therapy. Turns out too much people qualifies as an addiction for me. It stresses me out, feeds itself, and makes me anxious and sad.

I'm gonna go unrepentantly watch youtube and pet a cat now.

Tech addiction is one of my biggest worries as a parent. I spent a huge amount of time playing Civilization, Doom, FIFA, and so on. Years later I spend a lot of time on WoW.

Nowadays games are even more addictive. You can play online. You can customize your character. And there's now 25 more years of advances in discovering what makes people hooked. I'm already seeing my kid's friends playing Fortnite all the time, and they're only 6 years old.

Plus now you need a computer to study. And the computer is now the best way to learn useful things as well. So I'm gonna end up trying to show the kid all sorts of things that I as a parent think are good for him, but the same device can be used to waste his whole life.

The thing is I've seen the computer lead people to both great things, or complete failure. Some kids get one and can code before university, they know how to find things out with it, and they can organise their lives with it. Others have literally lost their futures due to being unable to pull their eyes away from the screen.

Look at how much you gamed, and look how you turned out. Would that be ok for your children?

In a similar boat as the parent as far as turning out alright. But in college I saw more people who gamed as much as I did flunk out than people who made it through with me.

The games we used to play had some degree of extension like modding or scripting that at least caused me to branch out. The same can't be said of the current generation who will grow up with games like Fortnite that have no depth outside of the game itself.

I guess there is minecraft but I don't know how that is doing and will probably be an exception not the rule in the future.

Single data point. There are others that didn't turn out so well.

Yoshi's Story was not for the Super Nintendo. It was an N64 game that was far inferior to Yoshi's Island.

I agree. I love all things Yoshi and I tried to like Yoshi's Story, but unfortunately it felt really vain.

Yoshi's Island is one of the best platformers ever, and I still get the music in my head regularly. The most recent game that that had a similar, rare combination of great gameplay and amazing soundtrack has been Celeste.

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