>As a 25 year old, I feel that I was truly the last general to experience what true boredom was like as a kid. Hanging out at the school during the weekend wondering what to do - those days are over now. Technology has definitely taken over our lives, and now there's always something to do.
While growing up, I pretty much always had a computer, but did not have live Internet till I was 19. We had only one TV station to watch. The computer would be on for only a few hours - it could overheat, and it was routine to turn it off when not in use.
For the last 6 months my mind has been preoccupied by this. I can't stop memories coming in on how I would just laze in the afternoon, enjoying the breeze. Even recalling the boredom is a "good" memory. I would read a lot more books. I would sometimes play with toys. I would attempt solving puzzles. I would doodle with the calculator and learn interesting properties of numbers. And fun stuff on the computer - be it games, or programming, or playing with Fractint and POV-Ray.
These days: While I still have constructive hobbies, I'm realizing they exist mostly to make me feel constructive. If I examine my time at home, a lot of it is on the computer. And most of that is on the browser or email. I use a desktop which is on 24/7. The browser window is always open, with tabs open. And if I were to randomly ask myself what I gained in browsing the web in, say, the last month, I can't come up with enough to justify it. Intellectual debates on HN are cool, but I'm way past the point where it is meaningfully useful. Yes, I may have learned a few things while browsing the net, but the gain vs time spent ratio is not that good.
I'm not an addict. I spend time outside the house, and don't miss the computer when I'm, say, hiking. But it troubles me that this is my life at home. And fortunately, I find smartphones to be a real pain to use, so it can't be an attention sink.
In the last few months I've been musing on how I can capture some of my pre-Internet lifestyle back. It's complicated - I don't want to go cold turkey. There are scripts I run on a cronjob on my PC that are very useful to me (and are not tied heavily to my Internet/PC habits) - so I don't want to simply switch it off. Instead, I want to cripple some aspects of my Internet usage.
I haven't actually taken some concrete action, but ideas:
1. Disallow certain programs/processes (e.g. my browsers) from having access to the Internet. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to do this in Linux.
2. Use extensions like Leechblock. I don't have much hope for this working - I tried some years ago and kept finding ways around it. And I often just fired up another browser that did not have Leechblock installed.
3. Make accessing the web via browser painful. In the old days, when I wanted to use the computer, I had to boot it up (took a bit of time), then dial up to the Internet, then launch a browser. If I could simulate it so that when I launch the browser it takes that much time, it may significantly reduce how often I browse the Internet. Bonus points if the whole computer becomes unusable in that time period (it's not really effective if while I'm waiting for the browser to load I start doing other stuff).
4. Whatever crippling methods I have should be appropriately difficult to disable. If it's too easy, then I'll disable it all the time. If it's too hard I won't use the system.
5. Maybe have a cronjob that kills all open browsers every, say, 45 minutes. When I'm busy browsing and the browser crashes, will I really want to restart the browser? More effective if I couple it with 3 above. And maybe I shouldn't allow the browser to reload the crashed session, so I'd have to rebuild the tabs?
6. Disable multitasking while in the browser. I think the fact that we can browse the web, and run other programs at the same time, makes it more difficult to control. In the old DOS days, I ran only one program at a time. Even with the early Windows, I effectively ran one program at a time - multitasking ate up resources.
7. I just realized that I used to program in the days I did not have the Internet. It's a bit sad that the norm is to find solutions in Google or Stack Overflow, or even in the online docs. See if I can somehow download the docs for offline use. But then I wouldn't want a 5 minute delay in loading up the browser if all I want to do is browse local files. Conundrum...
8. Every so many minutes, somehow autoclose all tabs except the active one. While tabs are awesome, they also lead to more time in the browser. This will force me to be more discriminating in picking the tabs I want to read.
9. Somehow suspend accounts on sites like HN for, say, 6 months. I won't be able to post. Maybe block it altogether.
10. Netflix via Roku on my TV does not count. To me that's "TV time", and in any case, I don't spend much time on it. Thankfully, Youtube has always been a poor experience.
11. The goal isn't to get off the computer. It's to do more constructive things with it. So I'll likely program, do image editing (I have a few years of backlog), write, etc.
12. I haven't figured out where email fits into all this. Should I cripple it or keep it as is? I don't use webmail - it's the old style of IMAP + MUA + MDA
I hope I find some way to achieve a healthy amount of the above. In the back of my mind I'd been planning on posting this as an Ask HN to see what other people have come up with.
(As an aside, I think part of my current obsession is that in the last year I've met with a number of my high school friends - most of whom I hadn't seen since getting live Internet - scattered across the globe. That's actively reminding me of life in earlier days).