It's worse than that. It is all baked into our daily tools. Even HN as a community and a forum aids in distraction. Pretty much any community that lets you form an echo chamber around yourself (all social networks, and communities including HN)commands your attention by making you interact with people who think like you. If this were done in real life it would be much different, but the online medium of it falls short in the tangible relationship department.

I hate to say it, but the big nasty "R" word might be the only way to curb the disease of distraction by limiting notifications and psychologically abusive features.

The extend of psychological abuse for attention seeking is so great now that most if not all of us are in some way affected, even if we deny it (myself included).

Major offenders: - Twitter - notifications, likes, comments, emails, notifications in tab titles - FB - notifications, messenger, likes, comments, friend recommendations. - Slack .. good luck making those little notification circles disappear if you are in a number of different channels - Linked In - constant emails, people who have looked at your profile, messenger you can't close

It's also going to get worse. As automation grows, more and more people will find themselves occupied with bullshit jobs, the kinds that look to expand and capture a piece of the attention economy. There is a good chance you, the person reading this right now has a bullshit job. You may even know it and acknowledge it, but will ultimately justify it as necessary and a force for good (sorry, it's probably not). It's a tragedy, but a lot of talent, time and life is being wasted on increasingly larger number of bullshit activities that add absolutely nothing (except $$) and take away everything (time).

I should know all of this as I work in a bullshit industry, doing bullshit things, taking people's time & money. I am not happy about it but I see no real alternative in the foreseeable future. My job involves figuring out how people think, what will make them buy and then making them buy crap they don't need or in more quantities than they need it.

Personally, I have made significant effort to cut down on distractions but I still fail by coming to HN. I can't help that discussions here are engaging and make me think. Twitter is another platform I have tried quitting many times but find myself too curious to see what's happening and checking again. I've managed to cut Reddit down to 1 sub, but even then it seems really difficult to quit that last piece. I still check LinkedIN occasionally but don't expect much from it, nor do I care about what's being discussed. FB is totally out of my life, including messenger so I have made some progress there. Slack also totally gone. I completely uninstalled it and direct people to email. Speaking of email, I am almost always at inbox zero thanks to a ton of filters. Stuff still gets through from spammers and occasional subscriptions that want to push crap I don't care about, but I manage to zap those with the "mark as spam" button quickly.