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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I deleted all my tweets. Killed the app. Killed the Reddit app. Killed Instagram. Killed Facebook. I need to reactivate FB and do a dump of my data, but I’m dreading that. I just want the photos.

I’m finding solace in boredom and using that as a catalyst for change. I’ve been reading more, already finished three books in the last few weeks. I’m on a mission to pour rocket fuel on my personal consulting business.

I’m also seeing a psych and a psychotherapist. It’s helping, albeit slowly.

Eliminate cognitive load. Eliminate distractions. Eliminate things from your life that don’t bring you joy and happiness. Do it. Rip it off like a bandaid. Every little minuscule things counts and adds up to the “death by a thousand cuts” anxiety ridden life we are all enduring.

Ignite a fire in the forest that is your life and let all the shit burn to the ground. The big strong redwoods will remain. Don’t be afraid to seek help from professionals.

We are only on this earth for one life. I only get to watch the Super Bowl maybe 30 more times. I only get to own so many more vehicles. I only get to spend time with my dogs for so long.

It’s not just tech workers. Everyone is struggling. Be good to yourself.

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Great comment and kudos to you, but a couple thoughts on the following:

“Eliminate things from your life that don’t bring you joy and happiness.”

I see this sentiment a lot in the techie self-help sphere, along with corrolaries like “ruthlessly eliminate negative people”. While I understand the motivation and agree it is true up to a point, it can also lead to a shallow and avoidant approach to life if you get carried away with it. Many of the most potentially rich and satisfying aspects of life are also the most dark, difficult, and complex when they go wrong. You shouldn’t always run away.

The trick is to find a balance—sink some roots into the inherently chaotic and often ‘negative’ emotional substrate of life without letting yourself get pulled under. Offset the weight with lightness, but don’t try to avoid carrying any weight whatsoever.

>it can also lead to a shallow and avoidant approach to life if you get carried away with it.

There is nothing wrong with taking this approach, while you get yourself back on track. I've gone through this myself. Became an "asshole" in some peoples' eyes - "Why should I attend that social event? What am I going to get out of it? Nah, pass". They've gotten over it. So have I.

Truly though, who gives a shit, if that is what you need. Like OP said, it's your life. Do what you need to do for you. If you keep investing in things that suck the life out of you endlessly, it's going to drag you to a dark place, which is no good for anyone.

I trust selfish people more than I trust "selfless" people. Simply because selfish people are less likely to snap, and take out all of their repressed frustration at a seemingly random time.

It's taken me a while, but now I have a more diplomatic approach to extending my personal energy to benefit those around me, or invest in projects, work, etc.

You are right. It requires balance. However, you should not be afraid to tip the scales the other way for a while, so that you can refactor your priorities.

hey I really needed to see this today. thanks.

Thanks for this.

I feel like this notion of tossing things that are unpleasant is pervasive in California, in a way that it wasn’t where I grew up, in Texas.

As you say, there is a lot of value in sticking with shit that can be really irritating, and hard.

In Texas, they go too far the other way, and tolerate things for longer than they sometimes should.

Funny how that tendency maps so well to the foundations of their politics (progress / conservation). As usual, the right way is somewhere in the middle.

Interesting observation.

I think it’s true. My take on it: Mostly occurs because California is filled with people who come from somewhere else. It is filled with restless people who are goal oriented and need results to be filled with joy.

I think places with more rooted populations find their joy in people and not goals. They are not on the move. There is a certain personality that thinks..I am going to move cities, zip codes, countries, jobs ..in search of something better. Always something better than where I am now. They are never going to be happy with status quo for long..joy is always a moving target. That’s what makes them tick. That’s what makes them good at what they do. People are people.

I think this is what is supposed to be true diversity. Diverse personalities. I find diversity based on skin colour or language or gender etc are such shallow classifications. Considering that, I don’t think we have diversity at all..because birds of a feather flock together.

Utah Phillips phrased it as "People back East have a tremendous sense of place, here in the West, we have a tremendous sense of event."

> “Eliminate things from your life that don’t bring you joy and happiness.”

The key here is to have a long-term view of this. Obviously this doesn't mean to disown your relationships with anybody who didn't bring you joy this week, but you should look at the history of the relationship, and how you think the relationship will be in the future, and decide whether or not the relationship is really a value add in your life.

The idea of eliminating negativity is problematic because, sometimes, relationships that are the most challenging are also ones that end providing fulfillment and personal growth.

Outcomes are often impossible to predict in advance because you just can't know which relationships will end up challenging you in ways that help you grow. Also, you and your circumstances will change and those changes will affect the nature and affect of your relationships.

I'm not saying one should cannot or should not make decisions about who to keep close in one's personal life. I am saying, however, that predictions about the future value of any personal relationship is as likely to be mistaken as correct.

I don't think relationships should be about maximizing one's potential, whatever "maximizing" may mean. Relationships are important and so is happiness, but I don't think relationships should be cultivated and curated in the service of maximum happiness.

I think you might be interpreting my comment a little too far into "stick your head into the sand" territory. That is not at all what I am advocating. It's important to be realistic and a part of the world around you ... but it's very clear that people have too much shit in their lives and need to get rid of a lot of it.

Re: Ruthlessly eliminate negative people

I'm undoubtedly the most negative person in my life.

Well at least you have that going for you!

> I'm undoubtedly the most negative person in my life.

This can change, it takes work.

Easier to change yourself than change someone else!

Famous last techie words

This is basically Bentham vs Mill utilitarianism for anyone that wants to explore how at least humanity’s great balancing act has been recorded over hundreds of years.

But to summarize — you should optimize for things like quality of happiness rather than happiness units. And this gets messy and you will make bad calls, it’s a moral framework for decision making no one has a perfect system. But be optimizing for great happiness and make those long term investments.

I think the parent commenter made some great points about social media, but I was going to say something about that line as well.

This seems to be a really common sentiment, and I could not disagree more. At worst, it comes across as severely narcissistic. At best, it's avoidance of reality.

Joy and Happiness are fleeting emotions. If you felt them all the time for something, over just a little bit of time you would not.

Yeah, I feel like joy and happiness are side effects of a meaningful life, not the cause.

The value of boredom cannot be overstated.

The "always on" culture that has become prevalent in the past decade has, in my opinion, contributed greatly rising angst/anxiety/stress.

We don't give our brains any time to rest anymore. Most people start and end the day by injecting thousands of images, words, and ideas into their thoughts via screens with no time to process and "clear the queue" so to speak.

I've start implementing "nothing" days once every two to three weeks. These days are spent with absolute 0 screen time. At first it was extremely difficult to detach, but after the first couple hours of the day, I start to feel more centered and at ease. Reading, talking, getting out of the house, sitting on a park bench, visiting a museum, investing time in a hobby - all these things help remind me WHY I spend so many waking hours working and being connected.

I won't ever advocate for the complete removal of technology from all aspects of life. But, as in all things, boundaries are very important.

After much back and forth and introspection on this topic I just went ahead and became a Zen Buddhist.

I don't think we can function as humans without regular long, meaningful detachment from all these digital tools.

There's a lot of ways to do it. But I feel like everyone needs to pick one.

If you don't mind, a question: do you believe in reincarnation?

That's always seemed like a barrier to consciously 'accepting' Zen, the way one might accept Confucianism or utilitarianism or any other moral philosophy.

Interesting question. I would say that honestly I don’t, in the sense that I have any degree of certainty that it happens.

But I also have no degree of certainty that it doesn’t happen.

One of the core concepts of Zen is abandoning western concepts of duality. I’m increasingly willing to be confortable with the idea that I have no ability to conceptualize and verbalize the concept of myself existing before life or after death, and likely never will.

So it’s not that I will or won’t, it’s not really a yes or no answer. More like a NaN answer.

Yeah. Smartphones and tablets have filled up the usual breaks the human brain has had for the first 200k or so years of its existence. Always-on has to have maladaptive effect on creatures that didnt evolve with it.

That's a great idea, I have been thinking about doing this as well, I need to just do it.

> I’m finding solace in boredom and using that as a catalyst for change

Yes, this is exactly it! Perfectly summarized my day-to-day after doing everything you listed on that first paragraph. Hackernews a few times a day at most for no more than 5 minutes at a time is all the social media for me.

Not seeing a therapist or anything but my outdoor activities are therapy for me personally, in their own way. Started riding my motorcycle again. Just generally treating myself better, spending tons of time working out and having way more energy, and more time to explore ideas and trying things.

The last distraction I still have is my phone, which goes on airplane mode for a good chunk of the day. Do Not Disturb mode for the rest. I'm done with it all.

20 years ago no one would have ever stood for all the shit distractions that bombard us constantly today. People called and texted... and waited hours and sometimes days for a reply, if they got it at all.

On that subject, the only way to break the expectation that are "always available" is... to not be always available. Just turn that shit off. Don't reply unless you absolutely have to.

It's liberating.

Absolutely! For years I’ve had my phone on a mode where I do not get notified of anything but emails and all the special VIP stuff so my wife/family can reach me. It actually began because a bud of mine tends to text like he is on AIM. He will send three words at a time and blow me up with a dozen notifications for one cognitive thought.

Anyway... my phone is beholden to me. I choose when I open apps. I have notifications disabled for virtually everything. I also have it on perma-silent. It will vibrate once for certain things... and ring only when those aforementioned special people call me. At 9pm it goes into do not disturb. At 7am it goes back to normal.

My wife on the other hand... good grief. She is a solo dog walker / sitter and is getting bookings CONSTANTLY. Her phone sounds like R2-D2 having an aneurism. I’m working on her... but she has insane FOMO since she is still gaining a strong foothold in our community. It’s tough to talk to her about this stuff because she’s right in the midst of it: anxious, worried she will miss client messages, worried she will miss a booking, etc... so until that dies down a bit it’s not even worth pursuing with her. I hope she can eventually get to this level, though, and realize that she will be much happier when she controls her attention instead of allowing others to do it.

People are afraid to be left alone with their own thoughts even for a minute.... It's just terrifying to them. They cannot confront them head on, so they whip out their phone and check Instagram. Oh, look, a dog!

Personally my issue with my work in tech is the cognitive dissonance between the collective belief that we’re all “changing the world” and the reality that most of us are doing very little to do that and/or that deep down we actually believe that the company we are working for actually has a net negative effect on the world.

I realized this about 6 months ago, and this is exactly why I decided to start my own company. People that truly want to change the world should do the same, unless you fear instability more than you desire to change the world.

Serious question: why does starting a company equate to changing the world? The vast majority of companies sell some good or service for a fee, which is of course super important for society but not exactly world changing. I guess the hope is you can grow your company large enough to have a major impact without selling out so much as to just care about profits and shareholders?

> deleted all my tweets. Killed the app. Killed the Reddit app. Killed Instagram. Killed Facebook.

I agree with the bulk of your comment, but I couldn't help but notice...

If the solution is to not use all these apps, apps that are being developed by those very same anxious workers, what does it say about silicon valley's sunny optimism that they are changing the world for the better?

Does anyone else feel it's paradoxical?

It became paradoxical as soon as you could step outside the offices of SomeTechCo.(ly) in SF., and literally find the sidewalk littered with homeless humans, human waste and needles.

I'm not saying there is any correlation. Merely that if tech companies in the SF Bay area cared about 'making a difference' - there is ample opportunity to do so, literally outside their door.

> silicon valley's sunny optimism

This is all marketing hype speak from the type-a extrovert hustlers at the top. No sane person truly believes things like FB etc... are changing the world.

Considering the extent and the societal and political ramifications of the mountains of propaganda being disseminated on Facebook, as well as the outcome of the 2016 election, it is clear that FB is changing the world... for the worst.

> what does it say about silicon valley's sunny optimism that they are changing the world for the better?

It's cover for their employees to make the world a worse place, while collecting massive checks, and not feel bad for it.

I don't think it's working anymore.

Welcome. I spent the last 6 months doing exactly the same thing and was able to create enough time to start the company I've been talking about for years.

Social media is a curse on our society's mental wellbeing, even if it can be a very useful tool in spreading important information.

I'm actually working on a book which documents my process I developed to do this for myself. Mental models, different perspectives on your habits and vices, etc. Please let me know if you have anything that's worked for you. I think this is something everyone should do.

I haven't seeked help from professionals yet but I will definitely consider it.

I'd love to read it when you've finished it!

Approaching it from changing mental models, perspectives and learning new skills is how we view mental health issues management/prevention. If you're interested in this angle, you should try out one of our sessions at Mindset. It'd be really great to hear what you think of them.

I'm not a writer so I'll let you know when it happens. It may be years from now, but I'm steadily working on it! :)

I'll check out Mindset, thanks. (I couldn't find it on google, send a link if you don't mind)

I'll be waiting!

It's only on the Apple App Store at the moment, if you search Mindset on the App Store it will be the first non-ad app.

Ahh unfortunately I don't have an iOS device. Is it on MacOS too? I have a Macbook for work

You should create a landing page so that people who are interested in the book could subscribe and get updates.

I was thinking of making it a blog because that's kind of how I've been writing it for myself.

And then organizing and compiling it into a book.

That's also a good idea which would allow you to get feedback.

I recommend you to read Taylor Pearson's article on how he approached writing and marketing his book:

https://taylorpearson.me/jesusmarketing/

A shorter version written by me can be found here:

https://www.writersincharge.com/taylor-pearson-sold-5000-cop...

Update your profile with an email address! I’d love to stay in touch.

Sure!

Edit: done! Can't wait to hear from you, I'd love some more ideas to put into the book.

I'm in the "anxiety ridden life" mode and can't seem to find a way out. Trying to find a therapist but health insurance doesn't cover mental health. Trying to decide if it's worth paying someone to listen to my first-world problems...

I pay out of pocket too, and it hurts, but it hurts more when you are in a deep hole and feel like there is no way out. For a while I was paralyzed and was unable to even earn income ... which is a far greater problem than having to allocate funds for therapy.

Let go of control and hand it to someone else for a while. Give it a shot, even if for just one or two sessions to start.

When I was depressed with cash flow issues, that was certainly a rough place to be. The only advice I have if you're in that situation is to power through it, and accept it's gonna suck for a while. If you're going through hell, keep going (or something like that).

therapy is worth it. Any problem affecting you is a real problem that needs addressing. The "first world problems" meme is just for funny quotes/pics, not real life.

Others might chime in, but I say yes, a good therapis is worth it. What country are you in and do you know why mental health is not covered?

Here's what keeps me on social media:

* YIMBY activism. Facebook especially is a great, low-friction way to get new people involved.

* FB can be a great way of sharing, say, photos of kids or activities or events with people who are... maybe a bit more peripheral than friends I see every day, but who I still find value in keeping in touch with.

> * FB can be a great way of sharing, say, photos of kids or activities or events with people who are... maybe a bit more peripheral than friends I see every day, but who I still find value in keeping in touch with.

What got me off Facebook (>3y ago, not a passing whim) was the realisation that I found no value in keeping in touch with people I was only 'in touch with' via Facebook.

> * YIMBY activism. Facebook especially is a great, low-friction way to get new people involved.

Okay, that probably helped too. ;)

I think there is a difference between "people I added on a whim and don't actually know" and "my cousin that lives out of state", for example.

I pretty aggressively prune my facebook friend list. I think I'm at something like 68 friends right now. The majority of them are actually older family members who like my random rants about the antics our kids get into.

Basically if I add someone on facebook and they aren't actively part of my life or social / family circle, they get culled.

It seems like a nice compromise.

> I think there is a difference between "people I added on a whim and don't actually know" and "my cousin that lives out of state", for example.

Yeah, an example might be my 4th grade teacher that I liked a lot and added me. She's a sweet lady who's almost 90 at this point. Not sure I would have had any contact with her otherwise, but it makes me happy to see what she's up to.

>What got me off Facebook (>3y ago, not a passing whim) was the realisation that I found no value in keeping in touch with people I was only 'in touch with' via Facebook.

This. If you're only interested in keeping in touch with people as long as it takes zero effort on your part that means that you don't really want to stay in touch with said person. Once I realized that, being done with social media was easy. I run a nextcloud instance that allows me to share photos and large files with family, and anyone for that matter.

Facebook is legit changing. It is pushing me updates from small groups I belong to, some of which are people I've known for over 20 years now back from the earlier web.

What appears in my feed seems very curated.

I also don't have friends who post random political news stuff.

My FB feed has become enjoyable and fun now. I get to see my friend who moved out of the big city to start a farm run her now successful farm. I get to see my friend who moved to Germany talk about work/life balance in another country. I get to see my friend who is a prof at college talk about his student's essays.

Honestly... it is sorta nice now. It wasn't a year ago, but these last few months have been great.

Reddit is completely what you make of it. I belong to some super positive communities, some great recipe groups, and some technical subreddits. I get an endless feed of healthy food suggestions, opportunities to help out students just entering the work force, and some awesome discussions on science and engineering topics. /r/askculinary is great and I've had multiple people reach out to me due to my activities helping people out on various smaller programming subreddits.

I spend more time on HN than either of the above.

> Eliminate cognitive load. Eliminate distractions.

Agreed! My reddit feed is small enough that if I refresh it after an hour, odds are nothing new will show up! Facebook is similar now, it is no longer an endlessly scrolling list of stuff, honestly after 10-15 minutes I am back to where I was yesterday. Overall it is a win for FB because I have gone from "0" to "10 minutes", even though I imagine these changes may have made some of their heaviest users drop their total engagement time. If they can get more people back on the platform, it may be worth it to them.

> Ignite a fire in the forest that is your life and let all the shit burn to the ground.

I think this is why Marie Kondo is so popular right now. Throw it all out! I've always tried to get rid of things I don't use, but forcing functions and absolute rules can be useful at times.

Welcome to freedom my friend. The only social apps I’ve kept are Snapchat for family and Reddit for gaming stuff.

It’s been really eye opening to me how much better I feel after deleting my Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Twitter is particularly bad. I genuinely cannot find a single positive thing about it. It just feels like a big huge bitch-fest of one complaint and antagonist after another. Doesn’t matter the agenda, it’s pure negative energy. I’m so glad to have dismissed it.

Yeah, Twitter is really bad. Every discussion, no matter how trivial, devolves into a flame fest. I've told this story on HN before, but I was reading some minor controversy about Hearthstone esports and eventually the thread devolved into people threatening to kill each other. Over someone that made a dumb mistake in one of their games. It is crazy.

I think some of us use a lot of electronic communication for work, so we kind of get the idea that there is a human at the other end of these threads. The average Twitter user has not quite made that connection yet, and see it more of public performance art than person-to-person communication. The results are not good.

(There is also some cultural thing going on right now where it's no longer OK to compromise on anything. This results in extreme polarization everywhere.)

Twitter, more so than Facebook even, is 100% dependent on who you follow. I choose academics, (good) journalists, etc. My feed is constantly enlightening, I learn something everyday, and there's no gossip or BS. Every time someone posts a selfie or some food they are eating, they are gone.

I love it.

Also: muting. You can not only mute trolls that sneak into your feed, but entire words and people. After a few weeks of customization it's almost full proof.

I came back to Twitter after a 4 year hiatus to my account which formerly had thousands of followers in my hobby niche. Wow is it horrible now. I don’t remember it being so polarizing and negative constantly. I find that to be the case for many Internet communities (e.g. Reddit).

I guess it depends on who you follow, what you mute, and who you block.

The most negative energy I get now is people begging for money, because they don't have enough and need some more. The classy ones try to sell something other than a sob story.

Maybe I should mute "Ko-Fi", "GoFundMe", and "Patreon".

I follow mostly tech, artists and gamedev people and I get very little of the negativity. Don't follow any of the big public figures etc.

Unfortunately, a few of the programmers that I'd like to follow retweet a lot of the cultural warfare crap (left vs right, white vs nonwhite etc.), and there is no feature to filter that out specifically. In the end, I decided to just unfollow them, as the agitation created by vitriol and stupidity was just not worth it.

The other kind of negativity I see is people tweeting dumb/argumentative things at the people I follow. The solution for that is to only read replies that the people I follow replied to and ignore the rest of the randos. This makes my daily Tweeter routine very quick BTW.

I'm with you, once I realized how much anxiety and self-loathing I experienced when on social media yet I was so addicted to it that I couldn't stop. I tore that band aid off, deleted all my social media accounts and I could not be happier. I did not realize how much more time I had without social media, how much more time I had to invest in myself, to achieve things I was happy with and was content without needing a numerical approval of the people in my life, the more 'in the moment and living' I was. I realized how much people thought they knew me because of my photos and posts until I was completely off social media. People become curious of what you've been up to and asked me how I was. I noticed how effective this is to build friendships and, this could be the people I surrounded myself with but people have forgot to ask how we each other how we are actually doing because we think we know based off of peoples social media. It's sad.

I've been off of social media for over a year and I don't regret it. I'm happy to miss an event because I wasn't on Facebook, it allowed me to see who actually wants me to be there versus those who just invite everyone in a group.

Is it possible the anxiety and self-loathing would have existed in another form if not for social media, and social media is getting scapegoated for other issues that you've got, which are now hiding dormant because rather than deal with them you externalized them onto a technology?

Wise words. I wish I had read and thought about things like his, before I got my heavy depressions being not even 30 years old.

Thought I had already experienced bad times but nothing came close to that half year of what is called "Burn Out". Wouldn't wish that to my worst enemy.

People, take good care of yourself, OP is totally right.

Intense physical activity helps too, given that our bodies are designed for that.

At the beginning of 2018 I was in a pretty bad state in many ways. One of which was my health.

I did a lot to turn it around, including running regularly, and a better diet. I lost a lot of weight. But what's more amazing in the long term is the mental transition that's come with it. When I get anxious, often I think "when is the last time I went running?" and if it was more than 2 days ago, getting my gear on and getting outside is nearly automatic. It's an emotional outlet. Anxious? Run it out. Angry? Run it out. Happy? Run with it!

Truly, we are meant to run. We are meant to exert ourselves. And our bodies crave it, if given the ability to.

For when you need to get your photos off of FB: https://github.com/spieglt/fb-photos. Hopefully makes it easier to get "Photos of me" which they don't include in your data export.

very well put together comment because I started seeing a therapist and it has helped me find a new perspective on life in general. I was just grinding away in San Francisco without really having a long term plan...now this is just one part of my life.

> I’m finding solace in boredom

you seem to be very active on HN. HN is my main distraction too.

Yet here you are on HN.

Please fix your outstanding bugs before igniting that fire.

Thank you for this comment.

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