Comment by hilbert42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hilbert42 | Hacker News Reader

"Modern humans spend virtually no time on "inward-directed thought", and not solely because we're too busy: in one US survey, 95% of adults said they'd found time for a leisure activity in the previous 24 hours, but 83% said they'd spent zero time just thinking."

I think Pascal was correct because at least those people I know well enough to discuss such matters with tell me they don't spend much time thinking or contemplating about much at all. This is a bit strange to me as I've always thought about things—mind you, not necessarily things of great importance but about things in general. It's dead easy for me to daydream time away (unfortunately). (When I was at school one of the punishments was to be sent to stand in a corner and stare at the wall. It used to send some kids almost crazy but never bothered me much—all I had to do was to go into daydream mode to pass time away!)

Since reading this article it's occurred to me that those people who've really struggled with the isolation of COVID-19 lockdowns and who continually seek the company of other people are perhaps those who suffer this 'inability to sit quietly in a room alone'. I mention this because during earlier posts on the topic of large numbers of people who were not coping with the enforced isolation, I said that for me, if anything, the enforced lockdown was a blessing as I wasn't continually having to deal with people I'd rather not deal with. Similarly, I find noise and activity distracting, even annoying at times.

No doubt when COVID-19 is over and the postmortems begin in earnest, this connection will be researched.

Another afterthought, perhaps those best suited to interplanetary traveling will be those who do have a good ability to quietly contemplate things (after all, it's likely they'll be forced to do lots of it).

I find it disturbing the way a trait that seems to be very common among humans is being framed as a problem.

External stimulus means you’re with other humans that you can cooperate with. That you’re sharing stories and learning. That you’re hunting for food. That you’re building a shelter. All these things are necessary for survival. It seems possible that being sociable and industrious might well have been bread into us at some point. And it’s probably the reason we aren’t like big cats in Africa, just hunting and then resting to conserve energy.

We should not be suggesting to people that their instincts are a moral failure to be cured.

Not everyone frames it in a judgemental fashion. Some people simply decide to see what happens when they decide to go outside their comfort zone. The tendency to not explore these spaces seems to be one of the reasons why they are occulted.

It's a problem. That's why doing it (mediation, mindfulness, prayer, sitting zazen, ...) helps!

Watch animals: they meditate instinctively. Dogs, cats, birds, they all do it.

Just like animals all stretch instinctively. (We had some chickens for awhile this year and they stretch too. It's funny: they stretch the wing and leg on one side together, then the other side.)

What I'm saying is, "yoga" and "meditation" are necessary for survival. You gotta remember civilization is only 12K years old, that's nothing in the biological scheme of things. We should be spending a lot more time napping and "zoning out".

Em... 12,000 years old? Where does this number come from?

IANAArcheologist-nor-Anthropologist...

The first city is generally considered to be Ur, which "dates from the Ubaid period circa 3800 BC" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur

However, there's the Potbelly Hill "dating back to the 10th–8th millennium BCE" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

I've heard of stone cities in Southern Africa that are believed to be older than 100K years, but that's not part of the known archeological record.

Some would argue, and I'm inclined to agree, that civilization could be considered to date to the beginning of the Stone Age, which "lasted for roughly 3.4 million years" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Age

Stone knives aren't primitive, they're sophisticated ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithic_reduction ), arguably the product of a human (as contrasted with animal) mind.

The 100K years timeframe is more believable than a random cutoff 12K years B.C. Humans are way too advanced species to progress from monkeys to what we are now in just a few thousand years. I'd say it's taken close to 18 millions years since humans were advanced monkeys, but even then the difference between a "regular monkey" and an "advanced monkey that can make tools for hunting" is massive and needs an extended period of prehistory.

Postulating that basic instincts are problematic is too cynical. It doesn't have to be one way or the other. You certainly need somekind of external stimulus to react to the surroundings (e.g fight or flight response). Inward introspection is great but it's just another tool at the end of the day.

Of course the need for external stimuli is a universal and important human need. The question is merely whether 100% of one's waking moments must serve this need, or whether one has the ability to spend a percent or so of one's time not satisfying this need:

> …that people detest being made to spend six to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think – even to the extent of being willing to give themselves mild electric shocks instead.

Simply pointing out the importance of external stimuli is like responding to an observation that many people cannot hold their breath for 30 seconds (say) by pointing out the importance of breathing.

The problem, in my opinion, is that/when those things are done compulsively. If you're hungry it's fine to have a compulsion to get food, but as a human you should also be comfortable doing nothing, otherwise you're essentially seeding misery.

The problem is that we live in a society where one is constantly being bombarded with stimuli all the time. Because people cannot be in silence, you have to endure constant noise.

I began a new job recently and was shocked to find out they have a speaker system that plays music everywhere in the building including office areas. On my first day, they were playing gangsta rap all day long...

So now, in order for me to focus and do what I'm being paid to do, I have to separate myself from the environment by either working from home (in silence) or using ANC headphones all day, which is not pleasant.

I always find this percentages puzzling. I reckon people busy thinking are too busy, or simply never get requested to fill in surveys about how they spend their idle CPU brain time.

Thinking is the last remaining freedom, as long as you don't say all the things you think of out loud. :)

"Thinking is the last remaining freedom, as long as you don't say all the things you think of out loud."

Absolutely, right on both accounts. (Occasionally swearing under my breath sometimes gives the game away.)

That's one of the unmentioned beauties of being a programmer... you can swear all you want, and people just think your code won't compile :-)

Hey, it's not only programming, how many other triggers would you like me to mention? ;-)

My mom really liked this song. She grew up in East Germany until the fled.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Gedanken_sind_frei

Also check out the author and what other things he wrote.

The modern world is also set up in such a way* to preclude such activity because we are surrounded by stimuli and activity that distracts people and gives them things to do and think about. I noticed this when I became more interested in quiet contemplation. Its not easy for everyone to allocate uninterrupted time for such activity.

* the modern world emergently selects for these interruptions, I'm not suggesting an anti-mindfulness conspiracy. Its why Buddha is sometimes depicted with lions and tigers. The legend is that when a meditating practitioner is near to enlightenment, he or she will hallucinate ferocious beasts and those are illusions that come about as he nears enlightenment in order to distract him or her.

"...to preclude such activity because we are surrounded by stimuli and activity that distracts people and gives them things to do and think about."

You're right. In my opinion, one of the best examples of this is to be seen in our films, videos and multimedia presentations, etc. With very few exceptions, extremely tight editing is now the norm, scenes are cut to within an inch of incomprehension and there's rapid switching from one scene to another and back again. We now have the ridiculous situation where scene switching is so rapid that the set designer's work is in vain as the viewer has hardly sufficient time to comprehend the foreground material let alone the background scenery. (You can easily test this by recording some typical video then playing it back and asking typical viewers to explain what they've seen. It's devastatingly informative in the negative sense in that they miss almost everything!)

From my observation, this fast, ever-changing stimuli is harmful from the perspective that people now have a shallower grasp on reality/everyday things around them than they once did when times weren't quite so fast. What's more troubling is that there seems to be no attempt to make people aware of the fact.

This is some helpful insight. Anyone who plans to edit video in the future should contemplate it. We need more longer, slower shots. Rapid cuts - like high notes for a singer - should to my mind be used more sparingly for greater impact.

>When I was at school one of the punishments was to be sent to stand in a corner and stare at the wall. It used to send some kids almost crazy but never bothered me much—all I had to do was to go into daydream mode to pass time away

Me as well. I wonder if it is the upside to having near-crippling ADHD.

To add another anecdatapoint, I had exactly the same thought. It kind of makes sense; I think of ADHD as being a matter of intrinsically-driven attention rather than motivated attention.

I suppose defaulting to daydream mode is moderately useful for the large portion of the prison population with ADHD.

Always been afraid of my terrible impulse control sending me to prison for one reason or another but never considered that I could just daydream the time away. Good to know.

Great username. Fellow physicist?

Fellow physicist? No, more engineering but the username was inspired from distant memories of having to get my head around the mathematics of David H's famous space! And I've always been a fan of Douglas Adams and the similarly-inspired Red Dwarf (right, that's a category and now I'm classified). ;-)

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