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Comment by silicon2401 | Hacker News Reader

breaking the phone habit is imho one of the best things anybody can do these days. Phones often are an all-in-one coping mechanism for other issues: boredom, stress, loneliness, etc. One of the best things I ever did was get off all social media, force myself not to even pick up my phone except to respond to a call or text, and just confront the boredom. After a few minutes of no phone you find yourself actually doing things and focusing again. After a few days you wonder how you could ever have wasted so much time infinitely scrolling through videos or articles that you can't even remember the next day, let alone 4+ years later. In contrast, I've been able to make so many memories gaming, playing music, watching movies with an actual sense of immersion, art, reading, exercising, and so much more. The childlike sense of wonder and excitement that I had as a child all came back as soon as I learned to focus and be in the moment again

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Reading a fantastic book called Digital Minimalism on this very subject.

Back when I used social media I noticed I'd be very angry arguing with people I didn't even know. Never meet anyone with a job. Deleted all that crap, moved , and had an amazing partner( she had a JOB) within a month.

Life is right here, if your at a coffee shop and you notice someone reading a book that seems interesting ask about it. Works out much more often than chatting with bots. Even when snapchatting with a "real" person, the "typing" notification felt like a raw anxiety machine. Now I only meet people in real life, text her once if she'd like to get dinner at 8 or so and then move on with my life.

Feels really good to hop off the social media hamsterwheel. Me a few years ago:

Gotta get more followers to get more likes to get more followers to get more likes to get more followers. Then maybe my matches will see how cool and popular I am. It's very much pointless. You'll never be popular enough. Without question I've removed the vast majority of stress from my life by ditching social media. Frankly my life is amazing. But if I'm staring at what other people have all day I'll never recognize it. Everyone will post 'just engaged' photos , no one is posting 'our marriage has been really rough, but I don't want to move back in with my parents'.

HN is social media.

On that note, to today's 10,000: HN has a "noprocrast" feature that can help you break off the habit slowly. I love the defaults (20 minutes every three hours) and it's enforced across devices. Go to your profile to set it up.

> HN is social media.

Strongly disagree.

Social media is where one shares ones social life (it's in the name!). HN, like many other sites dating back to the days of USENET, is a subject discussion forum; in HN case, a technical / IT discussion forum.

Granted, there are sometimes crossovers between the two, but HN certainy isn't one of them.

I still crave (you)s on HN. Even though HN has no notifications or inbox. I still check my threads frequently to see if anyone has replied to me. Maybe you are happy using throw-aways and shouting into the void, but I think that is a minority.

I don't think it would qualify, since there's no connection between users' profiles. You can't set up a "friends" list, or any other kind of group.

I must agree with the parent commenter: HN is social media.

Oh, maybe it's not exactly like facebook or Twitter, but it ticks so many other boxes.

I could list many, and argue about them (arguing: another staple of social media), but the most important to me is that HN is effectively a procrastination tool, and it's associated with that mental "fix" of instant gratification.

It's different from facebook in that HN is more heavily moderated and more focused, but other than that, it triggers the same kind of (bad) habits, at least in my case.

You are free to pick a different definition. "Permits arguing and procrastination" would make it a pretty big category, including all online forum and chat systems back to the Usenet / BBS and maybe CompuServe / Prodigy days (I don't know enough about the last two).

uh yeah, those things are absolutely social media as well

Usenet seemed more social than HN, as I remember it from the 1990s. You'd go back to the same groups, and see the same people posting. On HN, I don't usually see any name I remember.

I regularly see names I remember on HN: tptacek, pron, dragonwriter, lmm, coldtea, etc.

It's not exactly the same as contacts on Facebook, though it's closer to Reddit. Definitely social media.

Regardless of whether it's social media or not, HN is a huge digital waste of time. Try to think of more than 10 posts that really improved your life over the years. Now realize that you probably look at more than 50 HN posts a day. I would spend much less time on HN, but it's an addiction, like most things digital.

My experience has been different. I consider HN to be a kind of 'finger on the pulse' for my profession as a programmer, and in that regard it's fantastic.

Reddit, on the other hand, is a huge time sink (some good, some bad, I read an awful lot of short fiction on Reddit, and I consider that a positive).

I can think of dozens upon dozens of posts that were useful over the years! In a way HN has reduced the amount of networking I have had to do in order to see what people are interested are in, as they are posted here!

I've found a lot of good things on HN. I'd say it's near a net zero as far as time lost vs new things learned goes.

Yeah and I would have deleted it along with my other accounts if it weren't for the "no procrast" feature too.

Someone reading a book at a coffee shop probably doesn't want to be bothered by someone asking about it.

It’s fun watching people raised in a world where all communication happens on a screen dismissing the things people used to do to communicate as impossible.

I do it myself. Even though I spent half my life in a word where the only way to talk to a friend was to pick up a phone and dial their number, today’s Jason recoils violently from the idea of doing something so rude and invasive as that.

So just in case: in a previous world, sitting in a prominent place doing superficial activity such as reading, smoking, or looking at a phone screen was a signal that one was open to casual conversation.

> So just in case: in a previous world, sitting in a prominent place doing superficial activity such as reading, smoking, or looking at a phone screen was a signal that one was open to casual conversation.

That's not universally true. To my understanding, places like Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland), Japan, and Russia have historically had cultures that don't encourage randomly walking up to strangers and striking up a conversation.

They will either not look up, or quickly answer and go back to the book if so. It’s okay if that happens.

> ...Phones often are an all-in-one coping mechanism for other issues

While I agree in principle for healthy people, it's a waste of time, but for people for whom light entertainment is their medicine... would you rather they be drinking?

This comes up a lot re: video game addiction.

The jury's still out on the impact of social media and light entertainment (i.e. YouTube) on mental health. UK teens for example are doing far fewer drugs, getting pregnant from unsafe sex much less often, rising in school rankings, despite less sleep and higher levels of reported anxiety from watching more YouTube and Instagram.

"Everything in moderation" is kind of reductionist, of course we'd prefer that an asinine activity whose harm must be marginally declining the more people use it, not less, for the average person, substitute a harmful one like, I don't know, smoking meth. That's definitely happening for some people.

>... but for people for whom light entertainment is their medicine... would you rather they be drinking?

While I don't find anything wrong with light entertainment being one's medicine, why make the assumption that drinking is the next viable 'medicine' in line? Are there not countless alternatives to drinking to remedy "boredom, stress, loneliness, etc."? Picking up hobbies? Sports? Anything else?

Edit: I want to clarify I'm not judging those who cope with alcohol - I'm 5 years sober, I've been there, I get it. I just don't know why we should assume OP wants people to become alcoholics.

Isn't a similarly low-effort activity like drinking the more likely alternative for the kind of person who relies heavily on social media to fill their lives? Higher effort activities like hobbies and sports and such are obviously healthier alternatives, but anyone can already do them and they probably would if they had any inclination to do them in the first place.

That's an unwarranted assumption.

Phones, games, apps, and social media are, quite literally, engineered to be addictive.

Addiction is powerful. There are plenty of cases of star athletes ending up as homeless junkies, and this isn't because they lacked the ability to engage in higher-effort, healthy hobbies.

Especially for the generation of kids raised on (and often by) smartphones and tablets. Breaking those addictions can open up a universe of new possibilities, and provide much more positive outlets for all of the energy previously invested in games or social media.

> Addiction is powerful. There are plenty of cases of star athletes ending up as homeless junkies, and this isn't because they lacked the ability to engage in higher-effort, healthy hobbies.

Yes, I'd argue that it literally is because they lacked the ability to engage in higher-effort, healthy hobbies. Ask any star athlete junkie what he thinks is more healthy and more fulfilling: hobbies & sports, or whatever drug they ended up addicted to? They know what's better for them. For one reason or other, they don't do it. If the reason is addiction, that literally implies that they can't do it and addiction overpowers their ability to engage in higher-effort, healthy hobbies as a replacement.

> Breaking those addictions can open up a universe of new possibilities

Except you're not breaking these addictions, you're just sequestering or discouraging one particular abuse. Sometimes that helps. After all, teenage abstinence isn't zero percent effective. After all, cold turkey isn't zero percent effective. Though, the universe of possibilities they open tend to be relatively unreliable compared to teenagers having sex anyway & junkies returning to drugs, or safe sex & methadone.

> Phones, games, apps, and social media are, quite literally, engineered to be addictive.

No they're not, they're engineered to be engaging. There's no evidence I know of that phones, apps, etc consistently induce anything close to the addictive response in humans as the addictive substances we know of. Frankly, claiming that these things are "engineered to be addictive" is flat out misleading and conflates the extremely consistent & brutal consequences of addiction as science understands it with the much less understood area of social media.

Holy false equivalencies!

You've managed to take... Well a bunch of things which do not create physiological dependency and decide they're exactly equivalent to opiates.

These are all fair points reasonably made.

Therapy first, phone detox second.

It's sounds silly, but the way I've broken the phone addiction is with a watch. I've got it paired as a family member through my wife's phone, and it has a cell plan so the only phone number I have is through the watch. My work requires me to have a mobile "phone" and I get a stipend for having the service, so I'm required to have something. This serves that purpose, but for my mental health, the mindless scrolling and surfing are gone because the apps on this thing are too small for my middle age eyes to bother with. And with work internet access being restricted, I've pretty much broken the smartphone habit. Yes feels like an expensive way to break a habit. I agree, but all things factored in, it meets every requirement and gives me a lot of hours back in the day for what you mentioned: reading, exercising, study.

This is also my experience. Since getting a watch (with LTE) I’m much more willing to leave my phone in the house or car on walks or when I’m out. I have a phone too - it’s just necessary for when I travel for work / if I need to do anything while away from the computer.

I guess it’s phases of connectedness - an iPad let’s me be more mobile than my computer. My phone let’s me be more mobile than my iPad, and my watch covers the rest. Do I need this level of connectedness? Probably 3x per year. But those three times are absolutely critical and it gives me peace of mind if I’m on vacation - if my watch isn’t ringing I’m free to do whatever it is in front of me.

I did the digital minimalism thing (and need to do it again soon), but a watch is a nice forcing function. And calls have to be short because they are on speaker phone (or EarPods / Bluetooth, which overall is a good setup).

If apple keeps going the way they are going, I will need a very strong argument to get my kid a smartphone in 10 years when I can get them a watch that allows them to make calls, send limited texts, and not get wrapped up in social media / taking photos all the time.

What watch? Apple? I like that idea

Boredom is amazing.

I spent four hours today demolishing a deck alone. I was afraid to break my phone so I left it.

Four hours of work without music or podcast. My brain went to all kinds of places and I solved like five different coding problems I was faced with at work.

I should really bill my employer.

I am trying to cure myself with a surrogate.

The surrogate is Facebook Oculus Quest VR.

This might seem funny at first, but there are some advantages: while you stare at the screen, you also move at the same time, which I feel is important for health. The battery runs after an hour or so, and you have to put the device away. At this point I usually feel the need to do something again, but I'm no longer 'after work tired', and can do something productive like go jogging or do house chores.

The experiment is still going on, I feel it is promising.

> and just confront the boredom

"If you are bored, you are not paying attention."

Boredom, as they say, makes you creative.

So you can of course use your phone to cope with boredom — install a couple of good drawing / painting apps, music creation apps, study-something apps. Use them when bored.

Just stay away from the endorphin-pedal games which teach you nothing and are not a work of art to be experienced.

With that, a conscious act of putting down your phone and looking around is important. You can make it a habit without abandoning the phone altogether.

>Boredom, as they say, makes you creative.

I have never heard this maxim. Is it well known?

The Pet Shop Boys sang, I would never find myself feeling bored 'cause we were never being boring.

(1) https://www.google.com/search?q=boredom%20required%20for%20c...

(2) Ask any animal trainer, like a dog trainer.

Aah, yes, of course. I'd call it 'blue sky thinking'. I definitely came at the expression and not what it was saying. Thank you.

I realized that having an older phone (Nexus 6P) helps not use it because it is so slow and annoying to use that I dread having to interact with it. So I still have the necessary features like navigation, on-the-road connectivity, company VPN authentication etc. but past that don't get addicted to time wasters at all.

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