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Comment by pugets | Hacker News Reader

What I miss more than anything else is having an attention span. Years of abusing social media has left my brain pinballing all over the place. I am a collection of unfinished thoughts. Even as I write this, I can feel my mind needing to latch onto something new.

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As a parent, I've been watching this play out in real time among other peoples' children.

Most parents I know are deliberate about limiting screen time and ensuring their children don't substitute screen time for other activities. It's actually not that difficult to do so as kids are really good at finding entertainment in their environment even without electronics.

However, some parents give their kids all the tablet, TV, and phone time they want. As they grow up I can see them failing to learn how to play with others their own age because they'd rather reach for a screen than make an effort to do something. They can be frighteningly grumpy when separated from their electronic devices and can even throw tantrums until their parents cave in and give them more screen time.

FWIW, I've also watched parents reverse this trend by slowing weaning their kids off of screen time and substituting other entertaining activities. It doesn't take a whole lot to nudge people in the right direction, but putting that phone down and doing literally anything other than stare at a screen can be a difficult first step to take.

I'd argue that I've been watching this play out in real time among other... parents. It is actually sad when you go outside and start noticing that people are glued to their phone screens, including parents who would rather look at their smartphones rather than their kids. I can tell you that little kids notice that they lost the attention war to their parents' smartphones.

I've made this argument before, but in relation to dating.

You'll never be more interesting than a smartphone. It's virtually impossible. You're a single human, and that device contains the entire world. If you meet a woman, she has her friends on there. She has her instagram account. Snapchat, TikTok, whatever. You are instantly contrasted against the entire world (against only the highlight reel) and you don't match up. And you never will. You're dull and uninteresting. Just wait until you find yourself swiping on Tinder while your date is in the restroom. No one is immune.

The same is true for children. I'll never be as interesting at a Twitch stream or a flashy YouTube channel. Because no one is "on" at all times. Even at my most interesting, I'm not edited down.

I'm glad to have experienced life before the internet and cell phones. We'll never be back to that point and we may not be fully aware of what was lost for some time yet.

I met my girlfriend of one year on bumble, she seems to think I am more interesting than TikTok (which she enjoys) or Youtube or Instagram (where she has a decent size following.)

Honestly I think if you are feeling this way then you might want to traverse deeper into your relationships, if someone is looking for an entirely shallow relationship than this could certainly apply.

I really don't know about that. I struggle to find something interesting online most of the time and when I'm actively hanging out with friend I only use my phone to communicate or check on things occasionally. I'm not gonna sit around and just browser social media while hanging out. Now if there's dead time and nothings going on we may all be looking at our phones for a bit. But even then I'm increasingly less and less enticed by social media where as years ago this was much less true.

I am so thankful I met my wife before smartphones came out. Heck, I met her the year before the WWW came out. I’d so hate to be in the dating market today.

This does not jive with my experience at all.

Maybe it's because my age bracket still remembers flip phones. Maybe it's because I'm upfront about my own tech habits. Maybe it's because I swipe left on profiles that have linked IG accounts.

Whatever the reason(s), you don't need to be as interesting as an app, because you are not an app. Plenty of people just want to connect and relate with someone else, and there's nothing more relatable than not being able to live up to the standards of a glossy influencer ad campaign.

I agree this is sad. However, as a child of the 90s, I lost the attention war to my parents' TV. Maybe I just had absent parents, but I feel like most parents haven't been interested in their children for a while now.

Probably never were. It’s only lately that parents are expected to watch their kids every step until they turn 18. Back in the day you’d just tell them to go throw rocks in the well with the other village kids and come back at sundown

I've started weening myself off of everything that's instant-gratification. No reddit, no imgur, no short-format news stories or list articles. A week ago I drove 9 hours for a camping trip and spent several days without my phone and smart-watch. For several months I've made a point to walk at least an hour a day (to go about 5 miles) without looking at my phone -- but I still wear my watch to track the distance. I still feel like I have to have some form of audio going in the background - maybe something educational, maybe ASMR - while I'm browsing hacker news. If I play a game, I still choose one without a narrative so that I can listen to a podcast while I play. I'm not sure that any of these habits are beneficial.

I think Nicholas Carr had a great point in The Shallows (2010) [1] -- our brains have a lot of plasticity, even into late adulthood. The way we use the internet probably has a much larger impact on the way we think than we are currently willing to acknowledge. There is a healthy way to integrate electronics into our daily lives, but I don't think many of us have found it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book)

I’ve been suffering the same thing over the last few months. A helpful technique for me has been to swap out my smart watch for a dumb watch, and to put my phone in a drawer unless I intend to use it.

I also heavily limited the types of things Facebook will send push notifications for. It used to be that if I got a notification, it was because one of my friends actually interacted with me in some way. Now I get a bunch of junk notifications that I feel are designed to pull me into the app and not really inform me of anything, to get me back to scrolling a feed. Like I’ll get a notification that someone I don’t know made a post in a group I’ve been in for years without ever getting a similar notification in the previous years. So I basically turned off everything that doesn't involve my actual friends doing something relevant to me.

>I also heavily limited the types of things Facebook will send push notifications for.

That answer for me would be everything. (Except messenger which basically one friend uses for me because of where she lives.)

It’s funny because for me a smart watch is the perfect compromise - you still get a bunch of the useful features of a smartphone like navigation, timers, a calculator, music, Apple Pay, etc but with none of the really damaging web-based attention black holes.

I often go out with only my watch, and it feels so freeing to have only the good side of technology accessible.

I am very strict with the notification settings, otherwise the constant buzzing on the wrist would be worse than a phone.

I recently quit all social media. There was a bit of withdrawal but I can confirm that my attention span has started coming back.

It’s easy to quit, but how did you manage to fill empty time that you’ve suddenly gotten?

I'm learning how to play the banjo.

For me, the idea of needing to fill the time is one of the symptoms of the problem. Empty time is perfectly fine.

Apologies for asking the obvious, but then why are you here? :-P

Haha good question. I wouldn't consider HN social media, as it's more nuanced discussion around topics, although the lines are somewhat blurry. I think of social media more like Twitter and Facebook.

Do you visit Reddit?

I switched from visiting Reddit from the web/phone client to a Gopher proxy with Lynx (in order to view the submitted sites in the posts):

gopher://gopherddit.com

Also, my NNTP list:

alt.ascii-art

alt.folklore.computers

alt.os.linux.slackware

alt.sys.pdp10

comp.infosystems.gopher

comp.lang.forth

comp.lang.perl

comp.lang.perl.announce

comp.lang.perl.faq

comp.lang.perl.misc

comp.lang.perl.moderated

comp.lang.perl.modules

comp.lang.perl.tk

comp.lang.postscript

comp.misc

comp.unix.programmer

comp.unix.shell

fj.life.in-japan

rec.arts.int-fiction

rec.radio.amateur.dx

rec.radio.amateur.moderated

rec.radio.amateur.space

rec.radio.shortwave

Sometimes I interact over NNTP on https://synchro.net (they have a web/BBS interface too). As the pace is much slower, I can comment once or twice a week and everything is still good.

Finally, Gopher and Gemini sites. A really slow pace, no ads, no likes, no bullshit.

Wow haven’t thought about Gopher in forever. I still prefer to interact with the command line instead of the GUI for most things. I’ll have to give that a try.

Haha you have to help me here. Could you please help me understand what gopher is and NNTP? I do not know whether I should feel dumb, too young or too old for not knowing :)

Too young, those are pre-WWW things. NNTP are public mailing lists (proto discussion forums, though right now the proto is mostly used for fully automated luxury piracy) Gopher was supposed to be alternative to HTTP/HTML.

Sometimes, but it is intentional, and not reflexive.

I know, I was half kidding

Me too, congrats on completing that second sentence. :)

This one is a tough one and I can relate. I haven't been able to finish a book or work on any labs or FOSS work in years now. I reach for the phone even when I get a moment of downtime. The addiction is strong and now I as learn to be more mindful I realize how common place it is for everyone.

As a parent I've flip flopped between leaving my phone in the bed room / office during the day to flipping through TikTok while my kids crawl over me because my brain is so fried and all it wants is some dopamine hits to help get through that day.

Thankfully, crawling out of the first year of our second child and sleep, routine, etc. is all getting easier (not being in COVID lockdown helps too) and I'm finding it more common for myself to leave my phone in the bedroom while I enjoy my day with the kids.

I've also realized that the sole reason I bring my phone to the kid's park is in case I need to contact my wife, or vice versa. I've been tempted to get a smart watch w/ cellular just so I have less bulk to carry around, but a "dumb" phone may be just as sufficient ...

Just makes me think: When I get to this point (rarely if ever though with social media), I feel guilty. I possibly spend too much time on the computer, but I give myself these options if I am going to continue to use it (during spare time): learn a new thing related to my interests, write toy programs, or put it away and spend time with my wife, all if not at work.

There's something to be said for leaving your phone at home, driving to a park, and just walking around for a few hours.

Yeah, mindfulness is promoted as a cure for that but I’m not sure. Right now I’m pretty mindful in random daily occasions but it just gives me more depression and overthinking. When I’m turning that off for some days I’m… more happy? But still miserable. I don’t know what to do

I try to walk phoneless more and more just to zone out entirely. Free mind holidays, no login required

> What I miss more than anythi

And then I collapsed your comment. It’s worse than I thought.

What to do to fix this?

In general, you can train attention like it's a skill or exercise you practice. Stuff like mindfulness meditation is training of attention.

If we're talking about how social media shortens our attention span then it may be prudent to reduce usage.

I got mileage out of replacing habits of checking social media with reading longer-form articles. I picked up the idea from books on habits (Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, Atomic Habits by James Clear). To replace a habit, it helps to understand the prompt that causes it. When I feel tired, or worried about something, I found myself opening social media apps.

Behaviour-wise, following the prompt, I've replaced checking Reddit with checking Hacker News (similar enough to work, without getting too engaged with the content). I've also replaced Twitter with curated Tweetdeck streams, and Facebook for the news feed with newspaper apps (a free one like AP could work, though I pay for newspaper subscriptions).

Cognitive-wise, in terms of thoughts, I also recognize that social media is designed to hijack your attention and maximize engagement, so I've chosen to frame it as a negative (versus a neutral) habit for my own personal goals.

In short, replacing the habits with similar ones with better consequences, and understanding why I'm doing this has helped.

It’s like an ear worm. The fix is more music, but of a different type.

Nice. I am battling this problem the same way as you. I replaced reddit/fb with Hackernews / curated Twitter but I think it is slowly getting too toxic as well..

> What I miss more than anything else is having an attention span.

I need to look for more examples of the art of the future. The one paragraph short story (4chan greentexts I guess), the 20 second hit single.

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