Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

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Sorry to interject with something more generic but I feel it's somewhat pertinent. And sorry for the gray beard tone. Here it comes:

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Obsessively following anything or anyone is not good for you and that's very likely a 99% universal advice.

I was super good at multi-tasking all my life... until 2-3 years ago my brain started resisting me and sabotaging me at every turn. Gradually I realized that I am gulping waaaaaaaay too much information online; not just HN but favourite forums like ElixirForum, Rust Users, OCaml, and a few very big subreddits on top of that.

Starting to gradually dial down things did wonders. Even today I still insist on checking 2 outlets from the above listing and I am working on eliminating my fear of missing out. So far a good compromise has been to never check them during this or that hours. And even that helps.

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Here's something even more generic as an advice but I also feel it applies well, especially nowadays with all the distractions that bombard us:

Do your own thing. Develop problem-solving skills. All the out-of-context advice is still out there. If one day you need it, you can get metric tons of it in minutes.

Start focusing. Start analyzing your own life, your own personal / work faults, and optimize for your own unique circumstances. Treat your life (or whatever part of it you want improved) as an optimization problem and work on that.

>Obsessively following anything or anyone is not good for you and that's very likely a 99% universal advice.

I think the problem with reducing the advice to this level is that it reduces away the idea that some information is much less healthy than other information.

When you follow other people online, you are always learning from the information you gather. The problem is that you aren't always aware of what you are learning. If one is constantly following very successful people, they are learning how filled with the success the life of others are. This begins to contrast the lack of success in their own life. Not that their life lacks any success, but it isn't filled with only success. You get a false impression of the life of others which results in an unhealthy judgment of your own life.

This can become a significant problem on social media and one that I've seen brought up before in regards to teens and instagram. The older one is the more life experience and other sources of learning one has and thus the less susceptible to the effect, but less susceptible doesn't mean immune.

In contrast there is a flood of other information that isn't as toxic. Follow your favorite hobby by someone who shows both their success and failures and you don't risk building the same unrealistic picture. Follow a bunch of information largely freed from daily grind, like watching videos that dig into math, history, and science and you would have even less risk. That's not to say you can just assume the information has no risks at all, addiction and such are still a concern, but short of some very specific scenarios I would find it much safer to consume.

It is like telling someone to not overeat. While that's good advice, it is important to make sure the person you are talking to understands that overeating refined sugar and fats are much more a threat than overeating vegetables. Such an example almost feels silly because of how common sense the information feels, but when it comes to following people and information sources online I find people aren't as well informed as to what is the deep fried refined sugar and what is the vitamin packed fiber.

Oh, true. I also started hesitatingly following some specialized blogs and forums and that was good for my mental health.

And yep, people very easily miss nuance.

This is an interesting concept. I wonder if there is some way of quantifying the toxicity of media just like we quantify that of food. Or something like the “Nutrition Facts” label that we see on foods but on media, list the effects along various parameters that might affect someone’s mental health.

Lovely practical comment, seems almost universally applicable, thank you :). Especially this bit:

>If one day you need it, you can get metric tons of it in minutes.

Excellent comment!

> Do your own thing.

The article points out "A delusion is created that progress is made." and I agree that consuming content should not be mistaken for progress, rather you should also actively act on the content you consume. Create something out of it.

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