Comment by rg111 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rg111 | Hacker News Reader

Learning.

From my childhood, I have always loved to learn new stuff- all kinds of interesting stuff.

Before, when I became interested in something, I looked it up on the net, read books, and asked people about resources.

But with "feed"s, everything went downhill very quickly.

When more and more resources became available, I struggled to keep up with them.

There were not only too many resources I came to know about on topics that interested me, I also came to know about a lot of topics themselves.

There were not only too many things on things, but there were too many things!

I feel a lot more pressurized, a lot more agitated and anxious because I know about so many different kinds of things that I would be interested about and I am sure (at least in my mind) I would be good at.

These things range from a new programming language or a framework, to a new region and its culture that I suddenly came to know about.

The resources come as articles, essays to books, GH repos, MOOCs, and even diplomas.

I am so grateful because of the internet and specific kinds of social media because I got to know about a lot I otherwise would have missed, and my life would have been completely different. But after a certain amount, or velocity, things go to the dogs.

I believe there is a rising curve that plateaus after a certain distance in the X axis where Y is learning and acquiring knowledge and X is flow of information.

Before, learning was just super fun, and now I am often paralyzed in my free time and I do nothing so that I don't mourn not doing other things, and end up doing nothing.

I am thinking of ways to put a stop to this, and have so far come up with a few ways.

Thank you for summarizing years of inquietude. I thought that I might have ADHD, but my "symptoms" started when I realized that I could never catch up to all the information that the Internet is presenting me daily. I wish I had a solution to let it all go. Anyone?

Acknowledge that there's no need to catch up to everything, and that you can narrow your interests to a few things that really interest you, and study them the old fashioned way, with no blinking lights.. just a book, some quiet time and possibly accompanied by a hot cup of coffee.

I also started thinking if I had ADHD, but I still have one good habit surviving from single-digit age- reading books.

Despite everything, I manage to read 25-30 books each year.

And these books are always either very long novels or non-trivial, high-quality non-fiction.

I also manage to get immediate works done through time-blocking, and pomodoro (don't need pomodoro for stuff I really like).

But these techniques don't save you from being "reactive"- doing stuff that is needed right in the moment, and nothing else- behaving like primitive animals.

I can get hard, intensive work done, read books, learn hard concepts, but still lack very seriously in long-term action-taking (used to be good at this before).

Trying to solve these.

Buddhism?

It used to be that information was rare. So to find it you had to use tricks like knowing what person in the village had some books or knew how to do that thing you heard about.

Now information is abundant, so abundant in fact that it's clearly impossible to fit even 1% of it into your head in one human lifetime.

So the meta-skill is figuring out which of the finite number of things you actually want to learn. I suggest going upstream as much as possible. Are there any topics where your interests converge before they split off to many disciplines? Read books about that. The more you can get upstream of stuff the eaiser it is to tell where real novelty and interesting information is (in my experience).

If I can suggest a book: Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

I had a lot of the same feelings you describe here. Reading this and actually making tangible changes to my habits helped me rediscover my love of learning. Ultimately, the solution for me was to force myself to be bored. I set artificial limits for myself when consuming content online (for instance, I use the procrastination features here on HN and I deleted all "feed" apps on my phone, like Reddit).

I found that once I was bored, my free time became so much more enjoyable and it was easier to deliberately work on something.

Thank you for your suggestions.

I have read two of Newport's books- Deep Work, and So Good They Can't Ignore You.

In Deep Work, he emphasizes on being comfortable being bored.

Actually the thing is, it is so easy when you have to choose between good and bad. Like- play that video game or read that research paper. Nothing hard about choices here, but when you have to choose between that research paper and some interesting non-fiction, or that great new blog and a conference video, that MOOC and that new language- it becomes paralyzing for me.

I am trying to figure out how to come out of this paralysis when you are choosing among many choices that are all good for you and going to benefit you.

I will give Digital Minimalism a try. Thanks for the suggestion.

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