Why do you waste so much time on the internet? | Hacker News Reader

Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

zan.bearblog.dev

1,328 pointsmemorable652 comments

Loneliness. We don't have meaningful social connections anymore like our parents or their parents geeration had. We are so scattered, that I am unsure how many of my friends are actually friends and how many are just professional contacts. Everytime I switch job, almost 70% of my friends suddenly fall out of contact. Heck, I don't even know the people who live in next apartments both left, right, up and down on the same building. Socializing with my friends mean, setting up an appointment weeks ahead to see if we can align on a free-slot and this often involves all of us commuting to somewhere and disbanding by 22:00 hours because family, work next morning, chores to do, doctor appointment and other human things.

Interestingly, in this rat race, a lot of people suddenly inherited significant wealth and managed to use those wisely to have enough return to maintain a minimal lifestyle without working a primary 9-5. Some of us also achieved significant wealth by our early youth that we can afford to chase our hobbies for long time without worrying about the rents and bills and other responsibilities. Add social network to this, and these people cumulatively pursue things like world travelling, elaborate vacations, own businesses, YOLO etc.. , an endless stream of "other people doing YOLO" while us being worried what did I achieve so far?

So, yeah, we feel lonely, go to social sites(which is appearently the whole "internet" to non tech-savvy groups) to see how others are having it good. Then suddenly we realize we wasted a lot of time on watching others having fun and decide that, we need to get better hobbies and stop this. But the loneliness never goes away as hobbies are extra toppings when we have a complete social life, so we are again pulled back to the cesspool, because at least there we can get some connection in forms of comment, likes and we can post our opinions as well or get into hours of comment-wars(which counts as social connection too).

> Loneliness

I had to read through your comment a couple of times. From the sound of it, you’re likely in a better position than many other people here, and what worries you isn’t the lack of social contact but the depth and quality of it.

This is a common issue that a lot or even most people face as they get older. I think that a lot of us have been able to fill this gap by finding significant others and starting families. I wonder if the trend towards settling down at later ages and holding off on having a child - or forgoing it altogether - is also part of the issue.

Social media doesn’t help, but the answer to that is to stop using it, or, at the very least, to keep yourself from using platforms that encourage comparisons.

i think i fair ammount of it is that it's difficult to do things spontaniously anymore. when i was little, my parents friends just used to show up and see what was going on, hang out, have a drink, whatever. and i think this kinda builds that friendship, as it's the random shit ppl do together that builds the bond (best example is the Friends tv show) or when you're a teen and there's nothing to do so you just hang out with your friends. (that 70's show)

it seems really difficult to do that anymore because you can stay friends with someon on socials but then they live 2hr drive away. also it seems less accepted to just show up at someones house, also lives are really busy, so everything has to be scheduled now, otherwise you'll be interrupting things.

(sorry for the poorly structured brain dump.)

Just showing up is something that has definitely gone out of fashion. I have family I barely see because meeting up requires advanced notice. Even then it feels like an inconvenience, hence, other than weddings and funerals, I don't bother.

Even phone calls need advanced notice these days

I personally have an arrangement with some friends: they can call me or pop over any time… but they have to accept I might be busy, and vice versa. So far it has worked because we’re all too lazy to be doing anything other than hanging out.

What do you think causes this?

A few theories: We prioritize unimportant stuff over people. Examples: going to the gym, grocery shopping

Too much ceremony around the actual meeting. Your place gotta be tidy, you gotta be a good host etc. I have neighbors I really like who moved in ~6-8 months ago. We had them over twice and visited their place once. Each time each party made a huge effort. My wife made us clean our place for the better part of the day and every time we visited someone clearly had spent hours cooking and prepping stuff. Nobody wants to do this all the time. I even brought this up explicitly that we all gotta chill the f out about being super hosts. Everyone nodded and I am sure whoever hosts next time won't put much less work in.

Cultural change. I don't even know how to get to the place where I would just walk to my neighbor to "hang out". It feels like everything these days needs to have a reason and a plan. And this is in the rare case where you actually could walk over and don't have to drive 20 minutes to find out your friends took their kid to swim class.

100% this, I miss it so much.

Everything having to be scheduled is so depressing and stressful to me. I wish we could go back, but we can't.

We have some rather close friends who live nearby and had a spontaneous dinner with them more than once. It's refreshing and fun when done in moderation.

Well…why can’t we? What is the mechanism driving this?

It seems to me that social media, increased ease of communication, etc, should enable spontaneity, because now you can at least confirm that someone is home as you drive over.

I think two things contribute to this situation:

1) Social media enables us to not lose track of people from past lives or who live far away. Before social media, you had to make friends IRL or you didn’t make friends. Now, most of my friends don’t even live in my city or even time zone.

2) We all work more. Everyone does. I don’t have any data to back that up, but my best estimation is that, while literal working hours have stayed roughly the same in light of increased productivity, we’re all so available all the time that we are kind of always working.

I’ve attempted to remedy both lately, and it’s tough. I’ve had to establish extremely firm (and I think totally sensible) boundaries with work and yet I constantly feel like I’m just barely reinforcing them. It’s mostly worked, though, and I’m not sure what to do with the extra time, seeing as everyone else I know is in the same “always working” mode.

few randoms thoughts on this. yeah but if everyones friends don't live close by then everyone is always out visitng far away friends. we're forever stuck in the cycle.

also it's way easier to say no to someone online, (as people are lazy and don't feel like going out right now) vs a friend showing up and being like lets go do this fun thing #insert peer pressure here#.

also clear work life boundaries are super important. i treat work as if i were in the office, once i leave i ain't checking it until i start againt tomorrow. also no slack or email on my personal devices, eww.

I wonder if the connectedness makes it easier to avoid actual connection. Because of fast & easy texting, I can always check in before showing up or calling. It's much easier to stay in that medium than escalate to a higher throughput medium. I just texted with a friend for 30 minutes. We should have just called!

Once you are coordinating things, it's easy to overthink and make things too complicated or cumbersome. Also, "Oh I am meeting John, maybe if I do that I also should invite Peter. But I haven't talked to Peter in a while and it's awkward to ask to meet in 30 minutes. But we've always all met together... Maybe I just text Peter to see how he is doing and we all meet another time. Maybe it's best if I organize a little spring party in my backyard next month...". If I was on the phone with John and would have to call Peter instead of everyone just texting, I might not even have time to overthink everything.

That‘s me but evermore so I‘m stuck between a rock and a hard place.

As one sibling comment - I too have noticed this: I can remember friends of my parents showing by having a good time completely spontaneously. I liked it very much.

On the other hand I’m one of those people who get irrationally upset by random visits especially when it’s from family.

I guess that’s one reason why it’s so hard for me to be happy.

The getting upset part is interesting. I have some theories, but am curious to hear why you think it makes you upset.

I really find it hard to pinpoint the exact reason. In the moment the "surprise" is what feels overwhelming. I know it's paradox because on the other hand, that's what the interaction my parents and their friends had were - little surprises.

It feels a bit like wanting a surprise gift for Christmas (contrary to something you wished to get) but then being upset because you did not get what you wished for...

I would love, to hear your theories maybe this willhelp explore that feeling a bit more

My theory is that we have so much entertainment and so many low-importance chores and tasks we put on ourselves that any unplanned event feels negative. One might have planned to go shopping, watch the latest episode of a show, read an article or watch a video that one stumbled over earlier in the day or similar. There is just no more idle or unplanned time. In the rare case that time is unplanned, it feels precious, although we did this to ourselves.

I recently started to only allow myself to watch tv on Friday evenings. I've also made a much stronger effort to limit social media consumption. I feel a lot less stressed and I think it's because there suddenly is no default way of filling time. Not only do I spend more time on things I actually value (musical instrument practice, reading books and working on my software projects), but I also think that I am much more often in a state where I'd be delighted, rather than stressed if friends or family suddenly stopped by. Unfortunately, I think this theory will never be put to the test. I am more excited though when friends message me.

My observation is that this used to be much easier because someone was usually home, typically a wife who did not work. Now everything is planned to the last minute because everyone is focused first on working, with family and friends getting the leftover time.

I wonder if another aspect of both partners working is that it pushes chores into the weekend and after work. When I was a kid my mom would go shopping during weekday mornings. I go shopping during a weekday evening or on the weekend. Same for other house chores. If someone showed up suddenly, chances are we aren't home or furniture is up because the Roomba is running.

I had an experience last year that hit me really hard and drove that point home: Due to an emergency I had to travel to the area I grew up in. I arrived at a hotel where I was expecting to wait for my family to arrive. A friend I went to highschool with and have zoom call with about twice a year texted me that he and his girlfriend are having dinner at a nearby restaurant. I just walked over in ten minutes and now was having dinner with my friends. No car, no planning, nothing! Unfathomable! It usually would take a week's heads up and a drive for me to do anything like this with any of my friends. It hit me so hard how much I miss this kind of thing. If I don't make plans in my everyday life it means my wife and I will likely be sitting around at home or maybe go out for dinner. Makes new think about moving, but all my friends are really spread out. Everytime there is a little bit of a group someone moves. It's also never walkable

Family and significant others have become harder to find. Out of wedlock births went from 3% for your parents generation to 40% today.

40%. That is insane to me. I’m all for getting rid of the legal institution of marriage but I know that’s a niche idea and not what a bunch of people are doing.

Whatever the cause may be for people not being together, not having kids, or having kids out of wedlock (stable relationships - essentially)… we need to address it because it definitely is a key ingredient for happiness and health. (Especially so for men - the stats show this quite clearly)

> This is a common issue that a lot or even most people face as they get older. I think that a lot of us have been able to fill this gap by finding significant others and starting families. I wonder if the trend towards settling down at later ages and holding off on having a child - or forgoing it altogether - is also part of the issue.

I doubt this is all of it. It may have intensified recently, but the American obsession with the nuclear family predates the internet. Your wife and children should not be the entirety of your social circle. Likewise, your (man)children and other mothers should not be your mother's entire social circle if you are a child. Loneliness would be greatly reduced if more people were able to force their circumstances to be favorable to forming lifelong platonic friendships.

I think its a good time to take the initiative and invite a neighbor around for dinner or even dessert one night. I'm not sure why Parents and Grandparents were better at this but the younger generation maybe isn't as good at realizing social interaction is important and you have to initiate at least 50% of the time.

Your answer is a good one.

I’m optimistic that remote work can help society reverse course on the constraints that have trapped people into loneliness. We got into the habit of commuting during our free time, working far from home. We sometimes move cities to get a promotion at the corporate HQ or to keep a career at a company that relocated. If we don’t move, our friends may to get ahead in their careers. These constraints imposed by office work separated us from our families, communities, and friends.

With acceptance of remote work growing, hopefully fewer people will feel they must move to have a career. If that happens, people will live more places. That will improve the odds that people who can’t work remotely can, at least, work closer to home. It’s possible clubs and activity groups will make a comeback. I’ve observed signs of this already, having recently met people that are joining clubs or arts groups to replace the pure social aspects of the office. I’ve also met early career people who are excited to be living near their high school friends and families. And I know others who are happy to be able to move away, but keep a good job.

It is not that work friends can not be long term friends. I met one of my closest friend when we were working for a startup. There is something about big companies which prevents people from making true friends. And I think it is the collective belief that "work friends are not true friends". People don't want to share their mind freely with each other and there is good reason for that. We fear that we might speak something which is inappropriate. We are trying to be politically correct all the time. I am pretty sure I have offended people during college but that didn't not matter in long term. One can't always be just neutral or positive.

I am addicted to twitter and reddit. Especially reddit. It often takes the place of reading, hobbies, quiet moments, improving my home, talking with my spouse, and playing with my baby.

When reddit records a click or an upvote, it thinks it has been a Good Product, and created Engagement. Reddit then takes those feedback loops and tunes the algorithm and feedback loops to create further engagement.

But in reality, there's almost no positive relationship between my engagement with social media and my personal human flourishing. I think these products are mostly poison for my soul.

I’m the same, and I’ve been struggling with it for a couple of years. I’ve even addressed it in therapy, and it hasn’t helped. The only thing that has helped at all is a site blocker.

Twitter and HN mostly fill me with frustration, loathing, and angst. Like the cigarettes I smoke fill me with tar and carcinogens. Reddit at least I occasionally find something interesting, due to carefully curated subs.

It’s just addiction, nothing more.

Site blocking helps. For about two weeks. I do not even remember why I removed twitter again from my router's blacklist.

A moment of madness, perhaps?

Unfollow everybody on Twitter.

Why does HN bother you like that?

There are a lot of incredibly frustrating, problematic, and exasperating opinions and personality types to be found on HN. The particular members of any of those sets will differ based on the eyes of the beholder.

There's no shortage of passive aggression, angst, oneupsmanship,virtue signaling, dogwhistling, etc. It just so happens that there's a sufficient about of incredibly useful opinions and comments from subject matter experts that make it worth consuming in spite of the fact that it's a forum on the internet, and all of the baggage that entails.

(side note: this isn't intended as a dig on HN moderation - you probably all do a better job than most other venues. kudos.)

I find HN with its moderation to be night and day difference from many other forums.

100% agree, which I do not take for granted. Niche communities in reddit used to be that way. Not it's an overwhelming abundance of low effort content like "me too", "tree fiddy", "and then I took an arrow to the knee"

I think there are still don't good niche subreddits. They just may not be the ones they used to be. Like Twitter, Reddit benefits from grooming.

Most rely on volunteer moderators who also happen to be active members. The two roles are not exactly compatible.

Then maybe those models aren't as good?

For me, reddit is the one that gets me angry. It's addicting, but also seems like teenagers and bots arguing with it each other. Instagram is increasingly inundated with ads, but at least I get to see thirst traps and cute animals.

Youtube is the only social media site that I think is a net positive on my life, because I learn so much, but I've started going for runs again because I really need time away from a screen and the constant dopamine hits.

> seems like teenagers and bots arguing with it each other

Yeah that helped me with getting over the addiction. Most people dont care about your opinion, you aren't going to change anything, if some dumb teenager thinks they're smart (even though they're wrong) just let them be.

That's the exact reason I've been Twitter-free for five years.

I am absolutely caught in a loop between refreshing reddit, hopping to twitter, hopping to Instagram, and then back to reddit — a cycle that takes just long enough for all three platforms to re-popluate with more content.

It's not healthy, and I feel bad about it.

They have got me exactly where they want me.

And like you, it's very clear that this is not conducive to human flourishing. Unfortunately, I've been caught in this, and similar loops for so long that I have a hard time knowing what flourishing even looks like anymore.

EDIT: One thing that did help me, for a time, was finding a REALLY good book, one that completely sucked me in—in this case it was David Mitchell's latest, 'Utopia Avenue'. It's been a long time since I found a really fantastic book, when you do, there's nothing better.

And I realized that the next morning, when you wake up after a long evening of reading a good book, you remember it. You remember it as being a great use of time, something you can be proud of.

An evening spent scrolling through social media is never memorable. It's never something you're proud of, something you want to tell people about.

A good night with a good book is a good use of time.

I need to remember this more often, myself.

that is the distinction.

I scroll reddit obsessively but I don't enjoy it.

I read books obsessively but I enjoy it.

A possible experiment to try: what happens when you only browse Reddit through an anonymous, not-logged-in browser and IP address? And then only use your account when you are actually sure you want to post something?

For me, it's enough just to log out. The friction of logging in is just the right amount of friction.

I do this,I find my self scrolling a lot still. Though its helped avoid alot of the stupid back and forths I used to let me self get into.

> But in reality, there's almost no positive relationship between my engagement with social media and my personal human flourishing. I think these products are mostly poison for my soul.

This is why "engagement" is something only corporate f---splats say under normal circumstances. Either they secretly know it's a form of psychological enslavement or they're oblivious to the problems inherent in trying to measure it.

my problem with reddit (and here i guess?) is idk what else to do with like 5-30minutes of down time. I dont really have my life optimized for constant activity and idk what else to fill that with now.

Be bored. I’m not good at this yet, but I’m practicing just sitting there in those idle periods. It’s what we evolved to do, and what our phones are breaking us about

start a hobby. exercise. music. a side hustle. something that has a positive reward loop

Something like Duolingo? Read a book?

I almost never regret time spent reading a book. But I frequently regret time spent on Reddit/Youtube/Twitter, even if I enjoyed the content at the time.

I'm more likely these days (as the decades pile up) to deliberately stop reading a book, if it hasn't engaged me by the time I've read 20% of it. Of course, many never get started, once I do a quick scan.

I estimated how many more books I would likely read before I die, and it's a shockingly small number, even though I read a lot! So - choose wisely.

As a married husband (almost 20 yrs) and father of five kids, allow me to share some wisdom. Spouse time is vital to a healthy, strong, vibrant, lasting relationship. Reddit doesn't care about you like your spouse does. And kids grow up way too fast. Treasure every moment.

>> Spouse time is vital to a healthy, strong, vibrant, lasting relationship

Hear! Hear! This cannot be overstated.

>> And kids grow up way too fast. Treasure every moment.

And this on the other hand ... works only if You somehow like children (and who does not like small psychopats with dictatorial aspirations). For the others (I believe most of people who lives in my housing estate can be counted) I observe that the moments they really treasure are those when their children are is safe distance from them taking care of themselves.

Interestingly, not caring about your children will likely result in little dictators. You might not want to give them attention, they do want it, and they'll get it one way or another.

Yeah it seems like with my own children good behavior is proportional to attention. They don't ask for much, but they don't like feeling like they're in my way. If I treat them decently, they'll let me do the things I need to do, and they know I'll come back to finish up with them later.

could not agree more with this. social media exists out there, but spouse and kids are right in front of you each and every day. when done correctly, seeing the growth of your family and spending time with them can be extremely rewarding, even more than the dopamine produced by interacting with the social media

The danger is that the social media provides a moderate dopamine hit but at nearly no “risk” - whereas many other situations provide a higher hit but at a much larger risk: the kid may be cranky, your spouse might be having a bad day, etc.

We tune our activities for the minimization of risk. Perhaps adding a random chance to ban you for browsing would help add some risk back in.

> And kids grow up way too fast.

what seems like an instant, they are gone.

I find time passing subjectively much faster when there are close long-term daily social connections (even remote), although maybe that’s just me getting older.

I find time goes extremely fast when I'm not doing deeply engage work that requires 100% of my brainpower.

Want to slow time down? Maxwell's equations have you covered.

As somebody who can't for the life of me find a partner and hasn't been in a serious relationship for 5 years now, Reddit time is all I have left.

I would encourage you to not think of this in an addiction framework. Instead think of this as a self medicating framework.

Why are you choosing reddit over spending time your baby? Do you fear handling the baby? Does handling the baby make you feel uncomfortable thoughts or feelings?

Is there something, like ego, that reddit gives you?

This is a good problem for self journaling, working with someone, or whatever your preferred form of self introspection is.

Chronic media consumption is not always based on avoidance. It is very easy to open social media during genuine downtime "for 5 minutes" only for an hour to pass before you know it. That is just bad self control due to dopamine addiction.

Dopamine addiction isn't a real thing. You don't get addicted to going for a jog or eating chocolate.

It gives a constant stream of novelty and instant gratification, two things the human mind is deeply biased to crave, delivered through an interface produced by decades of A/B testing and applied behavioral psychology.

It absolutely is an addiction machine.

Is chocolate an addiction machine?

It tastes good. People really like it. Given the choice between rice cakes and chocolate, you'd probably choose chocolate. Chocolate manufacturers test chocolates and release the more successful ones.

Does chocolate have teams of behavioral psychologists designing every aspect of the experience of its acquisition and consumption in order to create a situation in which a huge chunk of our society is unable to stop compulsively consuming it to a point where it's negatively affecting their lives?

Everyone else replying to you is trying to convince you with arguments that reddit isn't a good use of your time. As you already know, this won't work. You're already convinced.

The only thing that works is a site blocker. It actually works. Convince yourself that the block is permanent. Delete the app. This of course won't completely stop you, because you could always unblock yourself. But it'll stop you from mindlessly pulling up reddit.

everybody likes to put their reddit down.

but we are just good friends.

reddit man.

If you can't control your reddit consumption already I'd expect that the site blocker will end up disabled before long. I'd try to involve a therapist if the goal is getting to the bottom of this beyond even reddit or websites in general.

Even just blocking everything but old.reddit was enough to help cut it out, though I suspect HN has replaced it now as the “waste time machine”

Start a habit tracker tracking # of days not browsed reddit. you can trick your brain, since it loves streaks. also tie it to some reward mechanism so it seems like you're earning something by not browsing vs a punishment.

Sometimes a simple "pattern interrupt" can break the cycle. If you've a habit of opening the page whenever you hop on your phone, that extra effort may be enough to push back against the potential incentive

Anecdotally, a lot of digital addictions come down to ease of access vs dopamine hit. As soon as your access method is "futz with a hosts file" or "ask your wife to unlock the blocker" (I was pretty bad), it becomes easier to break the cycle.

More people need to utilise their tendency toward lazyness, I swear

I had a similar addiction to reddit a couple of years ago, especially while I was in college. It just became something I did as part of my routine. In hindsight I don't know why, since I rarely had a good time on there. It felt like everyone was an asshole, the content was all repeats of the same shitty jokes and fake stories from people desperately trying to farm internet points. It all felt pathetic, and I knew it at the time, but something kept bringing me back.

So one day I decided to just delete my account, and that was it. As soon as the account disappeared, so did my interest in the site. It was like a switch flipped in my head. I guess it was the internet points that were tickling the addiction part of my brain?

Next time I find myself wasting too much time on a social network, I'm just going to delete the account and move on. Unfortunately, I don't think HN lets you delete your account, so I'll need to get creative if I decide to drop this site too (maybe do something to get myself banned?)

>In hindsight I don't know why, since I rarely had a good time on there.

Someone told me once that addiction is built more strongly with negative experiences and it blew my mind. I think it's probably true.

Addiction isn't built by you getting a reward, it's built by you desperately chasing a reward you never quite reach. We call a book a "page turner" not because it's a satisfying book, but because every chapter ends in some bullshit cliff hanger. Same applies to TV shows.

I would suggest that maybe you weren't addicted to reddit because it was actually giving you what you wanted, but because you were chasing some satisfaction that you never quite got. Satisfied users leave a site happy after 5 minutes and get on with life. People who have spent 2 hours opening 200 threads and still haven't got the happy feeling they came there for stay around to open "just one more thread" another 50 times.

Others have said, but spending time with your spouse is important. But, equally important (and it's a big part of having a good relationship) make sure you're stepping up and pitching in around the home with the chores.

Nobody likes them, but if you're not doing 50/50 (or at least something mutally recognised as fair) and you don't occasionally overachieve to give your spouse a bit of a break, it can be a big issue. If Reddit/Twitter are prioritised over getting the basics done, get that sorted out.

> I think these products are mostly poison for my soul.

You spend time on reddit because you want to. It seems unproductive to tell yourself that you don't.

You have a cognitive disonance, logical contradiction that you just need to bring to the surface and follow through. When you are about to reddit ask yourself whether you want to or not. Not some idealized version of yourself in your head. Just what do you want right now.

Then debug, introspect. Eliminate wishful thinking and accept reality - more time on reddit less time for other things. Do I want that?

Answer yes is perfectly fine. You do what you want anyway, but in my case simply bringing these contradictions to my conscious mind (and sometimes looking for a moment where it is exactly - like, I know that it's A or B I can't be spending time on both things at the same time, If I want to learn X it requires time) is enough to eliminate them.

I still spend time on reddit (not that much), but I don't think I'm doing anything I don't want to do or that it would be better to do anything else.

We are always doing what we want to. Telling ourselves that we don't is needless suffering.

> You spend time on reddit because you want to. It seems unproductive to tell yourself that you don't.

This seems like a mischaracterization of how addiction works.

Replace "reddit" with "heroine" and not much changes, except to the same effect.

I like to think of it as "I can't stop scrolling Reddit despite knowing I'm not enjoying Reddit". I deleted the Reddit app, and blocked reddit.com (which I found myself using next) to 0 minutes on Digital Well-being (on stock Android).

Addiction is just a pattern, a framework of looking at reality. You could say you are suffering addiction withdrawal when you are away from somebody or some place you love.

Addiction framework and associated solutions seem to be pretty effective for things like stopping heroin usage.

Quite likely it can work for reddit too, but I'm guessing PC already tried it.

I'm just offering a different framework and way of looking at things, which works great for me - or to be even more precise, removes some suffering. One may just decide she wants to spend a lot of time on reddit, but being honest with oneself and trying not to hold logically contradicting things in one's head seems like a good thing.

Addiction isn't "just a pattern". Stop treating people like logic-driven robots.

Its just your association with the term pattern. Or maybe mine. To me, love, death and myself are just some patterns too.

I mean just something that we name. If we look at a tree and I say its crown forms a nice sphere, I'm not treating trees like geometric objects and I can still appreciate its beauty and marvel.

Observing the same reality you can see it through different frameworks consisting of different patterns. The same tree can be seen as color palette for a designer, bunch of areas with different living conditions for microbiologist, shapes for painter, material for woodworker etc.

Once you divide reality to some patterns in a certain way (what I call a framework) when somebody suggests different division we usually don't throw away existing one, so we subdivide our patterns based on what's somebody is saying instead of looking at a whole thing and then the other framework usually seems like a detail, not important, worse, less useful.

Being able to abandon your preferred framework for a moment allows too see the same things differently.

E.g. I can have a long conversation with somebody who deeply believes in God, (we skip the church bit for a moment) and if I substitute just a name of the pattern, if I do s/God/Universe, it turns out our worldview is virtually identical despite me being an atheist.

I think there's some value in most of what you're saying. Your overall proposal, etc etc.

But when you say "You could say you are suffering addiction withdrawal when you are away from somebody or some place you love", you demonstrate that you have no idea what addiction is. No idea.

With respect, I strongly advise you to not say things like that. It's super wrong (which is okay but sub-optimal), you look dumb (which is bad for you), and it's hurtful to other people (which is bad for other people).

I hope you can continue to be naive about addiction for your entire life.

I have seen some forms of addiction up close, but I think the term is more general and we shouldnt taboo every with which some people have extremely bad emotional association with.

IMO I should be able to say I was forced to do some work even if I wasnt in a concentration camp myslef. Or that it bugs me that something is messy even if I dont have extreme OCD.

Internet addiction is a normalized term and I think withdrawal fron losing somebody you love or even a place can be more accute.

Also I'm sorry about whatever you had to experience related to addiction.

It sounds like you're mixing up the casual, colloquial use of addiction ("I'm addicted to key lime pie") with the medical term ("i suffer from addiction"). The latter is not just a failure of willpower and is qualitatively different from the former.

You can use either, but if people think you mean the latter and you start arguing points that only apply to the former, expect pushback.

> You spend time on reddit because you want to. It seems unproductive to tell yourself that you don't.

"Just stop being depressed" - Psychiatrists hate that one trick.

That's not what I'm saying. If you want depression analogy it would be more like

"You are suffering most of the time. It seems unproductive to tell yourself that you aren't"

You spend time on doing heroin because you want to. It seems unproductive to tell yourself that you don't.

Yes.

We are always doing what we want to.

Perhaps I should have added "given restrictions of reality"? I mean you can have diarrhea and be currently shitting your pants. And you may not want to do that. Seems like a stronger argument than equaling heroin to reddit. But in both cases your options are limited. From those, you choose what you want. And you are then doing what you want to do (with or without telling yourself that you don't really want to do that - whether that's shooting heroin, going to rehab or changing your pants). If your argument is that what you want was not available as an option, then your problem is wishful thinking. Reality is what it is. You are here now.

As far as I understand it, a heroin addict, at times when he's not craving and has some choice, has a choice to continue doing it or to go through hell and then some. I doubt there is much cognitive dissonance before dosing. But I just don't know this context enough (except for the fact that random dude view's on life are very unlikely to help).

But in general yes, if you murder people you can apply this thinking too. You will either decide that's not what you want or have less cognitive dissonance while doing it. Happily slashing without thinking that you don't really want to do that.

I'm not selling any cure, just suggesting that there seem to be no need to ever think "I don't want to do this" and then do it. And I mean it. From cleaning up shit from the floor, through putting your dog down to going to a funeral.

It seems that you may be unfamiliar with the concept of compulsion. All you've done is water down the word "want" to meaninglessness and uselessness. It distinguishes nothing in your theory.

> As far as I understand it, a heroin addict, at times when he's not craving and has some choice, has a choice to continue doing it or to go through hell and then some.

No, not at all. I think your understanding depends strongly on your ignorance on that subject.

The dangerous thing about reddit is the fact that it has these wonderful nuggets of information. Some really thoughtful opinion, or some unique perspective on things. I always use the example of someone writing essentially an essay on how to make neapolitan pizza [1], including a list of references, one of them being a scientific article. Where would I find this in a book or on the internet? Blog sites and similar things usually are only there to sell ads or something else, are padded with fluff or simply wrong. Here I have someone anonymous without any ulterior motive, without fluff, just exactly what I want: pure information in a useful structure.

Similarly you can sometimes find really cool answers on /r/askscience or /r/askhistorians.

Of course, this is in stark contrast to the vast amounts of low quality posts from people posting thoughtless one-liners while they are waiting on the bus, sitting on the toilet or about to fall asleep. Not to mention many toxic comments. But every now and then I find these little nuggets which keep me hooked.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/neapolitanpizza/comments/h8llnp/fre...

I weaned myself off reddit by blocking everything except i.reddit.com in my hosts file. if i blocked everything, inevitably there would be some post that I'd need to read because i stumbled upon it on google or what have you.

Now, if I really want to read a reddit post, I can. but half of the links break unless you manually change the url to include the "i." subdomain again, the interface isn't so great, but I can access all the content if i really want to, it's just inconvenient enough that you're not going to mindlessly scroll for all eternity

I totally blocked Reddit in my hosts file. If I really need a post work purposes I go to Google translate, load the post and click 'see original'. Such a hassle that I hardly ever do it. YMMV.

I think its funny that we both stumbled on a similar approach

I'm addicted to reddit too. But before that I was addicted to newsgroups and other web forums. I dont think I can blame Reddit app, I think I just love talking with people online. What I've learned is that most people really dont care about my opinion. I now only comment on stuff that I have something useful to bring, and its a topic that is really relevant to the board/thread. Those rules can cut back commenting a lot.

I logged off from Twitter and Reddit and blocked it with Leechblock NG [1] on my computer. That took care of 50% of the problem. I would still browse them on my phone.

When I switched phones I decided to not install Twitter or Reddit on the new one for a week.

After getting over some FOMO on the first week, I decided to extend it for 1 month.

I have been "clean" for ~7 months now. Except for the occasional direct link from my mobile phone, and fortunately thanks to the ingrate mobile experience their webs provide, I will probably keep doing this for a while.

I find other ways to distract myself, though (other websites, doing random queries in google, etc). I am working on the underlying problems I have. But for me getting the distractions out of the way first was easier than the alternative.

[1] https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock/

Because we humans have a lot of idle time.

We feel like we're wasting it, and we feel we should instead spend time archiving goals, to better ourselves, to do something more meaningful. But that is not how life works. You are just unnecessarily burden yourself with guilt. Thinking you should be doing something else. There are so many things to learn about, so many things to experience, right? We fear on missing out on life, chasing something, but what exactly we don't really know.

But maybe you just don't need to? Most of us are exactly fine with where we are. Of course you should always strive to improve, but truth is "killing time" is a big part of life. Especially for top of the food chain animals like humans. Watch some livestreams of lions on youtube, what do they do? 99% of the time they just sit under a tree doing absolutely nothing, and I bet they don't feel guilty about it. People used to walk labyrinths for hours and hours, just to kill time.

This whole notion that you need to make the most out of every moment, live life to the fullest, see all the places, chase the uncomfortable! - I don't think it's necessarily the best advice, the happiest people I've met tend to have very simple boring routines.

> People used to walk labyrinths for hours and hours, just to kill time.

I walk and ride bicycle just to kill time to this days

I agree with this. Not to mention that being idle still involves complex thought processes, like treating traumas and understanding concepts.

Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t provide me with any comfort. I’m only going to live once. When I’m old and bound to a chair (hopefully due to frailty and not because a psychiatrist strapped me to it), I want to feel like I achieved something more than a passive human existence.

All these hours spent consuming forgettable garbage on Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and in video games… these are hours not spent learning recipes, making music, writing programs, lifting weights, or practicing Spanish. If I could channel my energy towards these things, then the long-term payoff would be much more enriching. Not only that, but I’d probably be a happier person if I was disconnected from whatever daily drama social media wants me to care about.

If I spend the next 10 years of my life the way I spent the last 10, I’ll approach my midlife with no discernible talents, ambitions, or meaningful lived experiences.

> All these hours spent consuming forgettable garbage on Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and in video games… these are hours not spent learning recipes, making music, writing programs, lifting weights, or practicing Spanish. If I could channel my energy towards these things, then the long-term payoff would be much more enriching. Not only that, but I’d probably be a happier person if I was disconnected from whatever daily drama social media wants me to care about.

I do all those things and I still waste a ton of time on Youtube.

And it's fine; your brain cannot dedicate all of its waking time to high-intensity intellectual endavours, you just end up burning out.

I worked full-time and studied for a few years. Remarkably, I still had a share of free time, but I couldn't do anything "productive" with it as I had no mental energy to do perform these tasks. You _have_ to just hang out and do nothing.

The most productive people I know waste a ton of time outside of their chosen specialty, and it's not a coincidence.

This is such a key insight. For me at least, “time management” is really about managing my energy levels more than anything.

You’re saying one thing and doing another.

It’s not on anybody but you if you end up living a passive human existence. Either change what you’re doing or accept that your dreams will stay dreams.

Their comment doesn't blame anyone for their situation.

If they see their comment as a negative thing (which I think it’s clear that they do), then lack of blame is exactly what you don’t want to see. They need to be blaming themselves, not nobody.

Self-blame doesn’t help in most cases. Self-recrimination easily leads to guilt, self-loathing, and defeatism.

You should spend as much time as possible on your phone / the internet. When you die you won't have access to it.

There are plenty of people who consider the alternative activities you listed just as meaningless.

But if you ACTUALLY want to do those things and you don't because of internet addiction. Then you need to break it.

Positive and / or negative reinforcement.

By some snack or drug or something you really like and set a goal of no scrolling for whatever is a reasonable time limit. If you achieve it have the treat. Gradually up the time limit and increase the reward.

Negative reinforcement would be harder. It has to be something you actually don't like and drive no sense of purpose from. A lot of people will do something like pushups, but then they just see it as the cost.

Possibly since your fear is wasting time, when you catch yourself doing it. Then purposefully waste time without scrolling. Like time out.

Your positive reinforcement can't be related to the addiction though.

I think most people would like if they could be productive 24/7 (or more realistically, consistently productive during their waking hours), but I think there is some amount of "waking rest" that humans need, or at least that modern human existence makes it hard to avoid.

This same post could have been written 30 years ago, but it would be about mindlessly switching channels on the TV, watching vapid sitcoms interrupted by a handful of commercials you've seen dozens of times.

Maybe before that people would read the local fish-wrap newspaper or same stupid book they've read dozens of times.

>Watch some livestreams of lions on youtube, what do they do? 99% of the time they just sit under a tree doing absolutely nothing, and I bet they don't feel guilty about it

Lions are at peace with the world. They sit around with clear minds, watching nature go by. They are content with the world and their place within it.

This is absolutely not the same as a human who spends 4 hours a day doomscrolling through twitter and reddit and can't help checking their phone every 5 minutes.

The point is that lions are chasing down prey 100% of the time, and so humans also don’t need to be actively doing something 100% of the time either. Doomscrolling isn’t a great example, but is comparable to the leisure of lions.

The point I was trying to make is that even within "unproductive time" there are extremely healthy, and extremely unhealthy ways to spend it.

Someone introduced me to the idea of "mental diet" a while ago. I find it to be an interesting concept. We know not to spend hours of our time eating junk food because it's not good for our physical health, why do we never consider our mental health in a similar way?

Doomscrolling is just filling your brain up with mental junk. Most content on the modern internet is just mental junk honestly. And spending hours reading and getting invested in all of this crap really does affect your headspace for the rest of the day.

Lions, by comparison, have a very pure and healthy mental diet.

> Lions are at peace with the world. They sit around with clear minds, watching nature go by. They are content with the world and their place within it.

Maybe for an adult lion at the peak of its powers. An elderly lion will end his days alone, cast out from the pack, surviving on its fading wits until....

I feel like you are romanticising animal nature.

Maybe they're doomscrolling the environment or their own mind?

Do lions ignore prey if they're not hungry? I know younger cats usually want chase something if given the opportunity, regardless of whether they've eaten or not, or have access to food 24/7.

Older cats tend to just sit around and watch the environment, perhaps waiting for something to happen?

Excellent points and a fresh perspective.

We should be happy we have a few hours to "waste". Enjoy it instead of punishing yourself pointlessly.

If you wish to force yourself into a habit of doing something else instead -- take steps but also question the intent.

agreed. We are not a robot, but a living creature.

However, I think key part is how to shorten that idle time.

I am trying meditation for now, but I cannot see any improvement, unfortunately. Maybe I am missing something.

Return to monke. That is the solution.

This sounds like a major depressive episode. A very experienced psychologist recently told me that even folks with no hint of mental health trouble started having a hard time with motivation and mood in the pandemic, but many with existing tendencies towards depressive states were plunged straight into oblivion. Talk therapy and medication can be a big help, but CBT exercises can also help if you're against using medication and can't imagine going into a deep dive about your feelings with a therapist. Even if it's not depression, this poster should talk to a psychologist. They're not able to right the ship themselves which doesn't bode well for it improving on its own. Finding a therapist sucks but telemedicine is more accessible than ever at this point.

As an aside— folks love dismissing mental health concerns by saying things like "everybody has a hard time getting motivated." That completely ignores the scope of the problem— it's no different from telling someone their motorcycle accident is no big deal because kids fall off their bikes all the time. There's a boatload of peer reviewed research out there that discusses the debilitating effects of depression. Go read it if you're skeptical— I'm not your research assistant.

For those who didn't get the memo:

Be warned, folks! Depression is not about sadness, but about not being able to do things.

If you are feeling incapable of doing things, like physically siting in front of the computer and not being able to do any work, you are probably depressed.

Sometimes you'll sit in front of the computer, try to start some task but somehow end opening hackeer news, digg, youtube.

Seek help as soon as possible, do not wait until you are fired.

> Sometimes you'll sit in front of the computer, try to start some task but somehow end opening hackeer news, digg, youtube.

I have to strongly disagree.

If that kind of behavior gets out of control it sounds like typical adhd. One still wants to do stuff but unable to get oneself into actually doing it.

Depression IMO is when one starts losing motivation and ability to derive pleasure from activities that were normally pleasant.

What about "Depression" is a sign that something deep down is shifting or needs changing. After introspection, my loss of motivation is a lot of the times me knowing that I want to work on problems that I dare worthwhile for the future of humanity and earth like climate change, environmental work, planting trees and social work..., and being obliged to not work in that triggers the lack of motivation unless obliged by survival. I am very skeptical of medication to solve these kind of issues.

'Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.'

I think that the issue of deriving meaning from one's work (and life) is as old as humanity.

It looks to me also that there's a bit of idealization going on on your side. In any case you'll work with other people and I bet you won't feel too good if you'll be doing env. work with total assholes. So I would also look at that angle -- being among people you like/appreciate and who reciprocate also kind of eases that existential thing (IMO).

Now I am working in the field and organization which definitely are worthwhile / good cause (imo). But it comes at a price, I wouldn't mind to work in a less meaningful place (subjectively) for a few years with a significantly higher comp.

Also good cause is a motivator but the not the most immediate one. Used to work in a slightly dysfunctional company but my responsibilities were (mostly) so well defined and managed day-to-day that just getting stuff done was satisfying.

It's not that cut and dried. Comorbidity of ADHD and serious depression or anxiety is something like 80%. Depression also affects your ability to focus. Either way, you should get help if it's negatively impacting your life in ways serious enough that you've made concerted efforts to stop. That's especially true if you haven't been able to improve it yourself.

The opposite of depression isn't happiness— it's vitality.

Also burnout. Burnout shares a lot with depression though (and may even basically be a type of depression), but with the difference that it can usually be fixed with sufficient rest and holidays and lifestyle changes.

Besides the obvious (pay a doctor to do real diagnostic tests), how can you differentiate between depression causing the inability to do work and ADD dragging you straight to Reddit?

I highly recommend "Feeling Great" by Dr. David Burns. He's very data-driven and passionate about helping people improve their thought processes and therefore feelings. I've been seeing a therapist associated with his work and it's been very helpful at uncovering many deep-seated issues of perfectionism that have led me to distressing anxiety lately. I sympathize with OP even though I've tripled my salary since the start of the pandemic by climbing the corporate ladder. But I'm constantly feeling like I'm not doing enough or feeling amazing enough. This therapy has taught me to see the value in my perfectionism, but also why I may want to tone it down a little bit.

I wonder if this is because we're lonely..? Just wondering out loud here.

E.g. Twitter - feels like many of the "thought leaders" I follow, their "friends" are also on Twitter. And they tweet/respond so much I often wonder if they're really ever "building a business". And are they ever interacting with their real-world friends or family?

Or if their lives just consist of a constant refresh of their feed. Even at dinner, I wonder if they're even present?

And I wonder if that's why podcasts have become so popular - it's someone talking to you. Someone having a conversation, albeit one-sided, but usually it's pretty interesting.

For the same lonely reasons, I wonder if this is why public radio has been so popular with long haul truck drivers. Everyone wants to hear a human voice once in a while.

The constant reading, listening and entertaining videos... The voice in your head generates a discussion, with itself. At least it's something.

We work from home. It's quiet. With no one around. We're looking for a preoccupation.

We're just desperate for any type of human interaction.

"Likes", hearts, thumbs-up, upvotes, +1, PR merge, etc. - are we just clinging to anything that acknowledges our existence and humanity.

> I wonder if this is because people are lonely..? Just wondering out loud here.

Discord has propped up my social life for years now. And I mean outside of the internet as well! I also engage in independent, more traditional social engagement and it usually ends in nothing more than a hangover.

Not unexpectedly, the internet makes it easier to bring people with similar interests/believes/personalities together. There’s also some weird demographic issue where apparently the internet is the only place where people my age seem to exist. I meet a ton of people irl m, mostly much older, with some only several years younger or several years older. In the past year for example, I’ve met maybe 2-3 people who were within a year of myself.

Also I often find myself mindless swapping discord channels or refreshing HN or Twitter constantly, when I’m bored and want to talk/argue/whatever, typically at night.

Discord is most likely the most phallocentric large scale platform ever made. It is an abysmally terrible place to go to meet people, and particularly to go argue. Ever seen what the most popular politics server on discord looks like? 4chan is tame by comparison...

Deep rock Galactic is a video game that actually has a decent Discord integration, to the point where I feel like I gain value from being there.

The general chats are whatever, but having a collection of people who may respond to an LFG call is great for when I want a higher-quality batch of compatriots for the more 'hardcore' parts of the game. Plus, they have a bunch of pre-made voice pods that cap at a game's player limit, and have built support for direct-in-Discord lobby invitations.

The issue isn't discord, discord is in essence just IRC again. IRC wasn't exactly a bastion of intelligent conversation in all corners, but one of the biggest issues I think the internet currently faces is that everyone is here now. Every brain with a thought no matter how vapid or vile is now joining the conversation.

But just like with IRC, it's all about the specific community you've joined, not the platform. You can definitely find good communities on discord.

In the real world we have a natural protection from these idiotic or demeaning posts: shame. It is a very important component and mechanism in social connections that is completely missing online (unless your handle is tied to your real identity like VIP Twitter).

How could it translate online where anonymity is like a shell protecting you from shame?

In small online communities that is still how it works, people don't want to disappoint their peers and their handle is their identity with built up socia capital to lose, so they behave or get excluded in some fashion.

The internet really enables large groups and strangers to join those without any kind of social capital buy in to the community. I think one of our biggest mistakes in online communities was thinking you could just open the doors, invite thousands of people in, and expect that to go well. That doesn't go well in the real world when there are real world consequences. Any concert or protest or big sporting event always has bad eggs in it. Think soccer fan riots or protests turned sour or concerts with heaps of assault going on.

I think you're right in some sense it's just that the influences of social mechanisms are different online. Anonymity is often just psuedo-anonymity inside small online communities. People still don't want their online handle tarnished as they use that persona to be part of communities, and they would lose their social capital with that handle if it went south. But it's also possible for strangers with worthless handles to show up and be horrible with zero consequences.

> everyone is here now

Maybe we need a communication medium that requires technical skills to operate again.

It started out as a pc gaming type thing, so yeah, most of it is men, but the choice of server matters and they have expanded and rebranded a lot. If you are going on political servers it's already not worth it and you missed the point with discord, stick to small servers made by friends, people to play games with, or communities dedicated around 1 thing like open source projects or some specific media, etc. Once servers become too general or inclusive the system breaks, but even then on large servers (political or not), 4chan is not tame in comparison.

Cry about it somewhere else. Most of the servers I’m in are private servers with small amounts of users and a pretty good gender balance.

I have found that people who grew up on the internet tend to have a "third place" that's online, which it sounds like for you is discord. That kind of makes that your priority over a real-life third place like a pub or something, since it's where all the people you are super familiar with are it's easier just to stick around that.

For me all my online third places disappeared (specific IRC chats and forums), and I never really found another. I'm on discord but they're very shallow places for me now. I spend most of my time online just on YouTube, and the rest of my time at work, with my partner or family, and doing hobbies. It's a very reasonable offline-life but I do find myself missing a third-place. Maybe I need to join a gaming clan or something.

Third place? What are the first two?

home and work?

Home and work, the third place is somewhere you go regularly which helps form strong relationships with the people there. As some other people mentioned, church often played that role. University can be a third place, community centers, your local pub, sports clubs and so on.

It feels like a semantically-strained take, but I think Twitter is more of a place for people to say things, than it is for having conversations. Most people seem to use the site to broadcast something to their audience without really engaging.

Exactly. Twitter is a broadcast megaphone that tends towards rewarding cults of personality, so it's no surprise celebrities, a president and self-important CEOs love it.

Maybe I interact with more niche audiences?

The people I observe essentially live on twitter. They’re everywhere. Both with tweets and replies.

I miss working with you, Jim!

You're the best Peter! :)

I've read that the decline of religion also plays a role here. Aside from the religious aspect, the sense of community and regularity you get meeting the same people on a regular basis is lost.

It's kind of the mix of a loss of "third place" (institutions, coffee shops, etc.) and the increase of social media bubbles that pushes us to be more polarized, I think.

The only place I've gotten the regularity feeling of a third place was a really specific gym I used to both work and train at. Everyone knew who I was even if I didn't train with them, because I also worked there, so when I trained there it was my third place as well and I was always having great conversations.

I haven't had anything like it since, and I've been relatively proactive too. I have hobbies, go to meets, and go to the same coffee shops and restaurants so often that they know my order, but there is always this barrier between everyone, like no-one needs eachother because they have their phones. I ride the same bike park twice a week and go to the gym every couple of days, but I moved on to a 24/7 gym and everyone is buried in their phones, and I don't see the same people twice at the bike park. Me and the cleaner always have a great yarn though, I appreciate that.

On of the best "third place" locations I've had was a gym as well. This was about 15 years ago, before iPhones and Airpods, etc. existed, or were as prevalent, so it was easy and common for gym regulars to strike up conversations and get to know each other.

I don't go to the gym anymore, but a few years ago when I resumed for a bit, everyone was on their phone, or dead-eyed while listening to music or a podcast, etc, and not interested in talking to anyone.

Boxing/mma gyms are good for this. Can't really keep headphones in if you get hit in the head!

I always say to people that CrossFit is my church, and while I say it with mild sarcasm, internally it is true. Everyday I turn up, see the same people, build a community to the extent we do socials, help each other out with all manner of things, and honestly it gives me fulfilment more so than anything else I do.

I know next to nothing about crossfit and it definitely looks like religion to me. I'm not even sure where this impression comes from but it's probably first or second thing that comes into my mind when I hear "crossfit" (the other thing is that someone I vaguely know does it to keep in shape -- but we never discussed it in any detail).

There is a level of passion and commitment to crossfit that other disciplines don't always have, and due to the way it's practiced it's really beneficial to have your own space for it so crosfit tends to happen at crossfit only gyms, at scheduled times amongst regular practitioners.

To keep riffing on the religious theme, there was a fair bit of controversy around crossfit when it first arrived on the scene, to the point where even other fairly similar gym disciplines were pushing it out of their gyms. That kind of criticism tends to drive you back into your group (the same way door-knocking drives evangelists back to the warm embrace of the parish), and I almost never see crossfit happening in regular gyms, just crossfit gyms. As above that's partly practicality, but I think it's also fair to say it wasn't received well at first and that likely drove people to those specialized gyms instead of practicing it at their local.

I do powerlifting/strength training and powerlifters had the same issue in mainstream gyms, and there are powerlifting specific gyms around. But that's gotten better over time with mainstream gyms having powerlifing/olympic lifting gear more often than not now.

Keep in mind I'm in the UK, so I think it functions very differently than in the states. Religion is already a prominent part of the culture there, whereas here I don't know a single person my age that has gone to church since they were a small child. We don't have the level of radical level of belief of commitment about much here. As such, the atmosphere is more of a pub, minus the drinking, but it fulfills my "3rd space" need outside of work and home. I've heard from people within the community that CF in the US was scarcely cultish in comparison, so take my previous comment through that lense.

Maybe that's why places like SoulCycle, Barry's Bootcamp, or yoga studios have also sprung up. People do want connection, just not in the way it was before.

The community of my church is probably keeping me there more than my faith is.

I'd probably be more into church if it was just a social club and didn't come with that expectation that you'd be worshiping an invisible sky daddy, adopting questionable morality/philosophies, and attending what's basically a Republican political rally every Sunday. My wife goes to hers and it's nice, socially for her, that it comes prepackaged with a ready-made group of friends, but as soon as the Bibles and Trump flags come out, I bounce.

Heck I would join a church for the community if the faith part and Trumpettes weren't involved. Unfortunately all of the churches around here have more red hats than not.

If your part of a community that meets your social needs your world view changes and you become conservative. The exception is the groups that aren't directly opposed to conservatism but they typically lack the true community adhesion.

This isn't a democrat or republican thing though, you can totally join a Democratic church, with a strong community, but they are largely minority churches.

They are also still generally conservative.

It’s sad to hear someone’s view of church be similar to that of a political rally because that’s far from the truth of all the churches I’ve been to. Of course, we do read the Bible and worship God, but this social club that comes with “prepackaged” friends that you refer to can’t exist unless the people going agree on some ideas of morality and philosophies of why we’re here on Earth.

I'm fortunate to attend a church that is socially progressive, theologically rigorous, and relishes honest questioning and debate. I don't think I would have maintained my faith without this environment.

Agreed. There was an interesting post here recently that had this theory why churches work:

"Eventually, you pick a relatively relaxed “normal” religion, complete with all the “God” stuff. You don’t believe everything they say is literally true, but our reality is strange and inexplicable, so who knows? There’s a great stable community and you talk about the broader themes of life and you’re healthier and happier.

You secretly guess that the group is sustained by a minority of true believers who make up critical mass for a larger group of people like you, but you never talk about this and neither does anyone else. When you have kids, you feel weird about explaining your thoughts about all this to them, but you don’t parrot back what the religion says when you’re talking about the meaning of life either."

https://dynomight.net/plans/

That's a really good point... These days a lot of us work-from-home or independent contractor types don't even have much of a "second" place.

A good church can be like group therapy. You see the same people. You have common issues. The core challenges are discussed. There is a guide book that everyone agrees is the best. There is a group counselor that helps everyone work through the book to heal together.

I think pod casts just replaced radio. I don't think that's as interesting of a phenomenon as youre suggesting.

i don't know why everything old feels like it had more flesh, even with the limitation and flaws (conflict of interests etc)

Many youtubers use youtube to reach out to friends or make friends. For younger generations using the media as antidote to loneliness is more common. Unfortunately all the media rot after a sweet period

People often say they will keep old TV shows like Friends, How I Met Your Mother or The Office on in the background. I think it simulates the feeling of having familiar social connections in ones life.

In Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist's wife Mildred "finds herself more involved in the "parlor wall" entertainment in the living room – large televisions filling the walls" [1]. She frequently calls the entertainers that appear on the screen her family. So this satirical observation is at least as old as that fiction.

I frequently wonder how AR/VR will play in this particular space. Cynically, I believe there is a killer app to be had there.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451

I got really into watching Twitch for a while in 2020 (especially IRL content such as a mechanical watch repair guy (relevant to yesterday's top post about watches), musicians, and other small streamers I could get to know and they'd recognize my name) and that scene often came to mind.

I wanted to keep my post short so I didn't list all of the ways I feel we express this tendency. Others mentioned podcasts and talk radio but Youtube and Twitch are great examples. There is no denying that people who watch creators like Mizkif are feeling like they are part of a group of friends. Ludwig called it out most famously in his parasocial video [1]. It is so well known it is already a hackneyed meme.

Sometimes I feel smug looking down on people who become obsessed with the latest Kardashian drama or the British Royal Family or whatever celebrity culture. But then I turn a critical eye on myself and I'll realize I spend a lot of time watching YouTube videos on woodworking, small engine repair and outdoor activities. I don't do any of these things and I tend to watch the same creators over and over again.

Some people want to feel like they have hyper-crazy friends like Jake Paul who live wild fantasy lifestyles. I'm not certain that is different than me watching videos of some guy quietly building a log cabin on his own in the woods.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzyQbfh4t_8

> In Fahrenheit 451

The rewriting of online history is going on right now, its like Fahrenheit 451 is a blue print.

the risk is also low - you can feed your lonely without much risk of damage - the real world is harsh - the world you curate for yourself can be as you please - given we tend away from difficult human interactions[1] - this cure of the lonely is easy and "safe" - however - more difficult to assess - is this making us more or less lonely?

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=books+about+difficult+conver...

That’s kind of interesting. About 5 years ago I used to stream on Twitch. I did pretty decent at times up to 500 concurrent viewers.

I came to a similar conclusion when asking myself “why do they even watch me?” The same answer came to me “Loneliness”.

Streaming close to 24/7 helps, because it means you are always available when needed. Having a schedule, means people can be there with you in the times when they are alone. Creating a name for your followers, the tribe, being open with people. These things play into it also.

That’s why people connect around specific games I think, to have something in common.

It's loneliness in my case.

I have no one to talk to that's close to my age,

I do use it more when I'm depressed though.

Books never did it for myself. I would read, but my mind would wander to negative thoughts, and my problems.

That is fiction though. I have my 1000 plus book library of non-fiction books I thumb through every day. A book is usually right near my computer. I fall asleep with a non-fiction book.

I also have a portable radio with me when walking, or waiting. I just need someone yacking in the background. Without it my mind wanders.

When I was younger and had friends; I was never like this.

When I'm done with the internet, around this hour; I don't want to think about the time I wasted on my devises until the next day.

Would I rather be talking to people on a friday night--hell yes, if it's not get to know you speak.

I'm tight on money, but I could go to a bar tonight, and talk to strangers.

A beer is $8 bucks plus a dollar tip.

I need a car to get to the bar.

I need to white knuckle driving home because I have an old car, and cops love to pull over poor people. Cops know they are easy pickings. Plus--they think we all drink to excess like they do. If they can't nail you on a marginal DUI; they can find something wrong with your car. (If you are ever in Marin County after 10 pm, expect a pullover. 99% are for no reason other than profiling. Even you rich boys who look like Elon Musk sometimes get pulled over too.

It's just easier to pull out the ipad in the end. If you work the internet right, you can avoid the negativity. Here, or on FB, I never come back to a post I commented on.

I do use social sites, like this webpage, as a journal. I say what's on my mind, and it feels good some days. I never get into arguments because I never return to a discussion.

I had to reach a point where I admitted to myself that, as much as I may wish I were a person who could handle having a smartphone in my pocket, I'm not. If I have one there, it will suck up time I don't want to give it. I tried putting all kinds of guides in place until I just...got a flip phone that, yeah, can run Android apps, but absolutely sucks to use. It doesn't have a touch screen, so I have to navigate with a D pad and type with T9. It's awful.

That's paired with a color eInk device that can also run Android apps. It's wonderful for reading things that have discrete pages (ebooks), but awful for anything that moves or requires scrolling.

My personal computer sucks too. This happened totally by accident, but I wound up with a machine that won't sleep properly, so I have to shut the thing all the way down every time I'm done using it. It's a pain to use.

When I reached the point where I actually wanted to change, I had to make it suck to do the things I used to enjoy. I kind of envy the people who can add smartphones to their lives and have their lives get better. Mine got worse.

But at least now, when I'm looking at some free time, I don't want to pull out my phone (I hate using my phone), I might want to read an ebook, and I don't want to pull out my computer. I wish it didn't come to this, but at least it works.

I am much the same way. I use more of a half measure than you, which is to physically remove the phone from my proximity as much as possible unless I’m intentionally trying to zone out. So if I’m working, the phone is in another room on silent. When I’m done with work, I do a hard “screens off” time for family time from 6-9 or so. That, combined with deleting fb/ig and logging out of twitter (still sometimes useful for news so I haven’t deleted it), has helped me exercise more control over my habits versus just sheer willpower.

I think you're in that category of people whose discipline I envy/admire! Half measures are so much better at mitigating the downsides of any tradeoff. I totally recommend them for anyone who can use them and make them work!

I agree completely, the only reliable way to quit using a smartphone is to stop carrying one.

I don't know why we apply such different thinking to digital addictions than physical ones.

You would never tell someone who was trying to quit smoking "just carry a pack of cigarettes and a lighter everywhere but don't use them".

Because we still need certain utilities on our phone, like Maps and Music and Search and Camera. Those aren't the problems--we still want those things, which are not addictive and fruitful, but we want less of things which are addictive and fruitless, like Twitter and Reddit. Cigarettes have no such essential and positive utility.

That's why I like this phone that can do those things, but I really have to be sure I want to do them.

It's surprising how often I actually don't, though. Rarely am I going anywhere I actually don't know how to go. Rarely do I actually need to take a photo of something (though to be fair, I've never really been into photography; this would be different for people who are). I prefer quiet to music (although again, admittedly, I know I'm not the norm here). And not being able to search the answer to any old thing whenever I want? Turns out I forget most of those things by the time I get to a computer, so I guess they weren't terribly important. I make more of a point of trying to learn things now.

I don't distract myself as much as I used to. I feel like I'm actually more present when I'm present because I don't have anywhere else to be.

YMMV, but there's no perfect solution. Everything has tradeoffs. You just have to choose which set you care about most.

>though to be fair, I've never really been into photography; this would be different for people who are

Anyone who is seriously into photography will be carrying a proper camera. The idea of professional photographers using smartphone cameras is just pure marketing bullshit IMO. Smartphone cameras are severely limited by physics and always will be.

As someone who used to be heavily into photography, my smartphone may as well have not even had a camera because if I wanted to go out and take pictures I would bring my DSLR.

Plenty of photographers have admitted that phone cameras often are "the camera you have" when the great shot arises unexpectedly, at which point the unreasonable quality they offer given their constraints comes in handy.

They are also excellent B-stock video cams in live settings etc.

>Because we still need certain utilities on our phone

You don't "need" any of those things, humans got on with life just fine without them for 100,000s of years, smartphones have only existed for the last 15.

>Maps

Look it up on a computer before you go, or ask someone on the street for directions. The only "benefit" having maps on a phone gives you is that you can completely avoid talking to people and just stare down at a screen instead.

>Music

MP3 players still exist. Or just ditch the music and be present in the moment.

>Search

I have never spontaneously needed to search something that couldn't wait 30 minutes until I was back at a computer.

>Camera

If you're going somewhere you know you're going to want to take pictures then take a proper camera. Otherwise you probably don't need one. I can't think of a single instance in the past 2 years where I needed to take a picture of something that actually mattered without knowing beforehand.

> You don't "need" any of those things, humans got on with life just fine without them for 100,000s of years, smartphones have only existed for the last 15.

That's an odd thing to say. Humans got on with life just fine without electricity, central heating, public education, public transportation, computers, and the internet. I'm grateful I have access to them.

What's the cutoff for things that didn't exist for the majority of the humankind, but are good to have?

What phone do you have and can it run osmand? There aren't many android flip phones...

It's the Kyocera DuraXV Extreme. I downloaded F-droid through the browser, and since I was coming from a GrapheneOS phone anyway, was already pretty used to a de-Googled setup. I haven't tried OSMand on it, but it probably can.

I did need to install Apps4Flip Mouse[0] to be able to use some apps that aren't D pad friendly, like Signal and Waze.

You might have some luck finding devices on other carriers with Jose Briones' Dumbphone Finder[1]

[0] https://www.apps4flip.com/apps/ [1] https://josebriones.org/dumbphone-finder

T9 was great. Back in the day, I and others could send SMS messages without ever taking the phone out of our pockets; purely from muscle memory.

Just speaking for myself, I've noticed that my habit is to eat what is in front of me, and clean my plate. I mean this both literally and figuratively.

If I have dessert in the house, like a bag of chocolate, then I eat one after dinner. If I don't have it in the house, then I just don't eat dessert.

If I have a social media feed full of content, then I'll scroll through all of it until there's nothing else that's new.

So what I've been doing is not entirely quitting Internet stuff, but instead I just massively unsubscribing, unfollowing, and filtering all the feeds. Sort of a Marie Kondo thing. I go through every subreddit I'm in, every RSS feed, every account I follow on Twitter, and i strongly consider "is this really providing lots of joy and/or value?" If not, it gets the chop.

I've cut out at least 2/3s of the stuff I was following since the peak, and it's only going down. Now when I doomscroll it's only for a few minutes. I hit the end of new content very very quickly. When that happens I start to look elsewhere. I've been reading a lot more actual books, done more chores, and been more productive overall.

As for the things I unfollowed? They clearly had no value because not only do I not miss them, I can barely even remember what they were.

Doing the same, but this does not really apply for algorithmic feeds.

When you open YouTube the recommendations are always the first thing you see, same for TikTok and Twitter (although at least you can configure it there).

Sure you can say “just don’t use recommendation systems” just as you can say “just don’t go on YouTube”.

True, but I exclusively watch YT on laptop and have the link to my subscriptions. It really does help.

You can follow Youtube channels via RSS feeds, though, which removes the issue with recommendations.

This is the way.

https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist

I use the following user stylesheet to hide YouTube recommendations for exactly the reason you mention:

    /* hide main page */
    ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"] {
        display: none;
    }

Nice. I'll have to incorporate this little gem for the Linux laptop. Thank you. When I'm home, I primarily watch YouTube on my TV, but I don't use YouTube. Rather, I use SmartTubeNext, which grabs the same videos as YouTube, but has no ads, tracking, kills sponsored content in the video, as well as no YouTube recommendations. I'm very happy with it. I run it off my Amazon Firestick. If you're interested, here is the how-to: https://troypoint.com/smarttubenext/

I find it relatively easy to use YouTube without exposing myself to their recommendations (not that they're ever particularly good, in my experience).

My bookmark for YouTube is directly to my subscriptions, and it's also possible to create a android shortcut link directly to subscriptions. Occasionally, a flow will direct me to the homepage, but that's rare and I usually organically bounce back to my subs without even thinking about it.

There's always recs below a video, but again, those are rarely very interesting to me or they're things I've subscribed to anyway.

I’ve been using a really nice extension the past couple months called unhook [0] that gives a lot of control over the YouTube UI. I’ve disabled shorts, the homepage, related videos, comments, etc. and now I only see videos I have subscribed to. Much more useful (I subscribed for a reason!) and much less time wasted. Just thought I’d share in case it helps anyone!

[0]: https://unhook.app/

That looks good, thanks.

I block recommendation sections on some site with the ublock element picker (like the "recommendations" stackoverflow puts in the right column from their other sites, completely unrelated to the current page or search terms).

I never got round to trying that with Youtube, this seems a better solution.

> When you open YouTube the recommendations are always the first thing you see

There is a brilliant hack to YT's urge to show you some BS. Make a bookmark of YT submissions on HN. Clear cookies. Click on any few random vids. Voila! Now YT considers you enough smart person to be shown a decent recommendations!!! (But the magic quickly disappears if you will click any BS from main because my hack does not affects the main page).

I just block the recommendation and comments section with uBlock. No dessert, no temptation.

The recommendation algos can be quite good but you need to give them good signal. I doubt many people do this, but clicking 'not interested' on the clickbaity vids and thumbs-up high-effort content can very quickly tune your recommendations to be very high quality.

Switching Twitter to timeline mode rather than their poor excuse of an algorithm helps. Learned that from HN....but I have a browser plug-in that also removes all their recommended and "Joe also owed this tweet" junk.

Which browser plug is this? It sounds amazingly useful.

https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter/

If you need it for mobile, on my mobile (Android) I downloaded Kiwi Browser so I can install that plugin.

Funny enough I have the opposite opinion regarding twitter: If I use it in timeline mode I have the urge to read through all of it until where I stopped last time as the OP described (same with my Feedly RSS feed) In algorithm mode its more like a "don't care, its garbled anyway, just a sea of stuff". That being said I am still mostly using timeline mode.

I'm the same way, keep me away from buffets, cupboards containing sweets, and any newsfeed.

One thing I've founds success with was getting a digital Economist subscription (confession, just a shared password). Having a steady stream of high quality content without paywall nonsense helped me replace my regular trolling around internet with something more useful and less addictive. Perhaps paying a bit for something high quality can help fill void for those dopamine seeking internet impulses.

I've always looked at paywall sites as obnoxious cash grabs that try to reel you in with small samples of quality content... But this makes me look at them differently now. Perhaps the fact that you gave them money allows them to forego excessive advertising and clickbait and provide you with quality content that is actually worth reading because they can focus on creating good content rather than pulling people in with free clickbait and just do anything possible to keep us scrolling and watching ads. The unfortunate part is that it doesn't really make sense to pay money to subscribe to every single website individually... Maybe if google had a quality version of google news... lol

Thought this was just me and it’s so refreshing to hear. I can never eat just part of a bag of chips. Or save the really good sandwhich for later. Or not drink another coffee because I already had one. Etc. etc

Do lots of other folks experience this? I seem to only have self control when it hurts my job or income, and even then, barely.

I'm similar, but I'm far from neurotypical, so I can't say whether it's typical or not.

> Do lots of other folks experience this?

I don't think we're alone but I doubt that we're "normal."

I’m normal.

Anybody want to define "normal" ?

I'm Joe, nice to meet you.

I think a lot of people with ADHD would relate, or have been able to at some point.

ADHD here. Kids are ADHD. My Malinois has to be ADHD. Being ADHD like I am with almost two decades of IT under my belt has felt weird. I crave my YouTube channels and certain news sites since the content creators I watch/read put out daily content. Ditto my insane amount of caffeine and nicotine consumption, which I learned from having my kids diagnosed, is me self medicating in lieu of something pharmaceutical. I'm also OCD, so that doesn't help. People with ADHD/OCD need closure something fierce, so when I feel like I'm not getting it, I feel the world is not right.

On the professional side, my ADHD/OCD makes for some clean code and pedantically-set up servers. Nothing says ADHD/OCD like taking two days to crank out code which some of my colleagues can crank out in half the time. I'm told I'm too pedantic sometimes. Too much of a perfectionist. ADHD can do that to you. I'm happy with my lot in life.

I don't know why this comment feels like a punch in the face... I have severe ADHD, it's been getting worse and only medication helps, and I cannot get it.

I have failed my whole life, I cannot start shit, I cannot finish anything, I'm just an impulsive monkey who is unfortunately aware of their own situation, stuck inside a body, forced to watch a deadly trainwreck in slow motion.

The little I've achieved has taken me 10x as much time as it would've a normal person. And I'm pissing it all away anyway.

This is hell.

And then I see "everyone in my life is ADHD lolkek" "I'm happy".

Sorry. Glad your case is mild enough.

I don't have ADHD, but I have family with ADHD.

Wouldn't you say that ADHD affects the person, and therefore the type of personality would change the outcome? (In contrast to ADHD defining the person)

Edit:spelling

Why can’t you get medication? Is it because of the country you live in?

Hey, I feel your pain. It’s important to consider though that you can only do your best with what you’ve got. So long as you’re doing your best, your honest best, what else can you do?

I know the urge to beat yourself to for it is pretty strong. But the only thing you can do is regroup and try to make the rest of today better. Then start again tomorrow.

You’ve achieved something, right? Maybe it took ten times as long. That’s fine. Just keep at it. Don’t compare yourself to other people, just yourself yesterday. That’s all that can count.

It’s easier said than done. Don’t hate yourself though. Life isn’t easy, you just make the most of it. Take care.

I think it's pretty common. I personally call it "Goldfish syndrome", although apparently that's caught on with another informal meaning according to the internet.

Eating and drinking delicious high calorie things rewards your brain. On an evolutionary time scale, delicious things were relatively rare and often required expending a lot of energy to acquire. In the last 100 years or so, modern technology has shifted the typical diet to be primarily cheap, processed high calorie foods.

If you want to change your behavior, I would suggest calorie counting with a phone app. Do it every meal or snack, before you eat it. Even if you don't restrict yourself, it will make you consciously aware of your intake. You'll naturally start thinking in terms of energy intake rather than sensory intake. You'll also start to be able to correlate your emotional state to your current level of hunger rather than the other way around. "I am so hungry I could eat 300 calories of potato chips!" I did that for a few months recently and lost 8 pounds. I stopped doing it more recently, and have gained 3 back.

If you're a hipster at heart and have free time, you could also start doing more of your own food processing at home. Rather than order a pizza ever again, learn how to make a really good hand stretched pizza dough from scratch. If you really like good coffee, buy a hand grinder and whole beans, or figure out how to roast your own beans.

If you think you're eating unhealthy and having external pressure would help with your self control, maybe just go see a primary care physician and request a cholesterol check and to be screened for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. If you have indeed been too indulgent and lethargic over an extended period of time, your cholesterol will probably read high, and you probably have fat in your liver that may be causing slightly elevated enzyme levels. A Dr. telling you to try to eat healthy may not be motivating, but quantitative data may be.

If you want an altogether nerdier name maybe call it Wittgenstein syndrome?

Drury reports a conversation with the famed philosopher:

> So the next day when we were alone I asked Wittgenstein to tell me more about Kierkegaard. Wittgenstein: “Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.” He then went on to speak of the three categories of life-style that play such a large part in Kierkegaard’s writing: the asethetic, where the objective is to get the maximum enjoyment out of this life; the ethical, where the concept of duty demands renunciation; and the religious, where this very renunciation itself becomes a source of joy. Wittgenstein: “Concerning this last category I don’t pretend to understand how it is possible. I have never been able to deny myself anything, not even a cup of coffee if I wanted it. Mind you I don’t believe what Kierkegaard believed, but of this I am certain, that we are not here in order to have a good time.”

> Rather than order a pizza ever again, learn how to make a really good hand stretched pizza dough from scratch

This is good for different reasons, such as less additives in your food which might be healthier in the long term, taste, and the pleasure in the activity itself, but is unlikely to help with weight loss. There is little difference in calorie content between two similar pizzas, home made and from a restaurant (assuming you’re not eating Domino’s cheese-stuffed crust style pizzas).

If you compare the same pizzas restaurant vs. homemade then sure, but learning to do it well allows you to modify everything to suit your needs. A really nice thin crust can be made with quite a bit less dough, which may then need a lot less cheese to saturate the dish. Just like that you've knocked down two of the most calorically heavy parts of a pizza!

Neapolitan style pizza baked at high temperature is actually extremely sensitive to excessive topping. Too much sauce or fresh mozzarella, and there will be too much liquid for the center of the crust to cook properly. I'll typically only use maybe 3 tbsp of tomato sauce, and aim for 50% of cheese coverage by area if using hand cut mozzarella cubes, or 80% coverage if shredded.

My typical dough recipe has 150g of flour and 5g sugar per pizza, which is about 550 calories. Let's say 250 calories of cheese. Raw tomato sauce isn't even worth counting. So 800 as a baseline for one pizza. Fully loading it with pepperoni might bump it up to 1000.

A few months ago I was trying to restrict myself to 1800 calories per day. We had friends over for pizza one night, and I decided to just not worry about it and gorge myself. I counted it all up before going to bed, though, and my daily intake worked out to be about 1900.

My point is it's good to make lifestyle changes that lead to healthier choices on average. Pizza is inherently calorie dense, and easy to eat too much of. You might as well make it a relaxing hobby that requires some effort and forethought, rather than something you order out for several times a week because you're stressed out and exhausted. Good dough takes 24 hours to optimally ferment, and requires at least a few minutes of kneading by hand. Stretching the dough, topping it, and then baking it require some focused attention. It's not a big time commitment, though. The activity, mindfulness and the delayed gratification are the healthy part.

Neapolitan style pizza in particular is very thin crust, and the emphasis is on carefully chosen high quality ingredients rather than quantity. It is significantly less calorie dense than typical American pizza. Eating a whole pizza with toppings might be 1000 calories, while a single slice of cheese pizza from Costco is around 800 calories.

It's also very informative to see for yourself the ingredients going into what you're eating. Buying a can of cake frosting at the store gets you roughly the same outcome as making it from scratch using a whole stick of butter and several cups of sugar, but the latter seems more likely to influence the size of the piece you take, or at least make it obvious why you feel bleh after eating it.

For me it depends on how my day is going.

When I first read about willpower being an exhaustible resource, it totally aligned with my experience. A few years later I read that those ego depletion studies had been invalidated and that surprised me. Running out of willpower seems like something I experience.

That is my experience too.

But it might be something that is subjectively felt, and people then attributed it to be something that depletes. Even if the depletion is invalidated, the subjective feeling might however still be valid. --- If I should suggest another possibility on the spot, I would suggest mental fatigue. You get tired of denying yourself things the same way you get tired of denying your kid pestering you for a treat.

It's not directly depletion, but I could subjectively describe it as a resource getting depleted.

It might be worth thinking about what it is that is being depleted, exactly. When I "run out of willpower" it doesn't really feel the same as when I "simply cannot do it anymore". If I lift a weight enough times, eventually I simply can't anymore, no matter how much I will it. It's not a decision, like a decision to stop working on a problem. That would be a lack of willpower to continue...?

Is there really a mental equivalent to physical exhaustion that leaves us beyond the ability to make a decision? Is that what running out of willpower would be?

Believe it or not, even something like physical exertion has hard-to-define limitations. The amount of reps that you can do of an exercise is more based on how forcefully your brain drives your nerves to activate your muscles and keep going. If you have a habit of sticking to sets of 10 reps, odds are you will feel exhausted at 10 reps, and this is because once you hit your magic goal, you're no longer applying the same concentrated mental energy, and you suddenly feel tired and stop there. But if you did that set like as if it were the last set of your life, or like you were at the olympics trying to break records, you'd be able to push 15 or 20 reps, rather than just the 10 that you do as your comfortable limit. You have the physical ability to keep doing something until the moment that your muscles lock up from lactic acid buildup and you just drop. But people rarely ever reach that state. They stop much sooner because pushing further requires more concentrated brain input which they don't want to dedicate. Maintaining your current routine is effortless, and we tend to favor the easy, comfortable. Pushing your limits is uncomfortable, and in a world where we have become so accustomed to prioritizing indulgence and comfort it becomes hard to break out of our safe zones.

Reading your comment made me realize that you're right, there really isn't such a hard rule even with physical exertion. Even putting some motivating music on might make you push for an extra rep or two. If a gun was to your head maybe you'd do even more. The extreme end might be phenomena like "dead man's grip" where inhuman strength is shown while on death's door.

It may be a common trait in programmers, since we're rewarded by getting to the bottom of things: "why is this function failing? who calls it? in which possible states?"

Most programmers have experienced being so immersed in code that we don't notice time is passing, forgetting to eat or sleep.

It's similar with immersion in social media / food / whatever. We become lost in the activity and lose our sense of self.

I've recently heard of the concept of conscientiousness as a personality trait. People with low conscientiousness tend to procrastinate more, and it's tied to ADHD. Apparently it can be trained. I'm trying (though not really succeeding) to make pauses, take a deep breath and think about "what am I doing right now? What should I be doing instead?". Seems so basic, like I've regressed to being a child who has no self control...

I identify with all of this, but this:

> to make pauses, take a deep breath and think about "what am I doing right now? What should I be doing instead?".

this too can have its pitfalls. In my case, I always feel like I have BOTH too many things that I WANT to do and too many things HAVE to do and whenever I step back and try to look at the bigger picture, I realize that I don't feel like I'm making tangible progress on any of them. And then the anxiety sets in and I feel like, "well, if I'm working this hard and not even keeping up, why am I working at all?" And so I sort of "give up" for a few days or a week and feel even MORE guilty because literally nothing is getting done and I'm getting even further behind.

A lot of the comments I write here may sound like I really have my shit together, but that's just because I have a lot of generalized experience that just basically comes from lots of introspection and time being alive. But I have yet to figure out the one weird trick to being both productive (making progress toward future life goals) and happy (enjoying what I have in the present).

Perhaps try to distinguish where your wants and pressures come from?

So many of our "wants" are social status goals, or social expectations.

I find it very hard to discriminate my own desires from my unconscious programming by others.

Whenever you feel pressured, try and find the root cause of the pressure?

Just an idea - perhaps damaging but hopefully enabling.

I joke about my procrastination with my team: "I looked at my TODO list for the day and there's no way I can get to 90% of it, so I might as well just not get to 100% of it". Sometimes there's a lot of truth to the joke, however.

As much as I know I should prioritize it based on urgency, highest impact, what I could delegate etc., if the willpower required to do that is more than the ramifications or not doing it, it can be a losing battle.

On days when I push through a ton of work, I'm energized at the end of the day. Compared to the feeling of guilt that I just wasted a day when there's so much to do and I achieved little. Yet knowing that still just doesn't provide the necessary motivation some days. I've yet to figure out a reliable solution for it.

It's worth mentioning that conscientiousness is a personality trait that's part of the "big five" personalities traits. It's a personality trait brouping that is supported by evidence [1] unlike Myers Briggs [2].

[1] https://www.simplypsychology.org/big-five-personality.html

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2013/mar/...

Yes indeed, many of us do. Nearly everyone I've ever dated gets mad at me at some point because I can't keep cookies in the house or I will eat them all. You are far from alone, and in fact I suspect the overwhelming majority of people are the same. Hence the obesity epidemic.

Personally I find that my self-control is limited to the same extent that my time and energy are limited. If I'm tired, it's harder for me to be disciplined, and the place that I most often tired is at home at the end of the day, when temptation to over eat is at the greatest. I believe there is a fairly substantial body of evidence that shows I am not unusual in this regard. This phenomenon is why groceries stores put candy in checkout lanes, when you are mentally tired from exercising discipline by not picking up the delicious-looking tray of cupcakes in the bakery aisle and thus are most susceptible to temptation.

I think some people can just use willpower to maintain their discipline in every situation, but those people are extreme outliers. Like Navy SEALs or Olympic athletes or other extreme high performers, and not even all of them. Those who can are experts at delayed gratification and are able to visualize what they want and then never deviate from their plan for how to achieve it, regardless of their current emotional state or energy levels. But that is vanishingly rare and often their behavior is a result of some deep trauma (eg someone who is super disciplined about their diet because their dad died early from an obesity-related illness) rather than a positive focus on a certain outcome. The truth is that the vast majority of people just follow their natural inclinations and do whatever is easiest for them. The path of least resistance.

As one such weak-willed person, my approach has been to structure my life to remove temptations, much as the GP comment above described their approach to curating their internet content. For example, I have lived almost exclusively in big cities for my entire life until the last year, when I moved to the middle of nowhere. Which means I can't get takeout food delivered and it's much harder to go out and get ice cream on a whim. Compared to living in a major city where I could get Michelin star restaurant food delivered in a matter of minutes, the temptation is just much, much less powerful. I order my groceries online too, which also dramatically reduces the tendency to impulse buy anything unhealthy (I get to skip the checkout lane with the candy, for one thing). On the other side of the caloric equation, I set up a home gym so that travel time to the gym doesn't become an excuse not to exercise. Basically I add barriers for bad choices and remove them for good ones. I am in the best shape of my life as a result.

I guess what I'm saying is that most people achieve good behaviors in part because of their intentional discipline and in part because their environment is conducive to those behaviors. The real trick is figuring out how to intentionally structure your environment to match whatever behaviors you want. It's effectively borrowing motivation from your peak-energy level periods to provide discipline during periods when you don't have the energy to generate it yourself. It can be incredibly hard to figure out, because you need to know how to change your environment and how you will actually react to that new environment, which isn't always predictable.

An easy way to have self control is to switch to a keto-like diet. You don't even have to count calories and carbs in most cases. There's a variant called lazy keto, where you just stick to approved foods and don't need to count. It's surprisingly hard to overeat on things like cauliflower and pork chops.

Be wary however of the more "extreme" advice on keto-like diets. You don't have to stuff yourself with fats, or put a stick of butter in your coffee.

100% this. People often ask me "How do you stick with keto? It's such a strict diet." I always answer: "It's actually one of the easiest diets: the answer to most 'can I eat this?' question is 'no'."

There isn't a persistently high cognitive load on deciding what you can eat, once you master the foundational knowledge of eating low-carb.

I really want to follow it, but what about the bad breath?!

It's definitely a thing, you can smell when people are in ketosis

isn't that ketoacidosis not ketosis? (i'm genuinely asking )

That usually happens because people use stimulants to accelerate energy burn and it dries you out, and when your body, especially your mouth, get dry, you will get bad breath immediately. If you want to test this out for yourself, try brushing your teeth while you feel very dehydrated. Your breath will smell bad soon after.

This is terrible advice. Any fads are. Ketogenic diets are not good for you in any way.

Bad behaviour starts with acknowledgement and the best way to do that is to track what you eat and learn to adapt slowly and develop self discipline. Use a tracker app and set a reasonable daily break even nutritional target and start thinking about what you eat. Slowly substitute better choices in. Eventually you will develop self control.

People want quick fixes but keto just breaks other things.

What is so bad about keto diet?

Not going to list them here but I suggest you go and do some research of the side effects and risks from actual medical research not HN users.

For me it ended in a few days in hospital.

How?

https://www.ndtv.com/health/top-10-reasons-why-you-should-no...

This is a very low effort, unsourced listicle, that is probably wrong on several points. Disregarding that, I was more curious about how this particular person managed to get hospitalized.

True enough, but it does outline the potential nutritional shortfalls of extreme food regimes, most of which I was aware of. It seemed to sum up most of the obvious shortfalls - I was only passingly interested and this was a low hanging answer. I have seen numerous extreme diets. Many of which are OK in the short term - but not in the longer term. Unless the OP replies - I have no idea in detail what befell him?

Perforated bowel.

How did you get to that point? Diverticulitis?

Constipation believe it or not.

opiate linked? Opiates often paralyze peristalsis = gut walls die and perforate.

Nope I don't take any drugs of any kind. Low fibre in keto diet caused an obstruction and perforation.

Keto can definitely cause constipation under some circumstances, but I'd be dubious about linking it to fibre. Fibre also doesn't count towards carbs, so it's not something that you can't have.

The key thing you do in a keto diet, entering a state of ketogenesis, can cause massive complications for diabetic people due to ketoacidosis.

Unfortunately a lot of people who would be interested in dieting and trying out a keto diet are diabetic. It's not always dangerous, but it's generally not a good diet for diabetic people because of this.

This is incorrect. I'm a Type 1 Diabetic and in my opinion keto diet is probably the healthiest diet a diabetic can be on.

Ketoacidosis is a result of extremely high blood sugar for a prolonged period of time combined with ketosis. The reason this happens is that without insulin your body cannot use the sugar in your blood so your blood sugar keeps going up and your body doesn't get any energy out of it.

What happens when your body is out of fuel for a couple of days? It enters ketosis and starts to burn fat. Ketons mixed with sugar in your blood will acidify blood, this is ketoacidosis. It's an extremely dangerous condition.

However, if a diabetic is on keto diet they will have low blood sugar and their body will enter regular ketosis almost eliminating the need for insulin and ensuring a stable healthy blood sugar.

In other words, a diabetic will end up in ketoacidosis if they're bad at controlling their blood sugar, regardless of their diet. However, if they are on keto diet the chance that their blood sugar will be very high is extremely small. High blood sugar is the killer, not ketosis.

I've been doing a keto diet on and off for a number of years. When I'm in ketosis my blood sugar is steady in 80-100 range and I don't need almost any insulin.

Yeah, you absolutely don't need to overthink keto once you have a good idea of what foods provide the ideal set of nutrients that you need. You just have to keep those foods stocked, and eat whatever you have on hand when you're hungry, until you stop being hungry. As for avoiding junk food, just STAY OUT OF THE JUNK FOOD AISLE. Don't walk through there, don't daydream about chocolate, make a conscious effort to keep it out of sight, and it will be out of mind. That part takes some self-discipline, but once you make the conscious decision to keep it out of sight, your mind will go wander to some other distraction or stimulus and you will forget about it, and it will become a habit soon.

The truly hardest part of all of this in general is finding a suitable form of substitute stimulus that keeps you from being driven to seek your default vices. The unfortunate part is that there are not a lot of accessible/healthy things in life that provide the adequate stimulus that we seek/need in order to feel "okay". We're drawn towards drugs and junk food and etc because it's easy to acquire and satisfies our needs for stimulus in the short term.

It's common.

We tend to keep doing what we are already doing (an inertia of sorts). If we are eating, we keep on eating (even if we are not hungry anymore) until an external factor stops us (e.g. the food is over).

Changing states (starting/stopping) is the hardest part, but if you trick yourself somehow to stop it's easy to just put the food aside. The question that remain is how do you stop yourself from doing what you are currently doing? Some people use an "1,2,3 technique", where you just count to yourself and once you reach three you start doing what's needed. Mindfulness also helps, where you take a breath and think exactly what you are doing and why (I am eating, I am putting my hand in the bag of chips, I am bringing the chip to my mouth even if I am not hungry and don't even enjoy it that much, this would just make me feel fat afterwards).

> I can never eat just part of a bag of chips.

To me, part of it is being mindful. Don't open the bag of chips and then watch a movie or surf the net while munching on them. You will eat the whole bag.

If I mode change from sitting in front of the computer to standing in the kitchen eating the chips and then mode change to back in front of the computer, I don't mindlessly consume the whole bag. But I will still sometimes consume the whole bag.

One thing I have also tried to do is differentiate between "I want chips because I'm hungry" vs "I want chips because I'm craving salt". It's not easy for me to tell the difference. I coat some baby carrots in salt or Old Bay seasoning and munch a few--if that keeps the munchies away, my body wanted salt. If I'm hungry again 15 minutes later, well, my body wants calories.

Nevertheless, I'm mostly in the camp of "Just don't have chips/cookies in the house". It also helps that I learned to bake as a child. I like tasty desserts, and most of what now exists is mostly sugar overload with no flavor. So, a dessert easily sets off my "Is this dessert tasty enough to merit skipping two entire steaks <or insert whatever main course you like> to compensate?" And, if my that activates, the answer is almost always a resounding "No." and I skip dessert.

Unfortunately for me, I found a middle eastern place that does homemade Baklava with a cream filling. It's right next to a Mexican restaurant that I also find quite nice. This is a bad thing for my waistline.

This is me so bad. I have it in the good and bad ways.

In the good I will run couple marathons a month and in the bad I will eat whatever I can find.

I always felt like an outcast, good to hear I am not alone :)

For media consumption it is exactly the same. The good is that I get to the nitty gritty of technical problems. But I also read the unless crap till no end.

I have been able to ditch Twitter, reddit, Facebook and Instagram but I just substitute it with hackernews and YouTube.

Haha. Same here. I have gotten back into reading though. That took a while because I lost the ability to concentrate on books as I grew more dependent on streaming and social media. Its been about a year now, since I left all the major social media hubs, got incredibly selective on daily news (only one local media outlet and a couple of polar opposite international ones that I pay for) and cut down on watching streaming services, that I started to be able to concentrate on reading books again. I grew up reading everything I could get my hands on. I missed it terribly.

HN and youtube still stick. Mostly tutorials, workouts or info videos ( Andrew Huberman, justforfunc, 3blue1brown etc. ) on youtube though.

Same, but with books and audiobooks I just misuse them in the same way, feels like consumption addiction, even though, like you, it is all in the selfhelp / tutorial / learning space.

I think it's a common problem.

My default method of weight control is not to have unhealty food and alcohol in the house except for weekends. In the office I only have healthy food available. It works and I have gotten used to it - mainly because my anything goes weekends act as a great pressure release valve.

This is great advice. Unsubscribing, especially from the stuff that triggers me, helps me not to waste too much time.

Yup, dashcam videos / crashes is a huge time sink which I have to ruthlessly unsubscribe from. It's one of those things where you can feel your blood pressure increase as you watch it.

I used to spend a lot of time on youtube, in part because I had the free time to spend on it, and had gaps in my schedule that were convenient for watching certain content creators.

Since moving into the workforce, my free time is no longer segmented into so many pieces. I don't get as much value as I used to from 10 to 15 minute chunks of entertainment, so I stop keeping up with the sources, and just lose touch.

It isn't that the content I'm leaving behind is bad or 'cheap', it's just that I don't have the time and attention to keep up with most of it. My entertainment time is better spent on stuff that takes longer to engage with/consume, since those bigger things are often more valuable as entertainment.

I'm coming to a realization across all facets of my life, where I am interested or engaged in many more things than I have time for. I am starting to prepare myself for the uncomfortable process of sacrificing a few (in fact, many) things I've previously mentally and emotionally invested in, but I know it's going to be a big shift and the dread causes my feet to drag. There's just not enough time... and I don't believe that the solution is "improve focus and productivity" because that's a fast track to burnout and disengagement for all but the most obsessive of minds.

Curiosity can be a curse, and has killed several cats.

I may have been on psychedelic mushrooms at the time, but something I took away from the trip was an acknowledgement of a feeling of 'shedding' in life, in terms of hobbies and interests.

Stuff will get boring and be forgotten, or fall to the side and be ignored while it collects dust. This is something that I should expect to happen, and be prepared for. So long as you derived some value from those once-great things, it hasn't been a waste, and is just a symptom of time passing.

Maybe you pick those things back up later, and maybe you don't. For myself, I think my 'best life' would be one where I had the space and tools to be able to pick up or put down whatever ideas come to me.

> I may have been on psychedelic mushrooms at the time, but something I took away from the trip was an acknowledgement of a feeling of 'shedding' in life, in terms of hobbies and interests.

I had a very similar feeling in a similar setting, like a large part of the process of life is scrubbing crusty exteriors off so that new capacities can emerge. Like continuous molting.

Thanks for the reminder.

scrub-a-dub-dub the existential dirt from your soul, wanderer.

Somewhat related is a one-player game I'm looking at, called Thousand Year Old Vampire. Eventually, the character must choose what memories to leave behind. It's going to be a strange experience when I get to that stage.

"Out of sight, out of mind" works great for me too. It's staying occupied so that your thoughts don't meander back to that thing, that makes the trick.

A lot of addictions are borne and sustained out of boredom. When you find something else to fill time, they can be removed relatively easily.

https://tokimeki-unfollow.glitch.me/

Presents the Twitter accounts you're following so you can decide whether they "spark joy"... pairs well with

https://opml.glitch.me/

Which looks at the accounts you're following, looks at the links in their bios, sees if there's an RSS feed indicated at that link, and puts the whole thing together into an OPML feed (the standard XML-of-RSS-feeds format used for RSS reader import/export, among other things).

this tool is great, thank you!

i would love if a tool like this were made based on interactions I've had with authors. generally, i like comment or retweet content that "sparks joy".

would be a good first pass filter

Glitch will let you fork ("remix") and modify -- I don't know if the Twitter APIs are real friendly anymore for that open-ended of use, but it'd be worth trying :)

I just spend the past 20 minutes in the unfollow tool. Thanks for helping me waste so much time on the internet!

Are there entire feeds that you've deemed too wasteful? I get that you can slash much of what you look at on Twitter and still get what you want.

But what about things like Instagram, TikTok, etc. - did you delete those apps altogether or also aggressively trim (if you use them)?

I cut out Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Facebook I left a decade ago, for its ethical issues. Instagram I left because I felt the performance aspect was unhealthy: even in my only-friends-and-family circle, I'd still care too much about picking out the perfect photo of my kid or wherever.

For Twitter I realized it was way too easy to get sucked down political/angry feeds. One day Twitter said my account has suspicious activity (maybe a bot tried to log in) and I needed to reply to an email to re-enable it. I never replied to the email. Somehow this meant that every time I followed a Twitter link, I'd get that alert, so I could never see content. I felt so much happier.

I noticed the same about myself and have been doing something similar. I haven't been as focused on cutting down things I follow (actually even increasing), instead just paying attention to what I find valuable and aggressively cutting out everything I either dislike or find superfluous and spammy (eg if I see the same post multiple times on my reddit feed, I'll quickly check the poster's profile, if they spam the same content on several subreddits regularly I'll block them even if the content is something I enjoy).

> If I have dessert in the house, like a bag of chocolate, then I eat one after dinner.

I think for most with social media the equivalent would be to eat the entire bag.

Yes, he eats one. Bag :)

On the other hand I started following only “teaching chinese” accounts on instagram. Whenever I go on instagram I just watch stuff to learn chinese because it’s in my feed.

We are just monkeys smashing buttons in front of us

>I just massively unsubscribing, unfollowing, and filtering all the feeds.

Nothing has been more effective for me than this, as well unfriending/following people or accounts that actively make me angry. Had to unfollow like 10 people tops and the quality of my feeds got noticeably better.

You're on the path, and the end is almost inevitable - no social media accounts at all, and no smartphone. It's wonderful.

Haven't been using social media for more than five years and it doesn't feel like I'm halfway there.

Now I am using my smartphone pretty much in the same way I was using my PC when smartphones didn't exist (e.g. 20 years ago): quite a bit of browsing and few comments here and there.

It's not that I can't do without smartphone: on holidays I can totally avoid using it for browsing. But that inevitably comes back to "normal".

And I'm pretty sure I was distracting myself with literature in a similar way when I was even younger (e.g. 25 yrs ago). I read very fast and hardly retain anything:) Is it in any way healthier? Not so sure, it feels like binge reading is as addictive and unsatisfying -- I do that nowadays (rarely) too.

> If I have a social media feed full of content, then I'll scroll through all of it until there's nothing else that's new.

I could never do that with Facebook as it is mostly all useless crap and ads

In weight watchers (yes, weight watchers), we classified certain foods as "red flag foods"; these were foods that we _knew_ we could not control ourselves around. The kind of food where you have one, and then suddenly you've finished the bag/box.

I tend to agree with you: if it's there, you're going to go for it. We all have things like this. "Cleaning your plate" is a good metaphor, but I'm betting you don't "clean your plate" when it comes to exercise or other things that may be less enjoyable.

Identify the things in your life that are red flags, and consciously keep them out of your life. It's hard at first, but soon, you don't even miss them.

So many threads on HN are basically "What does neurodiversity look like?"

I think a corollary to this is the relatively modern idea that life needs purpose in the form of measurable accomplishments.

Looking back at how most people lived their lives, it was sustenance, interspersed with things like family, religion, and friendship (if you were lucky). Nearly nobody owned much, nearly nobody 'did cool things,' nearly nobody was famous.

They all just had a part of life (surviving) that they knew was bad and hard work, then they tried as hard as they could to escape that briefly.

Now, we expect work to be fulfilling and non-work to be fulfilling. For the majority of people where that isn't true, it feels really depressing, which is compounded by the fact that society pushes you to spend more time on improving the work side of things (which again for most people will not be intrinsically fulfilling no matter how hard they try), so they end up feeling lonely and sad.

There was a study with a soup bowl that would automatically refill, and found people ate a lot more than they would if just given a regular soup bowl.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15761167/

It strikes me the Internet is now a bottomless soup bowl of content, and we have know indicators to tell us when we should stop.

It's a good analogy, but that study was retracted: https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2018/feb/1...

> my habit is to eat what is in front of me

This! I often let my phone run out of battery and avoid plugging it in so I can do other things.

From a similar thread, someone mentioned that phones are only good for content consumption. When I’m on the computer, I’m at least somewhat productive and the distractions aren’t quite as strong.

It’s what’s keeping me running an old phone; short battery life has its advantages!

In the world of food it was a watershed moment for me in controlling my waistline when I stopped checking the unit price on items at the store.

The brain invents its own portion sizes that are more dependent on the size of the container than the total supply. I don't know how you introduce portion control to the Internet, but we definitely need it.

Some people have strategies for avoiding a shopping cart full of junk food. I wonder how far you can stretch that into media consumption before the analogy tears.

Interesting, I had the same thought about the size / price ratio recently. I want most bang for the buck but it kills my waistline

That happens when I'm depressed, almost word by word.

I also treat it in the same way by cutting everything. That doesn't fix the problem though, and eventually I replace the bad habits with new ones.

For a proper fix for that you need to solve the underlying causes of your depression.

My completely unprofessional opinion is that almost everyone that uses the internet throughout the day has developed some form of undiagnosed ADD/ADHD.

The modern internet has broken our slowly evolved brains. We are not built to cope with these types of attention destroying activities and media. At least 20 years ago you had to sit down at a specific place and use a chunky computer. Smartphones have made it 1000x worse.

There's no easy solution. I don't think becoming a digital luddite is the answer...but we all need to be more intentional with our time.

It's not the only answer, but Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism^1 is a good read for anyone that finds themself feeling this way.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40672036-digital-minimal...

information/stimulation addiction is a thing....

No, it's not. This "X is addictive" where X is porn/videogames/making popcorn view is based on a flawed understanding of brain circuitry.

is it ADD or is it just a common pattern of human nature?

Is eating sugar when it is offered a disease, or an environment that is toxic to instincts that usee to suit us well?

> Is eating sugar when it is offered a disease

It's not, but it will lead to some (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc).

In the same way, consuming infinite amounts of quick-hitting and dopamine-inducing social media is not a disease, but it can damage our brains and lead to "disease" in the same way that sugar damages the rest of our body.

Again, I'm not a doctor and I have no facts/evidence to share. Just my own thoughts on how things are going.

I'm reminded of Scott Alexanders musing re: whether someone "has ADD" if they have trouble focusing on things that are simply boring as fuck, like looking at spreadsheets (or code...) all day every day, week, after week, after week.

But then if all their peers are in fact outperforming them, because they're already all self-medicating for ADD symptoms, or have a prescription for ADD meds, so they can focus on something that most ordinary people would have trouble focusing on... what then?

What's normal in a work environment that's fundamentally and extremely not normal?

Got a link to that post?

Not the GP, but it's https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...

Given enough time abnormal becomes normal and everyone who couldn't fit in is selected out. Several thousand years ago agricultural societies were abnormal, but they allowed high population densities and were better at war so they dominated (except on the steppe).

When Henry Ford popularized the assembly line he had extremely high employee turnover. People didn't like working that way.

The spice is life...

There will always be performance-enhancing drugs.

I would not be surprised if we have permanently damaged our brain’s reward centers.

I remember years ago being a teenager and having limited access to computers and the internet so when I did have them I used my time to learn as much as I could.

When I didn’t, I got bored, and I picked up books. I remember reading books on history, biology, psychology, electronics, programming, etc. and learning from them, often just by flipping pages and reading passages that looked interesting. In fairness, even nowadays, it’s not uncommon for me to have a dozen Wikipedia tabs opened about random stuff that piqued my interest.

Nowadays I can’t get bored anymore. My phone is rarely out of arms reach and I own every steam game I ever wanted and a computer that can handle them.

Recently, I recall trying to work on a side project when I got stuck on a design aspect. My power went out later and with all my devices dead and I remember being bored to death, pacing around the apartment when the solution came to me.

Someone introduced me to the same idea a few years ago and it really stuck with me, "the only time people in the modern world experience boredom is in the 15 seconds before they pull out their smartphone".

It's in moments of boredom that you start having deep thoughts about the world, start thinking through solutions to problems you have, start thinking about changes you can make in your life.

I got rid of my smartphone and now the 20 minutes each day on the train where I'm "bored" are one of the most valuable parts of my day. And my mind feels much fresher after it, rather than being crammed with 20 minutes worth of mental junk food from the internet.

>I got rid of my smartphone

Teach me! How do you keep in touch with people on the go? This is the only thing that has stopped me from dumping my iPhone altogether. I sometimes leave home without it but I end up relying on others for coordination, etc -- which means I haven't liberated myself so much as fobbed off the responsibility to others.

I don't have social media (besides HN), so my main contact with people who aren't in my immediate vicinity is through sharing photos directly on iMessage and the odd article-inspired rant.

I just use a £15 nokia phone (they still make them). It calls, texts, and plays snake.

Texting on a T9 keyboard is slow but I've come to consider that a feature. Before I had a smartphone I would just text everyone, now that texting takes actual effort I find myself calling people more, or asking to meet up in person. And I find myself forming much deeper personal connections with people as a result.

What model?

Nokia 105, which still works in europe where we have 2G. If you are in the US I believe options are more limited, but they do have some 4G ones.

>> I got rid of my smartphone and now the 20 minutes each day on the train where I'm "bored" are one of the most valuable parts of my day. And my mind feels much fresher after it,

Thats interesting - I think I lost ability to be bored even if I do not reach for phone immediately. My mind somehow switches to a strange mode where I reply random events from my life and try to come out with different plays for each interaction. And I cannot do this if I feel discomfort - its too hot or too cold etc. And I used to think that this was boredom but now I think this was because I was distracted by environment. The real boredom is something that I vaguely remember from my early childho hit`od and I cannot get there now - my mind is to full of past interactions. The smartphone age can be somehow at fault here - maybe my brain thirsts for dompamine hit so much that it creates its own mental junk.

I recently uninstalled the social media apps on my phone and I have been noticing the number of times I reach for my phone are quite many. These are times I am just seeking stimulation of some sort, not trying to communicate or research something. Since I no longer have the apps, I just head over to settings or photos and then get so bored I just end up reading a book instead.

I’d also recommend Nicholas Carr’s 2011 book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”. I read it a long time ago and was impressed with its insights on attention (or the lack of it) and the usage of the Internet.

> The average shot length of English language films has declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds today

https://www.wired.com/2014/09/cinema-is-evolving/

I think it's much shorter now, that article is almost 8 years old. With the ubiquity of digital cinema, I suspect the average shot length is 1.x seconds.

What movies are these? An average shot length of less than 2 seconds sounds like it would give me a massive headache.

Here's a list I stole from Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-films-have-the-lowest-average-sho...

ASL 1.55 - Doomsday (2008) : 4052 shots over 105 minutes

ASL 1.72 - Transporter 3 (2008) : 3360 shots over 96 minutes

ASL 1.73 - Domino (2005) : 4046 shots over 116 minutes

ASL 1.83 - Quantum of Solace (2008) : 3198 shots over 98 minutes

ASL 1.84 - Crank: High Voltage (2009) : 2718 shots over 84 minutes

ASL 1.92 - Transporter 2 (2005) : 2524 shots over 81 minutes

ASL 2.01 - Band of Ninja (1967) : 3424 shots over 114 minutes

ASL 2.01 - Moulin Rouge! (2001) : 3594 shots over 120 minutes

ASL 2.03 - Gamer (2009) : 2502 shots over 84 minutes

ASL 2.03 - The 6th Day (2000) : 3418 shots over 116 minutes

ASL 2.08 - Hot Fuzz (2007) : 3304 shots over 115 minutes

ASL 2.10 - Dark City (1998) : 2982 shots over 104 minutes

ASL 2.15 - Armageddon (1998) : 4025 shots over 145 minutes

ASL 2.17 - The Transporter (2002) : 2420 shots over 87 minutes

ASL 2.17 - The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) : 2910 shots over 105 minutes

Who knew that random passersby on Sunset Blvd that got pulled into a Hollywood film screen test had this much power?

I'd expect that some films, at least, have an uneven distribution of cuts. Action scenes will have more cuts than non-action scenes etc. Still, it's interesting to watch these films with the shot length in mind, it can definitely be unnecessarily frenetic.

The article kind of says this, but I suspect the process of editing films and composing shots has gotten easier over the years as the industry has refined tooling and techniques. Not just CGI, but the ability to arrange and view scenes is probably much more fluid today than it used to be. This also seems like something where incremental editing improvements lead to incremental changes in shot duration.

There were a few points in my life where:

- I forgot how time could pass outside of internet. Days were flying in-house.. yet everytime I walked to anything 5mi away.. suddenly I felt like I lived a whole life yet only 1 hour had passed.

- It reached a point where when my ISP was failing, seeing the internet box being solidly offline dilated time in the blink of an eye. I had a giant "oh god yes." screamed by my brain because I felt free.. no more F5/refresh of stuff that only satisfied me shallowly and forbid mind wandering or in-depth activities. Stunning effect an electronic pipe..

Not exactly. It's definitely not ADHD if there's no prolonged and debilitating impact. Being distracted an hour there and a couple there is not like ADHD.

ADHD would be like more like falling in a pit where one basically cannot do anything meaningful for days and days despite willing to do so (if the motivation is lost, in turn, we are talking about depression-like states).

I doubt that many of normal smartphone users get into such pits despite they appear distracted and might have an urge to get into one's smartphone.

Agreed. We may have a lack of practise/comfort with the slower pace, but I think it call it ADHD is to understate the disorder.

ADD/ADHD are very much a spectrum. If someone is having trouble focusing for a few hours a day, even if it’s not literal days on end, I don’t think it’s crazy to investigate ADD/ADHD as the cause/name of the problem.

Agreed. Especially if slacking for days would quickly lead to negative consequences. ADHDs are often distracted until the very last moment when the failure becomes imminent -- and then work to avoid it.

Some times I go through periods where I do that repeatedly. Distracted and unproductive, to the point where it physically hurts, until there's no possible alternative but to work hard or fail.

I found Newport's book to be so surface level for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the problem that it wasn't worth my time.

What really helped me was these two books:

(1) The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu (2) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshanna Zuboff

and the nextdns.io installed on all my devices. I literally blocked Reddit, et al to break the cycle of "I just woke up so I'mm scroll until I'm fully awake" and then oops -- an hour went by.

The thing that ended up motivating me to change was reinforcing for myself the fact that I'm in this mess because very smart people have designed systems to exploit me. Fuck that. I'm in control of my attention.

Can you share more about the habits you built to break that cycle of scrolling for an hour in the morning?

The first thing I did is move my phone out of the bedroom. This helped break the habit of picking it up right away in the morning, and created some friction. I keep it on my desk on a charger.

The second thing I did was decide on a few things I had to do before picking up my phone for the first time in the morning. This like a game, where I started with one thing and then built up more, to see how many things I could get done before checking my messages. I started with taking a shower. Then I added walking the dog, then coffee, then breakfast... now I'm up to the point where my entire morning routine has to happen before I pick up my phone.

It's not easy. I'm not perfect at this, and there are days when I go back to bad habits. (In this context, I use "bad habits" to mean "habits that prevent me achieving the goals I set for myself). That's why I block certain websites still, for myself, to help from getting back into those habits.

See also Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari.

I have diagnosed ADHD and I can waste just as much time on my amateur radio as the Internet. I guess we get a pass due to the technical neediness, but I spent 3 hours yesterday listening to static trying to hear a specific station…

ADHD is a developmental condition which is highly genetic and relates to neurotransmitter brain chemistry (Dopamine / Norepinephrine). People with ADHD have it their whole life, it's not something you can develop in adulthood. However, people can be (commonly are) diagnosed in adulthood, especially for the inattentive subtype which has less outward symptoms.

What can change or develop over time is the life circumstances that a person with ADHD finds themselves in. Circumstance can make the difference between ADHD being a disorder with significant impairments vs a joyful and creative existence.

Situations which demand executive function, like putting down that mobile phone or closing youtube in favor of doing something more productive are much harder for people with ADHD. The market built by the tech industry to transact human attention for profit certainly hasn't helped here.

Here's a good brief overview of ADHD: https://www.adhdbitesize.com/post/understand-what-adhd-is-re...

Or a bite-size youtube version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMWtGozn5jU

An online ADHD test which is relatable and seems fairly accurate: https://totallyadd.com/do-i-have-add/

> it's not something you can develop in adulthood

I disagree, from my own personal experience.

According to the CDC/DSM-5, people with ADHD simply have enough of the described ADHD symptoms, and most importantly "interferes with functioning or development."

We don't yet know enough about the brain besides that people have different brain makeups and respond to different stimuli differently. We don't quite know what causes ADHD but we can group the overall symptoms together to try and treat them.

That said, plenty of the criteria in the DSM-5 can be as a result of our modern lifestyles. I talked to multiple psychiatrists/therapists who had consensus that I had ADHD. I tried all the different meds, none of them really helped. The only thing that did was changing my lifestyle. Completely eliminating some addictive habits that wrecked my response/reward circuits (porn and addictive video games) (still a work in progress but it helps). Structuring my life for more consistency and setting up a system that would prevent me from dropping into the negative ADHD habits.

I recommend reading ADHD 2.0 by Dr Halowell. Everyone's journey is different and I don't want to take away from people who get serious improvements from traditional ADHD treatments. But ADHD is a spectrum, and it's unfortunate that many of the traits that come with ADHD cause negative outcomes for our modern society, but it's really just a different functioning of the brain. Some activities exacerbate the negative outcomes, and some can reel them in. Like most other things, I believe ADHD is partly genetic and partly behavioral. The weight differs from person to person. One of those you can't control, and one you (sort of) can

I'm not sure we're disagreeing here? As I understand it, some people have a certain kind of distractable brain and there's an underlying brain chemistry implicated here which isn't something you develop in adulthood.

However, having this brain chemistry doesn't necessarily mean a person suffers impairments in daily life: impairments are highly situational.

I suppose - to the extent that the DSM-5 requires a fair level of impariment for someone to be diagnosed with ADHD - that it's technically correct to say people can develop this in adulthood: there it passes from a syndrome to an disorder. (Personally I feel it's kind of absurd not to have a name for the syndrome if it occurs in the absence of impariment due to life circumstances! Perhaps this will be "fixed" one day as psychology slowly becomes more quantitative.)

Thanks for the book suggestion!

As it's a developmental issue, you can't get it once your brain is fully developed.

However, your circumstances change as you become an adult and once well managed symptoms can start showing. You don't see impaired decision making when you can ask your parents about everything. You're not late when mom makes sure you get out one time. You manage all 2-3 household chores you have, but crack when you get 20-30. You manage your pocket money well enough, but not so much a full adult budget. You're fine when you know what you're supposed to be doing (the homework for tomorrow), but adult life gets you overwhelmed. Etc. Etc.

I think the last couple years have been especially bad. We've had a pandemic that isn't 100% over that removed a lot of the non-Internet interactions from most people's lives, we have a major land war in Europe now that could turn into a civilization-ending nuclear war at the drop of a hat, we had a contentious election in the U.S. about a year and a half ago that culminated in the Capital being ransacked, we've had ongoing droughts, wildfires, and heat waves that will probably just keep getting worse, we have supply chain disruptions, and so on.

It's really no wonder people are paying attention to the Internet, because at any moment some new calamity will be upon us. (It was kind of also true for me during the Trump presidency: I felt compelled to check the political news multiple times a day as if somehow my personal supervision and online comments would keep Trump from doing anything too crazy.) I've started to wonder if I'm exhibiting ADD-like symptoms, and I'm also wondering if it's not just me, that it's happening to most people at the same time.

Maybe things will go a little bit back to normal as in-person social interaction ramps back up. (I'm in the Portland area. Here, Covid restrictions are basically over but a lot of people are still operating in a pandemic mode. We've just now been allowed to work from our cubicles again, and only a couple of my coworkers actually do it on kind of a once-a-week cadence.) I don't think things are going back to anything like what I'd like to think of as normal, though. The world's just a really turbulent place right now.

I spoke to a fairly well respected psychologist about exactly the issue OP was describing. He felt that the issue was really poor impulse control and suggested introducing delays between action -> reward.

He thought it wasn't ADHD because I don't otherwise get distracted if I'm engaged (watching a movie in a theater, cooking etc) and can generally see the task through to the end.

Note: watching a movie in a theater is, for me, a totally different experience to watching it at home. At home there's always an option to pick up the phone in the middle or walk away and do something else whereas at the theater I don't have that option. I can very easily watch a full movie at the theater but it's been a fairly long time since I was able to watch a full movie at home in one go.

As someone with actual ADHD, before I had internet, I could waste hours reading the TV guide or pacing my room bouncing a ping-pong ball.

However, when I actually have something to do, when I'm with friends or on a vacation, I barely remember my smartphone exists. But again, at the end of a 2-week vacation, I catch myself doing the same things routinely and mindlessly, without enjoying them as much.

Basically, when I'm tired or something, my brain goes for a quick dopamine fix which requires the less effort and, very importantly, the less deciding. The "beauty" of social media, is that they free you from the decision. On Wikipedia, you have to decide what to read, but social media give you a nice platter of content: "here's a tip for straining pasta, here's a nine-year-old who died."

If there's a started jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table, I'll go for that. A Duolingo lesson pending, a book laying around, sweets in the pantry, a small enough cleaning task...

> but we all need to be more intentional with our time.

Yes. Think how you want your time to be spent. Then make the hard easy, and make the easy hard. Make a "dopamenu" of fun/relaxing/satisfying stuff to do when you need a break.

I'm not sure about wasting. Most of my surfing consists of unearthing gems, and I have to wade through a lot of noise and muck to find those gems, but the gems are there. If I could automate it, I would, but it wouldn't be the same.

A piece of code that crawls the net looking for something I would really enjoy is a hard problem, and I would have to code in my own biases to the program to make it work properly, and this means I couldn't share the program with others since it would be very personal and context specific.

I am aware of confirmation bias and filter bubbles, but it doesn't mean I don't like my own bubbles. It's just plain psychology afterall and we're all human, although I do try to break out of my comfort zone in terms of what content I consume, and regularly scout for different places to get my content besides The Bird Site, Reddit, FaceBuck etc

Can you give an example of such a gem? Normally I just rely on HN to provide me with interesting links, but lately it doesn't seem to give me the same kick it used to.

Sure. Some links I just bookmarked and will use:

https://highbrow.se/ (Alternative search engine)

https://cora-pic.com/en (Meme generator)

https://www.mightyapp.com/ (New upcoming cloud browser)

https://ossdatabase.com/ (Database of OSS)

My own list, which is pretty different in character than Derek's.

Gankra's work on a useful rust memory model is both fascinating and useful: https://twitter.com/Gankra_/status/1509335163045650436

This tool to convert low-complexity rust tests to proofs is interesting and something I'm glad I know exists: https://model-checking.github.io/kani-verifier-blog/2022/05/...

I'm using this code I found out about via reddit in a side project, probably less interesting to you though: https://github.com/setzer22/egui_node_graph

(Warning, videos from here on out):

Cool product demo of a futuristic debugger: https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/debugging-by-querying-a-datab...

These people also have a cool demo of splitting a single program across two different computers (frontend and backend webserver in their case). Maybe a bit less convincing than the previous one, but something I intend to watch: https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/uis-are-streaming-dags

These people have some really cool work on automatically solving physics problems (just linking to one of their talks as an example): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHhDgxkiR9c

I'm not the person you asked but I try to keep my gems in bookmarks, would love to share some. Obviously I don't know your interests so take it for what you will. I have many more than I'll post here if you want some.

Some of this came from HN, some from elsewhere.

This website lists the first references to some cultural icons on Usenet (for example the first time AIDS was ever discussed, first mention of a new TV cartoon "The Simpsons", etc.) http://www.eightyeightynine.com/culture/80susenet.html

The Public Domain Review, a collection and analysis of interesting stuff in the public domain https://publicdomainreview.org/

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. I have spent many hours browsing the incredible content here. https://www.davidrumsey.com/

Artvee. Free, high quality art. https://artvee.com/

Restoration Mustang. A high quality long term journal of the restoration of a classic Mustang. Think like an /r/diy project but with way more detail and over a longer time scale. https://restorationmustang.com/

The Renegade Gardener. Highly opinionated no-bullshit gardening advice. I especially love the "Don't Do That" section. https://renegadegardener.com/

Garden Myths. There's a lot of misinformation and old wives' tales in gardening, this website cuts the crap. https://www.gardenmyths.com/

Million Short is a search engine that lets you cut out the million (or 10,000 or 100,000) top results from a search, really good for finding gems. It also has an option for removing e-commerce websites from search which is a godsend. https://millionshort.com/

This one is relevant if you live in New Zealand and love the outdoors: Can I Light a Fire? https://www.checkitsalright.nz/can-i-light-a-fire

> code in my own biases to the program to make it work properly

Isn't this, in theory, what the "algorithms" are trying to do for you? They see what you interact with and try to optimize for "similar" content to surface these gems for you automatically, since it will keep you in their platform longer.

The quality to noise ratio on mostly social media platforms has become obscenely low over the past three years or so. I do think social media can be a force for good but it seems like the algorithms are best at perpetuating the lowest effort, spamiest content.

Completely agree with this - it's those gems that keep us addicted. If the internet were 100% time wasting garbage, I think it would be easy enough to quit completely. But that tiny percentage of good content, which can often be very good (some of the best and most worthwhile writing I have ever encountered has been posted on obscure forums), keeps you searching for the next "hit."

Personally, I would love to subscribe to a paid service that would produce a "daily briefing" of sorts with well curated highlights of the internet. Content aggregators have tried to get at this, but the signal to noise ratio is still way off. If someone could produce this product, I actually think it could be quite successful.

The folks building the internet are very, very good at exploiting our weak points to keep us scrolling.

I've recently gotten way more aggressive about managing my screen time because I realized I had become incapable of just sitting in silence and peacefully focusing on a single task — even while working I was constantly using my phone to open Reddit or Twitter or Discord, for reasons that I couldn't explain. My brain needed constant dopamine hits to function and spending more than a few minutes on any particular task was extremely difficult.

I've had a lot of success recently by leaving my phone in another room and replacing as much of my non-work screen time as possible with slow, screen-less activity — writing in a notebook, reading real books, walking through the neighborhood (with my phone left at home), gardening, cooking. Basic stuff, but all things that had gradually disappeared from my life as my smart phone and laptop took over every part of my brain.

The first few weeks of this were pretty tough, I was constantly looking to where my phone normally would have been and I had to relearn how to just focus on one thing at a time. Now that I'm in the groove my brain feels dramatically more clear and calm and the urge to grab my phone every 30 seconds has mostly faded away. I'm getting more comfortable feeling "bored" again. As a bonus, I've regained my ability to read novels — I've read more fiction this year than I did in the last 10 years combined.

I read another techno-dystopian rambling within the last 24 hours that this text strongly reminds me of. It even has spelling mistakes too (stratergy).

"i swear its always the days where i cannot help but fall asleep during the day, which always starts as a nap that is supossed to take no more than 20 minutes but ultimately takes more than 2 hours, where i learn something great about myself and feel giddy and silly the rest of the day or utterly destroyed by my own previous obliviousness.... i gott lucky today i took a nap today and feel extremely silly, goofy, and content, the euphoric high of a drained and noided individual..(corny i know but whatever) i swear all the computer generated music and single-wavelength light i see looks and sounds a bit better today.... i think the zuck has infiltrated my brain but i kinda like being online idk about yall... i think i have reached the zenith of what consumer culture and the mall aesthetic inspires in people... i feel as if i have traveled back to the extremely-early 2000s and also simultaneously 50 years in the future..." From the description of this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCSMaKWzz8Q

There’s actual science on this. Evolution wired our brains to place a VERY high value on novel information. Something out of the ordinary could mean you were about to get attacked by a lion. Or, could be something useful to your survival. Technology places novelty at our fingertips, and can be very alluring. Also, the more time we spend multitasking — something we’re not actually capable of doing in a truly parallel sense — the more energy we expend, weakening our ability to focus, making the lazy cycle of endless scrolling even more appealing.

There’s a pretty simple way to break the cycle: go for a walk, spend time in nature, have an old fashioned phone call with a friend…

Source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/distracted-mind

I’m going out salamander hunting tonight. The target is the Pacific Giant Salamander. I’ve been a pro photographer and producer for nearly 30 years. If I’m successful, if I get interesting footage- you folks might see it. My Tik Toc record is 60 million. FB is 120 million. Instagram is 11 milllion. I have no idea if these stats are correct (I have trust issues with these services). Yet I don’t engage with SM personally but make decent $$ from it. It all seems so shallow and fake. Yet here I am being paid for content.

I’m looking forward to the adventure. Meeting people in person. Driving for hours, crawling around remote streams till 2AM. Getting wet in the rain. Feeling uncomfortable- either too warm, too cold, or too wet. Sleeping the sleep of the exhausted whenever I get to my bed.

I’ve withdrawn from the internet more and more. I’m not clean. I’m not a purest. The internet is an incredible window to the world. I use it frequently. But it is more polluted by blatant $$ and manipulation (which I profit from).

But my 24 year old daughter is consumed by the online world. So many sedentary hours scrolling. Fearful of genuine human interaction. Fearful of the discomforts of the real world. I’m paying more and more for mental health care for her. I invite her to these adventures. She just went to Mexico with me. She had panic attacks followed by profound depression. It breaks my heart. She barely left the Airbnb.

What are we doing? What am I doing? I used to think I was contributing to a better world.

For me I've found over my 27 years of browsing (I'm 53) for each decade there is less substance and more fluff. There's far more stuff out there on the Internet for sure but much I find is vapid and that seems to be attractive. Like fast food it's empty calories but satisfying.

Years ago it took effort to be on the Internet you made sure the phone was available, you started a program, a dial-up modem connected (or not), you opened up Internet application not a Web application. It took work just to get to step 1 now it's instant. More and more interactions but no substance just people trying to be witty - so much witticism, memes, echo chambers, anger.

Now I find I am to the point where most times I just use a mouse or tap on an icon very little typing and I seem to stick to the same ten websites.

I think it's basic stimulus, response, reward. Just seeing two vertical arrows one pointing up and one down has a visceral effect on me. We've conditioned ourselves to be like this. The bell rings and we salivate.

I'm approaching my 50s, and for me, it's because I am still astounded by the achievement of a global, low-cost, communications network.

When I was a child, international phone calls were still rare, expensive, and unreliable things, and if you left your home country, staying in touch mostly involved getting newspapers from home (24 hours late), or maybe getting lucky and receiving shortwave radio broadcasts like the BBC World Service or Voice of America.

First getting internet access seemed amazing, and for me it's still amazing. Even when you were first tethered to a copper phone line, that line seemed like a pipe to the entire world. Cellular internet blew my mind, and satellite technologies like Starlink are blowing my mind again.

What an absolute privilege to be living in an age of almost universal global communication.

Yes, I remember that early thrill of a chat room or forum where I was communicating with someone on the other side of world. And not only that, the marginal cost to do so was practically free once I already had a cheap second hand computer and a dialup connection, and during college my school ran a free dialup ISP for times when I was at home.

The shine has worn off though. The fact that you might be 10,000 miles away or even typing you comments from the International Space Station no longer thrills me. It's all become mundane. (Well, if it was the ISS then I suppose that would still be pretty awesome)

811 points 428 comments so far and staying at the top at HN for a full day, that alone explains "why do you waste so much time on the internet?" :)

I spent about two hours online daily for job-unrelated stuff, on average: 30 minutes youtube, 30 minutes twitter, 30 minutes HN, and 30 minutes email/general news etc. Half of the time is wasted.

As software developer we're trying to optimize our code for the CPU all the time, but we're wasting our own CPU, the brain, which is ironic.

Seriously! Now, I will end up spending 3 hrs trying to figure out why `807 points and 426 comments` for such a trivial and common experience!

It is one of those experiences people ruminate about on their own about but this post has given us an opportunity to talk about it with others that experience the same.

I know exactly why I do it and it feels impossible to stop. I scroll endlessly to avoid the pain of everything else in life. Doing work, doing chores, doing hobbies, talking to anyone, making decisions even about projects I'm excited to work on, it all causes a small hit of emotional pain. I don't really know where this pain comes from either. Maybe some childhood trauma that I can't even remember? I don't know.

The 2nd part that cements this into what feels like an unbreakable habit is that I feel like I'm constantly learning. It's partly true, I'm constantly learning about things that have even benefited me and my team at work, but in general it's low quality garbage I'm learning about or just the surface of a good/useful topic.

Like the author I have recognized this and done research on it and have no idea how to fix it. I remember finding the word akrasia [1] years ago that has stuck with me since but no help actually getting past it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia

Mate, if you haven’t already, go talk with a therapist. I’ve struggled with avoidance my entire adult life – avoiding awkwardness, pain, risk, “bad”emotions, difficult conversations, conflict – and talking with a professional has really helped me.

Much like making new friends past university, therapists are a crapshoot. Some simply aren't a good fit or have poor sofa-side manner or fail to develop a sense of trust.

If the therapy is part of an employer funded benefit, you also only get a limited number of sessions, and only with the employer-approved provider.

Also, your employer funded therapist will likely have a specific mandate to basically help you get back to work, meaning no longterm solutions or help, only bandaids.

Maybe I'm lucky, I work for $LARGE_CORP_WITH_GOOD_BENEFITS and Aetna covers a non-tiny number of independent mental health practices with a small copay per session. Are there many companies with therapists on the payroll? I can't imagine feeling comfortable in that setting.

Do you know of examples where this was the case? I've never heard of therapists having any such mandates.

That’s not how that works. The employers don’t directly employ therapists.

Plug for Lacanian psychotherapy.

Lacanians are focused, disciplined, and smart. There aren't many of them, either.

Dig around, read a little about Jacques Lacan; if it piques your interest, give it a shot.

Have you seen a Lacanian analyst yourself? If so—what are the sessions like?

Interesting. Though I've got very little interest in Lacan's work itself, I could see this being a pretty good filter for finding smart/disciplined therapists who are able to address more... abstract concerns (then again, maybe it's better for some of us to be forced out of abstract territory for therapy).

Any tips on what type of therapist (psychologist, therapist, counsellor, etc.) and/or treatment you found effective? Sounds like talk therapy -- but did you go through other stuff as well?

I recommend psychoanalysis. It’s the only thing I tried that helped, and it helped a ton.

AMA if you have questions.

Lift weights, run, get more sunlight/vitamin D, and go on walks in nature.

Talk to a licensed therapist with a PhD or PsyD that specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). There are masters level therapist, however most of them don't have as much training as people with PhD's or PsyD's (it can be hit or miss with masters level clinicians). But really it's about finding someone that you can connect with.

CBT focuses on challenging behavior that goes against your goals and building an arsenal of cognitive tools to maintain behavior that helps you achieve your goals.

It's what most people with these kinds of problems need.

I believe the sociologists of the future are going to look back at this era and cite the manifest lack of meaning in human life as source of the ennui that is the subject of this thread.

For a long time, religion filled this void, but for almost everyone, it no longer does. I don't even think most people who hold themselves out as religious really find any significant meaning there -- not doubting their sincerity, only the compatibility of those beliefs with modern secular realities.

It is simply true that it is a simple matter to learn enough about what we know about the universe to know, somewhere in the back of your mind, consciously or unconsciously, that none of this means anything. And the rest follows. It is garden-variety Camus' Sisyphus.

I believe this results in a void in our primate brains that is inadequately filled by anything yet available. We are in a transitory period where we are looking for true secular meaning to replace what we evolved with.

> For a long time, religion filled this void, but for almost everyone, it no longer does.

Did religion actually fill this void? Or did enough people simply go through life not voicing any of their troubles for fear of exclusion or even institutionalization in a religious and highly superstitious society that didn't understand mental health?

Religion didn't prevent alcoholism, out of wedlock pregnancies or domestic violence. It did however force families to take brutal measures to keep their missteps a secret from the rest of society.

No. I think you misunderstand.

When you tell people there is nothing transcendent, that life is indeed meaningless - sometimes they believe you.

Isn't it best to tell people life is meaningless if that's where the evidence leads? After a few decades pursuing 'god' and sacrificing to ascend I think teaching false hope (with or without strings attached) is worse.

If it’s meaningless what does it matter?

Think about it.

Spoiler alert.

It means the statement that "it's meaningless" is, in itself, meaningless. That liberates you to construct any system of meaning that you like. But that freedom can also be quite frightening and anxiety inducing.

If that is the case, then you have a couple of choices (broadly speaking):

1. Soothe the anxiety away with opium, doom scrolling, religion, career, keto, multi-level marketing, or whatever. After all you are probably struggling to survive and assert ones own existence, against a backdrop of other fears which are much more realistic than abstract concerns about meaning (eg. losing one's job, income, looks, etc).

2. Rely on a social fabric of emotionally supportive family, friends, significant relations in a context of peace, freedom, financial and job security, your own physical fitness, and other stabilising, fear minimizing, forces which free up your emotional resources to let you focus on not just finding your own meaning but to create a collective meaning in connection with others who are, themselves, meaningful to you.

To be clear, I am not dissing, opium, religion, careers, or even keto per se :) I think those things are all fine if enjoyed in the proper context.

Your point is beautifully made, but I think keto is probably on the wrong side of the ledger. Diets are the hard work that pays off into that better fitness and some of that fancy “stabilizing, fear minimizing” stuff you speak of.

That said, if you mean doom scrolling r/loseit and r/keto and not actually doing it then you are totally right :)

> It means the statement that "it's meaningless" is, in itself, meaningless. That liberates you to construct any system of meaning that you like.

No. The idea that your life has no transcendent meaning does not free you to “create any system of meaning you like”.

It means your life has no transcendent meaning.

Now the statement, “Your life has no meaning.” is not knowable, but it is true or false. Personally I believe, but cannot, prove that it is false. My point is that if you believe it is true, any follow-up claim you want to make is moot.

What’s even the point?

Telling anyone that life is meaningless is utterly different from telling them that you believe that there is no external agent or agency that provides a meaning for our lives. Asserting that life is meaningless is completely different from asserting that its meaning is personal and must be discovered by each of us.

If you have no strong opinions on the meaning of your life , strong religions would come and greedily take any ground you were willing to concede. If you really had no idea what you want to do you might as well end up in a covent or an abbey.

The presence of that extreme also allowed not being religious to be itself a strong voluntary choice.

It doesn’t prevent alcoholism or other human problems, just force filled the “why am I here, what am I going” gap whenever people found nothing else to fill it with.

I think we are less religious overall for very good reasons, now we should pay more attention to the gap that is less empty and what would come to fill it.

They [religions] also took over politics, and made it so that you could go to prison for not attending church every sunday (at least they did in England). As they said at the time: no biship? then no king...

Religion can only reasonably fill the gap in meaning if it isn't forcefully shoved into said gap. If shoved there, it's just another foreign body that miserably fails to heal anything as any number of other quack solutions: alcohol, social media, impulse purchasing, etc. In other words, it's just another opiate, but one which for a long time, was forced on people at literal gunpoint.

Not dissing religion per se, I just think that when we say "we used to have religion, and psychological health was fine", then we're looking at it with insanely rose-tinted glasses... actually, veering off in to total delusion?

But I am kind of guessing what historical periods we're talking about. Maybe we mean in prehistory, like the mesolithic? Because there's a lot less evidence about that so you have space to suppose that it was all very lovely, there were few tribes, they didn't have to violently compete, and internally they were all emotionally supportive environments in which a rich tapestry of mystical beliefs provided members with a deep sense of meaning and connection. But I would still be pretty skeptical about that. Not saying it didn't happen. But how widely and for how long?

To put a fine point on it, the problem is not that life is meaningless but that it has significant meaning and value and also death exists. Death is the antithesis of most human values and we're so far powerless to deflect it on a long-term basis, while religion gave hope or belief of circumventing or ameliorating death.

I scoff at all of the "accept it as part of the natural order" rationalizations; death is the enemy and my goal is to push it as far toward the heat death as possible. That final end will be a defeat, but much less of a tragedy than the ~120 years we get now. If meaning and memory can exist for 10^100 years instead then that's a prize worth fighting for.

I think all the proof anyone needs of this is the joy of children; death is unlikely and far from them and so they have nearly boundless ability to enjoy life and its meaning.

Pretty sure the "fine point" on it is just your personal spin on the matter. The people who believe life is meaningless frequently demonstrate the sincerity of their beliefs by killing themselves early. A common adjacent belief is anti-natalism, the belief that their own parents and most other people should not have children because it's morally a net negative to introduce new agents of suffering. Nothing about "the joy of children" is as universal as you present it as.

People have been saying the same thing for over a century. Take the following passage from Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, written in the 1920s:

> I belong to a generation that inherited disbelief in the Christian faith and created in itself a disbelief in all other faiths. Our fathers still had the believing impulse, which they transferred from Christianity to other forms of illusion. Some were champions of social equality, others were wholly enamoured of beauty, still others had faith in science and its achievements, and there were some who became even more Christian, resorting to various Easts and Wests in search of new religious forms to entertain their otherwise hollow consciousness of merely living.

> We lost all of this. We were born with none of these consolations. Each civilization follows the particular path of a religion that represents it; turning to other religions, it loses the one it had, and ultimately loses them all.

> We lost the one, and all the others with it.

> And so we were left, each man to himself, in the desolation of feeling ourselves live. A ship may seem to be an object whose purpose is to sail, but no, its purpose is to reach a port. We found ourselves sailing without any idea of what port we were supposed to reach. Thus we reproduced a painful version of the argonauts’ adventurous precept:* living doesn’t matter, only sailing does.

> Without illusions, we live by dreaming, which is the illusion of those who can’t have illusions. Living off our inner selves has diminished us, for the complete man is the one who doesn’t know himself. Without faith, we have no hope, and without hope we have no real life. Having no idea of the future, we likewise have no idea of today, because today, for the man of action, is nothing but a prologue to the future. The energy to fight was stillborn in us, for we were born without the fighting spirit.

Be that as it may, I was at peace with my existentialist void before the modern internet came along. I had companionship in smokey cafes with other people who saw the same lack of meaning in the universe, but were engaged in the making and building of things. All I see in this new paradigm is the desire of everyone to tear everything down, to destroy.

Existentialism leaves room for humans to give meaning to their own lives, through acts of creation and bonhomie. It also leaves room for the Holocaust, for evil.

Humans don't necessarily need a new religion. We need to learn to recognize evil when we see it without relying on dogma.

>to know, somewhere in the back of your mind, consciously or unconsciously, that none of this means anything.

But perhaps that is incorrect.

That’s why the only thing that really helped me was Buddhism, which directly tackles these questions and understandings

From a philosophical perspective that Wikipedia article covers a lot. I truly want to do A, but I do B instead. How is that possible?

The Wikipedia article offers a couple of classical and modern takes on the problem but I'd offer one more. That we misunderstand our own intentions. When I say “I’d like learn to speak Italian” that’s not what I mean at all. What I mean is “I’d like to be able to speak Italian.” and I haven’t even considered the work involved.

“We are I know not how double within ourselves, so that we do not believe what we believe, and we cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.” -Montaigne

I love hearing things like this. It's not like it tells me something I didn't already know, but just saying it in a new way that gives me hope I may eventually find a strategy that works better.

In my case it's carrying too much weight around. Even though I know objectively how much better it feels to be lighter, how much better I feel all around. I want to be thinner, and I want that even at the exact moment I'm eating something while I'm not actually hungry. I tell myself "You ought not to be doing this." as I actually put it in my mouth.

So I end up asking myself repeatedly WTF, why am I sabotaging myself even in spite of conscious recognition that this is exactly what I am doing.

Because as you say, I know I want to be lighter. I didn't say anything about wanting to eat less. You're a genius, thanks for giving me a new way to think about this. Even if it doesn't work.

Off to the fridge... (I kid, I kid... or do I)

Another thing to try if you haven't: ask yourself if you will still be alive after not doing the thing you feel compelled to do. Focus at that moment on the version of yourself in 60 seconds or up to an hour who didn't [do compulsive thing] and the fact that they're still alive. The fact that it is physically possible to not [do compulsive thing].

I find that often helps me. It's being in the habit of reminding myself I have more than one choice when dopamine cravings would otherwise cause me to forget.

It sounds like food provides you stimulus that you are craving. You can substitute that with fat burner supplements. There's a misconception that they alone are supposed to help you, but their direct thermogenic effects aren't what makes them effective. The thing that makes them effective (and any other caffeine-like supplement) is that they spike your adrenaline which takes your appetite away, essentially distracting you from eating.

> I know exactly why I do it and it feels impossible to stop.

The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.

I’d recommend you get your testosterone levels checked. One of the symptoms of low total testosterone is depression in males.

When I was checked I was on the lower end at 200 ng/dl and had the symptoms you describe. My doctor prescribed me first stanolone (DHT) and then switched me to regular testosterone. All I can say is it has changed my life. It may not be applicable to your situation but it might help.

Not to pew pew your suggestion, but apparently sleep, diet, and, exercise effect test levels as well, so more things to check at and rule out before committing to lifelong trt. Although I keep reading testomonials where people say they don't mind jabbing or applying creams.

Also test levels vary drastically during the day in a two peak fashion, when you get tested can affect results in a misleading fashion.

Also genetic sensitivity to testosterone can effect test levels. So you really need a good doctor who is able to look honestly at your symptoms and who isn't running a testosterone mill which is just a modern day equivalent of snake oil (except more dangerous, since test is actually biologically active haha)

Gotta love internet diagnoses. Probably well-intended, but you don't even know if they are male or female :)

As I had mentioned, it may not be applicable to their situation. But there is no doubt in my mind that testosterone mediates longevity in some fashion.

The question is, at what level is that? And does it vary individually? Too much and you’re at risk for adverse cardiovascular events. Too little and your bones will snap like twigs and your muscles will waste away.

Actually, the symptoms described are more to do with low estrogen (well, estradiol). And in males, estrogen is made by the action of the aromatase enzyme on free testosterone So tl;dr maybe OP is just menopausal? :))))

maybe everyone in north korea or 18th century france is also low T. it’s probably a chemical imbalance

thank you for your suggestion. I think talking to your doctor to see if it's reasonable, is a great idea. Much appreciated!

The 2nd part is especially bad, lots of people (I'm an offender) justify bs reading with "learning".

Oh. You just described like 95% on my HN activity

I'm on the same boat, but, without trying to rationalise it, I think exposure is a real thing.

HN is mostly entertainment for me, but just absorbing tidbits of information from people I believe are much better than me in my field is extremely useful. It's not much different than passively attending a conference.

Hey pal. There are a lot of people giving you advice about how big of a deal this is. Here's my take: that all sounds pretty normal.

Should you take care of it? Probably

Should you drop what you are doing and schedule a bunch of Dr Apts? Probably not

Any who... if it turns out to be a big deal, hit me up, cause I should probably do something, too ;)

Being a person who enjoys learning makes it a much nastier addiction. I just wrote this in my post.

>> even about projects I'm excited to work on

This. Let me lay a comparison here to alcoholism. One thing that happens when you're an alcoholic is you plan your time around when you're going to drink. Suppose there's something you really want to do after work, but you're going to get into it for 4 hours and not go to a bar. You get off work, and suddenly it feels like a really heavy lift, when it was something you actually wanted to do. So you make excuses that you'll do it on the weekend, but then you don't do it, and eventually it starts to feel impossible. Time gets chopped up and you never get the long-term focus that comes with settling in and losing yourself in a project that takes hours of concentration. You forget how to concentrate.

All of these things are true for internet addiction as well.

I sometimes feel that it's because I'm not hanging out with the right kind of people. People with whom if I hang out I will be fun and they will be fun and I will be myself. But then I think when was the last time I was comfortably myself with someone. It was always either professional, or an acquaintance type friend, or a hiking group, or guitarist. Everywhere I'm a persona and not me and on internet I'm me and it's not bad. Don't know, something simpler perhaps.

I was just about to type "same reason I waste so much money on Heroin" but you pretty much beat me to it :)

That hit of pain is just a small feeling of loss for part of your childhood self, when you were all potential and didn't have to make any real choices. With each choice made, with each position we commit to, we expend some amount of our potential and turn it to something actual. The reward for this is obvious, the development of an adult self, a self we have chosen. The cost is less obvious, what if the person that you become cannot possibly live up to the ideal image of self you had as a child? What if you don't like the person that you become/are becoming? In fact, what if you can't even decide whether to like them or not because you're unsure of what your own values are?

The whole process of adulting can induce grief for the loss of an ideal, or anxiety over ambivalence towards one's self. Whether this happens or not probably is, at least partly, a result of what happened to you in childhood. Another part of it is probably genetic predisposition.

Anyway, the mild form of this is just procrastination, you avoid the anxiety of dealing with choices by doing something to sooth "that small hit of pain", but the price of that is wasting time and letting problems mount, which leads to worse anxiety, which leads to more procrastination. In more severe cases, when soothing behaviours no longer work, you get in to substance abuse and there are a whole of other ills.

Hope that helps in some way.

For me it's because I come up with roughly 10-100 ideas per day that I'd like to do, but there is (and will never be) enough time to do them all.

So I live vicariously through all of the other people doing the tiny handful of things that they manage to do in their entire lives.

This brings me down periodically, but then I remember that time is an illusion, and our perception that we're wasting time on the internet would seem comical to people who had never seen it (as recently as 1995) and will be remembered with fondness when we near the singularity (as soon as 2035).

Practicing non-attachment and understanding that this is not forever has really helped me rise above the downward spiral of depression, back to the upward spiral of gratitude for being here as part of the human experience.

When I was a child, my father decided to convert from Catholicism to Evangelical Protestantism. For reference, both sides of my family have been Catholic going all the way back for at least 300 years. So a schism occurred. My dad dragged me to his church services and wasted my entire Sunday mornings, and my sisters remained in the Catholic faith. My mom told me on the day that I was to first go to his church service that if I went with him, that she was not my mother anymore. So I went with my dad, because even at that age, I didn't do emotional terrorism.

Because this was in the 80s and we only had one television, books were my refuge. I was a voracious reader. In standardized testing, I went from having a 1st grade reading ability in 1st grade to college level by 3rd grade. That tapered off because I wasn't a huge fan of reading fiction and I had basically read all the interesting non-fiction in the local library by 5th grade. Being an 80s kid, I had a lot more personal autonomy than kids since and started spending a ton of time outdoors, riding my bike to go fishing and playing sports outdoors. When it got really cold, I'd write code in GW-Basic, but that was mostly to enter competitions to miss school (state science fair for the win).

So then I got to college, and was able to browse the web on NCSA Mosaic. And there was just TONS of new things to read. My ADHD went full blast reading article after article and my grades suffered a bit. Every new day is an attempt to avoid falling down the rabbit hole.

I wouldn't say I'm addicted to them, but when I find myself bored, I open a meme site (which shall remain unnamed) and just look at mildly popular memes. Doesn't matter what they're about. I just like the occasional laugh I get out of them. I also like social topics being turned into dark, twisted humor which is sometimes captured perfectly in memes.

But when I was going through a rough patch of my life (depression, suicidal tendencies), I would doom scroll said website every free second I could. I just didn't have anything in my life that gave me joy, apart from dark, twisted memes. I'm doing much better now and even though I am an extreme introvert with social anxiety, I find that I have replaced my time that I would spend on that site with time I spend with my colleagues. I still don't have friends, but Rome wasn't built in a day.

Why did I waste so much time on the Internet? If I hadn't, I wouldn't be here. It gave me that much needed laughter every once in a while that kept me from going over the edge and I would just keep scrolling, looking for one more laugh that will make my day a bit more bearable.

Just my experience though. IMO, generally speaking, people are spending more and more time on the internet because the products, or rather the content factories, have become so good at capturing and keeping our attention on them, that in comparison the real world seems bleek and bland.

EDIT: Fixed some grammar. English not native language

> Why did I waste so much time on the Internet? If I hadn't, I wouldn't be here. It gave me that much needed laughter every once in a while that kept me from going over the edge and I would just keep scrolling, looking for one more laugh that will make my day a bit more bearable.

Battling long term physical illness here that is an absolute fucking slog. Can very much relate to this sentiment.

Well said. Internet is a very good coping mechanism.

A week ago I deleted my Twitter account. Today I'm deleting my Reddit account. I'm keeping Facebook simply to stay in touch with family and a few friends, otherwise it would definitely go. I'm on the fence about HN, but it will probably go as well.

These online communities are a net negative in my life, and I'm done.

when folks talk about going cold turkey like this, I have a question for them - do you think they were a net negative or our capability to moderate our use of these social media was not controllable?

I think that platforms like Reddit and Twitter have been designed and tuned to keep people in "violent agreement". I found myself engaging in conversations that ultimately were just a time sink.

I have better things to do with my time. I think I wasted two years of my life doom scrolling. Time to be done.

We'll see about HN. This might be my last comment here.

I deleted Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other social accounts five years ago. Now I am refreshing HN all day, and other sites too. This problem really not about the platform, its about the consumer here.

I have come to believe that the algorithmically curated personal feed should be illegal. It’s too powerful and we can’t handle it.

Any social network should either have: a) One feed for everyone (like news website) b) A personalized feed that only contains things you’ve explicitly subscribed to in chronological order. No recommendations allowed or suggestions of “you might also like”

Yes we’d still waste a lot of time online because there’s an infinite amount to see in these glowing little boxes. But at least we’d be in control and we’d stop letting these big companies have complete control over our emotions

Another key factor is, that YouTube interleaves really well made educational content with fun and stupid videos (these have their own merit, of course). I think this leads to people hunting for new videos about topics that really interest them, those can be insightful and stimulating. At the same time, the next 20 minute TikTok compilation is one click away, as well as numerous click-farmy videos with no real substance but the appearance of depth and knowledge. This is simply not possible if you, for example, get your knowledge and entertainment from e.g. books. To click a funny video after watching a good video essay or educational content is somehow simpler than putting away your textbook and searching for your favorite comic in your bookshelf.

it's cheap - i could go for a walk - go to the gym - call my mother - clean the house - na - clicking the same 3 buttons in a different order on youtube - hoping for something new and amazing-- is "cheaper" - it's easy - & very occasionally - I win something amazing-

think this has always been true tho - mum used to buy the sunday times then read the same pages multiple times throughout the week - not sure she thought she would get something new out of them each time - it was just something cheap to do -

> clicking the same 3 buttons in a different order on youtube - hoping for something new and amazing-- is "cheaper" - it's easy - & very occasionally - I win something amazing-

You just made me realize that these algorithmic feeds are quite literally a skinner box because you're exactly right.. once in a blue moon there is a recommendation, a video, or a tweet, that really is amazing and can change your perspective or give you huge amounts of enjoyment

So we click on, waiting for that next payout of gold.

and if that is indeed true - do we control the algorithm - or does the algorithm control us? :=)

Feels kinda pathetic to lay it out like this, but the one thing I wish I could do is call my mom. But she's gone.

That's the last thing I wanna do, and she's alive (and calls me). D:

Randomly reinforced dopamine hits.

Same reason some people play slot machines all day.

When you're past the denial stage, you're already halfway there. Glass half full and such.

From the blog it is clear that the real problem is a lack of a meaningful physical/social life, as the person indicates they have no friends, hobbies, etc.

Therefore, none of the tips on cutting down screen time are likely to address the fundamental issue. If you free up time this way but have no better purpose for this time, you still end up in the same spot.

So you need to rebuild your physical/social life and I have a solution at hand: volunteer work.

An animal shelter is incredibly fun and rewarding work. Another thing I tried is to help out the elderly. Where I live you can volunteer to "walk" them. You can chose the commitment in hours per week. These people are very old, typically lonely, and immobile. So I go outside with them, push the wheelchair whilst chatting with them.

I figured this would actually kind of suck, a job nobody wants to do. I was totally wrong, it's awesome. They are so incredibly grateful and the chats are tons of fun. They're full of stories. In case you're socially awkward (I personally am not), this is a safe way to practice just making casual conversation.

The great thing about volunteer work is that you will be universally accepted and LOVED, there's no anxiety of being rejected like you might have in making new friends.

The reward is infinite. I'm a stoic but truly there is nothing in this world more rich and rewarding than the response you get from helping others. You can see it in their eyes. This tiny commitment from your side means the world to them. A beacon of light in darkness.

Your work changes lives and you get to feel good about yourself. Your time has meaning and you have meaning. Volunteer work is also a great proxy to get to know the community, make new friends, etc.

Do it. Look it up in the local directory and just try it.

One strategy I've found helpful in my own life for addressing that hopeless drowning feeling brought on by doomscrolling or other mindless activity incentivized by The Algorithm is to actively intervene and remind myself that this is noise. All of it is ephemeral, meaningless noise. It is not important. It is not nourishing my soul, and now is the time to turn the dial to a different station. Attention is a limited resource that I am currently squandering, and I better go find something else to do. And then I do it, and just like that, the hopeless drowning feeling subsides.

I too once felt aimless and demotivated like the author. But the desire to own things and have friends, as the author put it - this is Nietzsche's will to power, and it is one of the most profound insights into the human condition expressed in modern times. This desire was ultimately what drove me to move across the world, channel my energy and curiosity into learning a productive and marketable skill and ultimately make something of myself.

Humans have evolved over millions of years to be a goal-seeking, load-bearing species not content with mere survival. Our predecessors who were cool with hunting and gathering and spending all of their waking moments trying not to die have by now been largely subjugated out of existence by nations, civilizations, and religions / ideologies expressing a moral obligation to have dominion over the earth. In a world with unprecedented surplus for the select few of us who are privileged enough to complain on the Internet about feeling lazy but not quite knowing why or what to do about it, is psychologically debilitating to focus all or most of one's attention on meaningless noise. We need more than that to achieve a life worth living. All of the world's major wisdom traditions contain this grain of truth, either expressed implicitly or explicitly. I believe that there is an evolutionary reason why these traditions have persisted for the thousands of years they've been with us; adopting them has clearly bestowed some advantage, over many generations, in adapting to one's environment - and, perhaps more importantly, molding it to one's desires.

Best wishes for the author in finding their passion and purpose in life that will propel them out of the realm of survival and into the realm of thriving.

I don't. These days I try to be online only to do something specific: searching for specific, writing, email etc. I am online for 2/3 hours/day. I use Facebook Twitter etc. but not that much. Here's a trick: turn notifications off on all your devices and you'll be happier. The idea is to "consume" only the content you want and only at the time you want.

Turning off notifications is extremely effectual. I did this years ago for FB and really all apps on my iPhone and it’s the best thing I ever did.

The point about consuming what and when you want is right on.

Next step is delete the fb app. Next delete the account. Profit.

Middle ground.

Delete the app.

Browse on mobile-web. Facebook unfortunately is still important to maintain real world connections. Once you stop letting Facebook monitor your usage, the feed is not as tempting either.

Worked only partially for me. I still go to aggregate sites and just browse when I'm bored (or anxious, or both).

Mindlessly reading news or watching videos you would get dopamine, while making effort for studying, exercising and programming can give you endorphins

Endorphins can make you calm and feeling peaceful and truly satisifed, it is meant for long term while dopamine is for short term gratification

I'm unsure whether the English definition of these two hormones are correct or not, but in my native language, it is as how I describe above

Try Daywise. It was developed in collaboration with Duke University, and I've at least in my anecdata found that most notifications even if relevant, can be addressed when sent in batches every X hours. Also has reduced my spending on "deals" online.

For Apple users, iOS/iPadOS 15 support notification summaries at set times of day:

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/use-notification-summary/

I can't help but think - the people who don't waste time on the internet won't be replying to comments here.

It's sort of like a self-unselecting population

HN is one of the places online that is NOT a wast of time. It is full of useful informations. After using internet since mid 90's, and being one of first people that got the first gen iPhone, now days I try to NOT use smart phone or internet unless I need to. This is has significantly improved my life quality. Having more fun, I focus on the people around me and the 3d reality more. Then when I was using a lot of smart phone. Of course that is not the only thing, I had to do however it is a VERY good starting point. Highly recommend everyone who owns smart phone to try using it only in airplane mode.

If it annoys you, then you're probably an extrovert.

I am an introvert and I like being alone and being able to choose how much I self-express and communicate. In person, I do not have as much choice about my time and energy commitment in front of company if I want to be polite. It's just easier for me to manage my social bandwidth while being on the internet.

I think he is more annoyed of being unproductive, i.e. wasting time on social media instead of getting work done. I am more of an introvert and love working alone, but I hate looking back at a day and realizing that I spent most of my time lurking on certain wensites instead of implementing that undo functionality which I had originally planned.

I am also an introvert and the computer is an easy escape after a day of what I can only describe as sensory overload. That said, the author's point was more about productivity than socialization. There, I can only agree.

To offer a couple of personal examples: I have to actively avoid certain types of games since it is far too easy to explore virtual worlds, gather virtual resources, and build virtual things when I would feel more productive doing something real. That something real may be as mundane as learning how to develop software more sophisticated than toy projects, simply because the product is reflects reality rather than fantasy.

The other example is my tendency to watch other people do real things, like embedded development or repairing electronics. I have the interest and I even have most of the tooling. Still, consuming is easier than creating. That is especially true after a mentally exhausting day.

I can only conclude that technology has made some things easier than others, and that it doesn't necessarily correlate with what people value. It doesn't even matter whether those values are social or asocial.

I am addicted to absorbing information. Always have been. I had textbooks about random subjects as a kid (my favorite was a geology book mainly on Groundwater), and my most used computer program before my family got internet access was an interactive encyclopedia.

I'm curious, do you feel the motives for your voracious information digest are positive or negative? By that I mean, do you feel you're making up for something by wanting to learn as much as you can about different subjects? perhaps some kind of insecurity? Or is it just good old curiosity about the world and trying to be less ignorant each passing day?

I dont think it's either really. There's no rhyme or reason to it. It's the same feeling I get from binging a snack or spending hours on a video game.

I think an underappreciated aspect of this phenomenon is loneliness.

Many of the things that suck us in (including HN) have this aspect of being with other people, though they don't actually lead to us feeling actually known or cared about in the same way as our bodies/minds evolved for.

Thus, it's very easy to feel an ambient loneliness, go online where there are other people saying things, sharing things, sending us emails (even if they are not actually "to us" like newsletters) and getting sucked in, then feeling like "where did that time go" because it was not really an investment in any of those top-of-pyramid needs, but instead 'empty calories' of socializing.

I think that there are remedies to overcome your situation.

First of all try to remove the source of distraction and force yourself to take only one thing at a time. Open a webpage and read it entirely, read a book from start to finish (not necessary in a single day), try to work on your tasks without background music or podcast. Eliminating the distraction usually improve productivity.

Second try meditation. You can think that is a "radical chic" rubbish, but it really works. Start reading "Zen and Japanese Culture" and "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" and try to practice meditation, maybe with the help of an expert. You will see an improvement on focus and clear thinking.

Third, take time off your pc. If you understand that most of what you doing in front of the PC is not valuable, just close it and go out, or read a book, practice sport, cook, etc. Learn to recognise when you're waisting time and do something else. Try to make time at the pc more valuable. Use it for coding and research, not much more.

Improvements take time and consistency. We're used to get everything fast, but your cannot buy self-improvement in a course or a book. So start with basic steps and stop complaining.

No one mentioned, but when we are here, looking anything at the screen, we aren't thinking about those thing we don't want to do, and this could be a coping mechanism to avoid doing those things.

After a severe burnout I would also say that we need some time everyday to not do anything who require some mental or physical energy, and that could be browsing the internet, watching the TV, or just laying in the sofa looking at the ceiling.

Do you even lift? I mean that seriously.

Lifting heavy weights helps one get rid of all that mental bullshit. It's a cornerstone habit. So lifting can form a base for all other beautiful stuff in your life.

It's hard to care about trivial shit on Youtube or Instagram when you just lifted dumbbells until fatigue and did some good squats.

Or you start worrying about RPE / programming and comparing yourself to others.

At least that’s what happened to me. Got very strong over the years, didn’t get much happier, and then would stress out about losing any gains that were made.

Eventually I quit caring and started walking more. I feel the same.

Or browse the internet between sets. It’s big brain time. I’m not even joking, if you’re going to waste time at least multitask and get stronger/healthier in the process.

This is the sole reason I use reddit on my phone. I keep a tab for AskReddit, open something for later if the title seems interesting enough, and at least skim the thread within a few days. No app, no login, old-style UI.

Since my brain is usually disengaged when lifting (gotta save those calories for what matters), I rarely bother with anything 'deep' between sets.

One potential upside of this is that the threads are usually a few hours or days old before I actually read them, which means that I can expect no new content from them once I have my fill of a thread.

For that reason I never take my phone to the gym. I just enjoy resting between sets. I also try to make my workout as efficient as possible.

If you live in the boring suburbs where you have to drive everywhere to do things and see people, then yeah there's basically nothing to do except watch television and browse the internet.

My general theory of existence is that your environment makes up a huge portion of your overall wellbeing. Boredom, happiness, depression, anxiety - it all comes from your environment.

If you set your life up in such a way that the only thing to do is browse the internet, then yeah... you're going to waste a lot of time on the internet. Trying to block the sites, to resist the temptation, etc. is not going to work if there's nothing else to fill your time with.

This comment sums up what I was trying to say in another comment quite nicely, except in a more direct and practical way. Sometimes, I feel like this boring dystopia you describe is found in so many places as to seem inescapable. It's something intrinsic to modern life. Every building looks the same. Every road looks the same. Everyone's clothes and haircuts look the same. Everyone has the same attitude. Why? As Steve Ballmer would say, "Corporations, corporations, corporations, corporations." What do we get when the entire world, both physically and mentally, is shaped by the same style of hierarchy whose sole purpose is to extract human effort from the population for cash while ignoring the long term cost?

+1. I came to the same conclusion. The pandemic sped up the timeline of my mental processes and illustrated all the holes in my model of the world. That way, I am glad this lockdown happened before I made any life-altering and hard-to-reverse decisions.

Split this into two questions:

(1) Why do we procrastinate? (2) What is it about various Internet platforms and patterns that makes them so addictive, and good for procrastination?

For me, (1) turned out to be about not having a clear picture of what exactly I needed to do next for my goals, and sometimes not having enough social reinforcement and accountability for the things I'm working on; (2) there are lots of tricks and accidents that have made modern platforms really addictive, but one of the big ones is uncertain reward. I reload all sorts of things hoping for something new and interesting. Noticing that pattern is the first step to damping it.

The only times in my life where I stopped "wasting time on the internet" was upon returning from a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat. Especially after the first one this lasted for around 3-5 months. There was no effort involved on my side. It simply came very naturally to me to not check reddit/hackernews/fav blog first thing in the morning or during idle time (or at all really).

Some of that I can probably attest to the disruption in my media routine for 10 days, but that doesn't explain that it lasted for 3-5 months. During the first 3 months I overwhelmingly felt very peaceful, good, and even joyful at times, with negative emotional reactions being a very rare occurrence. I can't help but think that this was the main driver for my lack of habitual "wasting time on the internet". I just didn't need it.

If I could choose, I would prefer how it used to be instead of my current routine of checking reddit/hackernews/youtube multiple times a day. I think it's mostly not nurturing the mind in a good way. But I'm not beating myself up about it, and that's good.

Why not continue the practise to a greater degree? My social media use negatively correlates with my effort put into zazen

Something that really helped me with YouTube was installing the Unhook browser extension https://unhook.app/

Unhook can remove all 'suggested' videos. The home page will just be blank, and when watching a video, there will be no other video links on the page. This means I can still use YouTube, but I have to search for what I'm looking for. This alone has completely solved the endless video merry-go-round sessions.

Thank you! Just installed

No problem!

The real problem is "The Feed", the never ending infini-scroll. I don't think it's a coincidence that usually the item you're looking at in The Feed is shorter than the frame, so you can always see at least part of the next item, and when you scroll, you see part of the next item, and so on.

I need Unhook for Facebook and Reddit.

I think the internet just feeds what most people want or our minds want. It can be in a form of happiness, agreement, entertainment, etc... It's just part of spending time on things that we like to do. It may be considered as wasteful to some, but may not since that's what we want.

There are many people who have tried to quit and eventually gotten back because life out there may be boring, at least to their mind temporarily.

Until there're some serious conditions that cripple our physical bodies, then we consider some changes.

I think it's all a part of living things. We don't normally say "why does human waste so much time on earth?"

I find it interesting that most of the top replies here skew philosophical - death of religion, boredom due to being at the top of the food chain, and so on.

In my opinion my relationship to wasting time on the internet more resembles what I know about chemical addiction.

I want to quit it, but I can't, and it's because when I turn away from it I crave the feel-good juice I get from mindlessly scrolling through twitter.

I have concluded that I am not mentally strong enough to quit - and I consider myself to be reasonably happy and fulfilled in life other than the outrageous amount of time I spend online.

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned ADHD yet. It's not clear-cut or anything, but I recently just went through diagnosis and testing and mentioned this behavior. For me, I tend to resort to this behavior when I can't summon the focus to work on things I know I SHOULD be doing, so I end up scrolling for hours instead, because there's so much less inertia to overcome there.

It may be worth talking with your family doctor about. If so, there's medication and/or targeted coaching that can help significantly.

The cure does not come from discipline but from finding things that are more fun to do.

I'd rather read a book or tinker with a program instead of wasting time on the internet, but somehow my phone alone still recorded at least more than three hours of use and usually sometimes more than four. Reflecting upon this, I identified two reasons for such irrational behavior. First, I was afraid of getting carried away from reading a book, while checking timeline of twitter seems non-committing. Second, this little dose of dopamine from reading a short update from the internet seems really addictive.

Luckily, I find a treatment that seems working:

1. I realize that reading a book or a long article is not as addictive as before, for whatever reason. In addition, I use a timer to remind myself just in case.

2. I surround myself with many types of books, videos, articles, magazines, and some exercise routines and equipment. Whenever I have an urge to take a break, I first ask myself if I really need to get distracted. It's amazing how awareness itself can reduce the urge to check updates from the internet. If I do want to take a break, I pick the book/video/article/exercise that's most appealing at the moment. This little trick works quite well. My phone usage has been consistently below 2 hours, with nearly half of them coming from reading Kindle and Apple Books. I finished multiple books in the past few months, including tombs like Programming Rust, and Isaacson's Leonardo Da Vinci.

I wish I could spend even less time on social media, but at least I can see concrete improvement now.

I waste so much time on the internet because it's easier than doing anything else. Binging YouTube videos and peoples post mortems gives me a dopamine hit akin to being productive without actually putting any work towards my goals. I hate it.

>sometimes i wonder why do i waste so much of time on internet

I enjoy my time on the internet and I treasure it as a tool for reaching new intellectual heights but not in a straightforward fashion. I speak two languages more than my own native one thanks to the time "wasted" on the internet shitposting on imageboards & forums, watching JP vtuber clips and anime, playing CRPGs or MMORPGs, etc... and that's just the one quantifiable metric I can offer, cause to me it's pretty clear I would be a worse, less polished version of myself if I hadn't spend so much time on the internet running in circles.

>not even doing productive work >back to that unproductive and mindless pithole

What a tragic and servile mentality to think we are always meant to be productive to deserve enjoying our time on this Earth; guilt-tripping yourself back into the cog in the machine mindset to force yourself to become something you don't really want to be seems a terrible choice. That path will only lead to wearing you down, eroding your actual capability to be productive in the process.

PS: Try to improve your experience on the internet by constantly filtering your information sources until you find you stay here useful.

I don't think OP is implying all time on the internet is wasted. Or that we are meant to always be productive.

Speaking personally, I think all of the time I spent gaming and "hanging out" in specific internet/gaming circles when I was younger was hugely valuable. I think some portion of the time I currently spend reading HN is valuable.

But there are absolutely times where I want to be doing something productive, to be accomplishing a task, but I mindlessly browse the internet instead.

Hits a little close to home. I'm sure I'm not the only one, and anyone who speaks out about this should be applauded.

Years from now we will still be examining the after effects of years spent at the mercy of addictive user engagement algorithms.

Well done, you have condensed and encapsulated the problem into a single line. This is evil corps motto, "Keeping you at the mercy of our addictive user engagement algorithms since 20xx".

For me it feels like at some point, I stopped feeling like I could throw myself into hobbies that require real engagement. Long video games, deep dive coding, instrument practice sessions, etc.

Once I got a job, partner, and pets, at any moment something can demand my attention. Enough times of having to abandon a multiplayer game, break concentration, break my flow, and at some point I just started choosing to do things that have zero commitment. I still play games, but only ones that I feel I can drop at a moment's notice and don't require practice. Music is a faint echo of the presence it used to be in my life. The only thing I still get to do every single day is code, because I have to do it in order to live.

I also feel the loss of the "third spaces" in my life. It used to be a few select hangout spots with my friends, then it was the rest of the college campus. I've lived in a car dependent hellscape my entire life and it only got worse when I moved to the US capital of suburban sprawl for work. None of my friends live within ten miles of me anymore.

I used to spend an embarrassing amount of time on the social media, not really enjoying myself. I tried taking breaks for a month or so at a time, but would get sucked right back in because of some dumb meme or hype train or something.

Then after a while something snapped. I realized everything I saw online was extremely boring and shallow, and I had no desire to see it. I didn’t log out of any of my socials, and I still have the apps installed, I just have 0 desire to use them. Same goes for news sites and blogs (I used to read an article or two a day on at least a dozen sites). I don’t know what in my brain changed, but I’m glad it did because now I get about 4 hours of every day back.

Most of what’s online is just so pointless, but even worse, it’s not very enjoyable, and is often anxiety-inducing. I’d rather literally stare at the ceiling and just let my mind wander. Hacker News is the last site I still frequent, but even this has seemed extremely dull lately.

Do you still have interest in other things like reading, movies or exercising? Or its a general dullness?

Not a general dullness. I’ve gotten really into things I’ve never been interested in before, like gardening, bike-riding, and strength training. And there are several old nerdy hobbies I still enjoy—the internet is just very suddenly not one of them.

If you have social media apps, TURN off notifications, block them forever!

I also tried using greyscale screen modes in accessibility and I found it cut my phone usage in half. Definitely a cheap win for me to the point that I barely ever use my phone for "idle" time anymore, and certainly not "the" place I go to satisfy my need to spend time.

I don't get how people could have them on. I have a tendency to put my phone in absolutely silent mode so it's a pain to find at home -- simply calling doesn't work)))

I think we'd all be spending more time doing things that are "worthwhile" if we felt like they were worth the while. As it stands, I think the vacuousness of modern day life is hiding in plain view. Why put more effort in at work if it just amounts to a lifetime of toil for only the chance at a few years of rest far outside of your prime? Why bother learning something when you have the keen sense that a thousand other people are already working on it who are more talented and resourced than you? Long story short, we live in a world now that doesn't much value people but rather strives to capitalize on the value that people represent. Corporations and institutions have been given relatively free reign to kick people below the belt of their attention and to try and squeeze another ounce of effort, however misdirected, out of them. It's all a numbers game.

When I was a kid my parents had a big physical encyclopaedia set. I used to lose myself in those things just as much as I scroll through stuff now. Just because in both instances, it’s “interesting”.

But my brain doesn’t necessarily discern between “good” interesting and “bad” interesting without me trying to work it out and guiding it.

Which I normally fail at.

This thread should be our collective start page. Whenever you open a new tab, this should be the first thing we see :)

I have done it all, from large amounts of money from online businesses, to travels, to drugs, to sex (not trying to brag here). Nothing really stimulates me except interesting articles and weird technology blogs, I really just want to learn new things and drink coffee.

The modern internet, with ever-refreshing recommendations, is fully intended to be addicting. Possible mitigations: make it very inconvenient to repetitively view social media. Examples:

- Create UBlock rules to remove recommendations, only keeping the search bar on the youtube home page so if you want to watch a video you have to explicitly seek it out

- Redirect an address like reddit.com in /etc/hosts so it is inaccessible

- Seek out more productive forms of social media, and set loose timers for accessing them so you don't get caught in infinite scrolling

- Do not have social media apps on your phone

- Turn off internet when doing productive work if possible. Or employ context switches - one browser for fun, another for work.

I’ve been thinking about this for some time, since so many people (including me) seem to struggle with this, even while being completely aware of our behavior.

I think legislation should force social networks to:

- have a reverse chronological timeline for your network

- optionally disable any algorithmic recommendations

Social Media companies are mostly unrestricted in the current legislation system while they are trying their hardest to maximize user engagement.

Just like the use of certain drugs this something some people can’t responsively deal with themselves, hence it should be regulated.

And probably my idea is not very fleshed out, but I think something has to be done, and it has to come from states as the companies themselves can’t be held responsible.

I find myself wasting too much time on the internet and I don't spend any of it on social media. I waste most of it on HN.

A big part of the problem: brain plasticity. (Which, ironically, I read about on the internet....)

But the idea is if you're doing a lot of one thing, your brain adapts. So if that one thing is "quickly scrolling headlines" or "consuming bursts of updates," over time your brain just atunes itself to that form of stimulation.

If that's true, who knows how far it will lead? I was on jury duty, and spoke to the prosecuting attorney afterwards. And his complaint was that over the years, "juries have gotten dumber" -- that he'd consistently seen the attention span of a typical juror getting shorter and shorter....

The positive side of plasticity is that your brain can also re-adapt fairly quickly to a lower (healthier) level of stimulation if you can get over the initial hump.

My understanding is that most of this is regulated by dopamine, and your dopamine system needs time to reset in order to adapt to new patterns. In the meantime, it's normal to feel bored or lacking in motivation; that's part of the reset process and you just need to wait it out.

Personally, I've found it's easiest to change habits and patterns via some sort of healthy distraction that takes my mind off whatever I'm trying to change. Travel, getting into a new hobby/project, or starting a really good book are all great for this.

Andrew Huberman goes into this stuff in depth in his podcast, especially this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU

For me it's a busy brain with any information it wants to consume at my finger tips. This is something I'm working incredibly hard to combat, but my brain is constantly going a million miles a minute with the most meaningless and out of my control crap. The way I can "close" the thought is by looking stuff up on the internet related to that thought, or just distracting myself with some garbage.

A calm mind to me at this point is one of the most valuable things. I seldomly experience it, but thankfully it's been happening more often lately now that I'm conscious about it.

Find something better.

Don’t quit social media. Don’t restrict yourself by setting rules you’ll break a few days later. Why? Because it doesn’t work.

Life can be and will be about what you are passionate about.

So sure go ahead and enjoy wasting time on the internet. But after 15-30 minutes when it’s no longer enjoyable but rather you are seeking that enjoyment you first had, get up and try something new. It might be awful (so one and done), but it also might be amazing. It might just become the activity you wake up excited to do every day that social media/web scrolling doesn’t even compare to.

I'm in my 40s. I've been online since dialup BBS's in the 80s. I never had this kind of addiction to screens before the pandemic took away all my other outlets for novelty and interpersonal communication. I loved to travel, to go out every night, meet people in person.

It's terrible. It's a terrible world we've created. I'm really scared for the generation of kids who are growing up with no memory of what human interaction was like before this. I think it's lowered my IQ significantly. And I think it's worse for people with curious minds, people who are formatted to absorb information. When I was a kid, I read the encyclopedia for fun. I was on the debate team. I ran forums. 90% of my interactions were offline. There was a gradient between real life and online life that made online life a tool, not a habit. The current modality of endless scrolling harnesses both the debating impulse and the information-gathering impulse in the most harmful, least useful, most meaningless way possible.

I'm an alcoholic, and I smoke cigarettes. I am sure the modern internet is worse than both those things for my health and mental well-being. Having struggled with other addictions, I'm really only just starting to recognize it for what it is.

I think I need to find some kind of AA for internet junkies. Sitting around with a bunch of sad sacks and drinking bad coffee can't be worse than whatever I was doing at 4am last night.

Perhaps it's just a series of dopamine hits but there is some strange feeling of being satiated from consuming new information while browsing. It's only when I switch off I realize that there is no substance to it or even worse, I have information embedded in my head that I would rather not know but even knowing this, when I'm back online, it's almost like I'm being hypnotized and in a trance, in a much weaker way, but one where it's become addictively comforting.

It's become a real struggle for me.

sometimes i wonder why do i waste so much time high, not even doing productive work. Just drinking and smoking and sometimes doing lines. Its not like I enjoy them 10/10. So why do I do this? I even made a stratergy to stop this, but no matter what I do, it just...doesn't work. I will follow that thing for 2-3 days then back to that unproductive and mindless pithole. I haven't achieved anything in life, but i want to, i want to own things...i want to have friends...i want to have fun....but this....something is just holding me. I could simply just say i'm lazy, but is that a good reason..why would i even need a reason.

I would like to think its not laziness, but then what even is it? And again i will search on the internet about this, find some videos that talk about this, then some people in the comments will say the "i suffer from the same things",,,and then? then i will feel better that there are people that are similar to me....and? guess what? back to the same routine. I am sick of this...its like i know i will not have these comfortable days, these days where i just sit down and stay sober. But what will be at the other side of it? A person who i would envy and want to be like or someone who no one cares about and is pathetic

I wonder if this is why the internet hasn't led to the dramatic increase in productivity that one would have predicted a global communications network would have produced? Instead we are turning ourselves into mice with a dopamine feed on tap.

Maybe we need to find ways to value creation far more than consumption. Missing new and cool ideas is peanuts in comparison to creating something from nothing, whether that be art, technology, or friendship.

The author's post aligns with a lot of ADHD narrative. If the author is reading, consider getting evaluated.

That said, why do we spend so much time not being productive? Because we're not obligated to be productive 24/7. It's ok that you're browsing youtube instead of being productive!

You're demanding too much from yourself -- not because you can't live up to it, but because the expectations are too damn high.

> Its not like I enjoy them 10/10. So why do I do this?

I'll push back on this. I think we have such a deep inbuilt instinct to lie about the things we enjoy that we often delude ourselves. Humans are social creatures, and the things we say, especially the things we say about ourselves almost are heavily biased by what we think will make others like and respect us.

You know this as well as I do. When people ask you what your favorite music, movies or foods are you'll almost always prominently declare the high status things you want and omit the low status. It doesn't even feel misleading. Of course my favorite food is sushi and not french fries, even if truth be told and I spent a minute introspecting I'd have to admit that in the moment I probably enjoy McDonalds more than Nobu. Why would it be any different about the moment-to-moment activities we enjoy?

Note this is very different that what produces a sense of fulfillment on a broader, zoomed-out level. If I think of any abstract weekend a year in the far future, of course my far mode self-image tells me to say I'd prefer to spend it doing a cool hobby like hang gliding than binge watching reality TV. And afterwards, I'll have fonder memories of the hang gliding adventure than the 9th season of The Bachelor. But in the actual day itself, I'm almost certain binge watching is more enjoyable on a moment-to-moment level than hang gliding.

There might be some short exhilarating intervals that slightly edge out the dopamine peaks of the reality TV reveals and drama. But the day of hang gliding also involves a ton of boring monotony and sweaty gruntwork. The medians and especially the lows are much more enjoyable vegging out on the couch.

What even is the point of driving this home? Because I think the lying is counter-productive to actually changing the behavior. Like the drunk who paints a romantic narrative about how the reason he drinks is to numb the pain, when in reality he's just lazy and undisciplined and really genuinely enjoys getting loaded, especially compared to applying to jobs.

If you've deluded yourself into thinking you don't even like some habit, then you've also deluded yourself into how easy you can change that habit. "I don't even like endlessly mindlessly scrolling through my YouTube feed, so all I have to do is build a better system and remove the triggers and it will be a problem". But if you really, really enjoy mindlessly scrolling YouTube, that won't work. Little, arbitrary barriers aren't going to stop you. The only fix is to do the deep psychological work it takes to build discipline and impulse control.

It sounds like their habits are influenced by your environment. Just tie the habit to a new productive habit. Make it work for you.

Example 1: start learning a new natural language, and also switch all your social media feeds to only provide content in that language. You'll either lose interest in learning the language and start withdrawing from social media, or your unbreakable habit will sustain your new language learning habit.

Example 2: I listen to a lot of music. I don't feel right unless it's running in the background. So I tried learning french and listen to only french pop. It worked for a few months, but then I hit the problem of not being able to pick up spoken (not written) french and parse its grammar while also trying to pick up the phonetics of native speakers. But I then learned about creole and its more flexible and simpler grammars and phonetics. I was able to start thinking in the language using french vocabulary. So I pivoted my habit to learning Haitian Creole and listening to Haitian music.

This sounds like a methodology I’d like to try. I’ve not heard of it before. Do you have any suggested Haitian musicians or artists?

Thank you for sharing.

You've probably heard of this: atomic habits.

The idea of an atomic habit is that there is no disconnect between a habit and the objective you're aiming for. So in this case, the habit was not to learn a new language, but just consistently and constantly engaging with French. When I hit a wall, I doubled down my atomic habit to a simpler macro-french where all my past knowledge would still be applicable due to the etymology heavily influenced from french colonization.

I have no suggestion for artists, because the point is to pickup phonetics under variation. If you listen to the same artist, you're only picking up their way of speaking.

i.e. I'm guilty of playing dubmatique and maitre-gims on loop. Did nothing for improving my ability to parse a spoken french sentence in real-time. I just ended up memorizing the lyrics.

I suggest listening to pop music on shuffle, even if it's not your cup of tea. Pop music is usually very good with enunciating words. Additionally in my experience, pop music lyrics align really well with a language's IDF.

I have. Didn’t realize that it encompassed this. Thank you.

I’ll give that a shot for sure. It’s always been difficult to be sure if you were learning the right form or vernacular when messing around with language apps.

For me, ADHD. I don't have a solution for OP.

I'm going to go out of bounds with regards to the original question and maybe overstep but I would suggest that the mindset that this statement hints at

> A person who i would envy and want to be like or someone who no one cares about and is pathetic

is going to detract far more from life than idle Internet-browsing would.

I used to make similar judgement statements with regards to myself and my future but once I realized I don't devalue anyone that spends a lot of idle time online I shouldn't allow myself to devalue myself.

I strive to direct my attention to where I want it to go, and I fail routinely. I've attached my self-worth more to the fact that I strive to direct my attention, and while I do allow myself to take it seriously when I fail I do not allow myself to take it personally.

Attaching my self-worth to if I succeeded or failed was a too fickle and shallow well from which to derive something so important.

I feel almost lucky that I consciously never chose to use twitter, I don't use instagram nor facebook, and - and this is a major one - since a few months I only ever browse in incognito mode just so my sessions and logins are never saved. I.e. I'm not logged into YouTube anymore -> I don't get distracted by new video uploads of the 100s of channels I'm subbed to. I just don't care anymore, I even miss out on lots of "important political news" but I don't care anymore. It's not worth my time and attention, and most of the stuff out there is 1) negative and 2) I can't do anything about it. So why bother? I think this has helped me save some time, even though sometimes it makes you feel oblivious and like you're living in a bubble, and friends/family will make you feel almost guilty but ... I don't care anymore.

The Tiktok, Instagram feed or YT feed (or even HN feed or any other news feed) feel like snack food. They taste more delicious than other food but at the same time we aren't evolved to consume them in huge amounts so too much consumption is harmful.

So we always need ways to constrain the amount of snack food and snack media we consume

It just makes you feel slightly better. Same reason why the TV was on 15 years ago. Or the radio 40 years ago.

Sometimes I also spend too much time on mild entertainment. The solution, for me, has always been to identify what I'm afraid of. For me, procrastination always seems to be rooted in some hidden fears, and if I bring those fears to the forefront, I can understand them better and work on them. Once the fears are quelled, progress is no longer difficult.

Therapy helps you get out of a funk. Therapy takes many forms. As another poster suggested, volunteer work can be one of the best and most effective kinds of therapy. The important thing is to recognize that while you can very likely achieve many of the things you want to do, you probably need help to do it. People really do enjoy helping you (especially if you are grateful for their help.)

Once you have an internet connected phone or PC (as we all do) then the cost in physical or mental effort, time, or money to click another link or watch another video is basically zero. It also gives relatively high levels of dopamine as you're constantly seeing or learning new things.

So with practically no barrier to sitting there longer and a constant stream of stimulation the cost to benefit _ratio_ is incredibly low, arguably lower than anything else we're likely to do regularly. Any real world activity, which all require time and mental or physical effort, yield likely a much higher cost to benefit ratio.

Wasting time on the internet is basically just the path of least resistance and the best "deal" in your own mental economy.

Attention hijacking becomes micro-habbits that become a rourtine. After just a few days, it becomes very difficult to undo, even if being aware of what's going on. This is what I understood from Tristan Harris several years ago and it's still happening today.

I waste time on the internet because I don't have enough contiguous blocks of time to do anything productive or interesting outside of work (which is boring and repetitive and not automatable). I'm hoping to retire early so I can spend time on better things.

I didn't read the article. My response is addressed to the headline.

I waste so much time on the internet because I'm alone. I'm an atomized worker drone spawned from a pipeline designed to service corporations and governments.

I have very little personal human contact. Sometimes I walk the streets at night. I see a glowing box in almost every window. Almost everyone is extracting parasocial interactions from their TV sets as they mostly lay alone at night.

I crave human interaction. The internet is the only place where I can feel connected to others. That's why I'm here, that's why I waste so much time on the internet: it makes me feel more connected, less alone.

The why is easy. I mean, you basically have infinite entertainment and information at your fingertips. And it's all tailored to your interests. This is unprecedented. I don't think anything comes remotely close in human history.

It's almost like the platforms were designed and optimized to keep you on them ;)

Honestly I have the same problem, but I found a very simple solution to be productive.

The problem is not the internet itself, but a fast internet that allows you to watch videos.

A simple and yet very effective solution is to have 64kbps internet, at first sight it sounds absurd, but actually it's a very good solution for people who want to be productive, with such internet you can easily browse the most important sites like Stackoverflow/GitHub/HN, download packages from npmjs or use IRC/SSH.

I've been working on 64kbps for two years now and if it wasn't so, I wouldn't get as much as I did thanks to the low speed internet.

Got nothing better to do. Don’t care about being “productive.” Get through the other things I want to do - exercise, eating healthy, watching TV, reading, and then internet is left.

It’s not wasting time, it’s how I choose to spend my time.

There is something in the animal brain that enjoys _variable reinforcement_ more than other kinds of behavioral reinforcement.

I am not an expert, but if something gives you a reward _partially randomly_ -- e.g., the one cool (or otherwise captivating) post on Facebook that sometimes comes out of the 200 you scrolled through -- this kind of reinforcement produces the behaviors most resistant to extinction.

See "Effects of different types of simple schedules" on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement.

We are sensory creatures. The brain used to have to move the body along to see new things, but now it has realized that it is far more efficient (calorie-wise) to sit and bring sensations to the eyes (mind’s eye as well).

If you weren’t reading/viewing with your eyes/ears, what are you missing?

Taste, but you can eat while viewing.

Touch, this is missing, but the negative survival/health feedback loop is slow, so we ignore the loss of touch i nour lives.

Smell, this is missing, but we can smell our food.

Basically it is inevitable that the future of humanity will spend more and more time stationary while enjoying the internet.

When I read stuff like this I feel a huge disconnect from the modern world. I have never enjoyed social media other than HN. It all seems like a vapid waste of time. Sometimes I start to scroll Instagram to see what I'm missing out on, and by the second interspersed ad I'm bored and mildly disgusted, so I close the app. Maybe it's just that the algorithm isn't giving me the content I really want/need, so I'm stuck in some kind of social media purgatory, but I really don't understand how people get addicted to it.

> Maybe it's just that the algorithm isn't giving me the content I really want/need

(Don’t) try TikTok.

To be fair almost all of Hacker News is a vapid waste of time too

But the 10~20% that is very high quality is worth it. The link to something interesting that starts a meaningful, nuanced discussion that often includes people close to the topic at hand. I've never seen that kind of content on other social media.

There are meaningful things on other social media that make them Pareto distributed too and I disagree that the SNR of HN is higher than elsewhere

Well, that's the point of my comment - HN to me has much higher SNR. Would love to learn how to find the meaningful things on other social media without scrolling through the 99.9% of noise.

Broader questions for the author:

- Is entertainment a waste of time?

- What's "too much" when we talking about entertainment consumption? Where is the limit?

- Do you consider YouTube/Instagram a form of entertainment? If not, why not?

Usually this happens when I am bored or blocked at work or I am in a meeting where there is nothing for me to say or do 90% of the time.

Slack creates a culture that is built around response time but often topics on slack are low urgency and of little long term value. Heavy use of slack requires people to be around synchronously and inevitably people will be blocked on others. This is inefficient.

Daily stand-ups are a similar routine that provides not much value in terms of unblocking people.

I greatly look forward to tech companies who prefer written documentation (eg, Notion) over Slack.

> I greatly look forward to tech companies who prefer written documentation (eg, Notion) over Slack.

this is (at least how i'm reading it) a similar issue i've seen in hobby spaces that have moved from forums to platforms like discord for support. discord is great for right now collaboration but the archival process is like pulling teeth. it leads to repeated questions being asked because threads aren't often used and one problem's solution is mishmashed in with ten other conversations.

sometimes there are links to a wiki in the discord, which is nice. but it's still only sometimes, and if you have a problem that hasn't come up yet, you're stuck navigating discord.

Everything on the internet is made to be as addictable as possible. Anyways i don't "love" social media, but I just want to have free time to spare, but between my job and my wife only Friday nights are the only time i can really enjoy and i mostly don't enjoy it as much because I'm exhausted from the week and I just want to sleep. I use social media in between my daily life as a guilty pleasure to feel free to waste some time in some mindless shit without having to plan anything.

The mechanism of https://www.beeminder.com/ is unreasonably effective at limiting this kind of thing.

I've personally focused on improving the quality rather than trying to push down the time.

i.e. browse more /r/selfhosted and less /r/ukpolitics

Leaves me in a slightly better mental state - less continuous outrage vibes.

And same for twitter - I never post, and follow a handful of the hn gang basically.

Not perfect but adjusting reddit subs and follows is a mechanical actionable action you can take and get done today where "spend less time" is a vague aspiration for the future that requires continuous motivation

Well if you want friends the first step is to find them. Wish there was an easier way to do this but messaging people from HN/Slack/Discord has been a great option

I think there is a kind of zapping effect with that. The internet is a constantly changing thing with informations constantly added, and our brain is rewarded with a bit of dopamine each time we find a new interesting stuff for us (even very small, and can be completely unconscious) . Not that we will keep our attention to the new found stuff very long, it’s just the fact of finding something new that becomes an unconscious reward, thus this endless zapping.

My habit of scrolling through my FB feed endlessly went away after I unsubscribed from every "friend"'s feed. I had random people in there, people I had met just once, or people I had dated just once, or even one-night stands and FWBs.

One day I scrolled through the feed and for every item in the list, I clicked "unfollow". Soon, my feed was practically empty, except for the feeds of a couple of cooking pages I follow, and friends who rarely post.

I waste time on the internet when I am "compiling" My thoughts. Being in knowledge work, like many others here, means that most of the work is performed by thinking about a problem. After the problem has a good solution or set of solutions, there's only so much active thinking you can continue to do about it. I like to take a break and screw around while the solutions percolate some more. I usually see something I didn't afterwards.

I suspect lots of different reasons but for me I think it is simply catharsis to engage with something that doesn't require effort or reaction unless I want to, I can just consume. This helps my brain recover from the focussed deliberate work I do during the day.

Of course, this does beg the question, if we took steps to stop doing it, would it give us more time to do useful focussed work or would we instead just watch TV, read a book, go to the part or whatever.

Well, I live in Montana and I don't drive. There are busses, but they stop at 6PM, so I'm not sure where I would go, until I get a job that isn't remote, unless I suddenly developed an interest in going out to eat. But tech jobs here are mostly multi-location and require a car.

I leave the house maybe 1/5th as much as I did in Seattle, and I don't really have many other ideas besides wasting time online.

I set a points threshold on what hacker news stories I see. This article broke through that threshold even though it is not worth my time, so the thing I'm going to do immediately after posting this comment is raise the threshold some more.

That's the action that should always follow, any time something gets through the filter. Make the filter more restrictive. Over time, that should clear out the low value things.

Out of curiosity, what's your threshold?

It's now 700 points

The algorithm. It can offer you a very decent local maximum. So you keep riding the wave of decent local maximum. If you stray from this path you might find a better value but you also may find (more often than not) no progress at all. For the bigger journeys "career" and what not I do not recommend to follow local maximum paths you will go very on the surface and true fun is in the depth.

I only have a certain amount of energy to be creative or productive so I spend my other hours somehow on tradional media (music, movies) or consuming internet content or videogames. I don't fool myself that it's anything but. I could spend more time IRL but my patterns haven't changed back since lockdowns even though largely lifted. Maybe this summer will be the time.

Unless you’re at work, on vacation or meant to be spending time with others at dinner or some social event it’s ok to waste time on the internet.

You were not going to do something useful anyway. Before the internet people watched too much tv, played video games, read the newspaper, watched the news on repeat, read crappy books, ate crap, drank, smoked. We need downtime stop the self-flagellation.

Install a scheduled host blocker and block all your time wasters until the hours of 10PM until midnight.

Don't be afraid to admit that the moment you feel a touch of boredom you reflexively type 'reddit'. Tools like 'Freedom.to' block these time sinks and you don't even realize how frequently you visit these sites until you get the block notification.

After a week or two your cured.

Relevant: http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html

> Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. [...] It took a while though—on the order of 100 years.

> Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it.

Addiction. I’ve been addicted to the internet since a teen. I have worked to moderate my time on it for the last 5 years and have changed my life significantly.

Technology is beautiful, but there’s more to life than sitting in front of a screen doing exactly what the author mentions.

I’m writing a book right now that is talking about this challenge and the various things I had learned to find balance.

Sometimes I have intelligent conversations about stuff that matters to me. I really like that.

Admittedly, it can be like sifting a public beach for pennies.

And 99.999% of the time I end up talking to people who can't see a paving brick if it's wedged under their eyelid.

But I suspect that a really eloquent style can penetrate even the thickest. Well, I suspect it less lately.

And I just like talking to people.

I have the EXACT same problem. Constantly refreshing and refreshing insta, reddit, hackernews, etc etc. Shameless plug, I built this to try to curb my addiction -> https://github.com/neriymus/Fetcher, maybe it'll help someone else.

Because you're avoiding something. What "that" is depends on you, so that's why there's no clear answers. But it's usually some giant shit sandwich you're gonna have to eat and there's nothing you can do about it.

"If you gotta eat shit, do it first thing in the morning." like Albert Einstein used to say.

It's so often expressed it feels like a universal, but I don't feel like I do, at least. I spend a lot of time on the Internet but I don't think it's a waste because there's nothing else I'd rather be doing. Now, maybe my ambitions and dreams are set a bit low, but that's a different matter ;-)

I've been around since the birth of the internet, and just have been amazed with how much stuff there is to do and see and learn. Granted, there's a lot of cesspools, but lots of good wholesome stuff too. I mean, think about it - when in the history of mankind have we had so much information at our fingertips?

Can't afford to move out to some place with land yet.

Otherwise I'd spend a lot of my time tinkering with stuff outside.

I always have something playing whether it's music or tv (form of YT or some Netflix-type place mostly YT though). Also my friends are not in the same state as I am so I don't really have a life.

> Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

Because our brain doesn't like to get bored. We need to constantly do things. Also, the brain doesn't really like to start doing the right thing because that feels too much like work, even though once we start being productive we do feel good and enjoy it.

I am so used to Internet since young, and sometimes feel guilty of the time wasted on it. So I spent sometime completely cut off from the online world, go back to books and in-person interactions.

Ironically, books and people kept telling me: why r u hearing this now? It's already all over the Internet.

" I even made a stratergy to stop this, but no matter what I do, it just...doesn't work. I will follow that thing for 2-3 days then back to that unproductive and mindless pithole. "

You could view it as a failure or you could view it as something that worked for 2-3 days and go from there.

What has helped me immensely is intermittent fasting from the internet.

Setting a time to put away my phone and laptop every single day and sticking to it has rewired my brain and allowed me to rediscover old, slower, richer ways of thinking that I used to engage in. I cannot recommend it enough.

a version of this i do (and am obviously failing at currently) is to avoid sites with comments, and avoid search engines

sites with commenting trick your brain into thinking you are having social interactions, at best it’s a waste of time, at worst you end up legitimately feeling worse than you did before

the feeling of wanting to look up some random factoid and not being able to feels unsettling at first. this is how you know your brain is getting fucked up by this. whenever is stick to this for a couple days my brain feels much more normal and i feel more relaxed

Right now it's because I don't want to go and do the thing that makes me sad to even think about. Sometimes it's because I am frustrated with the thing I'm supposed to be doing. Well, now I will go make food and tell myself I will do the sad thing afterwards.

I am also in similar situations. Currently, I stopped using all social media. This video help me https://vimeo.com/97415346 in some way as well. I think its a habit and addiction combination.

Same here :(. I understand the consequence, but still I spend all my time watching useless news, reddit & hackernews. IDK why I am getting so much addicted on internet... And, I believe this is also why I haven't been able to achieve great things in my life.

> Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

Why not? It's not a problem. Before internet era people spent much time on useless things like reading books (mostly fiction), watching TV, playing video games etc.

Internet is just a communication tool people use to exchange information.

I don't think it's bad to spent so much time on the internet.

Let suppose you have a 9-5 job, after travel and basic hygiene, cooking etc, there's around 2-4 hours before needing to sleep (8-10 hours).

So what's wrong with spending time on your favourite leisure activities?

I spend many hours on the internet because it is endless source of information plus I listen music when I'm doing research. I can also say I'm not enjoying it 10/10 but I'm addicted to information and I'm in pursuit of knowledge.

Why do we?

I am currently in a 25+ people weekly sync up that is completely meandering. I can't do anything productive since it is hard to focus but I can read hacker news or Reddit because it does not strain the mind that much.

Do this 9 times a week, and pretty soon it is a habit.

As a husband & father, forcing myself to do some core household activities every day keeps me away from the Internet. Every weekend, cooking is my responsibility and every day I make sure to walk with my toddler outside the home WITHOUT a phone.

Partly?

because I feel like I should learn stuff, get better at computers and then translate it to bigger total compensation - I'm young, later I will have less desire to put effort into that or other things like kids and stuff

but very often it ends on HN/9gag or similar :D

I downloaded Duolingo and now every time my finger itches for reddit/instagram/YT at quiet point, I force myself to do a few exercises on Duo instead. I'm not going to master a language like this, but it feels a bit more worthwhile.

Stress for me is an equation.

When # things I need to do > # things I want to do, I become more stressed.

Although each task has a weight to it as well. Needs are weighted on importance and wants are weighted on desire.

This allows the “stress scale” to tip with many tasks or a few larger tasks.

The Answer, the thing that Helps, might be just around the next click.

I know, rationally, what I have to do, but the part of myself with all the neurotransmitters is convinced there must be an easier way, and it'd be more efficient to keep looking for it.

... what else there is to do? The days are 14 hours long (assuming healthy 10 hours of sleep), but I have energy for maybe 4-8 hours of activity on average. Rest of the time needs to be filled with some form of "time wasting".

Maybe I'm just being kept alive by Twitter's algorithm after all. I'm a little sad that it's not even a "waste" anymore, because I haven't found anything more interesting than that. (Deepl)

Because it's my job... I search for answers that others are too lazy to find, so I can help them fix their stuff. Can't do that without internet... Sadly. Also, Twitch's a drug and YouTube's my dealer...

There is a great episode of Jocko podcast with Andre Huberman that just came out where he carefully addresses this specific issue. Worth listening to (it’s in the first hour or so, I mention it because it’s 5 hours long!!)

I feel you! What helped me was Mindfulness meditation, this in particular: https://wakingup.com/. You can get at least one year free there.

I think the problem is I don't waste enough time on the internet (where 'waste' is a loaded word) - there's so much on there and yet I'm relegated to the same 5 or 10 pages I always go to

This thread is golden. It has the answers to the questions raised in the post.

Like any other addiction, it's a way of coping with painful emotions that you (and I) are hiding from (consciously or not). I've been in therapy for several years now and I'm still struggling.