I'm an addict
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I see the root cause (for me atleast (used to read HN and blogs for 4 hours everyday)) is that i cant stand being with myself.
During the last two months ive been trying to not panic when i'm idle. And not take out my phone or read the nearest material i can lay my hands on.
Instead i try to accept the necesity of "falde i staver" (danish for 'falling out of presence'). When i was a kid i would often just fall into this state and just defocus with my sight and let daydreaming take over.
Basically i have a war going against effectiveness. I hold unto my right as a mammal to be inefficient and sit drooling looking at trees.
My advice on "doing something" when you have day without plans is the following: Bike in the forrest, coffee from thermos near the ocean, read newspapers at the library, talk to people at trainstations (the frequent hangouts are always open for conversations)
But on that note, have multiple kids AND get a pet. You'll never have a free minute again.
But then you’ll flock to these addictions because you feel you need an escape.
I have four kids and a ShiTsu.
I understand it was hyperbole, but I would suggest one possible application of having and throwing everything you've got at raising children[1] to help with aimlessness/meaninglessness/purposelessness. Particularly when they're your own the common experience is your instinct/genome takes over and you'll find great imperative to do things you couldn't do for yourself. I learned about this concept from Jordan Peterson who also notes it works with pets[2]. For any bit of resentment about how the world has treated you, pouring yourself into someone else can at least give the solace that for them they will not suffer as much as you have, or at least not in the same insanity producing cyclical way as you had.
[1]: (technically can also be someone else's like foster, adopt, church, mentor, nephews/nieces) .
[2]: he talks about how people more frequently fill prescriptions for pets than for themselves.
Society keeps encouraging a lifestyle with less and less responsibility.
The government takes care of you (until you start bringing in profits), your employer takes care of you (with no raises). Everything seems engineered to coddle people without making them realise what they're missing. I feel most people are basically unaware cattle, happy to stay in their comfort zone and to keep producing what they tell them to.
Sexual promiscuity is cool, relationships don't last, having kids is a suicide, you're a victim.
A lot of the shitty parents have way deeper problems than this. The ones doing ok are probably glad they get to use their judice and they enjoy the freedom that comes with responsibility (without forgetting the obligations).
I believe there is a similar function in marriages, parenting, and other relationships -- the act of working through challenges makes you a "better" person at least in the regards of perspective, negotiation, less selfishness etc.
Of course, like basically everything in every discussion, there are exceptions but lets not focus on those because it makes it difficult to talk about anything save for physical laws.
Personally, I'm shocked at how just having kids has healed a lot of my held resentment. I used to look back at moments in my life that I wished had gone differently. Now I see that if you gave me a time machine and the chance to go back and change how I responded, I can't do it because I'd be erasing my kids.
I wouldn't even be able to stop the covid pandemic, selfish as that may be.
Is it career? If so, that's pretty depressing. Happiness is a superficial emotion. If your loved one was "happy" spending his entire life playing fortnight in his parent's basement, would you be sad for him? Charity?
I don't know. Never found a meaning as compelling as having children.
A google definition of superficial is "appearing to be true or real only until examined more closely."
I don't see how the definition of a type of emotion can be "superficial". Presumably your usage of "happy" in quotes is not actually happiness if you decided to put it in quotes. If you meant it as him actually being happy then someone could decide to be sad for him but that has nothing to do with his own happiness. Instead it would just be someone arrogantly projecting their own sensibilities and worldview onto the fortnite player while thinking they know better sources of happiness (when really the causes are subjective and every person derives varying levels of joy in different ways).
Making kids a "point of life" can itself be seen as a last ditch effort to be happy. The thought that there's some purpose in life that points to procreating is arbitrarily chosen and is seemingly that way because people derive happiness from some idea of having a legacy or finding comfort in interpreting the potential continuous spread of dna as some proxy for immortality
wait for the scientist who'll start printing soldier clones of himself
I can spend hours in my own head, just thinking about… everything. For me the phone rabbit hole usually starts with an idea that needs more information to live.
The outcome, however, is the same: I get very little practical work done, I am constantly behind and very frustrated.
I am getting better at doing things, but I quickly become overwhelmed, because those thoughts never stop and instead of doing what I need to do, it's a battle plus all those thoughts I have that feel like I need to spend time thinking them through etc, rather than doing the most basic of things that I need to do.
here, here!
I use "here, here" on text forums because you can't hear anything, but "right here" is a post worth reading!
Somewhere along the way I realized I had not day dreamed or used my imagination for a long time because it was so easy to "read the nearest material I can lay my hands on".
To add to your advice I would suggest to try to find out who you are without outside material and to get comfortable with this self.
I agree with you that the obsession with S-tier clearing life is very bad for people. I have many young friends who obsess over optimizing every move they make at cost to their sanity and time. Specialization is for insects.
yes, I even like framing this as an environmental conservation activity.
I'm doing nothing at all (only consuming oxygen, no content, no nothing) as a conscious action to save the environment.
And humans can have a positive impact on the environment. We can plant trees, do civil engineering to shore up damaged ecosystems, care for animals, develop cleaner ways to live and make food, etc. humans do not have to be a net negative for the environment.
Which isn’t to say that resting and daydreaming are bad or net negative. I think they’re good! Even if just good for the soul, that helps fight the encroaching nihilism of modern life and think more in a positive-sum manner.
the point is that it's the least we can consume, in contrast with a more capitalist friendly "go sit at a cafe to buy a drink" or even a scholarly-ambitious "read a book, or newspaper or learn something, don't just sit there". both of which are much worse.
There is no environment that need saving. Carbon emissions are merely changing the environment in a way that may not be convenient for a lot of humans.
You're just saving the status quo of human society, not "reinvesting in the Earth".
If by environment you mean species of animals you should worry more about plastic and trash than carbon emissions.
So you’re saying that I should have some potato chips on hand for when I’m being lazy? You seem wise.
OK, I get this. Really, I do. I've spent many many hours doing "nothing" just like this, and those have generally been happy times. But ... how would that change if you had a lot more free time? Could you spend all day every day in such a state? Would it be healthy if you did?
The reason I ask is that I've had to grapple with that question since I retired. Probably will even more so when my daughter leaves for college. And as much as I enjoy doing "nothing" I find that I just can't do it all day. I have to be doing something, which brings us right back to the issue of low-effort low-reward activities (e.g. doomscrolling on the internet) vs. high-effort high-reward activities (e.g. hobbies, community involvement, travel). I force myself to do the latter first so I don't lose the ability to do hard(er) things, and there's still plenty of time left over for the low-effort stuff.
I suggest that your "war" only needs to be fought because you don't have enough total free time, and it will seem like a very different war when that changes.
What if it was disadvantageous to outwork everyone else during anthropogenesis even if it is rational in our modern world where the upside is practically unlimited and the downside is nearly always limited? A natural environment is almost exactly the opposite - Does that mean we are fighting our "natural" behavior every day? This question isn't meaning to be fatalistic, exactly what OP and the video by Luke Smith he linked criticize. But understanding the biological reason behind procrastination could lead us to some deeper understanding on how to win this uphill battle.
Since i am on sickleave due to anxiety, stress and skizotypia i dont usually like being alone with my thoughts.
so what ive done with my time is this:
Wake up, fill my thermos with hot water. Leave my apartment.
Drive around on my bike looking for hidden places. It can be an empty lot behind a supermarket or an off-path place in the forrest.
Walk around and study the vegetation. Find a nice place for some instant coffee, chill.
Sit-drink coffee-stare-listen-repeat.
Decide to leave. Bike to a place where there is a lot of people i know. Leave cuz i am too anxious to talk to any of them.
Have a quick chat at the harbour with some strangers.
Go to the library and read a bit of comics or newspapers. Take the bus to another harbour.
Make minor.fixes to my small boat from the 70's.
Go to the swimming hall. chill in sauna and max up the heat. Stare.
Go home, make food for minimum money as an exercise. Eat.
Think about projects i could imagine would be fun. Imagine the details of them. Maybe write them down. Be okay with never doing them.
Watch some hbo.
Plan when i have my kids again "maybe tomorrow?" And where to take them? Usually the beach or the forrest and have fun in the woods.
Go my my bedroom without any devices and sleep.
I live in denmark
I like your routine though, I envy those who live in walkable areas!
My war is personal, ive been over productive for 7 years like this: Work 50+ hours as it engineer, taking on too much responsibility. Doing opensource projects in spare time. Doing srt projects like stage shows and stuff on weekends. Being a dad to 3. Being main supplyer of moneys in the home. Having some heavy duty mental ilness diagnoses on the top. All the while i never felt i was worth anything. Not a dime.
Now i aim for having low amount of recurring bills. Chill with my kids (i now dont live with anymore since the above details produced my divorce) Be outside, all weather, all the time. Be helpful. And accept a new way of not being productive. And therefore also not consuming a lot.
You touch on it a little when you say you begin to panic when you’re idle - what is the source of that panic? Is it FOMO? Is it un-processed traumatic memories? Is it unhinged neuroticism and overthinking? Is it something else? What is the source of that panic?
Both of these are traits of my skizotypical diagnosis being 'lack of identity' 'lack of understanding of how other people engage in life' 'emotional blindness' etc
> During the last two months ive been trying to not panic when i'm idle. And not take out my phone or read the nearest material i can lay my hands on.
> (...)
> My advice on "doing something" when you have day without plans is the following: Bike in the forrest, coffee from thermos near the ocean, read newspapers at the library, talk to people at trainstations (the frequent hangouts are always open for conversations)
Or maybe meditate? It may be hard (specially when beginning) but it's wonderful for learning to comfortable with yourself
Half the article was them complaining about poor working memory, and the rest about getting stimulation/dopamine from unhealthy sources.
Everyone has "a little ADHD". We all occasionally, forget things, hyperfocus on things we are excited about, etc. ADHD is the disorder of having those struggles so often it's debilitating. It stems from having an underdeveloped frontal lobe that doesn't feel dopamine as well as neurotypical brains do, meaning an ADHD brain needs more stimulus to feel healthy.
Because of the deficit in stimulus, people with untreated ADHD are statistically much more likely to have a substance abuse disorder (SAD); but in many cases, treating their ADHD (with medication and cognitive behavioral therapy) has the side effect of treating their SAD.
Addiction, in the public consciousness/vernacular, is more abstract than SAD: it can mean anything from chemical dependence to unwanted habits. I suspect most people tend to make a false equivalence between the former and the latter. I see all the time people struggling to change a simple habit and immediately labeling themselves "addicts". I think that's a unhelpful characterization.
I think the point people tend to miss is that in order to change a habit, you don't just "stop doing it": you must replace it with an alternative dopamine source. This is especially tricky with untreated ADHD.
A recent related post:
People with ADHD are 2.7 times more likely to deal with depression than people without.
This is very subjective and I can’t put a finger on what it is exactly but something in this post just feels like depression.
My unrelated take is that remote work is going to make this problem way worse.
My mechanism for remaining focused and getting through work has been to consume harder illicit substances, mostly cocaine. It's effective but definitely not sustainable long time and I'm not too sure where from here.
I am as above board as I can be when it comes to my medicine (never take more than 1 a day, never ask for more, etc) but the song and dance for getting refills, let alone a new or changed prescription, makes me feel like a criminal hunting for his next fix.
I can't imagine what it must be like for people who legitimately need opiates.
The hoops and ridiculous requirements he has to jump through are crazy. He just got a random drug test the other day. He has to meet with the doc all the time. They ask him stupid questions (I've been in the room). He has to fill out the same form each time with all these questions about addictive behavior. He's got to bring his pill bottle with him; not allowed to have too many pills, or too few, or you get in trouble. Doc was quizzing him about why he has other prescribed medications. And on and on.
My dad has to set aside pills so that he doesn't lose the prescription, since he doesn't use as many pills as he's prescribed; it's highly important to him, as he's played pool nearly every single day for about 57 years and he is going to hold onto that as long as he can.
The wildly excessive prescription of oxycontin & opioid is a crisis and a tragedy. If the response is an overreaction in the opposite direction, the result is also more tragedies.
Pain doctors seem like they are really stuck between a rock and a hard place now. You have a whole population of patients who have been given pain meds like candy, and when you suddenly take them away they're left dealing with the problem. Some of them turn to street drugs out of desperation, and that's a countdown to another fentanyl overdose.
Then there's people with chronic pain who may legitimately need the medication on a continued basis (some of whom have had their dosage increase to dizzying levels during the opioid crisis!) You frequently have patients with chronic pain who, after the pills are taking away, spend their time thinking of ways of killing themselves, as a pain management option. They cannot deal with the all-natural, constant torture.
When I look at the opioid epidemic, to me it's really hard not to think that the onus should be on pharmaceutical companies to not advertise their pain medication to doctors as non-habit forming when they are the very opposite, and results in those extremely addictive pills being given like candy to an entire population.
The 'good news' is the active compound in Desoxyn is widely available at cheap prices and surprisingly high-purity in hypo-regulated markets. It is, in a way, easier to acquire (on every street corner and through the mail) than many very boring prescription chemicals. So there is at least a theoretical alternative.
Amphetamines for ADHD is one of the most effective treatment there is in all of medicine, along with things like insulin for diabetics and benzodiazepines for anxiety.
Unfortunately, self-medicating with N-methylamphetamine is an extraordinarily unwise thing to try. It is hard to recommend that anyone who is already prone to substance abuse attempt that maneuver.
Ummmm??? Maybe not a best first step to working on ADHD Problems...
Second, seek medical help. Today, thats the path I would choose. You need a social safety net too, or things might take a bad turn.
Good luck with it, be well, and try and care for yourself the way you’d care for a sick parent or child.
No joke; shoot me an email if you want a detailed solution. I can easily chew your ear off with my own tale and anecdotes. Email on my profile page.
I was later diagnosed with severe ADHD.
As counterproductive as it seems, I think pot makes me more mindful, which can boost my work productivity. Sometimes I will smoke and then spend 30 minutes organizing my folder structures, documenting code, or writing a script to do something that I do manually everyday. When I'm not on pot, all of those tasks seem too trivial to justify doing.
What's the evidence that it is horrible for your health?
I am in the same boat, but I couldn't find anything conclusive when I was trying to do my research. Just various things that either or can cause an increase in heart rate and blood pressure, and I would assume combining both just increases said cardiac effects more.
I get what you’re saying but I want to push back hard on this. Everyone has some of the symptoms of ADHD at any given time.
But, ADHD isn’t more of the same symptoms. That’s how it’s diagnosed, but the underlying mechanism is a severely compromised ability to self-regulate which is categorically different from what people experience when they are out of mental energy.
Edit: I've clarified what I mean in other comments in the thread. My issue is the use of the phrase without explaining why it is wrong.
Everyone has a little trouble regulating themselves, some people have a little more trouble, some people have enough trouble that it becomes a disorder.
An equivalent is saying everyone has trouble walking sometimes when we're talking about someone who limps and needs a cane.
The symptoms are not the disorder and don't come from the same mechanism that causes normal people to have difficultly paying attention sometimes.
Feeling like you need to wash dirt off your hands before eating isn't a "bit of OCD", that's normal.
Worrying irrationally so much about clean hands that it ruins your life, leaving you crying from normal tasks like cooking ... every touch of a surface triggers fight/flight ... is a disorder.
It isn't the mechanism that's important, but the impact and motivators.
Same with ADHD. A bit of being inattentive or forgetful or whatever ... isn't a "bit" of the disorder that also contains some of those behaviours in extreme.
But I don't feel like that's the case here.
Personally when I hear people speak like this I assume they're trying to root someone in an empathetic perspective. I'm not sure I've ever heard it from someone who was arguing against the seriousness of the subject.
My issue was using the phrase in the first place without some explanation of just how wrong the idea is.
Two sides of the same coin imho. Both mechanisms are dopamine-driven.
ADHD is like having a coin that's to thin for the press (stimulation/dopamine) to leave a mark. Addiction is like having the press put too much pressure.
Yikes. What a bad take. Many people experience some of the side effects of ADHD may be a true statement. But saying everyone has a little bit of this debilitating mental disorder makes light of something that is not an easy thing to deal with for many sufferers.
That's like saying everyone has a little cancer because sometimes we all get colds which people going through chemo may be more likely to get.
It's like concern for having clean hands. A certain amount is sensible, normal and part of being a human.
Too much of that concern, when it becomes life ruining anxiety ... is a disorder. Normal concern for clean hands isn't "a little bit of OCD".
The fact that we, as humans, have to decide who gets the label of 'Has the Disorder' and who doesn't is just an artifact of how we like to label things.
For the same reason that you don't magically go from a child to an adult the minute you turn 18. There is a smooth spectrum of development as people age, but for practical and legal reasons we need a cutoff for officially calling people adults.
Some disorders are also on a smooth spectrum. Some people have a little anxiety, or show a few autistic symptoms without it ruining their lives. That doesn't invalidate the experience of people who have severe anxiety or a more advanced degree of autism. Don't imbue too much meaning to the where the cutoff for the label is.
There's no need to gatekeep mental illness, the goal is helping people. We're not competing for who has the real thing™ and deserves to be taken seriously. Let's just listen to people, let them describe things as they perceive them to be, and try to be helpful.
Those two X's are not the same, and it isn't useful to compare them even though they appear comparable or similar or the same.
The key bit is the anxiety (however small or large, frequent or infrequent) that makes the distinction.
I agree it's not very useful to use labels for behaviors that are considered normal and don't have any negative cause or impact (whether that's anxiety or something else).
My understanding is that a good part of the diagnosis of many disorders, as per the DSM, is by looking at the impact they have on one's life. If someone is perfectly happy with what they're doing, it's certainly an important distinction that makes labeling them with X disorder somewhat less meaningful.
It really muddles the picture and distorts what's really important; the experience of anxiety/stress/irrationality/impulsivity/attention issues/ ... to the person feeling it.
I think that's exactly what they meant, since they put it in quotes and then go on to say that ADHD proper is when those complications are debilitating.
I implore anyone reading this and noticing it in themselves to go to a professional and find out if you have ADHD or not. I am by no means "cured" or completely functional but at least now I have a fighting chance.
I was initially given Dexedrine (dextroamphetamine) and it was so good and I wrote the most beautiful code and my focus was pure and I needed more and more and I lined the pills up at night and did I mention beautiful code, on on sentences and becoming insufferable?
Anyway, I switched to a different stimulant (vyvanse) which had a more measured effect and did not lead to that kind of addictive over the top behavior.
Apropos of the original post - I find that during a procrastination spell, I’m still “working” in the back of my mind even though it might look like I’m doing legos at work. At some point my brain hits what I think of as an “activation level” and I suddenly “flip” my attention and focus to the job at hand. It feels like what happens when you’re kindling a fire, and you get a little bit of flame in some dry stuff, and then you “pop” that flame (attention) into the larger pile of fuel.
What a wonderful way to describe such a feeling. I have struggled, and still struggle, with the same issue. I have no idea of get that switch to flip on faster, but I hate wasting so much of my day just waiting.
I was tested at very young age, as most millennials were in the US, and was told I did not have it, luckily; but looking back on the people who were raised in that era and how they handed out SSRIs like candy I'm glad I dodged that bullet because the adverse affects of those drugs sound way worse than coping with ADHD--but it also explains why mental hygiene/health issues in the US are as severe as they are.
It's sad that people have ADHD, I personally can enter 'flow state' and block out all things for hours, even days or weeks if I really try; but it's to the detriment of everything else and so horrible for my mental and physical health.
I lived that way for almost a decade with only small pauses in between, power napping is all I slept and a good day was 3-5 hours, with work schedules that were optimized for productivity over everything and my life seriously was in shambles: I was a boot-strapping founder with a stressful day job(s) and side hustles and worked 7 days/week with 90+ hour totals. I tried my best to maintain a very contentious relationship and failed miserably at it.
I think what needs to be addressed is that extremes are all bad, and OP's situation seems like it would be manageable were it not for self-satisfying rationalization to waste his time. It's like those self-sabotaging people who get off on the rush from the failure more than succeeding, this scene in Two for The Money explains it rather well [0].
The first time I took my meds, my mind was blown. It was the first time in my long life I experienced peace and quiet. Now I am able to track my work, break large tasks into smaller ones, and quiet my brain. I’m on a dose + brand name with no side-effects etc.
The issue, and this isn’t true for everyone but I believe it is true for a lot, is that some doctors start people on what they think they should be at. Instead of starting at 5mg, they will do some BS calculation of gender and weight and start someone on 60mg. Yeah that is going to fucking suck.
Mine was a life of extremes, put simply I stopped caring about myself during that time and I poured myself into my work as I wanted to have something to show for what I felt was more than likely going to be a short Life.
I didn't think I was going to get rich doing any of that, in fact I lost money for most of it's existence and I never paid myself in order to pay everyone else and keep the lights on until we accomplished our mission statement, the only thing that saved me in the end was the skill set I developed made me marketable in fintech and I got head hunted to go work for a Megaorp.
I spent my Life doing what I wanted and lived a perilous and risky life and got addicted to the adrenaline rush and still deal with bad PTSD to this day. I take your words to heart, and I'm glad it worked, but sadly a family member who had a schizophrenic break down really early in life (teens) just passed from a heart attack this week; her health really went down hill after having been put on SSRI meds after that. But she also had substance abuse problems with alcohol, that run on both sides of her family, that exacerbated an already bad situation.
I'm devastated, I'm glad it worked for you, but honestly... I'm not sure it's as cut and dry as you make it out to be.
Back then I was trying to cope with my situation as best as I could, without medical insurance for most of that time, but I'm also the kind of person that goes to Ukraine during this situation and goes to help feed and process Ukrainians/Russians/Belarusians at the Mexican border in order to feel anything other than pain and sorrow if I have access to resources to do so. I'm not exactly seeking a medical escape to what I deal with, so much as trying to play a part in trying to accelerate the progress of the Human Condition in it's current form as I fear extinction is a real possibility.
In short, I was trying to fix my Weltschmerz with seemingly noble but self-destructive behaviours because I didn't want to give in to the often depressing and bleak realities of the World. I didn't, nor do I now, want to feel any number than I already was back then. Given your handle, I imagine you understand what that show was trying to communicate the most was about addressing mental health issues more than it was an edgy hacker show with cool realistic cut scenes.
I've since worked on it after the aforementioned situations and a friend's abrupt suicide last year: it forced me to re-evaluate my value system, and gain some perspective on my limitations.
If the medication doesn’t work or has side-effects, try a new one. Find a doctor (or more ideally a psychiatrist) who starts you on the lowest dose (if a stimulant) and slowly ramps you up.
The right dose is when, after taking the medication for some time like 2-4 weeks, you don’t feel much but at the end of the day you can reflect and realize you did way more than usual.
Medication is a small part of ADHD treatment. People have shown improvement with healthy coping mechanisms, strategies, exercise, healthy diet, etc. I’ve heard even an official diagnosis can relieve it a bit.
Of course ADHD is a blanket term and everyone’s is different. But it is possible that you would have a better experience with meds with a better doctor. I’m on meds and all my side effects have gone away due to my body adjusting, due to me buying brand name medications, and in my switch to Adderall XR. A better doctor can help you with all of this.
> bupropion may be effective for ADHD but (...) this conclusion has to be interpreted with caution, because clinical trials were of low quality due to small sizes and risk of bias
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bupropion#Attention_deficit_hy...
There's a couple week period of euphoria where I didn't have those issues at all, but I've come back down to baseline.
2) Drugs work differently on ADHD brains than on “normal” brains.
The mind is not the only thing being affected here. This shit is horrible for the body. Aren't there herbs that can help? Do doctors even care?
My partners life was literally changed by taking medication. Do you think that’s a bad thing?
I strongly doubt that ‘herbs’ are more effective than decades of scientific research. I presume that you’re hearing amphetamines and thinking of the extremes; as the parent said, the medical doses are far lower than that of recreational users.
Drinking coffee is a stimulant, and yet in moderation it’s not harmful to the used. Do you feel similarly about any sort of caffenation?
I've noticed this is mainly a US thing. If you all think it's great, there must be something to it. Like a big marketing campaign going back years. Nope, too wild! It's more probable I need a lecture on the benefits of being hooked on amphetamines in the name of mental health.
How long do you think such treatment can last? Have you checked? Do it for your partner. Do you honestly think using this stuff for decades does not come with major drawbacks?
I know people who have been on ADHD medication for 30 years. I'm assuming the people I know aren't the only ones. So do you have any evidence that these treatments can't last, or are you just making things up?
Edit: Also one of them has a doctorate and it would have been impossible for him to obtain it without medication.
To say life with mental illness/disorders comes with its own major drawbacks is really an understatement. Amphetamines may well have harmful effects, but untreated mental illness/disorders can cause an incredible amount of damage, not just to the person affected but to those around them.
Many people, such as myself, seek treatment with medication after they've exhausted all other known options. There's only so long you can keep running on empty. I'm just happy to have something that works.
Again, does coffee sit in that same boat?
First off there are multiple types of ADHD drugs. I presume you are referring to stimulant drugs which are the most commonly prescribed for ADHD, but there are many non-stimulant drugs available for ADHD particular in the USA.
Second stimulants are only party drugs if you abuse them. At prescribed doses they're very safe long term, so long as you've no heart issues. You often get a mild euphoria when you first start or increase a dose but it stops after a few days of use. The same applies to a lot of medications, they can get you high when abused but that's no reason not to use them at the prescribed doses.
Third there's plenty of evidence to suggest that the end effect of stimulants is different for many with ADHD and that they're less likely to abuse them due to this. The drugs do the same thing to everyone but due to lower levels of dopamine and/or higher sensitivity to dopamine many people with ADHD don't get high the same way if they abuse their meds.
Fourth there are lots of long last slow release meds which are difficult to abuse. Vyvanse in particular is almost impossible to abuse as it metabolizes into amphetamines after you take it and there's no way to speed up the reaction enough to abuse it.
Fifth to get diagnosed with ADHD your symptoms have to be having a severe negative effect on you life in multiple areas. I can't find the stats atm but life expectancy for undiagnosed and untreated ADHD sufferers is significantly lower than average mostly due to risky behaviour, mental health and bad consumption habits (food and self medicating with other far more dangerous substances). So the risk of any stimulant medication (which is extremely low for most people) has to be weighed against the risks of being untreated.
That's not to say there aren't any potential issues with ADHD meds. Everyone reacts differently so you should be careful and only take them under the supervision of a trained Psychologist. They're also not sufficient on their own. But they're well studied, extremely safe when used correctly and statistically the most effective individual treatment by far for a very serious condition. So please don't post misleading things like this and put people off of seeking potentially life changing treatment.
Anecdotally, green tea or just L-theanine extracted from it helps. Even mild euphoria is unwelcome as it can reposition dopamine (and possibly serotonin) baseline and lower effects from following doses.
> plenty of evidence to suggest that the end effect of stimulants is different for many with ADHD and that they're less likely to abuse them due to this.
Unmedicated ADHD person is even more likely to seek dopamine hits and get addicted. We are commenting a post titled "I'm an addict" which seems to be written by someone undiagnosed (I'm not a specialist).
Looking at your past posts it appears you aren't a discriminatory bag of shit, but you could have fooled me with this comment.
You don't know people's situation and you don't know how medicines affect them.
Next, set up an appointment with a mental health professional (I recommend a psychiatrist) to talk through your thoughts. They will help you identify the causes of your behavior and provide solutions.
And whether you have it or not, learning about ADHD is a great thing to do. I recommend starting with this cheesy yet informative YouTube channel: https://m.youtube.com/c/HowtoADHD
I agree, and I think it is important to talk about the sensation, not just the observation or impact on others (which are easy to compare poorly).
To me it isn't so much the _what_, but the _why_. The brain is hunting for stimulation due to a baseline deficit below that required to operate normally. I can tell you from experience that "hunt" can range from classic hyperfocus/lack of focus to chronic boredom, hypersexuality, drug abuse and so on.
What provides the stimulation to reach baseline one day, may not work the next day, or even from hour-to-hour or minute to minute. That's the core issue, however it manifests. If just one thing consistently hit the spot, it'd be akin to an addiction (where in addiction your brain down regulates, so you need to keep supplying it).
As it stands, it is more like being addicted to both everything and nothing, in a never ending frenzy of disatisfaction, frustration and boredom. Your brain, always downregulated, always chasing a moving fix.
Habit doesn't come into it one tiny bit.
Wellbutrin is known to fuck with dopamine, presumably sometimes for the better.
For me personally it is also about being above average smart. I'm intensely bored by a lot of people and activities. I lose interest, can't remember a lot, get irritated easily.
After many years I have some good friends, work which suits me, I know how to leasure well, basically I know how to amuse and challenge myself and don't experience lots of the adhs symptoms anymore.
I feel like I am one of the rare people that developed a SAD from medically treating ADHD. It's not from the intended effects of the medication, but from trying to treat the side-effects.
The biggest problem is that I am randomly bored and watch a youtube video. It's just 15 minutes after all, how much could it hurt? and then I waste 2 hours which is 105 minutes more than I had when I started watching that video. Maybe I should play mobile games because those have those pesky daily energy limits that stop you from playing more.
Helps I got a side gig playing music haha but my bookmarks on that are gargantuan. The dancehall reggae section alone is massive. I never listen to that and get stuff done, really the best concentration music for me doesn't matter the BPM it just has to be mostly free of lyrical content. So work music is mostly electronic or classical.
What are you listening to that's high BPM for work? That hard techno shit out of Europe lately is a lot of fun, Anetha is incredible [1]
Anyway, my pet theory is that the fast music acts as a stimulant, raising activity in every part of the brain - including executive function. Same principle as amphetamines.
Shit is WAY too spazzy for me to focus though, I guess you guys got different brainwaves than I do. It's funny because in the suggestions I got this, titled pov: you have adhd (breakcore mix) [1]
I think personally what I like about them is as much as they're not above taking some sample and running it into the ground, they have a really good ear for melody and pathos. IMO all their best songs start by them going "this anime soundtrack is great, but it could be about 25% faster and more high pitched and backed by a really hard beat." And you know, they're usually right.
A really good example for me is [2], Jersey*Spirit, which is a remix of Try Unite! [3], some anime opening. I think depending on which you listen to first you're going to have a totally different idea of how that melody is supposed to go, because as far as I can tell without a music education, by inserting a break with a slowed down voice sample and leaving out some parts, Sharpnel's version puts the verse emphasis on a totally different measure than the original (the "fly away" part is the "B" measure in the original, and the "A" measure in Jersey*Spirit). Would you have heard that was in there? I wouldn't! And I'm not making a statement on which take is better, but to me, having heard Sharpnel's take first, the just original seems unbearably slow, and also they should put that melodic idea in the center instead.
edit: And that's how I learnt that HNews strips unicode symbols...
edit: Also I challenge you to listen to Watashi wa Maid without getting it stuck permanently in your head. [4] but note that the album art is very nsfw. (Yes this was the only version I could find. Youtube probably keeps taking it down, can't imagine why.) Then compare to the [5] original - if you can, without falling asleep!
edit: Also that's from a hentai OVA. I should note that. Fucking Sharpnel, how do they find this stuff... but you can't argue they don't elevate it above the source material.
edit: As a final link, here's a (VR) DJ set they did recently that I like a lot. [6] It's less of their own songs and also a bit slower and less hyper. Might be more to your liking.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjpHgH8a8IY
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4x9W7kKl_k
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaKXIxnon_8
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=996u-54Fscs NSFW album cover!
I'm gonna need names.
Adderall has helped, so has some behavioral approaches, but nothing is a cure. For me, trying to eliminate distractions is either a distraction itself or ineffective.
Structured procrastination is useful, at least I am practicing piano or getting more fit instead of sitting around watching TV or reading dumb articles and forums.
As I recall there was no time spent stat, just video history eothout watchtime indication.
For all of this there were multiple projects on github that do all of this + with plots.
Apparently videos watched on the desktop aren't counted correctly, but I imagine it's not worse than summing the durations.
Edit: Maybe "upper beginner" is a better fit. I dunno, self study is weird.
I was hoping for an easy win here. ;)
The only thing I couldn't find an abundance of is long-form video essays -- it seems that (for whatever reason) that isn't something that Japanese YouTube audiences want to watch. TV shows make documentaries which are kind of similar but those are also fairly hard to find.
So, less than the average amount of time people spend watching TV?
This is a very unfair set of "ANYTHING else". I am sure you can come up with more real world list of what other people actually do after work, and that might make you feel a little more lenient about your own choices and needs.
> Any other ideas besides cold turkey?
/etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 youtube.com
127.0.0.1 www.youtube.com
Best of luck.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
Also, again maybe not for you, but a lot of people's numbers if they're just looking at watch history are going to be totally out of whack if they're using YouTube as a music streaming service. My wife's account is the one logged into our television and this would constitute the vast bulk of watch hours, having music on in the background while cleaning the house, cooking dinner, and doing a whole lot of other things. You definitely can't practice tuba in the background while also cooking and cleaning.
Some of my most clearest thoughts, ideas, or beliefs came to me when I was just walking on the street not listening to podcasts, audio books, music or browsing social media.
I think it's far more useful to literally stare at a wall for 3 hours than just mindlessly watch youtube videos. I say this as someone who is addicted to social media/internet as well and struggle very hard to overcome.
What I do is use the freedom app to set time limits and ban these sites during periods of the week. I bought one of those timed safes where I stick my phone in to completely stop the temptation for 4 or 6 hours. I know I can't completely end it, but what I want to do is just nudge myself to do something else. Instead of grabbing a phone maybe I'll attempt to read a book, or draw, or work on some data visualizations, or contribute to OSS. All activities I'd say I value more than browsing reddit (or twitter or youtube or HN) for hours every night, but my actions prove otherwise.
I'm not saying I've improved my habits 300% but at the beginning of the year I would read a book for 5 minutes put the book down pick up my phone then read reddit for an hour; at least now I can read a book for 45 minutes without being distracted. It hurts writing this because in college I'd read nearly 500 pages a week + my readings for class, I'd read nearly 200 books a year but over the last 5 years I've probably read 3.
I don't know where I'm going with this, I guess my mind wanders when writing as well...
One thing I enjoyed about Four Thousand Weeks was the story how people viewed work 100s and thousands of years ago, how whatever you didn't finish that day, you had time tomorrow to continue; I think this is a useful idea because modern society feels so "rushed" over work that isn't exactly useful. Also the idea of JOMO (joy of missing out); it was just a new heuristic introduced to me. We make choices all the time, we neglect doing things all the time. It's just a part of life, missing out on things means enjoying others It sounds like it's more stressful but it's not, at least how the book describes this.
With Stolen Focus, I was a fan of the author's interview about his other book "Lost Connections" when he appeared on an episode of econtalk [1]. I won't say much else about Stolen Focus, except his tips on what he does to lessen the nodge toward social media is what I now do as well.
[1] https://www.econtalk.org/johann-hari-on-lost-connections/
It's about being happy with the life you're living, the life you chose, and being able to take control to work towards your fulfilling desires rather than just choosing the feel-good compulsions forever.
That's impossible. You can click on a youtube video instantly at any moment and waste 3 hours thanks to the power of the algorithm. Spending that time on anything specific would require you to plan that into your schedule. You are not going to work on a side project when you think you have 30 min for some "harmless" fun but you sure are going to be trapped by the algorithm for three hours without planning to do so.
Just curate a decently small list of high quality channels and only browse via the subscriptions list. You'll know when you're all caught up and the FOMO isn't there. You'll still catch the stuff you're interested in, but you won't be pulled in a million other random directions.
That said, I have the YouTube bug pretty bad myself.
You might want to check out https://watchlimits.com/ (free extension, I built this), or some other tools I mention in https://watchlimits.com/blog/posts/more_hours_per_week/
I'm "unhappy" multiple times a day when I start doing something that doesn't usually have to be done right away. But it's often a choice not between doing something now or later, but doing something now, not never.
However weirdly this may sound - I constantly do things against myself, for myself. I don't get much satisfaction from finishing those tasks but my life quality has increased drastically and I wouldn't go back from moments of discomfort to an ongoing discomfort.
I think I'm a highly functional adha person due to my mom being a very responsible person and also I started taking Ritalin 12 years ago.
I'm always wandering how it feels for normal people who get there shit done without any meds.
I also want to do fire because all those responsibilities and the fighting feels exchausting.
My perspective is that once I took a step back and really looked, I noticed almost nobody is getting ANY shit done, and perhaps that’s OK. I was just holding myself to unreasonable standards of what “shit done” is that I don’t hold other people to and that was the root cause of my exhaustion. Society progressing is really just a series of extremely tiny things with the occasional rare major event pushed up to human population scale, something that one individual can’t compete against without burning out.
I'm not saying there are absolutely no people out there who are actually getting shit done and making it look easy, and somehow never burning out, but they are by far the exception and in no way "normal" people (and in many cases they are ticking time bombs, but the fallout may be well hidden)
“Independent discharges of dopamine neurons (tonic or pacemaker firing) determine the motivation to respond to such cues. As a result of habitual intake of addictive drugs, dopamine receptors expressed in the brain are decreased, thereby reducing interest in activities not already stamped in by habitual rewards.”
From: Dopamine and Addiction | Annual Review of Psychology — https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-psych-...
----
Edit:
I'd like to add a couple more ideas, because what you're describing in your article is spot on, and I believe can be generalized past your own experience.
> Another angle that makes this ever more distressing is that my memory is very, very fallible ... I can confidently say that I've done nothing I said I would do there.”
Herbert Simon says: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”.
As an information-addict myself, I've been meditating a lot about this topic. During the past two years I've been researching it from a psychological perspective (And for that, I'm grateful to @ericd for this HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24581016). I'll throw in some resources that I've came across during this journey, in case anyone finds them useful:
- Dr Gabor Mate: Addiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-APGWvYupU
- Dr. Anna Lembke: Understanding & Treating Addiction | Huberman Lab Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3JLaF_4Tz8
- The book “The Molecule of More” by by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long.
- The book “The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr.
“Talk to me about taste, and if this stuff tastes better, don’t run around trying to sell stuff that doesn’t taste good.” - Stephen Sanger, head of General Mills
You can search the web using that quote to begin your descent into the rabbit hole.
The food you eat does not just affect your body weight. It also affects your mental state.
There were some correlations that didn't sit well with me - one, off the top of my head, was an implication that MDMA consumption could make me politically conservative.
I personally would recommend just Huberman as he covers Dopamine to a great extent.
I find this YouTube channel very informative (albeit cheesy): https://m.youtube.com/c/HowtoADHD
Not really. But I'll check this, thanks!
1. I tried to get diagnosed with adhd but my doc just prescribed me some meds (amphetamines I think). They seemed like they would work until the effect wore off and I stopped taking them.
2. I have never abused any drug in the past.
3. I know this is a non issue for a lot of you guys and rightly so. I know I'm well off compared to a lot of real drug addicts.
4. I'm kinda depressed I think?
After a day of reflecting, speaking to my grandparents, spending time in a ceremony with my parents, and at the end of the day compulsively opening hn (I didn't expect this post to have any comments, addiction just took over), I can say a few things (before forgetting them!).
Firstly, I had a lot of time on my hands today and spending it on personal relations has been good. And secondly staying away from my room in general is positive. Being alone in my room is almost certainly a negative. I want to practice programming and do projects before my masters so I don't know how Ill deal with it. I'll reply to other comments once I wake up. Its almost 2am now!
Thanks for all the comments and advice!
1) I at least made an attempt at some of Cal Newport's suggestions in "Deep Work" and schedule working blocks for myself. I adopt a different posture, maybe wear different clothes, If you can afford to, get a second cheap laptop and use that only for work... And then go somewhere else physically. Even if it's just a different room.
2) Consider trying a few sessions of neurofeedback therapy. I did it in high school and really felt my ability to concentrate and think along a single track improve significantly. I can't guarantee anything but it's worth looking into.
1. Ask yourself why do you think this is a problem and debug deeply. Maybe, after all, spending day watching videos is fine and what you want to do and the story that you don't is unnecessary.
2. Once you bring it to your conscious mind, you face a decision, do I want to watch videos and maybe learn something and relax, given that it comes with not delivering some things I promised and doing the thing I've been thinking I need to do for a long time, or do I want to do e.g. that thing.
3. Then do what you want. It requires no effort. You do what you want. I know habits and dopamine addiction narration, but there is no substance dependence here and the trick is that we cannot really hold contradicting beliefs in our conscious mind (we have plenty of them in the background but once you collide them actively you usually end up creating some micro-rationalization). But here your focus is consciously facing the choice. Plus there's plenty of dopamine for something that's been on todo for a long time.
I am jealous this works for you. Life would be so much easier if my intrinsic motivation was well-aligned with my rational thinking.
I don't know if it can help you in whatever you want to achieve, but to me just realization that I always do what I want was huge. You can't honestly tell yourself you want to be doing this right now and that you don't want to be doing it right now. Once you unpack what does that mean in your head that you want it (requirements, consequences), whatever that means, you find some contradiction. But it took me some practice to be honest with myself and eliminating wishful thinking.
Accepting reality as it is, is huge. When you have in your head that if you spend time doing A you can't be doing B during this time, or that you can't achieve goal without going through steps you think are necessary, there really is not much left to do. Whatever you choose is fine, it's what you want.
E.g. I used to be thinking "I don't want to clean the kitchen, I have more interesting ideas for my life". Right now, it's a simple choice - don't clean the kitchen and have it dirty or clean it and have it cleaned up. Both are fine. Debugging gets complex when you have other people involved in your life etc but it still drops to the same thing.
Life's too short for telling yourself that you don't want to be doing what you are doing.[1]
If you take it deep enough, with our current understanding of the universe, there is no objective argument that working on renewable energy is better than watching youtube all day.
OK, I'm quitting this topic on HN, I've been selling this idea in many of my comments lately, just because it made my life so much better, but it's too verbose.
Btw if somebody knows this kind of thinking from a different source I would appreciate some pointers, because I'm sure I'm not the first one to come up with this but I haven't stumbled upon it yet and I would much prefer to point people to that direction.
1. And just to be clear I'm not ignoring very difficult situations that people are in saying that people are always doing what they want. The situation is difficult, whether that's hunger, war, illness or death. But that's reality. Given that terrible situation you decide to do something (or do nothing). It's what you decide, it's what you want. Telling yourself that you want to do something else that's not possible in that salutation is just wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is pure suffering. I strongly suggest stopping whatever you're doing if you think you don't want to be doing it and either stop doing that or fix the contradiction in your head.
No more verbose life views from comboy.
I just finished the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time management for mortals. Similar thinking in that a lot of suffering and procrastination is caused by not accepting the reality of our finite time on earth, that we can never do it all, and we have to make tough choices and most people try avoid the anxiety of facing those by distracting themselves. I loved the book, and your comment, as refreshing take on “productivity” but I recognize it’s also extremely difficult for many people to practice.
Many people here have the super power to focus on a problem relentlessly, it's kind of the trademark of the nerd stereotype - Addiction is the dark side of that superpower and one that I have to constantly keep in check. But I don't want to kill that superpower by squashing whatever thing I'm deep into at the moment, so I always use the litmus test - "Is this affecting the ability to keep my life in order?"
As long as there isn't a strong chemical component to whatever addiction you're trying to purge, a book like "Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg has a lot of practical ways to adjust your unconscious compulsions.
Similar to what I was told: "When you compulsively do something despite it having negative impacts on your life"
But I like framing it this way because if you only think about compulsion you're going to waste a lot of time shutting down things that don't actually matter. We're creatures of habit - we've gotten this far BECAUSE of compulsion, not in spite of it.
People with ADHD are naturally at a constant deficit in stimulation/dopamine. That's why we get distracted mid-conversation: the conversation wasn't stimulating enough to fill that deficit, so the brain started looking for more stimulation, thinking it could just multitask to compensate.
The deficit in simulation/dopamine is why people with ADHD can hyperfocus: as soon as there is a satisfying source of stimulation, the brain tries to squeeze out as much dopamine as it can.
Getting out of Facebook or before watching TV was rather easy, it was mostly uninteresting stuff I did not choose to watch.
Youtube and Hacker News got me. The quality, sometimes life-changing, content I have had access to there is really hard not to get into. Augmenting friction in accessing the content in the only way I found that works when I succeed convincing myself it is a real problem. This way it tilts the tediousness of accessing them towards the tediousness of boring tasks, which I have learned to find ways to make less tedious in turn. Trying to find balance in the addiction. Restraining from it in order to give time to interesting content to bubble up.
Also I have also been distancing so much from social activities only because they were slightly dissatisfying but instead of working on fixing them (which feels to me impossible because I lack the communication skills and I have an irrational core belief that no one can withstand even slight criticism) I'd rather spend time reading/watching about stuff that interests me on the internet. I manage to keep my life in order but I am not really investing in making something out of it. All the things I'd like to do irl, build a ecological passive house, build low tech devices, I lack the economical resources and social bonds to even start even though I am competent.
I don't know if I was always was a nerd (not the brilliant nerd type) or if I became one. Anyways I am doomed until this really becomes a hard problem in my life.
For me there was no big Aha moment or solution to getting distracted from what I actually want to do. It had been incremental steps, such as:
- focusing on consuming long form reading/videos
- heavily curating consumption with RSS, individual settings etc.
- disabling notifications of anything that is not important
- taking responsibility of things that I could avoid, engaging more
- regular exercise and sleep
Things like that. But again, incremental steps. Sometimes I shifted from one distraction to the next, but after recognizing this it becomes clearer what’s happening.
The results are quite powerful. Over just a couple of years I gained so much. I started to get bored of things that would distract me otherwise. I gained confidence and especially courage. I recognize undesirable behavior really quickly now and stopped fooling myself.
Initially I also used focus mode and different kinds of blocking apps to try to control my addiction. I configured them to block HN, reddit, lichess, twitter, youtube, etc, allowing me to use them only a few minutes at the end of the day and during the weekends. This approach didn't work so well. It worked fine for a few days but then the abstinence syndrome kicks in and I inevitably ended up "temporarily" disabling the blocks just to get that precious shot of dopamine before starting to work. Additionally, I was still wasting almost all my weekends and holidays consuming garbage.
So I got this idea, what if I tweak the approach a little bit: Instead of blocking the apps during "productive" time, what if I block them during leisure time, i.e at the end of the day and during the weekends. The thing with media consumption addiction is that it leaves me feeling that I don't have time to do anything. I neglect a lot of my personal tasks and goals. Work is something that I have to do somehow, after all I need a salary. Doing apartment chores, reading that book I bought or learning a new skill is something that can always wait. And it's during leisure time that I should be doing those things. So I decided to block media consumption during the weekends and try to do something more meaningful in that time. It's easier to deal with the abstinence syndrome, because the activities can be fun as well, they also produce (more slowly) dopamine, just that they are more meaningful to me. It's easier to skip silly but addictive YouTube videos to work on an interesting programming project than it is to skip it for a boring task at work. And there is also this feeling that it's only for a short time, I can get the dopamine shot later and that somehow tricks my brain. And then on Monday I already feel much better, and without feeling the need to consume that much media.
You could think of it like the nutrition labels on food. Imagine a pop up when you log onto reddit saying "this site on average engages users for 90-120 minutes per session". That would give you some forethought about how much value you're getting from the engagement and prompt you to make a different decision. Or at least a more informed decision.
But, it does seems like an addiction when I want to accomplish a task and 20 minutes into that task I'm back on YouTube or forums looking for more interesting data.
1. Physiological: This is relatively easy. The key is to understand how to get an accurate account of incoming calories and an accurate count of outgoing calories. When you have an accurate count of those you can lose weight. Andrew Huberman is really good on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqPGXG5TlZw&ab_channel=Andre...
I say this one is easy because it is very easy to be misinformed about food. For example, someone may have heard that salads or protein bars are low calorie and healthy, but that isn't necessarily true. And once they realize that they can adjust their food intake to account for accidently over eating.
2. Psychological: Generally speaking, a lot of people with drug, alcohol, or food problems are dealing with some sort of stress, anxiety, depression, or childhood trama. Everyone has a limit to their will power. So even if you strengthen your will power if there is another force acting against that will power it will win and you will stress eat or stress drink. Depending on this situation, Therapy, Meditation, life changes, rehab can help.
Nets are for trapping prey, that part has been completed a long time ago.
When we don't have the emotional tools to resolve trauma from our past, we resort to coping mechanisms. While I'm not a therapist, I've had to deal with my fair share of trauma and have come to learn a lot about how trauma affects us and the way we deal (or fail to deal) with our day-to-day struggles.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/smarter-living/why-you-pr... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park 3. https://nida.nih.gov/about-nida/noras-blog/2018/10/new-nida-...
But I believe we all are addicts to some degree and, at the very least, have the potential to become addicted to things.
Things I have been addicted to, in no particular order:
- Alcohol. No I wasn't an "alcoholic", but I continued to drink alcohol even though I knew it made me feel worse the next day etc. This one is very common.
- Cannabis. It turned me into a recluse and perpetuated a downward spiral into depression.
- Food. I became obese and thoroughly unfit due to my eating habits.
- Porn. It affected my real sex life which made me and my partner feel bad.
- Sex. I spent far too much of my time pursuing sex with multiple partners, broke many hearts and burnt many bridges along the way.
- Youtube (and previously TV). I watched it every night in bed and it caused me to have terrible sleep.
I'm not sure why so little attention is given to addiction. Obesity should simply be framed as food addiction. Nobody wants to be obese. It's uncomfortable, inconvenient, embarrassing. They all want to "lose weight". They can't because they are addicted to food. Making that clear would probably help people deal with it. It has certainly helped me in many cases to understand that I'm addicted to something.
You're in control, the end. Give yourself grace when you find that you've strayed from your target. Classify things into "Crisis" and "Not A Crisis" and set up daily, hourly, etc redirections to knock out whatever falls into the crisis bucket before anything else.
As for me, my path has been from just how the author describes the feeling to fairly functional. Years of anguish, piles of notes on how to act vs actually acting any different. My suggestion to you is to write down a morning routine that redirects you into taking care of what will cause you anguish up front if not taken care of.
I've personally written software for me that literally text-to-voice's reminders and redirections to an earbud my morning routine tells me to put in first thing. Second thing says to enable "repeat mode" so it can chime in with redirections.
If you want something lightweight just on your PC that does the same thing, alter this bash one-liner to your heart's content. It's osx specific but there are other ways / commands to do this on linux or otherwise. I've personally written an android launcher / service that does this so I can have it while I walk around in the world but isn't in a state yet that would work for others. Hopefully this will help keep you on target. :D
while true; do say --rate 230 --voice Daniel "Stay on target"; sleep 18; done;
The only solution I've found that isn't an impossible uphill battle against my lizard brain is... Be around people.
I'm not deep in an internet rabbit hole when I'm with another person. It's actually a motivator for me to live with a partner or roommates - they make me a 'better' person.
Maybe they make me ->A person<- rather than a brain hooked up to a doping device.
I wrote this [1] specifically to help you understand some of what's going on - well, at least some views for those of us who feel passionate about technology but sometimes have unhealthy relationships with it.
You already touch on many of the issues in your post. I have submitted lists of other books here too (search through my history for Cal Newport for example) that deal with tech overuse, addiction, hoarding and so on. Hope it's useful.
People forget AD(H)D is fairly common, regardless of if you think it's overdiagnosed or not. And with how technology has been turning everything into dopamine slot machines it will exaggerate the symptoms even more.
Note that inability to concentrate reliably has fairly severe downsides as well, like (at the extremes) inability to hold a job. This is not good for your medical situation either!
Depending on person, "ask a roomie to try their meds" can be a lot more viable than "go and talk to a medical professional." And it comes with a safety valve - your roomie will presumably cut you off if you get problems. Plus the dosage will be predictable and there won't be random additions. Note that I didn't say to go try meth.
(Google "death by adderall". It's not hard to avoid.)
Of course if there's medical contraindications like blood pressure or heart conditions this is a bad idea, but first of all the side effect profile is pretty mild, and second if you have a medical condition you should already know to not take meds on the basis of random HNews recommendations. - Actually, they should know their preferred risk profile anyway. I'm just reminding them that the option exists.
Even so, the rest of the advice is solid.
I’m a recovered amphetamine (Adderall) addict. I was enslaved to amphetamines for over 10 years. I started taking pills in college because they helped me focus and get things done, but I quickly fell into addiction and abuse.
Talked my psychiatrist into giving me ever higher doses. Frequently stole my wife’s ADHD medication after burning through all of my own. I couldn’t stop.
It all started (somewhat) innocently enough…
Yes it’s capable of giving you super powers at work, but it’s also really quite dangerous from an addiction standpoint.
Could you elaborate on why you increased your dose? Was there a loss of effectiveness?
I started taking ADHD medication during a time in my life where I was exploring and challenging boundaries. I had been a good rule following kid until college. In college I started experimenting with drugs in general. So naturally I wanted to experiment with taking more to see what it would be like.
I didn’t realize by chasing the high provided by Adderall that I would become addicted. Sounds dumb when I write it out like that…
To underline this point. There are almost weekly threads here which either either start with a mention of "ADHD", or someone posting a comment on "ADHD" along with how they manage it with self-help books. It is hard to find the right professional help, but it's something worth doing because it's probably the only thing that will solve the problems. We should encourage people to seek that help instead of only pointing to self-help articles.
Technology - especially software - attracts people with ADHD traits like hyperfocus, so it's not a stretch to expect a higher percentage of ADHD brains on HN.
On top of that, "arguing with people on the internet" is an attractive source of stimulation for those of us with ADHD, meaning we will overrepresent ourselves in any discussion.
ADHD is very poorly named. It has similar symptoms at times but it is categorically different because they come from severely compromised self-regulation across many facets. Emotional control, memory, focus, sensory processing, etc.
Many people with ADHD find ways to work around this by finding ways to create a structure they can work in. This contributes to the belief that ADHD can be solved by diligent, disciplined work. Especially because discipline is the solution to normal people’s issues with attention.
But the reality is ADHD not a lack of discipline, but the inability to have it in the first place. Some people manage, but many can’t and other people make moral judgements that anyone with ADHD isn’t trying hard enough.
Edit: I said this more clearly elsewhere:
The symptoms are not the disorder and don't come from the same mechanism that causes normal people to have difficultly paying attention sometimes.
www.youtube.com###secondary
www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"] #primary
www.youtube.com##.ytp-show-tiles.ytp-endscreen-paginate.videowall-endscreen.ytp-player-content.html5-endscreen
Source: https://pawelurbanek.com/youtube-addiction-selfcontrol
Any addict who said their plan for sobering up was to live like this would be told they are going to fail with 100% certainty.
It is amazing how much thought and effort goes into designing Web2.0 to keep delivering small dopamine hits. I too burn thru hours watching tech videos, browsing tech subreddits, looking for juicy HN posts and rarely come across articles about how the stickiness is engineered. Maybe I'm browsing the wrong stuff or maybe they're just too embarrassed to publish it.
https://howonlee.github.io/2020/02/12/I-20Add-2020-20Seconds...
I've been annoyed for a good while that online videos seem to be pretty resistant because of their variable lengths to the per-request futzing I've been doing. I probably need to get a pihole and inject latency at network level on streaming stuff, too, but this is pretty complicated and I have flatmates
Other than just blanket banning stuff (which never works for me), I've tried to make reducing my technical consumption into something interesting. Listening to podcasts on an iPod adds friction, as does writing on an old Psion device. I bullet journal too, it's a maintainable balance right now. Even reading books, any book, nothing technical or what I "should be learning" if I'm not up for it. They're all a nice experience, with (for me) just enough tech involved for it to be sustainable and fun. I've failed too many times to just ban stuff or "not look at a screen".
I love the outdoors when I'm out there, but when someone suggests to just go outside instead of watching a video or playing a game, I just feel guilt and resent the outdoors a little more. Old tech has been a nice, interesting bridge.
Your habits are not the problem by themselves. The problem is that your body and mind believes you have nothing better to do. Even though you can reason that there are other things worth doing your emotional self just doesn't buy it.
What worked for me recently (for the last 4 months only - so can't claim victory yet) was exercise and a goal (so I don't bail). Decided to run a half marathon. Found a training plan where I run 5 days a week.
- Now I have to get up at 7am (Before: 8.55am for 9am start) - If I don't get to bed by 11:30pm I feel lousy running (Before: 2-4am bedtime) - And it makes me shower and eat breakfast (Before: no shower, no food)
It's basically added a bunch of structure to my day, which has really helped with work
Watching Fortnite/Minecraft/Roblox videos all night is a zero sum activity... you might get better at the that particular game, but it's a useless skill for 99.999% of us (child labor issues aside). On the other hand, if you use that time learning an actual skill or absorbing general useful information, I think there might be an argument that it's time well spent.
When we are young, we have an incredible ability to grind on things, especially when sleep deprived. As we get older, that becomes much harder and our productivity inevitably falls. I'm finding more and more that I have to go with my bursts of motivation when it hits and ride that wave as far as possible. A little sleep depravation here and there isn't an issue.
All of this falls apart when your life is negatively impacted and you are not adequately managing your health, responsibilities and/or achieving your goals. To sum it up, I don't think an "addiction" to useful information is a bad thing. We live in an unprecedented time of nearly limitless access to information. To have someone not only tell you the information you want to know, but also demonstrate it is game changing. Addictions are bad, but watching Youtube can lead to incredible learning momentum. Achieving that with a balanced life is something I personally strive for.
The idea is you check in once a day (10 minutes or so), and just talk about what you've achieved, where you've failed, etc. It can be very effective.
I've done some pretty extreme things in the past, such as hired a "coach" who would hold me financially responsible if I didn't send proof that I got up and walked the dog to the ATM machine by 8 am every morning. (we had complex rules and she had a check made out to charity, ready to send if I didn't achieve what I was supposed to) It was extremely effective while I did it, but only for really measurable things.
I use a timer lock to keep cannabis locked up for a few days at a time, so I don't have to quit it (I think it is good for my creativity as well as for seeing "the big picture" and finding the positive, but it is bad if it is tempting me to use it while I should be working)
If you are interested in getting a group together to do accountability partners, get in touch. (rjbrown at google's mail service)
My understanding is you're addicted to dopamine.
You need a dopamine fast. Just take away all your dopamine sources for a 1 day, or 1 week. And then self reflect on its effects on you.
The repeat it every once in a while or whenever you need it.
1 day a week. Or 1 week per month. Something like that.
You've encouraged me to do the same. I'm very unhappy with my own addiction to youtube and social media. Though its more like 2 hours per day maybe
I don't use the YouTube app on mobile (instead using Firefox), so I'm able to use UBlock's cosmetic filters to remove the 'dangerous' elements. Recently the filter changed and I got sucked into recommended videos again (with significantly increased watchtime the last month or so). This post made me fix it again!
Also, my phone's Wellbeing settings allows set time restrictions on specific apps. It's a bit too easy to "game", but at least it gives me some feedback on how much time I spend on things.
But honestly, we're only animals: slacking off is a desired trait. We just need to put in some guardrails to avoid overindulgence. Good luck! :-)
ADHD feels really big and complicated as it lives in my brain, and it's always difficult to grapple with the question of, "Am I really addicted and need help for that, or is it my ADHD and need help for that?"
My best wishes go out to the author. I feel you.
If it strikes a chord, think of seeing your doctor about this.
The truth is, people are obstinate about change and also infinitely adaptable. So, make the changes small so you can get over the hump, and then stick with it ferociously. In 2 weeks it’ll be second nature.
You gotta have something fulfilling in your life away from a screen. Cooking, pets, exercise, relationships, kids. It may seem impossible to get there from where you are, I’d start with exercise. Great thing about exercise is it’s entirely fungible and each incremental increase is good. Start with anything and do it /before/ you do technology. Then don’t worry about it again until tomorrow.
My two cents - turn inwards for a little while. Fascinate yourself with yourself. Learn everything about yourself. From there you will find a purpose, which I think is what you're lacking so you let others fill up that space.
Meditating can help you separate all these stories you have about yourself from the true you, which is beyond words. Sit in silence and learn what it's telling you.
The idea is that curiosity is good intrinsic reward function. The problem though is that it can get stuck doing something that is completely unpredictable, like changing the channel on a TV.
I think this explains a lot about human addiction to endless videos as well. Ironically I learned about this from a YouTube video[2].
EDIT: I've been blocked from replying
Because lack of ability to concentrate, lack of motivation, and engaging in repetitive behaviour because it's the only thing that makes you not bored, are all symptoms of it
Become a Christian! It's a religion of slaves, three Popes were freedmen, it's a religion of slaves! Addicts are slaves!
I will say that despite disbelieving the miracles entirely on scientific grounds, I started going to a Protestant service to develop a work ethic. And it worked!
And the second thing I recommend is getting screened for Attention Deficit Disorder. Find a psych who has it too, like Dr. Matthew Stubblefield in California (show him this post), there's others too. So that will consolidate your addiction into depending on a single substance--under medical supervision--and be sated.
Related to this point, it's to make it harder to access your bad habits and easier to access the ones you want to develop.
A DNS blocker it's great for things like this. I even have 2 dual booted systems one with custom DNS restrictions, and another one for play and relax.
I don't think YouTube, games or Netflix it's bad. The key part it's intentionality, schedule and self awareness of why are you doing the thing your doing, and don't fall into autopilot
You mentioned going cold turkey, I think it's a good idea, but might be hard to implement as all or nothing approaches are prone to relapses.
You can use watchlimits.com if you are interested in setting limits for your watching, but still being able to watch some. For example youtube content is often useful in life, so it's good to have some access to it. Without a tool like this, just watching "one" helpful video could be cause a relapse to a whole evening watching.
Edit: for those asking for specific recommendations. It’s always best to find your own path according to the religion of your parents and environment. However, I can suggest that you investigate Mussar and look up some books in English.
“Musar is a path of contemplative practices and exercises that have evolved over the past thousand years to help an individual soul to pinpoint and then to break through the barriers that surround and obstruct the flow of inner light in our lives. Musar is a treasury of techniques and understandings that offers immensely valuable guidance for the journey of our lives.... The goal of Musar practice is to release the light of holiness that lives within the soul. The roots of all of our thoughts and actions can be traced to the depths of the soul, beyond the reach of the light of consciousness, and so the methods Musar provides include meditations, guided contemplations, exercises and chants that are all intended to penetrate down to the darkness of the subconscious, to bring about change right at the root of our nature.“
AA, in particular the serenity prayer, has at least some overlap with the more tech friendly pursuit of Stoic philosophy.
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
> Going cold turkey and never drinking again is the simple solution and it doesn't require all the drama
is very impolite to everyone who has ever struggled with any addiction.
- you just need to quit cold turkey, how hard can it possibly be to not do something?
- have you tried focusing?
- you should try making todo lists!
- if you would just sit still and listen, you could do better on your homework!
While I do agree that the parent wasn’t the most polite, comments like yours definitely fall somewhere in the naive-condescending spectrum and I read the parent’s comment as trying to figure which end of that spectrum it came from.
Any advice for an alcoholic that does not include "stop drinking" is not good advice. Every alcohol-related problem stems from the alcohol. It may not be everything needed for their recovery, but it has to be the basis. AA at least gets this right. However, AA paints a picture of addicts as people who are unable to ever get this aspect of their life under control. Unlike non-drinkers, AA alcoholics are always fighting the demon Alcohol. The organization does not believe in full recovery. Sometimes I have read a no-true-Scotsman formulation which says that if you can survive sober without AA, then you were not really an alcoholic. How is this helpful?
I think the proof is really in the pudding. AA has a lot of former members who still do not drink. These are people who quit drinking and eventually found the meetings unhelpful.
I live without fear of relapse. This is because I know that I will never "need" alcohol again.
To address the other side of what you are talking about, I hope that one day I will be able to live properly with ADHD. As of yet, we have not found an approach that generally works. Stimulants are helpful but they are a band-aid on the problem and have side effects. Behavioral therapy is helpful, too, albeit a bit mild in effect. I hope that when a good approach is developed, I will have the sense to try it.
Going cold turkey and never doing X is the simple solution for any addiction, now get addicted to anything and try that out...
I have been addicted to cigarettes and alcohol. Going cold turkey is essential for getting over the addictions. Never doing them again makes relapse unlikely. These are simple facts. AA says you can't really achieve independence you have to replace it with meetings and prayer. I say you can get over it. And I have experience with people who go back and forth to AA relapsing, and so how will they ever get free?
It's also very inconsiderate... Addiction generally has much deeper roots than just "craving the high" since it can be maladaptive coping mechanisms people develop due to traumatic childhoods (or later life, but less likely). Eg, substance abuse/addiction is commonly found in people who suffer from CPTSD.
The high isn't "I'm having the time of my life" for these people, but a a way to disconnect and silence their brain demons.
Also, a lot of people don't know they were abused or neglected as children (becaus it's "their normal") and then go through life as struggling with all sorts of internalised shit.
Edit: Also a very important thing I want to put out there: if anyone struggling with addition reads this, addiction isn't something to be ashamed of or to put yourself down over. It might not be your fault. But most addictions are maladaptive, and the sooner resolved the more you will get out of life. Don't be ashamed of yourself, and don't hate yourself for it
I was an alcoholic and now I am not. I don't think it is easy but it is relatively simple. A lot of stuff that is glommed onto recovery from alcoholism obscures the fact that you have to stop using the drug, that is fundamental. Anything that unintentionally encourages relapse is not useful.
For many drinkers, suddenly stopping can be life threatening, causing seizures and convulsions.
I also stopped drinking, effectively cold turkey - but I wasn't a very heavy drinker, just a habitual one. However, I rejected AA as far too prescriptive in its approach.
For anyone reading this who is considering quitting alcohol I recommend r/stopdrinking on reddit, which is an incredibly friendly and supportive place where people practice and discuss a variety of methods.
Surmounting all of this is very much like a lot of difficult tasks - often made more difficult by well-meaning people who want to point out all the difficulties you hadn't considered yet. What we need is more resources like: do you drink this much? Go to this clinic when you quit. Worried? Then quit sooner rather than later when you are drinking even more.
But IMO more often than not, we should't be flippant or dismissive about the excuses (for relapses or for continuing to use).
For some people, maladaptive coping—and all its consequences—is a cheap price to pay compared to facing a sober existence when unequipped to deal with it.
So even if they quit cold-turkey (or just quit), they won't necessarily improve their quality of life because they don't know why they got into addiction in the first place. However, going to support groups can help meet people. Those who struggle with similar root causes of their addiction tend to cluster as well, and that can (indirectly, and with a bit of luck) help identify root causes. That was what happened with me, and I'm forever grateful to support groups.
In my case I was an adult child of narcissistic parents (ACoNs)[1] and I struggled with C-PTSD[2] all my life (I self-misdiagnosed myself many times with depression, autism, younameit) and I'll live with it forever. In a twisted and perverse way, I think drug abuse and addiction—with all the indirect suffering they caused—also saved my life. If it weren't for drugs, literally wouldn't have had any coping mechanism whatsoever. So, in cases like mine quitting cold-turkey means that the withdrawal symptoms just compounded compounded with our emotional dysregulation.
Also I want to finish with this: I am really glad you managed to turn your life around and quit using. I'm happy that you took steps to improve your life, and as cheesy as it sounds: I'm proud of you! Thank you for sharing your story; I know talking about these things isn't easy.
Stay strong!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_parent [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_post-traumatic_stress_...
edit: wordsmithing
What an incredibly garbage take. Not genetics, having alcoholic family, none of that? You just distill it to that?
It's a nice quote because it is a bit more interesting than common popular wisdom that exists across humanity and in all religions simply telling you : "Accept what you cannot change"
That is often elided even more by "Accept your situation" or even "Obey" providing great convenience to the powers that be.
Apparently the monks felt a huge urge just to sleep, rest and abandon their study around midday... it was a fairly well recognised psycho-spiritual problem in the middle ages for some monastic orders...
They're interesting inputs for Marginalia's search engine FWIW.
You can find it in humanism, you can find it in secular philosophy, you can get therapy, you can find it in social political communities, it's in many places. You can even get some old bearded dude tell you what to do if that's what you need.
Religion is just one way to have faith.
Meanwhile many modern replacements usually don't have any longevity. Maybe one of them will survive but only time will tell.
The vast majority have staying power because of two primary things. Have children, teach those children your religion. In the days before mass education and when huge numbers of children died in early age making this a memnatic was an important way for societal continuation.
This says nothing about it's continued usefulness after a paradigm shift.
Zoroastrianism may also have something to offer here. Maybe it's time to revive it.
Any sources that will back this claim? Oh wait, you don't need facts. Do you give this sort of unsolicited religious advice to everyone or do you specifically choose people who are troubled?
> since psychology is the most vague of sciences
But since you make this claim, we can talk about it. So what's your advice? See religious scholars instead of board certified psychologists?
And yes, I used the word wisdom on purpose :)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that.
People that have gone through horrible circumstances can, and often do, benefit greatly from the moral certainty that religion provides.
Individuals love to look at individual bits of morality in said books in a choose your own adventure exploration. As much as the moral certainty says be nice to others, it will also contain many bits that are highly questionable and would deeply conflict with others views.
In general secular psychologists don't come with the violent historical baggage that religions do.
Who cares? It gets drug addicts clean and criminals reformed.
I'd be curious to see the stats on that.
I mean, there's a fairly strong Darwinistic argument for the validity of certain religions. Very few belief systems have survived a hostile environment for anywhere near as long as the big religions.
If religious belief systems are "wrong" (in the sense of being useful for navigating the world, not in the sense of satisfying certain conditions of symbolic logic and reasoning), then why have these religions triumphed over secularism time and time again?
I'd still consider myself an atheist, but even then I'd be careful to be so dismissive of belief systems that have proven themselves over the course of millennia to be incredibly powerful, enlightening and enriching.
I always find it ironic when the "Facts and Reason" branch of atheism pretends that we would all be driving flying cars in a peaceful utopia if it weren't for pesky religion.
I'm intrigued to understand your definition of "triumphed", as given the rest of the post I'm assuming you're not referring to the genocide of non-believers, which is, of course, precisely how the major religions achieved such longevity.
It doesn't take much of a leap to go from "I am valuable [because G-d says so]", to "I deserve to be equal to my fellow man, free to make my own choices".
To be fair, a lot of them spread by the sword. Convert or we kill your tribe. Some of them explicitly call out in their texts that it's OK to forcibly convert or murder non-believers, an attribute which is, I'm sure, a helpful "evolutionary gene" for the religion's spread. There are also religions with non-violent, but still coercive conversion, where there are non-death-related social consequences for nonbelievers.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Nihilism.
Could you recommend some?
I am not religious and personally i think is best to develop this on your own than taking a prepackaged system, but the utility and practicality of having ssmething already done and battle-tested is undeniable.
Just like you don't need to reinvent the wheel and write a complex library on your own when there's one available, sometimes is best to just use a prepackaged beliefs set and moral system to follow.
Many people are even unable to produce that on their own and epd up disparaged, aimless, living their lives without any understanding of right, wrong, good, bad, moral, immoral.
For what religions are and what they do provide, i personally think some branches of buddhism are better, like the Sokka Gakkai International's approach provides.
I don't agree with the sentence that religious scholars are the best psychologists because they only can provide guidance inside what fits this prepackaged framework-for-living they adopted, and in many many cases (i.e. mentall illnesses, deep issues, moral hardship in grey areas, etc) they are unable to effectively help in any significant way.
Good news is that psychology isn't incompatible with religion and both can coexist peacefully, and one can get the best of both worlds wathout thinking one is best; they work in different ways and provide different things, and IMO they aren't directly comparable, as a psychologist cannot help you very well in terms of religion, and a religious scholar cannot help you very well in terms of psychology (except for the thinfs that fit witin the religious framework chosen).
So all in all, i agree that religion as a valid choice and should be part of discourse, as sometimes it can very well be the best course of action.
Just don't agree with throwing blanket statements of what's best or not in a world as plastic and complex as the one we live in.
That ship sailed a while ago, my parents aren't religious, and I don't know any religious people.
So I'd personally recommend philosophy to people, instead of religion. Bertrand Russell (also known for his mathematical work) is an excellent place to start.
EDIT: For those who disagree, I'd recommend a Russell's essay "Why I Am Not A Christian" [0]. It is quite short and readable.
One constant teaching was that Christianity is not a religion. But about forming a relationship with God through Christ.
How can one even begin to attempt that task if one truly doubts that God exists? Also, is believing a God of some sort not exactly what a religion is?
A relationship is trying to understand God. What he means. How you can serve him. What kind of life Christ lived. How to live as an example to others.
Everyone has doubts. Most of my teachers would talk about times that they struggled.
It takes a lot of faith to believe that there is an all powerful God. that loves you for you.
It also takes faith to believe that universe popped out of nothing, the conditions for life happened to be just right, and that it’s also meaningless.
Maybe Christians are wrong. But maybe not. Worse that happens is people were nicer to each other for awhile. The other is that you spend eternity in Heaven.
I feel like I kind of get what you're saying. But it seems to even have this perspective that one ought to try to believe in God, to be motivated to struggle, one already has to accept religious teachings of some kind.
I don't struggle to believe that the universe popped out of nothing, I very easily and without any effort on my part maintain the belief that it's pretty much impossible for us to know where the universe came from and that it's probably not worth expending too much effort worrying about it. I'd see having to make an effort to believe something somewhat of a red flag regarding the validity of that belief.
> Worse that happens is people were nicer to each other for awhile. The other is that you spend eternity in Heaven.
I mean, some religious people are nice to each other. Others are downright nasty and make life very difficult for people who don't fit into their worldview (for example because they're gay). And presumably the worst case is that there is in fact a God who happens to take the opposite view on morality to the Christian one and thus Christians end up spending an eternity in Hell. As far as I can that's no less likely than there being a Christian God.
A Christian can just as easily say:
I don't struggle to believe that God created the universe out of nothing, I very easily and without any effort on my part maintain the belief that it's pretty much impossible for us to know where the universe came from and that it's probably not worth expending too much effort worrying about it. I'd see having to make an effort to believe something somewhat of a red flag regarding the validity of that belief.
Most reasonable Christians (at least 90% of the Christians I know and have met) will readily admit that we don't know with a 100% certainty that God created the universe. We have faith that He did, but we could very well be wrong. If I'm wrong, at least I've lived a full life and felt like my life had meaning.
> Others are downright nasty and make life very difficult for people who don't fit into their worldview (for example because they're gay)
People get all hung up about a Christian saying that it's a sin to be gay. We also say it's a sin to lie, and it's a sin to lust after a woman (or man) that isn't your spouse, and it's a sin to engage in gluttony. Does that mean we look down on people who have sinned and reject them? No, because like Romans says, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The law is like a mirror. It's a lot easier to see your flaws in a perfect reflective mirror then it is to see them in an old foggy one. The law is a perfect mirror that shows us the depravity we _all_ have inside of us, and it exists so we can strive to be better.
No one will ever attain perfection, but that doesn't mean we're free to go on sinning. Romans is an amazing book if you want to read about a devout Christian's struggle with sin.
Anyways, if a person engages in homosexual behavior, do I think that's a sin? Yes. But I also sin every day. It doesn't excuse it, but it's also no better or worse than any sin that I commit, it just happens to be one I don't struggle with. And if you don't want to be a Christian and still want to be gay, go for it! I'm not going to stop you. Because we're adults, and we make our own choices. It's as simple as that.
My opinion on the behavior means nothing, and I'm not going to berate strangers for engaging in an activity they already know I disapprove of because of my worldview. I literally don't need to say anything, and I won't unless they specifically ask me what my thoughts are on the matter.
Who revealed themselves directly only before the enlightenment, and thereafter must be experienced only in ones mind, testimony from those long dead, or by the evidence of supposed creation.
So there are definitely religions that encourage doubting whether God exists. Eventually you have to come to some sort of immovable mover. Whether that's the Big Bang or God, so there's nothing inherently illogical about believing in something that is timeless and has always existed.
Many Christians believe that you must believe in Jesus to get into heaven. I prefer what Proust said (paraphrasing - the actual quote I can't find and is far more beautiful): "Who is more likely to get into heaven - someone who believes in god, despises and judges the world and mankind or someone who loves all of gods creations without judgement but doesn't believe in him?" I refuse to think a loving god would make the litmus test such an arbitrary thing.
You cannot have faith and despise the world, you are supposed to judges your failings first before judging others.
Modern usages of the word "religion" group Christians and Muslims (for example), groups that would see themselves as distinct.
Interestingly, you can see a bridge period of sorts. If you think back to characters in movies of the 30s and 40s saying "I am not a religious man, but..." or "I am not a praying man, but..." you can kind of see the shift. A little reference to the good standing meaning but also some of the outsider type frame.
All that shift in meaning seems to do is that it determines which belief systems are considered appropriate by a speaker, and which aren't...
As a funny aside, I went to look up the etymology of the word and a quotation is listed at https://www.etymonline.com/word/Cult:
"Cult is a term which, as we value exactness, we can ill do without, seeing how completely religion has lost its original signification. Fitzedward Hall, "Modern English," 1873"
It strikes me as funny because the problem with the word 'religion' is noted as far back as 1873, but I'd argue 'cult' is now even less precise than 'religion'. I don't think it was always that way. References to Roman mystery religions as 'cults' generally lack the pejorative connotation.
This isn't the case as often as you might think. Consider religions like Unitarianism, for example. You can also make a strong case that the doubt is baked foundationally into Christianity itself-- consider Zizek's readings of Chesterton and Hegel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEuY46p5yH4
> And as soon as you remove the doubt ban, you don't really have a religion anymore, but a philosophy
Lots of philosophers were/are extremely religious
> “You have a right to be confused. This is a confusing situation. Do not take anything on trust merely because it has passed down through tradition, or because your teachers say it, or because your elders have taught you, or because it’s written in some famous scripture. When you have seen it and experienced it for yourself to be right and true, then you can accept it.”
I really like the quote you've posted. I dislike bullshit. There are many bullshit Buddhism resources out there. Where can I find the real thing?
Religion is philosophy, plus ritual and aesthetics. It's the set of philosophies that have survived the ravages of time. It's a set of philosophies that are so useful to live by, that these philosophies have survived through books and rituals for millennia. Or put another way, these philosophies are so incredibly effective, that people are surviving today precisely because they've lived by those philosophies, and the only reason we know of these philosophies is because they are survived by, and helped to survive, the people who've passed and continue to pass them down to others.
There existed philosophies you've never heard of, that are dead, because they died with the people who've followed them. Is it just chance? Is it because the surviving philosophies are better? Who knows. But if you're a betting man, you should bet on those surviving philosophies being actually better, more useful, more conducive to survival.
>the focus on "removing the doubt"
I think this is a focus exclusive to "nu-Christian" Anglosphere denominations, primarily American ones, and their focus is made a spectacle of because: (1) their focus is understandably cringe and the outrage is entertaining (2) the spectacle is used as a tool to de-legitimize religion as a whole, especially Christianity.
Nope. Religion tends to bring people together, often making them much more powerful as a group. But to me, it's just not worth selling out.
> I think this is a focus exclusive to "nu-Christian" Anglosphere denominations
I don't think that is the case. John 14:6 says:
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me”
> Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” John 20:24-25
If that's not encouraging engaging with doubt I don't know what is.
> If that's not an effort to restrict doubt, then what is?
I can tell you that 1 + 1 = 2 and you can still doubt me. Just because you doubt me it doesn't make that statement any less true. Also, me stating that fact isn't me restricting doubt, it's just me stating a fact. If Jesus was God, and what He says here is true, He's stating a fact. You can choose to believe or not to believe, or doubt or not to doubt.
Personally I see it a ’truth’ like in scientific truth and personal integrity.
Imagine Jesus as the incarnation of the best possible person. I you where to try to based your actions in a similar way, what would you do?
"No man comes to the Father but by me”:
You won't be the best version of yourself by chasing any other things (fame, money, pleasure, etc)
I too was disgusted by the first degree interpretation (obviously false) but I now discover a second degree reading that explain our human condition and most of our problems.
Look into Peterson Biblical lecture on Youtube if you want to see a psychological way of looking at the bible.
I still can't figure out how to deal with it, which is why I usually refrain from arguing with religious people. Afterall, when it comes to the big questions (like, is there a god), neither one of us can bring anything to the table - it's impossible to know by definition. And since all religious teachings are based on the existence of a god, there is no way to convince anyone of anything without first proving the unprovable. It's like two completely different sets of axioms - of course the conclusions are gonna be different, and the concept of axioms being "right" or "wrong" is meaningless by itself.
The fact that it was written in a book gave it incredible power and have allow our civilisation to exist and science to be developed but also removed much of the evolutions of the stories.
Now that our world change so fast the stories seems very outdated to our modern mind but most of them speak about a deep human conditions and traps we feel into multiple times.
It hard to speak to christians as most see it a first level reading (literally true) but most people are not ready to go into deep analysis of meaning, they need a story to unite them, to show them a way to a good life and so it was for all people 200 years ago.
Without those stories people put other things in its place (false idols) like money, pleasure, diversity and equity, communism, fascism, etc.
To the question is there a God, the God of the bible is a mix of the natural environment (god of wind, god of the sun, etc) and the human civilisation ’thou shall not kill’ if you kill, God will be angry: you are going to have a bad time (at the hands of other humans)
If you have the time, the Peterson lectures gave me a way to understand it that make sense to me (no bearded magician in the sky)
I get what you're saying but to offer another perspective, informed by the work of Rober Pirsig as presented in his second book 'Lila': I think those religions/philosophies you mention are an organism of their own, with humans as their hardware. Are they really more useful for any given human? (certainly some are not, if we choose a human who's an outlier, a 'black sheep', so to speak) Or ar they useful and more conductive to the survival of the religion/philosophy itself?
I think it's a struggle between intellect (the individual) and culture (religion, country, a political party, etc.).
This is certainly not true of the Christianity that I've been witness to all my life. In those circles, doubt is a given - an intrinsic component of the inquisitive human mind - and doubt is basically the core of all faith. If there's no room for doubt, there's no room for faith.
Why strive for anything? Especially when the very bare minimum for survival is already covered by community.
Overall culture seems to be more and more nihilistic and individualistic after dropping religion. Few people may be doing the right thing and say that we have to care about future generations. But wast majority, looking at their actions, doesn’t care.
I would rather follow a more humanistic path, that we define our own existence, and that we should attempt to minimize our own suffering.
Same for minimising one's suffering. A healthy society requires a lot of sacrifice from individuals, even with today's technology.
Therapy has changed a lot of people around me’s lives for the better. Indisputably. I have seen 20-year alcoholics change virtually overnight when their abusers are finally caught and the addict-victim goes and talks it through with a therapist.
Where I’m going to disagree, though, is that this is a black and white “Christianity or therapy” issue. I’m coming at this pragmatically; I haven’t been to church in almost 20 years now and religion is virtually non-existent in my life. There’s two things, though, with religion in general that can be hugely useful for someone struggling with addiction and/or substance abuse:
- Therapy-like religious guidance. Many denominations of Christianity (and other religions, but I am not particularly familiar with the exact customs) encourage you to share your burdens with either the leadership or broader community.
- Community itself. Beyond the primary “you are destroying your body” issues with addiction, one of the worst secondary effects is the social effects. When you have a substance abuse problem, “ordinary” people will start to distance from you. This can either end up with you just isolating from the world and getting lonelier (amplifying the problem) or seeking community with whoever you can find who won’t reject you (other people with substance abuse problems… amplifying the problem)
Religion can provide these things and while it’s not for me, I have a hard time dismissing it outright. Especially since we have, as society has become more secular, mostly failed at establishing accessible community institutions that provide these things. One of the most interesting things to me is that almost every other community is generally focused around either specific activities (eg a rock climbing gym, martial arts, bird watching, knitting) or specific professions (eg software developer meet-ups). Church is one of the few places in the world that I’m likely to encounter a very broad cross-section of society.
That all being said, quality varies dramatically. There are some churches that are, to me, completely toxic and have strayed far from “bringing light into this world”.
YMMV, but it works for some people and provides exactly what they need to heal.
In university, I dated a Lutheran (in Canada, there's two "sub-Lutheran" organizations, she was a part of the "more welcoming one") and it was a night and day difference. Not to go too far into theology, but these folks were some of the most "Christ-like" folks I have ever met. They really embodied the "be good to each other" concepts and strongly rejected the more evangelical/recruiting position that many churches take; their philosophy was "be good people, treat others kindly, feel free to have a conversation about your religion if someone asks, but don't try to guilt/shame/whatever, just be a good person."
I'm actually surprised this morning to be defending churches somewhat. It's a tragedy: the worst kind of Christians, to me, are also the most prominent and vocal. From my own understanding of the Bible and basic theology, I absolutely agree that many denominations are cult-like and have also lost their way from the teachings they purport to embody.
Meanwhile there's folks like the Lutherans I hung out with who, for lack of a better turn of phrase, are actually bringing light into the world. These folks get painted with the same brush as the... crazies.
> Knowing that HN is generally against it, I say it anyway
I am actually on the contrarian side of you, but thanks for putting you out there. I understand and respect your point and everything, but there is one thing, that I want to put out regarding what you said. To state the following, is quite problematic:
> Religious scholars have actually been the best psychologists but are generally dismissed by non-believers.
Without going into detail, for every profession, there are people who are good and bad at it. This has nothing to do with any background or anything. The difference with psychologists and priests/ missionaries/ etc. is, that one is certified and the other is not necessarily certified. This makes a huge difference in liability of the term/ role and it's rather dangerous to put them in the same bag. And I don't think to make this distinction is not dismissive.
Citation not required, as long as you believe, assumedly?
Having spent two years as a missionary in a majority atheist country (the Czech Republic) I'd have to say that wasn't my experience. For most Czechs, it seemed to be more of a general apathy about religion and the idea of God, not any serious skepticism or an active choice not to believe.
This advice simply doesn't work if the recipient is an atheist.
To me, Religious texts are made up fiction that hold no more meaning in my world view than Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. If you read enough fiction on a shared topic, you'll be able to pull the same number of 'enlightening' quotes from those books as religious people can from their own sacred tomes.
However, IF you are a religious person, and find meaning in your religious books, then take the win, and enjoy that path. It's just that it's not a path everyone can take.
It doesn't matter if the Bible/Koran/whatever is a fact or not. Religious beliefs/texts are an extension of human evolution and should be seen that way. Questioning their wisdom in helping humans thrive is like questioning the value of arms.
The west is in the process of creating a new one (modern liberal values), but as with most rewrites, you probably should have understood the existing solution before throwing it out.
I submit that plenty of religious thought patterns (things and systems you are not allowed to question the wisdom of, obsequious deference to authority, etc.) exist outside the halls of churches. PG's essay on heresy comes to mind.
Like proscriptions on pork or seafood; we have a pretty good understanding of the consequences of eating pork and don't necessarily have to rely on something that was a useful rule of thumb absent that knowledge.
Did you also know the universe wasn't created in 6 days?
If this is true, does it mean that churches all over the world did a big disservice to the holy books and stopped the evolution by creating institutions dedicated to preserve text of this books in unchanged form argumenting that those books literally are word of God and thus cannot be changed?
I'm sure you have some great ideas about living. Let's check the reproductive rate of the people who follow your ideas in a thousand years.
There is a lot to learn about life and human nature in religion. You don’t have to believe in an afterlife or practice dogma to get something out of it.
Admittedly I do ignore parts of it - there's a lot of "wives should be obedient" stuff in there that has not aged well for instance - and I read it as God representing something like the Chinese Dao - IE the impersonal and immaterial laws of nature, the way that things unfold, and faith in God being an active version of the Stoic idea that you can't change the things you don't have control over, so just let it be.
>Religious texts are made up fiction that hold no more meaning in my world view
Plato's The Cave allegory is relevant, even though no one would ever live in a cave like that and it's obviously fiction. Some people treat the Bible as a historical text, but most don't. Some people believe the earth is flat too, there's always that 10-20%.
Having said that, I tried reading the Bible but I couldn't get through all the begats. I do like hearing honest people discuss it though. Like anything, it can certainly be weaponized.
The thing is that the stories in religious books help paint a picture of life and offer anecdotes on how one can navigate it. There is no need to look for enlightenment, just practical advice on how to deal with tough life situations and help you find motivation and strength to power through. Thousands of years of observing and documenting people's lives through stories and metaphors has value, even for us non-believers.
I think you'd even be surprised how many people who regularly attend church services don't actually believe in the mystic aspect of it all; it's the community and guidance that have the most value to them.
Church selection seems to play a big role. I don't know too much about it but from other commenters, there are apparently churches that emphasize the mysticism and paranormal side of Christianity, some that focus on the texts, some that mostly deal with hero-worship and the hero's origin story, some that are basically political Trump rallies, and some more laid back ones that are basically social/music clubs.
How do you feel about The Iliad, Plato's dialogues, the Mahabharata, Tao Te Ching, or the Epic of Gilgamesh? Do they also offer "no more meaning in your world" than modern fantasy novels?
I didn't think being an atheist meant closing ones mind to human culture. Guess I've been doing it wrong.
I've always found good fiction enlightening. There is no need to be so serious about it.
My biggest criticism of religion is the very boundary drawn between fiction and scripture: that adherents to a religion must treat fiction as if it is reality.
All too often, that means obsessing over obedience to a structure of rules/dogma, instead of confronting the reality right in front of us; like voting to restrict gay marriage so God will bless our country, instead of learning to empathize with people around us to become a better community.
Agreed. This is the part that really gets under my skin… its been my understanding for most of my life that the bible specifically is full of allegory, not history. Yet, so many many of the “believers” I encounter don’t know what “allegory” means. The bible is their literal truth!
Tbh, knowing this isn’t helpful. It somehow makes me more paralyzed in dealing with literal believers. It always feels like they know they’re full of shit, but won’t admit it. There’s a disingenuousness to it that very deeply bothers me.
Being able to think critically of religion means being agnostic or atheist.
My assertion is that it's not you who is paralyzed, but anyone who cannot criticize their own position.
Do we know how this is going to play out, though? Has matrimony between same sex couples ever been widely available in any civilization? Rome, Greece, China and Egypt all had various different approaches to open homosexual relationships overtime, but it's hard to find any significant civilization that broadly equated same sex unions and heterosexual marriage. I'll allow that my research on this is incomplete.
I think anyone who thinks they know for certain how this kind of social change will play out on the scale of decades or centuries is mistaken. It's possible that everything turns out great and we enter a golden era of tolerance and flourishing human relationships, but at the same time there's usually something worth fearing in the unknown, which is why we tend to.
From what I can tell, the only group claiming to know what will happen in the future are religious conservatives who want gay marriage outlawed. It's their claim that homosexual unions will lead to a bad societal outcome, and that claim is based purely on religious dogma.
If pressed I guess I’ll say it’s unlikely to be true. But that’s not the point. I don’t even care to explain the point really. But both me and my wife ran Meetup groups about being atheist and eventually decided reading Christian philosophy and teachings was a better bet than the slow crushing millstone of the weight of the universe awaiting me behind the curtain of materialism.
There’s a lot of really bad stuff and I think Christianity needs reforming, but I still think it’s the better long term bet in terms of the wellbeing of me and my future generations.
I've been reading Stoic philosophers for some time now and it has helped me a lot. Christianity seems to take a lot from them and adds a mythical spin.
I think the biggest issue with religion stems from the fact that many people fail to understand religious texts are not factual they are metaphorical. Unfortunately, throughout history (and still today) this misunderstanding has been used and led to an incalculable number of heinous crimes.
The problem is expecting the dogma of a thousands years old tradition and book to be absolutely true. There are things in the Bible and Christianity that are basically tall tales. For example, I doubt Jesus was immaculately conceived, but it makes for a great story. People make up stories about remarkable people. I believe Jesus was a real person who had world-changing insights, but I'm afraid a lot of cruft has built up around him and been carried forward as literal truth.
The challenge for an individual is separating the wheat from the chaff.
Most of my thoughts on the matter are derived from Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You.
1. man serves self and family
2. man serves state and country
3. man serves god
He believed many of our problems are due to most of us still being stuck at level 2 of existence. A man at level 3 is immune to the problems of a man at level 2. For example, they couldn't even compel Jesus w/ bodily harm. They killed him, and what good did it do them?
He also argued that the shift to level 3 is inevitable and already in progress.
But the label of atheist has been imbued with all sorts of negativity. So much so that some people hear it and think being an atheist actually makes someone evil, without any care for the well-being of other humans. Or they think the atheist must be miserable and unfeeling.
It's why I don't even use the term any more. I don't know if other people I'm talking to will have the same definition of the term that I do. If someone asks me about my religious beliefs, I simply say that I have none.
The “atheist community” (and it was oddly enough a real thing for awhile, with atheist church and everything! Look up Oasis on YouTube). It attracted people who were hedonistic and amoral and, in retrospect, went down in flames about how you’d have expected.
I’m not just some isolated Christian who has never met an atheist deriding them as some sort of bogeyman, I was friends with people in Poly Quads and met spouses who were bullied by their SO into being swingers, then watched 50 year olds behave like teenagers with all the consummate drama as well.
Once we had kids we totally removed ourselves from that situation and it fell apart a few years later, after the leader (who was originally a Christian pastor, I might add) got #metoo’ed for (surprise surprise) having sex with half the women in the organization.
As an atheist, you weren't a practicing atheist. You were an agitator with a religion of your own, which is projecting and spreading atheism. I used to call these folks "militant atheists" because, like when I was a teenager and left the Catholic church, I was ready to treat others the way I'd been treated (and seen others treated). This is not a healthy paradigm for leaving any community though and furthermore it repeats the sins of the past.
> Like, I frankly don’t give a damn about the truth or falsity of religion anymore. That’s not the point. It lets me act as if my life has meaning regardless of whether or not that’s true, which even when I directly reflect on it is a small amount of comfort insulating me from the yawning abyss of existential terror I felt throughout all of my 20s and half of my teens.
... and then you adopted the mindset of an actual atheist (one without religion), and then adopted a religion!
For what it's worth, I'm glad you're happy, that's really what matters. Maybe now that you have experience as someone without religion it gives you perspective as someone with faith. From what you've written, it sounds like that's the case.
A final thought (and opinion) that no one asked for: as an atheist I applaud the healthy exercise of and engagement with religion. The only time in which I object to religions or institutions is when they think their ideas are proper enough to be codified into law. For that, we have science and bureaucracy, of which religion can be a part of neither due to self-interested hegemony, which is an obvious conflict of interest.
In fact, Harry Potter And The Sacred Text does exactly that!
I have been downvoted many times (not sure why?) for stating this on HN, but I will state it again:
It's sad that this line of thinking has taken over the modern time. We now have "science", so we don't need any of that silly stuff like "philosophy" or "art" or "religion". All can be explained through the scientific method and all other branches of human intellect are null and avoid.
Of course, this comes from the new Atheists who influenced a lot of the younger generation years a go when they started but their ideas actually stems from older philosophers who shaped the modern day thinking.
Mainly Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche (who was also influenced by Feuerbach), Jean Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault.
For example, What did Jean-Paul Sartre say? "Existence precedes essence" and you can _clearly_ see how this has affected the modern Atheism mentality in the 21st century.
If existence precedes essence, then everything is relative and nothing can be objective and absolute; thus to claim things such as objective morality in the way that religion does is meaningless.
Don't forget that Sartre said: "If God exists, I can't be free, but I am free. Therefore God does not exist". Once again, if you look carefully enough, you absolutely see this in the modern world. The New Atheists for example, took all their ideas and spread them from these philosophers. What was Hitchen's famous quote? He would constantly regurgitate Karl Marx: "Religion is the opium of the people" which again.. is rooted from Sartre philosophy.
There is a great talk about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KQcm0Mi5To
More to it, to anyone who claims religious people are intellectual inept, I would simply challenge you to read any of the material written by the intellectuals of the tradition. For example, for Christianity they would be: Augustine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas or John Henry Newman and tell me you're dealing with someone who has suspended his critical faculties.
You are welcome to disagree with them of course, but to claim that we should simply replace these materials with math books is disingenuous.
Just my 2c.
Op didn't say anything about art or philosophy. You added that stuff in. Atheism doesn't preclude art or philosophy.
> All can be explained through the scientific method
As opposed to "all can be explained through God"? How is that any better?
It’s a curios byproduct of human inquisitiveness and that’s it. it shouldn’t have any special rights or claims to have a deeper understanding of the universe that would even give certain people (priests etc) to be the judges of other people’s actions.
The world wouldn’t succumb into chaos if all churches / mosques etc . were gone in an instant and people forgot they existed as anything but pretty buildings.
There were of course smart and kind people at all times and they happened to use the vehicles of religion some long long time ago when it seemed like the best logic toolbox for the mind
That's a straw man - we all are idiots sometimes (I believe that most of times but that just me) and this little silly observation can be easily used to explain how otherwise rational and intelligent person can hold two opposite views in their had. Our rational abilities are greatly exaggerated by people like You who believe that there are magical others that can be rational all the time in all aspects of their life. Those people believe in God because they want to believe (by which I mean its an emotional decision and not an logical one) and the logic is there only to rationalize what their emotions are telling them. I suspect that if medicine will get advanced enough we will see finally that by just playing with memory and emotional state of person we can easily turn the most avid believer into Christopher Hitchens (and vice versa).
Then try Buddhism? More of a philosophy than a religion, and seems to have hit on the idea thousands of years ago that most problems in humanity are to do with mental illness of one sort or another.
Buddhism as conceptualized in the western world is a marketing strategy that appeals to people thanks to the fact the Buddhism is exotic, the same reason Christian symbolism is à la mode in Asia (just see how many anime have Christian themes). If you could repackage Christianity to convince these people that it is new, exotic and exciting they would convert immediately.
By the way, there are philosophical traditions, both in Buddhism and Christianity, that reject any supernatural claim and see religion as a useful but not true moral framework, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism
P.S.: I'm an atheist. I'm not defending a religion or another.
Anyway, not to be insulting, but it is all a bunch of made up nonsense for a time when we did not have actual explanatory knowledge for our existence and universe. We do now. Religion and its institutions are dying out in industrialized nations because they have lost their claim to having all the answers.
() I say we think we know because I'm actually agnostic (I typically say 'atheist' because it stops some conversion attempts I'm not looking for from even starting, judging by your two comments on this thread I reckoned I can give you the honest answer as you won't try to convert me into anything!) and I believe we can only know what we conclude from the information collected by our senses and our thinking process after that, but an error in either the information collection (think of how the first scientific estimates of the age of the planet were off by a long shot on account of choosing a poor thing to measure -- I'm thinking about the work of Halley here) or in the thought process would result in bad knowledge, and it seems to me there's a part of the scientific-minded population right now that has a blind spot for this: there's overconfidence in science.
To cut to the chase: our brains are just piles of chemistry. There is no meaning. We make it up, and that is ok. “Why” we exist is coincidence and millions of years of happy little evolutionary experiments blindly conducted by nature. Maybe there is a Deus ex Machina in there, but for our purposes does it really matter?
It means (pun intended) that the meaning is not self sustaining term in our reality - there is no absolute meaning outside of our perception. There is only relative meaning (as in what kind of meaning my perception assigns to things that can be observed by me - simply put - we create our own meaning).
It can be simplified further to there is no meaning or the meaning does not exist but in my opinion this is oversimplification and reeks of nihilism.
So if You look at things from the point of view described above the "why" question (which can be paraphrased to "what is the meaning") is wrong.
I also wanted to add that it's not that I think it is wrong to ask such questions, only that I think they're wrong when considered from within our system of knowledge, so I find them unanswerable.
Kind of how like "what kind of food does that digital computer like?" is a wrong question.
I'm not religious either, but I always find this hard to believe. What are the odds nature happened to provide all the building blocks for us to be here to question our existence? It seems far more likely that (i) nothing would exist, (ii) the universe wouldn't have the right combination of properties and forces to maintain its own existence, or (iii) it would be a boring universe filled with a couple of basic elements capable of producing nothing of interest. Instead, we have complex life and we're here building iPhones and spaceships.
For that reason I can't believe there's a single universe and through coincidence it happened to contain everything needed for life. Even if we go with the multiverse theory and a near infinite number of universes, I still find it difficult to believe. You can argue the universe is filled with a bunch of garbage and we're assigning meaning and value to that garbage because it's us, and we want to feel important. However, I really don't feel like anything (and certainly not something as complex as us) should exist in the first place. I want to say it's too much of a coincidence to happen by chance, but at the same time, I don't have a better answer as to why we're here.
What is so remarkable about the iPhone or the spaceship? Why is it worthy of note when compared to any other phenomena in the universe? What brings you to make a distinction between a live human body and an inanimate celestial body?
I'm not trying to say that humans are more important or meaningful than a rock. I agree with you that nothing inherently has meaning and it's an attribute we create and assign. I'm only saying that we're intelligent beings that are capable of some rather advanced tasks, such as creating a iPhone. In my opinion, it seems far less likely for us to exist than either nothing, or a simpler universe without us.
Yes, it's not impossible, just like I could throw a handful of sand in that air that falls to the ground and happens to write the story of my life. It's so unlikely though that I can't help but wonder if it wasn't just chance that we're here.
The why question has no answer nor will it ever have an answer. Life doesn't need justification or orchestration. It's a freak accident of molecules. It could have never happened and it can end by means of a disaster and the universe will happily continue without it.
As to what a human can/should to with their life other than not dying and trying to reproduce, that's an entirely cultural question. Cultural is a fancy word for: we made it up.
We have the technology and means to ensure every person on this earth does not go hungry and has a safe place to sleep at night. But humans do human stuff.
You probably pass plenty of homeless in your daily life and never look/think of them again. Yet somehow religion constantly preaches harmony and giving to others. Most religious people I know are inherently greedy and abide by Capitalistic morals and act as such.
I guess I could create a bubble for myself and not care about others at an inherently deep level like most humans on earth do.
What would a religious Scholar/Teachings do for me if I can plainly see that teachings are only followed when convenient or warped to fit my world narrative? What would you suggest?
His conclusion was: Absolute evil does not exist and pain is an instrument of good.
I can't find it online, my source is the documentary "The Genius of George Boole" [1].
Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death [2] could be a related reading too. I remember that I enjoyed it in a fun way.
Also a dumb theory of mine is: suffering is the proof that you are still alive.
I fell in love with this girl who I had known on/off for a long time. I found out she was an escort (quietly but distinctly confirmed payment-for-sex) in her spare time (she was a student when this all happened). This was really upsetting and had me very distraught. I simultaneously could see a life with her, but also felt disgusted at the escorting.
I wished I could speak with my grandfather about it. I knew he'd know what to tell me. But he had recently passed away. "Well, what did I like about Grandpa? Could I find a substitute? I need like, an old person who has reliable wisdom and experience, not just some wino who has hung on. Why isn't this a thing? An old person a community can approach for advice on..."
"Oh I think I need a priest."
When I went looking for one though, it was all about accepting Jesus into my heart and spiritual learnings and miracles that I must accept literally happened, etc. Real hard to find the "old wise person who can help me navigate this thing".
This doesn’t represent true Buddhism like Asians would recognize it, but I think it does highlight how you can build a practice and adopt the world outlook without the supernatural.
A low-level Zen inspired practice may be what you’re looking for
For me the bible is the same as any other (old) book where people write about their life experience. A good example is 'Meditations' by Marcus Aurelius. There is a lot of wisdom in it, and I have read it more than once over the years. It makes you reflect on your own life and decisions you make.
For what it's worth, here it is: https://www.deprocrastination.co/blog/what-is-addiction
Happy to answer any comments, questions, etc
All of these things could very well be what you end up doing but its really up to the individual to make the choices and change. You can't really do this reading an article like this nor can you find any solace by identifying others with your problem because it quickly becomes Wounded Club.
Instead of growing wiser, you stay wounded, thinking there is something wrong with you and you just end up like OP, watching youtube for hours on end, reading hackernews/reddit comments. If this is something you like to change then you need to take action. Without action all the advice in the world will do you squat.
Unfortunately, as of late, its become fashionable and quite profitable to humblebrag about non-issues. Do you really think that if OP's behavior is possible if their life depended on it? I think not.
One is too lazy to make a change then who's at fault? You can throw whatever 4 letter medical term and write entire books on it. It won't matter. If it is to be then its up to me.
The key to breaking through mental barriers as an ADHD-sufferer is usually not more will-power or less laziness, though one must at least want to change. The key is externalization -- that is, building external cues, props, and guardrails into one's life to help one stay on task in the moment - whether that means doing work or resting. We have trouble doing both proportionately.
Some people say they've had great success taking time every Sunday evening to review the past week and make adjustments -- whether that be putting a post-it note on the computer, installing a browser extension, setting a series of reminders, or any number of innovative ideas. Whatever helps you externalize the decisions you'll need to make in the moment.
Curious to know where you got this strategy from, think its a great!
Yes, we should take responsibility for improving our lives, especially in the face of clear signals that a change is needed. But, did it occur to you that this post was indeed OP taking responsibility for their suffering and a first step towards improvement?
It takes a significant measure of courage and vulnerability to publish this confession OP has written. We can be pedantic about whether or not OP is clinically addicted to anything, but I see this post as a positive step in the same direction of healing/improvement you emphasized.
Philosophically, how can we say that a person's poor choices of behavior are mental disorders when they don't even lead to life threatening outcomes? Is smoking a mental disorder? He wishes he could quit, but keeps buying packs. Is being fat a mental disorder? He wishes he was thin, but doesn't exercise and keeps eating pizza. Is simply not grinding leetcode a mental disorder? He wants a higher salary, yet doesn't even practice leetcode or interview questions.
He wants to stop procrastinating his work, but he watches YouTube instead until all the work simply must be done in a long all-nighter. Is this a mental disorder? Apparently to a lot of people, yes, this is ADHD! You need lifelong medication now; your brain doesn't work right! No, this doesn't sound quite right to me.
Addiction is real, and he likely really is addicted to the internet. That's a real problem he should fix. And it may be that ADHD medication helps him fix it; I've taken Adderall for a period of time and it certainly fixed any procrastination tendencies I had as well (I don't have ADHD). But if we're going to make the case that medication helps and thus it should be taken, why do we need to pretend it's about a mental disorder? It helps me focus and perform better at work, so it should be available to me, no? Or does its help have to meet an arbitrary level of helpfulness to be permitted?
Basically, I'm not convinced ADHD is anything more than a label delineating one end of a spectrum of self determination. The cutoff seems arbitrary, and there is a lot of reverse engineering to arrive at the end result of medication: He would be helped by Adderall, thus he must have ADHD, thus his procrastination is actually a mental disorder and not just being lazy. We can go down that road as a society, but I prefer the road where we just collectively admit, "Yeah I'm lazy so I take a pill and it helps," without the veneer of noble medicine curing Real Disorders.
"over 6 hours watching youtube videos, an hour of reading through comments[1] on hacker news, 3 hours of sleep and poof, the day is gone."
The day is only 10 hours long? Also author is only getting 3 hours of sleep per day!?!?
Yes, start with that. Disable animation and auto-play in any browsers you use. And only use browsers to consume content. This worked for me, and now I can't stand video or animations.
It might be a learnt behavior that you have to unlearn. Perhaps look how to unlearn something, if such a thing exists.
- Delete shortcuts to websites that you frequent from the browser start page.
- Replace your frequently visited websites with websites you want to visit.
Rinse and repeat.
I read about resetting dopamine receptors, but it's quite hard. A bit like losing weight.
For future reference, dicking around on the internet is not an addiction.
You need sufficient sleep to make short-term memories last. Author already said he’s not getting enough sleep.
At what point can we stop placing the blame on ourselves and towards those who make these products?
beeminder.com
What's the solution?
The core idea is to make a contract with oneself to not exceed a daily budget of procrastination and implement it. Say, 4 hours per day, on average. Everything else follows from it.
There are few critical components to make this work:
1. You need to admit you have a problem that needs fixing. If you procrastinate so much, quite possibly you are depressed. Like, for realz. That's OK.
2. Self-understanding that this is a matter of survival. Either you will make this work, or your life will be truly miserable, up to and including destroying your career, relationships and health.
3. Comprehensive time tracking. If you were watching a YouTube video while eating and spent extra 5 minutes to finish off the video after you were done with your meal, you need to track these 5 minutes. If you pick up your phone in bed just to quickly scroll through pages for 3 minutes, you need to track it. I use Excel for that - very fast & easy if you know the right keyboard shortcuts.
4. You need to do the tracking _yourself_. This is to (a) increase awareness you procrastinated and (b) introduce friction to doing it.
5. Social accountability. I have a weekly session with a coach where I report if I stayed within the quota, or not. But anybody you don't want to disappoint will do.
6. You are good as long as you stay within the budget. If you spend the time you reclaimed by laying on the couch and looking at the ceiling for 3 hours - that's a huge win. More on that below.
7. As always, you cannot neglect your fundamentals: sleep, exercise, proper diet, socializing. But now you will have time to deal with it.
Once you implement this process, few observation immediately come to mind:
1. You have so much more time and mental energy. Wow.
2. If you fail to track these short 3-5 minute burst of procrastination, they quickly add up to half an hour, an hour, two hours. Hence, you really cannot slip on that. If you slip, you also won’t be able to trust yourself, which is critical.
3. You become bored with that extra time, meaning you finally have time to think and talk to yourself. I cannot overstate how important that is. You can use this time to direct your thoughts / visualize better outcomes and hence motivate yourself to do the right thing (aka Cognitive Behavioral Therapy).
4. Once you keep doing it successfully for some time, you can now trust yourself that you are in control. This is huge, because your emotions now will be on your side.
5. You become less afraid of doing productive things, because you actually have time to do them, instead of thinking "what's the point, I have 1 hour in the day left after wasting all of it, I am tired, and I will give into my procrastination cravings anyway".
6. You will sleep way more because now you cannot procrastinate in bed. This will repay your sleep debt and restore your energy levels, making everything else much easier to tackle.
Overall, this strategy works for me very well because (a) I admitted to myself I have a problem that is very serious. This means I need to seek help and develop a process to solve it. And (b) I don’t mind doing comprehensive time tracking of my procrastination time, which is a critical part of the entire process.
Further reading:
"Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport
"Feeling Good" by David D. Burns
My ADHD alarms were going off right as I saw this. It is exactly how I characterized my struggles with ADHD too. If anything, I have had a point in my life when I would have written this exact same post. I have since found some reasonable solutions without medication. So, I'll post some of them here.
> Getting over it: Besides blanket ban on all things video and social media, I don't think I have a better solution
If I was a betting man, I'd bet against this working,
_______
Recommendations:
1. Don't fight your base state. If hedonism and continuous stimulation is what you are. That's fine. I literally walk around with a podcast on at all times and I watch ALL my YT subscriptions everyday. It is more wasteful to spend an entire day fighting off those urges, than to just do them in one go and get them out of the way. Those blockers/procrastination-extensions never help. I have tried. It only makes me more miserable.
2. ADHD people do a lot better with external deadlines than internal deadlines. Make small-tangible (about 50% of your capacity) daily commitments. If a task takes longer than 1 day, break it down until it seems like a '1 day' task. Communicate it in a formal settings (standups), and just like that, the fire under my proverbial butt, lights up.
3. Post-covid there is no such thing as weird working hours. If the wave of productivity hits you at 8pm, so be it. Traditional hours don't work for you, and trying to follow them will only make you more miserable. Just make sure you get your sleep and food on time.
4. Learn to give up and ask for help. ADHD people also tend to be perfectionists with weirdly strong ethics around commitments in the worst way possible. If the task has become an albatross around your neck, then ask for help. Pair program, have a white boarding session or plain old ask someone else to do it. If your rigid ethical system is blocking something critical, then it's better to be humble and move on.
5. Channel procrastination productive directions. I am known in my friends group for being the most resourceful person with encyclopedic knowledge about absolutely random things. Guess how I learned that? It has helped facilitate relationships and I get to stay at the top of my 'learning' by procrastinating. Another awesome way of procrastinating is unblocking your peers, my ADHD brain loves it. Sometimes I will use procrastination to build out the helper-package I had been planning for weeks or cleaning up old code. Not ideal, but better than nothing.
6. Do something you love. ADHD people above all, cannot do mind-numbing work. I changed my entire career direction to be in something that I loved instead of liked, and it has paid off big time. When work feels like procrastination, it is easier to finish work.
7. Pick up a deeply exhausting hobby. Drums are an amazing way for me to decompress if the ADHD side is peaking too much. I bang the living daylights out of that thing for 20 minutes, and it clears my mind up for easier work. Progmetal serves a similar use-case for me. ________
I am yet to figure out if I should get medications. I have self-medicated with a lot of coffee, but am scared of going any farther with real medication. I personally will wait until an adverse life event before choosing medication as a necessary solution. However, a few of my ADHD peers swear that they would not be able to function in society without their drugs. So yeah, maybe try some medication and things might just work out.
Lastly, watching normal people give ADHD folks recommendations is some of the most hilarious stuff ever. They simply can't fathom the complete lack of self-agency that's so central to being ADHD person.
____
My procrastination creds: (odd flex but OK)
* 100k comment karma on reddit (no memes) * 5k comment karma on HN (pure brute force) * 3 hrs/day YT videos watched on average (most of it is podcasts in downtime) * Medically diagnosed with ADHD * Was the most restless kid I've seen (undiagnosed till adulthood) * Was called 'smart, but the biggest nuisance I've had in a classroom' by professor (easter egg)
Seriously, what's the next step after acknowledging you have a disease (addiction being a well documented one)? GETTING HELP to treat it.
You just established your default-mode mind isn't amenable to your wellbeing: how do you see it helping to correct itself without any outside input?
As of this week, I just tipped back into sanity after 8 months being dysfunctional, another lapse into full avoidant coping mechanisms. It was certainly not the first time of my life, but I still got it wrong: I waited too long before reaching for help. As soon as I did the tide started stabilizing, and then it reversed. It took a couple of months (and leveraged the previously acquired experience) but it is obvious to me I'm back out of it now. Sleep, screen time, inner discourse... All indicators are in the green again.
Procrastination, addictions are symptoms hinting at other root causes. Believing that you can implement measures to keep it in check goes right against the very essence of the issue (as the article perfectly illustrates), and shows you don't have the correct grasp of the situation yet. You're leaving too much to chance, and I can tell you this is absolutely inefficient.
It is not the time to be picky and stick to one single truth® either: use a policy mix. The only required part is having someone TRAINED and EXPERIMENTED in dealing with your issue supervising your efforts. Someone you see in a regular fashion, each encounter creating another rung of the ladder that will get you out of this pit. Being in this kind of interaction tremendously helps with building the inner strength that up till now was lacking. They are your source of courage and support, the dam/dyke against which you fears, doubts and uncertainties will crash and subside. So make sure you feel you can trust them and stay clear from overly intrusive ones. But don't be too scared and just go to that first appointment.
Beyond that, anything goes, ritual/habitual practices especially (building up strength over time thanks to repetition). As long as you have that one external support providing strength and continuity to your efforts, you are bound to succeed. It will take some time, but the burden will get progressively lighter and the results more stable.
In the therapeutic frameworks department, I can strongly recommend EMDR, CBT and IFS (Internal Family System). If you can find someone in your area (or remote, you can actually self-administrate EMDR under the guidance of someone!) trained in one or several of those techniques that you get on well with, you're golden. This will most likely be the most efficient time-wise, but to a certain degree most things help, so start looking up directories of practitioners or local support group.
Take care everyone.
Agreed. There have been entire days where I've found myself distracted from completing otherwise pressing deadlines.
What I've found is that the activity I do first when I start my 'working day' dictates what I do. So, if I show up at work and open Hacker News or Tweetdeck, there's a not-so-insignificant chance that I'll find myself distracted one way or another for the rest of the day. However, if I stick to a set schedule, there's a good chance that I have a productive day.
What worries me is that these distractions build on one another. So, if I start on Hacker News, and stay off of it for the rest of the day, I can still find myself spending a good chunk of time going through unimportant emails or browsing various news feeds.
Do you think this is mediated by your mental state, instead of directly causal?
I noticed this for myself: I was recently diagnosed with a CFS-like issue and a combination of drugs and identifying food triggers has made a huge difference in my level of mental energy.
I still monitor and manage it day-to-day, and I noticed that when my inflammation is up, I am a complete sucker for YouTube videos and mindlessly rescrolling through Twitter. It's been really valuable to be able to reframe the problem as downstream of something more manageable.
It’s causal. I’ve found that my productivity level is relatively constant when I maintain a routine. The quality of my work may change depending on other factors, but I still make meaningful progress.
However, if I break my routine by checking social media early on in the day, there’s a good chance that my productivity will subsequently go down.
I haven’t found anything to suggest that I am more or less likely to do this when I am, for instance, not feeling well. One caveat. I don’t have to deal with anything you have to deal with, so I can’t make an apples to apples comparison.
Sure of course, I'm quite clear on what was going on in my case, but I was wondering how broad the dynamic might be. Thanks for your thoughts!
I don't have this experience on HN really. I suspect I'm closer to the average age here. There is the occasional poor opinion but it usually gets downvoted pretty hard. Even people that I disagree with I learn a lot from. Today in this thread I learned about how classic Christianity thought about doubt for example. Of course a lot of people are anonymous here (including me) so people are much more bold with their opinions than they would be in person.
Not discounting your experience, but to me I have a very different experience on HN than I do Reddit.
Not sure how it became this way but perhaps it’s as simple as what you say:
> People sound like I did 10-15 years ago when I lacked the life experience
They’re kids.
Or perhaps it’s more sinister and coordinated. Either way, the political component of Reddit has made me abandon it. It’s unfortunate because I used to enjoy niche subs in the same way you would any other niche forum.
- Authoritarian
- Intolerant
- Pro censorship
- Naive
- Bigotry
- More emotional than logical
Advocates for sharp increases in federal-level government power and authority at the cost of individual liberties and freedoms.
Don't take me wrong here: I don't pretend that I have all the answers, that people left of center are always wrong, etc etc. I'm just describing the reddit vibe and why it's not for me.
When I'm browsing /r/pics I don't see "seize the means of production at any cost!" for example.
These days "far left", in my opinion, seems to be levied at people who want to tax the ten or so ultra billionaires in the US, protect transgender rights, have universal health care etc.
I was pretty left wing until the whole AOC "scarcity is a lie" wing of the party started taking over all online conversation. I'm sure the same applies to conservatives and Boebert/Greene nutjobs.
I'm sure whether you see Reddit as left or right is mostly colored by the comments and posts that stick out to you, and those are probably the ones you find crazy or distasteful.
Also good to keep in mind that the US core Democratic party platform is only able to purport positions that have a reasonable chance of winning over some of the moderate right wing in the country. They're constrained by whatever the moderate right thinks (for better or worse)
I think like a lot of people I'm moving more towards the center from the left as I get older and I find this is a point of contention with me and people on reddit. It's not only that though, it's also things like people being dogmatic about particular programming languages. I used to do that too but now I tend to see the world in grayscale. There are positives and negatives about pretty much everything.
Regardless, I think this is mostly an age thing since people remind me so much of younger self. I don't think they're even wrong necessarily but I did find myself practicing "Duty Calls" quite often: https://xkcd.com/386/
I used to think people who banned politics from the dinner table were being closed minded, but I get it now, they're fucking bored of the topic, and it creates tensions that the topic is underserved of. It's the same discussion over and over again.
I can comment a bit about how this is achieved, and it is “achieved” because it’s worked for/not organic.
It starts with the mods being overwhelmingly far-left, from the mainstream subs to even obscure radio subs. People who post leftist #CurrentThing will almost never be banned, and people who inevitably reply will face immediate bans.
“So what? I just won’t comment” you might think, but most are unaware bans also shadowban your voting power. You’ll see the numbers change from your votes but no one else will.
This has the effect of shifting what’s “popular” in a given sub over time, further reinforcing the narrative. Lots of people go with the flow/assume what appears popular is correct, so the effects of silencing one side reach far beyond those who are banned.
When I was in my teens, I would tell engine builders on a car enthusiast forum that they're wrong about how a specific part goes together, because I'd seen one on google images and was pretty sure I knew better. I have grown of course, and whilst I know more about engines now, what I've truly learned is that someone who has actually done the thing probably knows how it really it is. People often base opinions on how they think things should be, when life is rarely so perfect.
The majority of comments I encounter on Reddit are jokes that are at least mildly amusing, and some of them are hilarious. If I had to describe Reddit comments with one word, I’d say funny, not stupid.
But those funny comments are often themselves memes, repeated in reply in similar contexts.
Reddit has become one big circle jerk to my eyes. It's why I'm on HN, because I'm addicted but hate the community on Reddit.
Yeah, but they’re still funny. Better that than hate speech.
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1. I’m aware of ScreenTime, but it’s too easily overridden.
I can turn it off whenever I want with one commandline, but it’s enough to keep me from falling into the rabbit hole accidentally
I bought it when it was a 1 time $20 purchase. You can define what times you want to block (Monday - Friday from 9am-5pm, for example). You can also lock preferences for when the Focus is active so you can’t change it. There’s also options for adding breaks.
It’s worked well for me. I know a little about myself and I need something like this to force me from being distracted. Whenever I find a new site, I add it to the list of blocked sites.
You can also block apps, or whitelist sites so everything except a few sites is blocked.
But holy crap, those nuggets are buried among the ravings of the absolute stupidest people in the world. It feels poisonous to my epistemology, but the good stuff is _so_ valuable.
I suppose the solution is to try to pick topics that nobody cares about? This was tough when Covid was an informational lifeline, but maybe I can just change my interests from economics to... Quantum physics or something.
Or simply set aside a sacred time block where you'll do nothing but think about what you will do for the day.
Meditation lets you clear your mind of anxiety, at least for a moment (and I find this moment is extended until you can become much less anxious all the time). It lets you get face to face with anxiety and understand why you're anxious. Or why you're avoiding something (like doing chores, your work or your homework), and then you can work to address those whys -- it could be moving to a different job or simply joyfully accepting your situation. I recommend the Zen tradition simply because it's the one I'm most familiar with.
Here are some suggestions for a meditation routine: (not exactly Zen meditation I believe, I've modified it a little)
(1) Start by breathing and focus on your breath;
(2) Scan your body and see if there's anything different or painful or uncomfortable; (I mean you whole body! every muscle that you know of, if you can) also take the opportunity to relax every muscle; be aware of your environment.
(3) After you're relaxed, spend some time clearing your mind. If anything comes to mind, "archive it", like saving it to disk and freeing your RAM. Try to make your mind a peaceful, clean slate, like a still water lake.
(4) Process whatever you're feeling uncomfortable about -- camly invite and embrace your fears and anxieties, understand where they come from, let them be felt, and then you can think clearly how to address them, without anxiety, fear or suffering.
(5) (Optional) Reflect on what you've accomplished and what you need to accomplish in the near term. How do those relate to the world and the most social good.
(6) Come out of meditation, slowly. Take a deep breath and resume your day.
During this, sometimes I keep my eyes closed, half closed, or fully open (but not wandering, concentrated in a single point). This requires a large amount of concentration, and I believe you will improve your overall ability to focus with this practice. Feel free to ask questions and add suggestions :)
edit: Another important teaching I got from (secular) Buddhism is to be realistic, attuned to reality (rationalism is a great resource as well). That includes the realism of your goals. Having unrealistic goals can make you really anxious and get in your way of doing anything at all. That doesn't mean you can improve; but for example tiny bits of realistic progress can be wonders for getting a project done, compared to unrealistic expectations of being active 100% of the time. Binges and distractions come when the reality of your limited stamina or simply rate of thinking clashes with your unrealistic expectations. Relaxing, resting, can be a healthy and necessary part of your routine, without unnecessary self-hatred and suffering.
You went online to do something specific: play, research something or whatever else and you were not distracted by 500 services fighting for your attention. It was a much healthier way of consuming.
edited: grammar