Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

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> mental health is as far away from the Internet as possible.

I don't think it's the internet, exactly. But anywhere on the internet where your attention has been commoditized.

Basically - if you aren't paying to use the app (and it's not decent open source software), get that fucking cancer out of your device.

Just the basics: messages, calls, GPS, maps, shared connection, photos/videos

those make one awesome, compelling device. Don't ruin it by letting fucking scum companies siphon all your energy and attention away for their own profit (and they are actively trying - complete with statistics and graphs, OKRs & key performance indicators... all painting a picture about how much they can fuck you by stealing all your attention and time)

Turning off notifications - all notifications - helps quite a bit. It's a lot easier to ignore attention-grabbing apps when they can't put their attention grabbing alerts in front of you.

I have an iPad explicitly configured this way, and it's incredibly relaxing to use it.

That does sound pleasant. I wish I could push notifications into a todo list with 1 button / click. I am usually not bothered or distracted by seeing a notification, but having to choose to delete it or act on it immediately is what gets me. I tend to delete everything and keep the interesting ones in the back of my mind for later ("I should check out my gf's new IG post")

I like notifications, and I try to respond to them intentionally. I open apps intentionally (this was easy enough to learn) and close apps intentionally (this was hard to learn). So I am pretty good about actually going into the app to do what I intended to do in response to the notification, and then closing the app. I can reassess afterwards if I want to spend more time in the app and open it back up, but again I create an intention before opening it that has a stopping point.

Intention is the difference between enjoying some funny short videos while sitting in a waiting room, and losing 1-2 hours of your life a day to doomscrolling. And if I could have a filtered list of notifications in a todo somewhere, I can set aside time to update myself on whats new that I care about but arent super important

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