How to stop being “terminally online”
nights.bearblog.dev
nights.bearblog.dev
It seems if I ever call out a loved one, whether my brother or wife or friend, for being on their phone too much, they immediately get defensive and argue they were just doing some one task. Even if this was initiated after them being zoned out for an hour or longer. And I've done the same when reading something super interesting and getting lost in time.
Honestly, it doesn't seem much different than how addicts act in an intervention. We need to realize that this is an addiction, label and treat it appropriately.
My wife finally relented when our kid asked me to do something while I was working because 'mom is too busy with Facebook again.' I think that really hurt her feelings, even if she never admitted as much.
I’m super happy though as the kids stayed with me :)
When we watch movies, it's me watching it and her scrolling. When we're in the car listening to music, it's just me listening to music and her scrolling. I'm starting to struggle initiating conversations because she's simply not paying attention. Whenever we're out, half her time is spent through the lense of her phone so she can take photos for her story.
She refuses to admit its a problem, disregards any argument I put forward about how it's disrupting her life, and when I really sit down with her and tell her how it makes me feels, she attacks me about the time I spend at my laptop (which I track meticulously and know its at most an hour outside of work, so she is simply using it as a defense).
I've dated girls with drug addictions before, and it was easier than this because they at least admitted it was a problem. I feel like I can't even initiate the first step with her. It's crushing, because besides this issue, she's pretty much perfect.
He's in his late 70's and a year ago bought himself an iPhone. He now spends ~4 hours a day reading a tabloid newspaper app, which has endless content. His attention span has fallen noticeably and he can't keep up with conversations that happen in the same room while he's "scrolling".
When I visit he's on his phone, and we go out for a walk (in the beautiful countryside around us) he stops and disengages when his app sends him the latest notification about what's happened on "love island", or some other nonsense. When I leave he's on his phone.
I tried to talk to him about it, and about how it's particularly effecting my mother, who I can see is lonely and lost a person she could talk to, important at their time of life. He just gets defensive and angry, which leads no-where.
Will he spend the most of the rest of his life looking at a screen?
Edit: wording of final sentence.
And even more, I wonder if it can be cured. I think it ties into how socially isolated men are, especially old men. Once you retire and your work social network is gone, their only social ties are online. They need to identify with a community, and I guess there is something appealing to being in a conspiracy in-group. It's just impossible to pull them out, because you have to replace that group with something else. And there's just nothing there for them.
Unfortunately this is not an age thing. Youngsters just have the tendency to embrace different manias (e.g. woke movement).
Conspiratorial thinking for the hard left is nothing close to what it is like for the alt-right. They are basically not similar at all. The alt-right is about Q, saying Trump lost a rigged election, or thinking moderates are grooming children and molesting kids. What is the equivalence with the hard left?
The black and white thinking is also super simplistic. How do moderates not have black and white thinking in comparison to the extremes? IE a moderate would say don’t vote or spend time on any one but the two main party candidates in the US. In other countries, they’d say focus on who has a proper chance of being elected. Black and white thinking and self fulfilling.
> The fact that you don’t think they’re equal is just because you have more sympathy towards one end of the spectrum over the other.
Or maybe I know they aren’t equal because they aren’t. Perhaps it says more about you and only you, that you jump to such an assumption and conclusion without knowing me.
I think Asians are considered privileged (so almost as bad as whites), and there was something wrong with Israel, too.
> saying Trump lost a rigged election
Some people on the left said similar things when Trump won the 2016 election.
Why would the left be the ones that put Asians on a pedestal? Fox, and alt right places put Asians in America on a pedestal enough already. It’s a regular thing when shitting on black people or brown migrants need to be kicked down by the [hard] right. I’d be curious of even minimal widespread hard left caring of Asians in a specific way.
Also, “almost as bad as whites”? Are you saying the hard left finds white people to be [really] bad? That’s something I specifically called out as an incorrect thing. It is a random talking point that to stir things up. I wish people wouldn’t take bullshit peddled seriously. Knowledge of hard left principles and people would show this is wrong.
Finally, some people everywhere of any kind are always saying something. A small portion of hard left people saying X is rigged is not comparable to the significant chunk of the moderate and extreme right doing the same.
———
I hope I have been able to keep the record straight that the extreme left isn’t the same as the extreme right and most assumptions or accusations of what the hard left is, have not and are not correct.
We don't talk much, not because we fight but because he's always too busy with his phone when I visit him :(
I'm not in the tabloid market segment, and perhaps I had the insight to self-diagnose? Did dewclin Senior do much before the iPhone arrived?
Perspective: I remember that Uncle Dave spent most of his (long) retirement watching sport on the telly back in the 1970s/80s. Any chance of sparking an outside interest?
It’s easier with hard drugs cause society, government, and even business mostly agrees it’s likely bad for you (except alcohol, that one still gets a free pass).
For me, I still try to remind her to be in the moment. She’ll ask to watch a show or movie and within 5 minutes her brain has pulled up her phone to read Reddit. I pause the show and then I’ll ask, “do you want to stop watching?”
She’ll reluctantly put her phone away (sometimes I have to wait a whole minute for her to actually put it down) and then I’ll resume the show on the TV.
The addiction is very very real and their diminishing attention span shows in their behaviour in other ways as well.
That said, I am a happily married old fart so it's only natural to not get some aspects of modern life.
Might be unethical or it might help her to get away from it?
Perhaps talk to a therapist about how to approach it?
The Power of Habit (the book) helped me identify my bad habits the moment they triggered.
Also, what's fascinating is that addictions seem to bundle together. If I get off the sauce, start working out, etc, it becomes immediately easier to ignore the phone, social media, and other reflexive behavior, like snacking for no reason.
One way I think about it: Marvin Minsky long ago wrote a book called Society of Mind, looking at human cognition as a series of semi-independent non-conscious agents. If I feel bad long enough, there's a collection of feel-better-in-the-short-term agents that work well together: mindless snacking, doomscrolling, playing video games, binge watching, overeating etc. Basically anything that helps me avoid being present in feeling bad. Even if in the long term they make me feel worse.
But there's a competing set of agents, the ones that mean regular exercise and eating healthily and good sleep and low stress levels. That set not only works well when I'm feeling good, but they're what helps keep me feeling good in the long term.
Either set can achieve a stable equilibrium, but the two sets aren't really compatible.
Not sure if that makes any sense, but that's one way I think about it.
That sent shivers down my spine, wow.
Zuck, Zynga, all of them can be launched into deep space for all I care.
> have you ever used/applied "internet slang" (cringe, based, cuck, chad) in/to real-life situations?
I take slight issue with this one. To me, there is no difference between “internet slang” and just “slang”. The internet is ubiquitous and the language we use online and offline is largely the same now.
Didn’t always be this way. I still remember the first time I heard a friend say “epic fail” in really life circa 2005 or so, and it was like some sort of glass wall had been broken between our real lives and our internet lives. But that wall is long gone, and I think that’s probably okay.
I remember before I deleted my FB account (I've since created a new one), my buddy said to me that I'd be ok, just that I might be strongly disconnected from culture—not necessarily to tell me to not do it, but to be aware of the potential ramifications.
You have to question what "culture" are you missing on.
I'm still on Facebook and let me tell you, you're not missing much in the culture department.
guy above you might have deleted his fb account in the early 2000s. right now, the culture isn't at fb, it's at places like reddit and 4chan.
The fact that people in 2022 describe 4chan as having any kind of effect on our culture should send shivers down our collective spines.
/pol/ is 4chan, 4chan is /pol/
4chan has always been the undercurrent of digital culture. It's just way closer to the surface now. And contrary to popular belief, the entirety of 4chan isn't some den of degenerates and racists. People end up focusing on /b/ and /pol/, when the entire reason they were created was to quarantine that sort of discussion from infecting the rest of the boards. /fit/, /sci/, /mu/ etc are about as toxic as any subreddit.
2)/pol/ overruns and sets the tone for the rest of the boards on 4chan IME. That's why I personally stopped reading there.
It would be a loss if your cohort planned/converse using those methods of communication, and you valued doing things with that cohort.
Perhaps some wanted that, maybe even I did—conflicted in wanting freedom from it and also fearing the loss of it.
How many times have I walked by a table in a cafe to overhear someone complaining that it's impossible to be taken seriously unless you adopt extremeist left or right schools of thought?
How many times have I witnessed adherents dismissing moderates or centrists? Accusing them of helping the "enemy"? What about people who think for themselves and have concluded something out of the mainstream? Throwing in some other unrelated political cause and accusing anyone who doesn't agree to be wrong?
It's disgusting, and those communities should be ashamed of themselves
I'm assuming, of course, that GP is a decent person and independent thinker, as those types tend to get railroaded in this glorious new dawn of political groupthink
[citation needed]
I don't see any reason to think that "groupthink", aka societal or subcultural values and beliefs, is at a notably higher level than much of history. In the west, look at the long dominance of the Catholic Church. Even after the rise of the Protestants, it was often more a set of competing orthodoxies, such that large groups were eager to cross oceans to get away from oppression. And when those people got to the US, quite a lot of them were eager to become the oppressors. Looks at the predominance of blue laws across the US. Look at who got tarred and feathered. Who got lynched. Who dealt with segregation and Jim Crow. Look at the Red Scare, the socially narrow dominance of mass media, or how eager and how violent the forces of conformity were in the 1950s.
I think today people are generally freer that at any point. But two big things have changed. One, the rise of the internet means the one-way, conformist channels of mass media have given way to everybody talking to everybody. And two, cultural power is no longer concentrated in a narrow slice of society, such that people previously unheard are now having some things to say.
I get why some people see that as "political groupthink". When you're in a dominant group, you're not used to getting challenged. But personally, I find it bracing, causing me to rethink a lot of things I took as givens because that's what the people around me believed. The death of old paradigms is always uncomfortable, but personally I'd much rather live in this era of ferment than in one where everybody believes the same comfortable old certainties.
The parts that were my opinions ("I think", "I see", etc) were clearly cited to me. But a fair bit of what I wrote was pointers to things people can look up. If there's something apparently factual that you're having trouble looking up, let me know and I'm glad to give you a pointer. Because I'm happy to give citations when people ask for them.
The reason I put a "citation needed" in was that was phrased as an objective claim, not a personal opinion. An objective claim I believe to be false. (And which I'll note that the author didn't give any further data on despite me asking.)
Now, we have... this: an endless cacophony of unqualified and undeserving voices spouting off whatever they want, for every purpose other than advancing productive debate. Where all get to be heard regardless of merit, yet original ideas suppressed because of pedantry (like "citation needed") and not having the backing of the melange of different social issues and media idols that we suffer under today. I don't think the political climate has been so stifling since at least McCarthyism, and for this I blame Twitter and social media.
I don't understand how you think such flowery, subjective language constitutes an objective statement of reality; all of my input into this matter is pretty clearly stated as opinion and observations outlined serve to reinforce it.
Besides, sitting there banging out "Citation Needed" like this was fucking Wikipedia is a crass, petulant move, and wholly inappropriate for something as counterfactual as a comment board. You can save the nitpicking for r/AskHistorians, where the rules clearly require it.
Depends on when you grew up, but assuming the 1985 is your birth year, then political polarization has been asymmetrically increasing since well before you were born. Take a look at the DW-NOMINATE data for the US House: https://xkcd.com/1127/large/
This asymmetric polarization mirrors doctrinal polarization among white US evangelicals, who have, for example, gone from having a plurality of views on abortion to treating it as an absolute doctrinal litmus test: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/02/18/the-bib...
I can believe that for you personally 9/11 felt unifying, but that wasn't the case for a lot of people. Not just including the Sikhs and Muslims lynched, of course, or all the people who saw that and got nervous. But also the notable percentage of Americans opposed to the Iraq war, which Bush began beating the drums for just months after 9/11.
I also believe that you perceived American culture as more unified then. But based on what? Twitter didn't launch until 2006, and didn't really take off until 2010. If a bunch of people were upset about something, how would you have known? Especially if they were in some group that didn't get a lot of mass media attention, you wouldn't have. It's not that edgy comedians were any less awful then. It's that the people they were being shitty about generally didn't get the chance to express their feelings on it. I think the problem you're seeing is not differing views, but people with those different views finally getting their say.
> political climate has been so stifling since at least McCarthyism
Oh? Why don't you break that down for me with some examples. Go through the major harms of the Red Scare era and then some examples of people similarly harmed today. I think that's wrong, but I'm happy to learn something.
> was fucking Wikipedia is a crass, petulant move, and wholly inappropriate for something as counterfactual
I don't think you quite understand what counterfactual means, but I think take your point. Your notion seems to be that this is a fact-free zone, and that it's shockingly rude to ask if their claims have any basis in fact. I obviously think that's ridiculous. If you want to go entirely unchallenged, maybe get a talk radio show or something. But as long as I've been here, asking for evidence has been a popular activity.
I don't have data for you, just my perceptions and opinions. There are too many structural problems with the way political data is collected in this country (starting with the wording on questions in political surveys, and ending far beyond redistricting shenanigans). Given how deceptive and manipulative most election campaigns are, and how third parties are disproportionately disadvantaged financially, I don't think that looking at the proportion of left/right seats in congress is a good proxy for political polarization.
What I do see as a proxy is the behavior of those around me, and then trying to extrapolate that to reflect a larger population. I live in one of many pockets of conservativism in a very liberal state, and I am judging on the tone and tenor of political conversations and how freely friendly, amicable political debate flows among social groups in a fairly politically diverse area. Again, this is highly subjective for many different reasons, and I can say that I used to travel around a lot and have rubbed shoulders with many different social groups and castes in this society, and so I feel that I am at least somewhat qualified to extrapolate here.
And that observation is that political discussion is getting narrower, more pointed, and more focused on nationally-popular memes/issues. 12 years ago I sat in a meeting of one of the local tea-party chapters, and it was mostly older folks rabblerousing over local stuff. There wasn't much in the way of conspiracy theories, there wasn't a whole bunch of liberal shit-talking, just a bunch of people bitching about this-or-that with the local schooldistrict. When they happened to pick on my own high school, I knew that much of what they were saying was factually false, and I was able to state to the crowd why, and that was that. (There was some grumbling but the conversation turned elsewhere.) There were both left- and right-leaning folks in my friend group, and there was a quiet understanding to not get into political debates, and people weren't on-edge about it so if something was said, it didn't blow up.
We didn't have too many local crazies flying massive American flags on their trucks, with their cheap shots at trolling regular folks -- but now we do; there are places I can go where I can see them on a regular and predictable basis.
Nowadays I stay out of political shit, people are way too toxic, obsessive, and focusing on the same dozen or so things that everyone else is talking about. What would this tea party meeting have looked like today?
I have a different social group now; one that I like far more but we are very left-leaning, and increasingly (and troublingly) so. There is a much higher proportion of "polsplaining" (like mansplaining, but politicos talking down to people that offend them), many more suggestions that people self-evaluate (and insinuations that they are bad for towing a particular line), and hot political buzzwords are on people's tongues (and used as scapegoats) far more often than I can recall. I find myself hesitating to argue some points as I don't really want to die on any of these hills.
When the Roe v Wade decision dropped I broke my rule and attended a local rally, as I was pissed (much like everyone else). But at that rally someone got up on the podium and actively denounced people that not only just opposed abortion or womens health issues, but also anyone that opposed Black Lives Matter, anyone that opposed reparations, anyone that opposed ACAB; they kept calling for a unified front to address all of these issues as one.
I don't recall overhearing anyone complaining about feeling unable to speak up, but in the last year or two it has occurred multiple times at my usual haunts.
But once again this is all subjective experience of one person, albeit someone who tries to be at least somewhat perceptive and thoughtful about it. I have an axe to grind, so I am very quick to denounce certain cohorts -- hence my original comment here -- but again this is all subjective and nowhere have I explicitly asserted anything as fact. If you take the omission of certain wording as an attempt at factuality, you should consider that certain kinds of language training encourage writing in a way that minimizes some phrasing as a matter of style, and that it is very common in many places where people write professionally.
I think its wonderful that so many oppressed groups are given opportunities at the podium, but the problem is that many of these oppressed groups are oppressed for good reason (like white supremacists), and there needs to be some sort of filter that keeps them sidelined. Unfortunately I don't see how to achieve that without some sort of orthodoxy, and right now the people that are trying to write that are fucking crazy.
What we do online effects our every day life even when we are offline.
I thought that was very sane thinking
Besides that, the recognition that your school or office is a bubble universe in certain ways sounds like an important one. You sound like you're attempting to refute the idea but I think you're making a good point. Someone who implicitly thought their highschool was the whole universe would be in bad shape when they graduated.
Those Reddit threads make for good entertainment today, however fake they probably usually are. But for better or worse, some day, I suspect it's going to flip around.
2 years ago, I was walking through Target and an advertisement came across the store loudspeakers touting "Mom hacks." Nerd culture has spread.
I would posit that the Instagram "mom hack" "lifehack" crowd don't associate the word with computer programming or pwning boxen.
1. how many people don’t “hang out” in social media culture, and only circulate on there with family and peers using everyday idioms and emoji/abbreviation; if they use social media at all,
2. how many different, disjoint online cultures there are. Many things widely circulated on reddit and adjacent communities may never surface on some FB mom’s group
People maintain much more different lives from each other than you seem to assume, even among those that who are “terminally online” or that “hang out on social media”
You just had to have played that game, and the game isn't obscure. Call of Duty is one of the largest franchises on earth and I would consider it akin to something like a Marvel movie in popularity. If someone referenced a meme from a marvel movie, I wouldn't describe it as obscure.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who have used the "press F" meme without knowing the original context too.
In short - I think it's not what's said, as much as how it's said.
No one is entitled to 100% free speech protection on a moderated platform one joins by choice. If you're concerned about saying what you want without the risk of being banned, consider hosting your own forum where you have all the control. Only then you will be free.
Some yes, otherwise you'd be surprised... In many circles and communities it's not the same at all - and even developments the 'social media'-inmates take for well known, are not a thing discussed at all...
It's like the "silent majority" of working programmers, who don't give a duck about HN, Rust, the latest trends in web and backend, and so on...
IMO, Internet slang is accurate as it transcends geography while there is some locality to slangs and vernacular.
The whole experience was a wake-up call, not just in terms of being arrested but being without a computer or any way to get online for a couple of weeks.
It really made me realize how 'addicted' I was to the internet, and going cold turkey was horrible, time slowed down and I was sure I was missing out on everything.
But I read so much more and all the days seemed longer (time dragged so much) and then when I finally got back online I hadn't missed sh*t.
You're reading all the time on the internet, it's literally the foundational enabling skill of it.
I find it very weird when people say the benefit of being offline is they "read more".
That said, I have some low quality conversations with friends in real life also. However that is a different dynamic because conversation does not have to perfect and periods of silence while, for example, hiking with friends is also good.
I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but our civilization is changing: more automation, less work required from a large fraction of the population. We need to get “being a human” in this new world right. Going on a Cal Newport style digital diet is just a part of a strategy for life.
(Your assessment is an unfair and inaccurate overgeneralization. One can use the internet to read books, blogs, articles, courses, etc, but of course you know this.)
The experience is not the same as sitting down and reading a 300 page book cover to cover which is also the product of an author sitting down and spending months or even years writing it. Of course that experience is definitely possible on the Internet - ebooks/PDF. But someone "reading" social media is not the same as really reading.
Reading online doesn't feel like reading. Most offline material is long form and has a clear purpose, otherwise it wouldn't continue existing. When you read it you are more likely to come away fulfilled, with new thoughts and ideas to process. You can't usually say the same coming away from most social network type interactions on the internet - You might have satiated your FOMO temporarily, but otherwise will likely feel empty. Obviously it's not all like that, there exists long form content on the web, but that's not really what we are talking about.
I don't see anywhere where contempt is shown, in fact quite the opposite. The post is written in a very empathetic way in my opinion, and I think displays a good level of insight into, and understanding of, the attractiveness of things that can do harm.
I'd challenge you to entertain the idea that this post has some good advice, and follow some of it. I have no data, but I expect you'll be happier as a result.
> I'd challenge you to entertain the idea that this post has some good advice, and follow some of it. I have no data, but I expect you'll be happier as a result.
Personally, I don't fit any of the implied criteria for "terminal onlineness," so your challenge isn't possible. You don't merely lack data, you lack a valid reason for assuming this advice applies to me or any other person whose habits you know nothing about. I recommend you entertain the idea that neither righteousness in your conviction nor confidence in your words transform your assumptions and personal experiences into broadly applicable maxims.
Even if this advice addresses problems you, personally, struggle with, that's not necessarily true for everybody. I know brilliant, happy, well-adjusted people, like my wife, who engage in behavior this author deems undesirable. It's just not that cut and dried. Perhaps the author's conclusions suffer from sampling bias? Regardless, I will still skip the rest of their blog entries.
In contrast, I'd be interested in reading something on the same topic that was presented in a subjective way, where the author isn't hiding their personal relationship to the topic. For example, "I was terminally online and here's why and how I changed". Or "my friend was terminally online and I like that they stopped". Or even "here's why I am frustrated dealing with terminally online people".
But for me, the pseudo-expert advice from somebody with no obvious expertise and no claim of it leaves me cold. I don't understand why I should care what they think, or why I should trust them.
My Twitter feed is a collection of funniest, most deranged takes on any subject. People IRL have no chance to compete, no one can outdo the best two seconds of 800 people.
Same with HN. Conversations like these are rarely happening offline.
And then there are communities I sunk into. Private forums I have been a member of for nearly a decade. I know the in-jokes, we follow the stories of more interesting (chaotic) posters, there's even some real emotional investment.
All of that reachable fully asynchronously. Went to the gym alone? Read between the sets. Waiting for something? It's right there on your phone. Sadly, also, someone being boring... well, better stuff is in your pocket.
May I suggest that you might be looking in the wrong places offline?
HN-style discussions are a staple of lunchtime banter at any number of tech firms. Likewise you can find similar discussions at any number of universities, or on the tech conference circuit. Not to mention your local nerd-leaning special-interest communities (be it tabletop, D&D, hacker space, BDSM, etc).
The internet makes it really easy to find a community of folks who share similar interests, all without leaving your house. But unless you live in the middle of nowhere, one can generally find such a community IRL
The place that did that was a bad work environment; shockingly enough the "working" lunches weren't the worst habit they had either.
I think one mistake of perspective we have, when terminally-online and evaluating the alternative, is looking for other sources of passive constant stimulation as a substitute for social media feeds. Not bombarding your senses is part of the point. Daydreaming and thinking doesn't have to be boring, even just enjoying a moment of quiet.
Saying that, I think most people lack social validation in everyday life and try to satisfy it virtually. Having interesting conversation is separate from that, but also a consideration. We seem to be disappointed by our offline social lives but don't do a whole lot to rectify. That would require change (scary) and effort.
- 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep" by Jonathan Crary
I changed to a white list to try and solve this problem, but then I just keep finding little bits of websites i need access to, to do what I want, the minute I disable something or find a solution, I just get around it somehow or need to turn it off and end up at square one.
I feel I tap into the " what is your life philosophy? what do you believe in? do the communities you browse online reflect this in some way? did you learn about these from people online?" this quite a lot.
The internet for me, is not about watching cute cat videos, but trying to learn more about life, philosophy, how to be a better human, productivity porn etc, maybe it's a big insecurity of mine, but I think about this stuff all the time and the internet is a unending resource for all this stuff, I figure that a great resource in solving and thinking about all these things, must be other people and there own thoughts and experiences that I can learn from and then integrate with my own thinking and the internet gives me unending access to that, or at least in theory it does.
So i'm reading through Hacking News, Reddit, blogs, watching youtube videos, podcasts etc, hoping to find those things and then I end up with a bunch of notes and documents etc, but it all kinda becomes overwhelming anyway, either from the content I am currently consuming or even all the thoughts and ideas I wrote down previous because I thought they where somehow useful.
I honestly don't know what to do about this anymore. I'm trying to figure out a system for living more simply and internet consumption is part of it, but also there is the bigger issue that i mentioned which I think is the primary driver of that internet consumption.
For me the best life hack to avoid wasting even more time is to rely on my Apple Watch to get phone calls and text messages, and leave my iPhone at home. This is sort of like using an old flip-phone because it takes accessing social media off the table.
My phone isn't actually the big distraction point for me, I don't have social media apps and barely use it, it's more my iMac and sometimes my iPad too.
I guess I need to find something that works for me, i'm yet to figure that out yet though.
You’re the only really technical person in the house, you’re the only one who can block you from doing things you know are bad for you, so you set up the software to do it, and then you have your spouse or a really good friend change the password. Now you can’t get back in without talking to them first.
IMO The internet is not usually a good way to learn this stuff. These are big life concepts that require deep focus and patience. The internet rewards the opposite of that.
The Big Concepts require both study and application. If you’re mostly spending time in the study phase, it’s not working.
I'm starting to just give up on it to be honest and consider more just trying to avoid this kind of information and figure out what works for me myself, my ultimate thought is to replace information consumption of this kinda thing with just more deep reflection and a bigger trial and error process.
I mean who are the people producing this content that I think will help me anyway? There just people, so I feel like I can figure it out myself maybe.
Even when cleaning i'm listening to these kinda podcasts etc, i don't know how much I get from it, I think I almost get more value from not listening to anything, as it allows my own thoughts to process.
I don't know. I feel kinda stuck with it all and this generally leads to two things, 1) Trying to find / consume more information 2) Overthinking that leads me to feeling more stuck and back to 1, i'm not sure quite what to do / where to turn, but maybe that is the issue, the whole 'where to turn' thought, is that same idea, wanting to figure out what information source will somehow make things different.
I know that for me, I once tried to optimizing just about everything in my life. That led me to try to learn how to do everything better and better. At one point I realized that I was overthinking and optimizing everything, even which path I would take to walk to the bus to save some time. The stress of attaining perfection just got to be too much, so I just worked on letting go of trying to improve everything.
So, maybe work on just being okay with things how they are and not striving too much to be even better. A lot of this requires being aware of your thoughts and moods so you can change in the moment. I've found meditation helps a lot there.
Also lack of scheduling, so every time I have to click to start, I often lose so much time in the morning just browsing before I get to work etc.
I think I've forgotten how I lived without a constant stream of information. I'm seriously tempted to get a dumb phone to remove temptation to browse when I have a few minutes to spare.
The stupid thing is for all my reading, I don't feel any wiser or even knowledgeable. At the same time I think I'm less able to engage in normal conversation.
Never to walk down the street looking at my phone. Eyes on the road. If I need to look at my phone, I stop somewhere out of the way of foot traffic.
All notifications are silent except calls or text messages from specific people. Calls from people I don't know and text messages get only a slow blinking light. Social media get no notifications.
When I am with someone or a group in person, phone goes away.
If I wouldn't allow someone to interrupt a conversation, the phone doesn't either. I won't answer it if someone is talking to me, especially something important. When there's a pause in the conversation, I'll ask politely to check to see who called.
Finally, and this might be the biggest, I am constantly listening to audiobooks and podcasts. It scratches that itch of needing constant stimulation, but I can still be aware of everything around me.
I don’t have a firebox, but I suppose it kept the recycling man in business.
I hide recommended content, unsubscribe from everything, unfollow everything, and generally have a "don't call me, I'll call you" approach to information.
I went as far as removing pagination buttons on websites I tend to browse too much.
I also use Pocket to save more interesting articles. Combined with a "things I don't understand" to-do list, I spend more time reading about practical things instead of just browsing. I don't regret that sort of reading.
Also, having a library card at your local library gets you books to read, both physical books and eBooks through the Libby book reading app.
Anyway, congratulations on recognizing the problem: you are ahead of the game compared to most of my friends in real life and family.
> The stupid thing is for all my reading, I don't feel any wiser or even knowledgeable. At the same time I think I'm less able to engage in normal conversation.
100% if I spent all the time I spend online reading actual books, I'd be much better off.
Up until few month ago my phone did not even have data plan. I ordered it now but purely for business needs. I use my phone strictly for phone calls and as GPS (I have offline maps). I use another phone to control gizmos like drone. For everything else I use PC and since I spend enough time doing various physical activities I consider my life balanced.
I believe the author (and many other people giving this advice) are naive to the difference between “free time with mental energy to burn” — where a hobby is definitely the right answer — and “free time where you’ve already used all your mental energy for the day.”
50 years ago, someone who was mentally drained by evening-time would be “vegetating in front of the TV.” Today they’re “doomscrolling.” In both cases it’s not that they’re addicted to a certain behavior, but rather that this behavior is one of the only pastimes available to them in their current environmental context that can be executed when fully cognitively fatigued, and yet not tired enough to sleep.
I say “in their current environmental context” because living in certain places (e.g. most cities, suburbs) limits your options. In more rural areas, you can just go out for a long walk in nature, or spontaneously go fishing. In communities that are safe, walkable, and socially well-connected, you can go to a {cafe, park, mall, bar, community centre, church, …} and run into friends rather than strangers, and just hang out shooting the breeze until you get tired. But many people alive today are in environments where they have none of those options. They have to come up with a braindead pastime that can be done both alone and indoors. We didn’t evolve to do well in this situation! Anything you pick is going to end up not being very good for you!
(Before anyone suggests “reading” — you’re underestimating the level of cognitive fatigue many people reach. If you have enough mental energy at the end of the day to concentrate on reading a good book and getting the full effect of it — as opposed to having a good book just slide past you, or reading “junk food” op-ed blogposts — that’s great for you, but that amount of mental energy would also be sufficient to cook or practice an instrument. Reading — the kind that actually enriches your mind — is a hobby, not a pastime!)
I’ve come to the conclusion the best thing to do when I’m tired is get off the phone and go to sleep. Sometimes I don’t realize how tired I am until I realize I’m spending more and more time on the phone. A sleep tracker was really helpful for identifying this but I don’t have one anymore.
Maybe the fear of such "falling off the wagon" is part of what keeps us on the internet. We don't want to lose the world's thread of conversation, because in the end one way or another it will affect us anyway. It's like not coming to the forum where future laws are decided.
Besides that, I agree completely. Twitter is a sort of highly competitive petri dish in which only the most infectious viruses can survive, with "viruses" being 160 character pieces of text. These messages do not need to be true or actually informative to survive and spread.
Mental health. Cardiovascular health. Health of interpersonal relationships. Work life balance.
I sincerely think we are at an equivalent situation as the tobacco industry in the 1970s. The decisions we make now will affect the lives of generations to come.
Cal Newport's site has a Ledger of Harms [1] at the Center for Humane Technology, and I wrote what I hope is an accessible and lightly challenging overview of the problem of technology overuse in Digital Vegan [2].
It’s been a few weeks since I had to put it down for another book, but here is my main takeaway (so far) - it’s all true, but in my opinion it comes across with very strong views and some extreme options as something to hand non-technical friends. It’s also relatively expensive to obtain in the US.
But thank you for your contribution to the discussion on this topic. I think you’re probably closer to where we should end up, but I don’t see a path to get there.
Sorry, I'm not following. Could you elaborate on the connection between Cal Newport and the site you linked to?
On the other hand, understanding that you are addicted, and why, are the first steps towards individuals feeling empowered to quit. Which, in many, if not almost all, cases - they absolutely are able to do. And it certainly improves their odds if they have a network of supportive friends, family, and the like.
For someone who isn't an addict, taking a non judgemental and understanding approach to get the addict to ask him or herself those questions or set themselves on the path to recovery may be a way to meaningfully help them. But it can only really work if they're already open and receptive to that. And that depends, to a great extent, on what your relationship is with them and how much they trust you.
* Learning some things 1st hand has a high chance of being fatal
* We cannot afford to live all possible lives but we do have to be able to understand each other and each other's motives to be able to get along - this means we have to imagine what it's like to be someone else.
The internet is just the latest way to communicate and learn things from/about other people.
I also don't think the internet itself—we didn't see this problem with blogs/wikipedia/trashy chain emails from your uncle.
It's the feeds. Because everything is tuned for engagement, if there's a type of content that's going to mess with your head in particular, the algorithm will find it and hammer you with it.
It's also possible that we're letting advertising algorithms push us around but one is not free from advertising in the unvirtual world either. There's a continual mental attack from every source that tells us we don't have "good enough" lives and must buy something or other to make them better.
Some people will read the whole series when a new book comes out, sometimes in a single session. If there's something they really don't like in the last book, they might be bitter and angry.
Internet-enabled pocket computers are vastly different than silent, dark, large, heavy, un-update-able, one-way, single-topic (more-or-less) sources of entertainment/distraction.
There is gluttony and then, there is gluttony with junk foods.
Books and Wikipedia addiction isn't quite like one more fetch of the Instagram feed. Update my story. See such and such latest story.
Both are forms of escapes but one leads to a dangerous generation of waste.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era...
I select "not interested/don't recommend channel" on all "news" type stuff on YouTube, and it's a much better experience. I learn more about all kinda stuff that I'm interested in. It took a few weeks for it all to filter out, but YouTube has a bunch of interesting stuff that's not news/current events related.
Food is, of course, a quintessential necessity, and someone who overeats or has an eating disorder needs to come to terms with temperance, moderation, and balance of lifestyle, rather than quit eating altogether.
15 years ago, it was realistic to hang up the modem, unplug the computer, get face out of screen, and get some fresh air for long stretches of time. But my reality today is that I use a device online to manage my household and do ordinary, everyday tasks, including working for my employer is 100% online. Implicit in this article is the fact that the Internet is no longer something to be avoided or removed from our lives; the article simply suggests that we can use it differently, improving our attitudes and our approach.
So rather than a "kick the habit" strategy, we typically need to devise time-management techniques and ways to form better habits around good, productive use of our devices, while balancing that with actual needs to unplug and take a walk in the fresh air.
That may mean that I don't obsessively check bank balances and twiddle my bill payments 3 times a day, 7 days a week. And it means that I'm not allowing every email and SMS to distract me from a task. And perhaps channels about home meal preparation and gentleman's grooming should be dominating my YouTube suggestions, above SNL and Avril Lavigne tracks.
I also need to cope with being triggered. If I have an anxiety attack or fit of rage over someone who's Wrong on the Internet, I am guaranteed to suffer insomnia and all the rest. And so we need the skillsets to short-circuit and defuse those situations, and sometimes the situation is avoidable and sometimes we need to find a way to push through it without losing our heads.
This blogger offers 15 pragmatic, common-sense strategies for coping. And it can get better. Do not believe that you can escape the Internet by avoiding it, nor can you escape real life by going online. Develop good hygiene, good habits, be productive, and learn to cope when things inevitably get difficult.
But why aren’t there more articles like this targeting teens, e.g. when — or before — the problem starts?
Language like this:
> irony, post-irony, meta-irony, and whatever-irony are the lingua franca of the terminally online.
makes it clear that this is not written with a general audience in mind.
Are there articles that cover really good points like this in a way that really sinks in for a younger audience, to help them understand the risks and how to recognize the problem before it becomes a deep rooted and/or normalized addiction?
As a parent of teens, it would be nice to find and share articles with them that are written in a way that really sinks in while not coming across as preachy/judgmental.
I think articles like the one here need to exist to get communities like this one talking about how to expand the conversation.
The trouble is, what is the right way to reach someone in their teens, at a time in their life when they’re probably far less worried about the “health” aspects of time online than they are about fitting in with their peers?
I’ve wondered if the only way is to embrace the social media platforms people find themselves consumed with - to subtly deliver/grow the message that they should unplug.
I’d say this conversation should start in schools, but am not optimistic that this would actually pan out.
YMMV but my trick for Facebook was a hard commit to "I'm going to take 2 weeks off". Cold Turkey with a boundary. I think I check it once for five minutes every month or two now.
HN is trickier because I don't have to login first to see it. When I start to think Im on it too much, I delete it from my password manager and don't supply an email. (Sorry, I know this is annoying to them what run this site)
Another useful thing is to generally keep a "don't respond to first level replies" policy. Keeps you in discussions but out of knee-jerk responses. Might seem rude but it keeps you sane.
With other sites like HN, I have short-term success with going cold turkey for a specific time-frame (e.g. a week). I can stick with that, and my use afterward is more moderate but eventually I come back to over-use.
I had massive issue with that, I always tried going cold turkey. Then I just stared to count hours, set high - but still - limits. And over time I found I feel that I don't have to, even if I'm withing the limits - I felt no need.
I have grown severely paranoid about what has happened around social media. I watched.. a conversation unfold in 2012. I thought at the time that I needed to de-escalate it. It kept escalating as I kept looking for a way to talk to the people involved. And, to my own perception, it grew into and took over the entire 'national conversation' that was happening here in the years that followed. I now have panic attacks whenever I see the words / phrases / jargon / ideas I watched form 'here'. I often have severe enough psychological issues that I just disconnect from everything and repeat the question "who are you people" to myself. Especially as my suspicions of what it was that had spread from that day in 2012 grew to... everything people say/think/do.
I'm not sure what way I could move forward. I've been trying, with minimal success, to write down in long form what I saw happen. I've largely lost the emotional wherewithal for it. I tried reaching out to old friends for advice, which shows I've lost contact with everyone enough that I can't. I was terminally online before this all happened, and don't really know how to meet people away from here. Or if I would find the same things, and shut down again. I do know that my paranoia extends to people I see in real life. The past 1 year has pushed me into a constant fear of everyone, online and off.
Not sure if getting away from the internet would help now.
In terms of what it is I've grown paranoid about, it's mostly subjectively / paranoid-ly that I said 'everything'. Resolving that was a major goal I had for trying to write personal journals about this.
The other side of that is the more personal: I've lost basically all of my friends, and struggle to talk to my parents. While my emotional issues are getting in the way of trying to write out what I've grown fearful of, I also don't really know how to get in contact with anyone. That was where this post sounded relevant to me.
Moving on from a rank paranoia via internet might require first rebuilding my personal / social life somewhat, so I have something to fall back on. And doing so is blocked by that very paranoia and emotional issues. Catch-22. Being terminally online as I am, may be a help or a hindrance to trying to escape that.
"Why not use our social media webshit instead? We are different, I promise".
I'd become really invested in online communities on Twitter, Reddit and Discord. Like others participating, I was becoming increasingly radicalised to the dominant group opinions there, and my world view was being gradually reshaped by every interaction with these echo chambers. I was repeating what I read there to friends and family offline, much to their bemusement. It was addictive and consuming!
My trigger point for escaping this was unintentional. These happened to be a series of 'left-wing' online spaces (though what I'm about to write could occur anywhere really), and I was becoming increasingly internally critical of some of the dogma. After a certain incident on Reddit, where a moderator of a high-profile subreddit was banned site-wide for linking to a critical article about a Reddit admin, I posed a question on the Discord: what if this admin wasn't really what they say they are?
The reaction was swift and fierce - people I'd talked nicely and comradely with for months and years lining up to shout down my question, calling it offensive, sending me insults, calling me a bigot. I was then banned from the server.
This surprised and upset me to begin with, but then I started questioning myself and my motivations. Why was I so bothered about this? Why had I invested so much of my time and energy into these communities? Why would simply asking a question cause such a calamity? Did any of this really matter? Was engaging with any of this having a positive effect on anyone, including myself?
Over time, this led to two major changes in how I approached using the internet. Firstly, attempting to broaden my mind to consider other views and opinions, avoiding dogma and narrow thinking (this is still in progress!). Secondly, not being as tied to accounts and identities online - I deleted or deactivated all my social media accounts, and now just create throwaways whenever I get a desire to comment. This helps me feel that I can walk away whenever I want to or need to.
That said, I've found I still can't give up entirely on consuming social media, it's too addictive. But I hope this is a step in the right direction.
I hope my sharing of these insights provides some value to others who may be experiencing similar.
For me I dedicate a two hour window of time to being online, and typically come out of it enriched, not craving for more. It's a learning experience 99% of the time.
> Extremely online (often capitalized[1]), also known as terminally online[2] or chronically online,[3] is a phrase referring to someone closely engaged with Internet culture.[1] People said to be extremely online often believe that online posts are very important.[4][5] Events and phenomena can themselves be extremely online;[4] while often used as a descriptive term, the phenomenon of extreme onlineness has been described as "both a reformation of the delivery of ideas – shared through words and videos and memes and GIFs and copypasta – and the ideas themselves".[5] It has been said that "'online' can be thought of as a way of doing things, not the place they are done".[4]
> While the term was in use as early as 2014, it gained use over the latter half of the 2010s in conjunction with the increasing prevalence and notability of Internet phenomena in all areas of life.[1] Extremely online people, according to The Daily Dot, are interested in topics "no normal, healthy person could possibly care about",[1] and have been analogized to "pop culture fandoms, just without the pop".[1] Extremely online phenomena such as fan culture and reaction GIFs have been described as "swallowing democracy" by bloggers such as Amanda Hess in The New York Times;[6] who claimed that a "great convergence between politics and culture, values and aesthetics, citizenship and commercialism" had become "a dominant mode of experiencing politics".[6] Vulture (formerly the pop culture section of New York magazine, now a stand-alone website) has a section for articles tagged "extremely online".[7]
My hobbies involve a computer and the people I enjoy interacting with are online, not on a meetup site or at work.
The important thing is being able to self-reflect properly on it, and not delude oneself. I can still put my phone away to have dinner with family or some other outing easily, as a point of trying to be focused on whatever it is I'm doing.
Being stuck in a "compulsion loop" online is not healthy for your mind. It doesn't matter if it is Twitter, TikTok or even Hacker News. What I'm seeing online now and those around me. Online behaviours that take the form of addictions are not healthy and should not be a part of a healthy persons lifestyle. And I wish that it would become a trend.
Sometimes being "terminally online" is better than the alternative until life circumstances change.
Then I remember I was about as online as you could be in the late 90s.
Sometimes, or even lots of times, people are just trying to get by.
The preference for "real life" I mention is a question of whether individuals engage with reality in non-digital form on a regular basis, or if they hide from it.
And I actually tried to go back to my mum phone this summer, she had an old unused Samsung Galaxy J3 (Android 5).
I only installed Telegram and Whatsapp.
It's totally doable but it's really slow. The positive thing is that most of the apps stopped working for Android 5. So even if I wanted to install them I cannot.
Unfortunately nobody uses in my area nothing else but discord, telegram and whatsapp so I feel I don't want to be completely disconnected that way.
I was thinking that, well, I could actually just wait to be in front of a laptop also for telegram and whatsapp but it seemed too much.
Certain communities on Facebook are quite interesting but my main feed is filled with so much viral junk that I end up scrolling through crap for hours a week.. Once I start, it consumes me for a while. Kind of sad really, I would rather spend time doing other relaxing things offline instead.
Just came back from a 2 hour walk outside with my son through our local park and farm, usually I'd of checked Facebook at least twice, I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more without “having to check” this or that.
I miss the simple days of just having forums and IM.
1 https://web.archive.org/web/20190327161227/http://www.lolcat...
Not that you should overly become self-aware, but when you are aware of something you are or do without knowing previously, you can change your life in a positive way.
Some of my favorite reads this year about the topic of the internet are:
Four arguments for the elimination of television
and
Amusing ourselves to death
These are great books to help you introspect on your technology habits.
In a lot of senses, introspection and thinking hurts; growing hurts, regrets hurt, dreams unfulfilled hurt, guilt hurts, what could’ve been hurt, and the future that awaits you, unless you change something, hurts.
And distraction numbs the pain. Numbs the thoughts. I’ll take an uneducated guess that a big chunk of cases of anxiety and depression are not caused by chemical imbalances, and are simply people’s brains telling them “you’re doing something wrong, correct course! Correct course! Correct course!”. Kind of like the aircraft TCAS/GPWS “Terrain. Pull. Up. Pull. Up. Terrain. Terrain. Terrain”
I guess that most people, both around me and online, never ask themselves those questions, and simply go through life as it happens. For some, that doesn’t go so bad.
Almost never does a successful, happy, fulfilled, healthy life come from a lack of introspection and suffering. “I carry the wounds from the battles I avoided”.
I've seen people educated in the field saying the same thing. Depression is nature's way to prod you to make a change in your life. Something isn't working. So you're probably not wrong, at least for some fraction of cases.
I think there are many lessons in stoicism, taoism, and buddhism that have helped me understand these concepts on an individual level. Here's an excerpt from a book I'm writing about this topic:
- Through Stoicism I found a sense of moderation, seeing the world for what it is and what it is not, and focusing on what I can control and having contempt for that which I cannot.
- Through Taoism I had learned to let softness overcome the hard, appreciate my uselessness, and to flow along when appropriate.
- Through Buddhism I had learned that my attachment would lead to suffering, appreciating the present moment, and how a trained mind leads to true happiness.
I believe that pain doesn't leave the body until it's done teaching you. I know it's not the most sensitive thing to say, but after a complete year of crippling depression, I felt it lift once I understood what it was trying to teach me.
Those 3 points about those disciplines are really interesting, I’m going to have to read more about them.
>I believe that pain doesn’t leave the body until it’s done teaching you.
I’ve slowly been coming to the same conclusion over the last month, indeed.
Regarding use of internet slang, there's the fact that the Covid lockdowns helped accelerate a pretty massive shift in how we interact even with people we can meet in-person. Unless you're living with someone, the bulk of interactions with them are probably going to be online. Then, since you're online you end up using internet slang, which gradually bleeds into regular speech. There is nothing wrong with this.
There's also the issue that you're going to want to share your hobbies with people, which is hard without the internet if your hobby is kind of niche. Most of my hobbies are very niche, I have only ever known 1 person irl and 3 people online who had a similar enough set of hobbies. Even programming and working with electronics, which started as a hobby for me when I was 13-14, only developed because of the ability to find like-minded people online, away from my irl 'friend' group who only saw it as something to make fun of me for and parents who didn't believe in anything but schoolwork and perfect grades.
Overall, this post seems to be based on the assumption that people who are terminally online haven't put thought into their lives or that it's wrong to be okay with it. I can still unplug when having an interaction irl which I think is sufficiently important like with family (although somewhat ironically, the only way for me to interact with my family over the past 2 years was over the internet), but simultaneously, most of the people I enjoy talking to and can deeply relate to are only accessible online.
I get the impression that to the author, "terminally online" is equivalent to being someone who spends all their time getting into heated political arguments on Reddit and Twitter. While I did go through that phase too, I realized how unhappy it was making me and the solution wasn't disconnecting but rather identifying sources of bad content and disengaging. I got rid of all the default subs on Reddit, sticking only to ones related to my hobbies and being very selective about following more subs, same with Twitter. I also got much more selective about replying to things (eg I'll usually just ignore replies to my posts which I feel might devolve into an argument). The result was that the content that made me "ragescroll" went away and I got happier.
There’s some spare bandwidth for habitually chatting, but not much.
If anything, there’s a better chance of finding this online vs irl.
Publicly declaring abstention from social media demonstrates the abstainer's privilege and taste more than it does any higher purpose. The point is to be intentional about our attention, and decide what to focus on and how to do it. This requires discipline and planning.Discussions of the problems with social media must question the driving neoliberal economics, consumerism and the Free Market Fairy. Suggesting individuals should choose to abstain comes from a point of view where individual choice is elevated to moral dogma.
Social media profits from human fallibility. Maintaining those profits under the pressures of capitalism requires the business to make people feel worse, and then offering them a palliative. In some respects, it's like the indulgences of the Catholic church in Martin Luther's time. The supposed values of social media in connecting and informing people, building communities, providing a medium of self-expression are warped by profit incentives. They no longer help. Instead, they exacerbate negativity. Social media have a vested interest in making things worse, or at less making them seem so.
being stuck with your thoughts, past regrets and future worries.
Any ideas as to how to deal with it?