Digitopia is ruining our lives
digitopia.io
digitopia.io
Yes, I've become aware that I am quite disconnected from "living in the moment" in a way that I was not when I was younger, a teenager.
I had begun to think that it was a result of getting older, taking on more responsibility (or just being more responsible, ha ha).
Losing my minimum wage job when I was in my teens, early 20's was not a huge deal. No mortgage but I did have rent — but if I couldn't make that there was probably a friend's mom's basement.
No kids then. No concerns about my health then. Friends to hang out with, commiserate with, bounce your problems off of.
It may still be "just growing up" but I suspect the degree to which I have supplanted the "running around" I did when I was young with browsing may be a big factor.
The author suggest meditation, walking, showering. I've showered daily since I was a teenager, started running daily (now walking) a decade ago.
Like flossing, meditation has come and gone with me. Perhaps I should do it regularly (and floss regularly).
Road trips seem to help me get back in touch with The Moment. No distractions...
Last Fall a high school friend and I rode the "Katy Trail" on our bikes for 6 days. Hauled camping gear, tents, stoves, water, food... It sucked right up until the moment we finished — and now I can't wait to do it again.
Reflecting on it, I think it recharged my soul and brought me back into The Moment for almost a week stretch.
I don't even need to ride a trail for days, just spending more than an hour on the bike outside is plenty to return me to the 'right' state.
The only bit of advice I can give is spend more time with actual people in real life. That doesn’t necessarily mean close friends, just anyone you can connect with. Trade stories, ideas, experiences and importantly time with people. Be spontaneous and do things well outside your comfort zone.
Importantly though, turning off notifications and choosing when you interact with technology, not the other way round, is important.
What I see is a lot of people saying on the one hand “I want my privacy and to be left alone” then hiring a vendor that is motivated to take your data and bug the shit out of you because it’s cheaper and subsidised by this poor behaviour. On top of that they then install apps which damage multiply that.
Incidentally on notifications all my kit is set on do not disturb all the time apart from alarms when I need to get up.
A subset of people seem to share this sentiment. From their perspective, the rest of us are somehow just doing it wrong when it comes to being online. What they never seem to have, however, is a clear understanding of what it's like to be on the other side.
A little vignette: I've been entirely off of social media for about 10 years, as in no accounts. Very recently, however, a friend of mine went on a trip and said the best way to follow along was on Instagram. So, I created an account and followed just that person and one other close friend, who is a fan of posting pics. Straight away, I was bombarded with an endless repeat of advertisements in the feed for some kind of colon cleansing technique. I'm unaware of any problems with my colon, so just ignore it, right? It's not that easy. Now, I have ideas about colon difficulties implanted in my brain. And it's now crossed your mind, too.
Some major forms of digital media insert themselves between me and my friends, rather than simply facilitating communication. In doing so, they hijack the power of human relationships.
It bends people. I'm not sure how else to say it. From where I sit, progress likely means giving up on maximalist capitalism and developing online stuff that strikes a balance between everyone needing to make a living and everyone needing to be cared for as humans.
It’s a recent category of analysis but subsequent studies suggest it’s real.[2]
Knowing how the sausage is made lends to awareness this stuff isn’t divine mandate. Disabuses people of pseudo religious belief in politically contrived economics, etc. If you consider religion is not the content of a holy book but a state of belief in socialized babbles essentialness to existence, American Civic Life looks a whole lot like a religion.
[1] https://theconversation.com/inoculation-theory-using-misinfo...
I, as many of you, work in tech. And the last 3 years were mentally horrible. The constant information bombardment, working remotely and rarely leaving the apartment, isolation, and so on and so forth, have left me scarred.
If anyone feels the same way, I hope that the pieces I'm shipping are helpful as I truly want to help a million people on overcoming the 21st century pandemic.
For those who are curious, I describe Digitopia as: an idealized but ultimately isolating and detached state induced by excessive digital interaction.
I have only been diagnosed after 30+ years of guilt and shame related to procrastination and other behaviors associated with ADHD.
Please recognize some of your readers actually suffer from this.
My relationship with Slack kind of summarizes things neatly. I enjoy using Slack and it is far and away my preferred method of communication with work colleagues and even work friends. At the same time, seeing slack messages or even the number of slack messages waiting for me is anxiety inducing. There is a false sense of urgency. Zoom is worse, on basically all counts. But Slack is a great idea and tool that is somehow awful for my mental health. I don't know what the solution is. I guess unplug and take a walk. No one has ever complained that I don't reply to a Slack message fast enough.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_addiction_disorder
I've set up different system accounts for different tasks, then I configured each account with its own privoxy proxy that blocks websites that are not related to that task. The proxies are there basically as a reminder, since a lot of these tabs tend to open without thinking of it.
So for example, on my work account, I can't use social media and news; on my social media account, I can't access github, access dashboards, or check my mail. Phone's on the work privoxy too.
The idea being that distracted context-switching, e.g. opening a hacker news tab any time there's a moment's pause in what you're doing, a moment of frustration, of boredom, any negative motion; that this is a major part of the problem.
This doesn't prevent me from checking up on social media (I'm doing it right now!), but it does mean I can't do so while supposedly working. To use social media, I need to log off the work account, closing anything I'm doing, and log into a different user. That's a lot of friction, and as a result, is something I do maybe once or twice a day for ten to fiteen minutes. I usually don't really find much to engage with and then log off.
I do find myself needing to make active choices a lot more. Like if I find I don't know what to do next, I need to decide on something. I can't just default to grabbing my phone and start cycling through the usual tabs. It's taken a while to get used to reading these moments as cues for getting off my ass and doing something, but it's also incredibly impactful.
The critical part of the regimen is that it does not have many of the drawbacks you get with going offline completely (or using a dumbphone), where you can't park your car because you need an app for that, or people try to get ahold of you and messenger isn't working on your brick.
With that being said, to be a bit hypocritical, and with the disclaimer that this is non-exhaustive and different things work for different people, the protocol that has worked for me is as follows:
Delete all social media
Meditate hour a day
Gym (weights, cardio) 5x a week
Good sleep
Proper diet and supplementation
Have job that pays good enough and be good at it
Live well below my means and take on no debt
I think once you remove basically everything, and you’ve listened and quieted all of your thoughts and sophisticated ape urges, you come to understand things truthfully, and wisdom + stoicism + peace naturally ensues.
Reverse this, turn the water on, let it warm up, then enter the shower.
Not being able to concentrate, escapism (fixation on superficial things/people, buying things online, imagining some perfect life you deserve to be living), sleep/restfulness disturbance (do you stay up to all hours and then frustratingly wake up early anyway? how about get in a solid 8 hours but wake up feeling like dogshit?)
That's not tech overdose, that's depression.
An example: when you are crossing the street in front of cars that are stopped at a red or stop sign, YOU have to watch the cars even though it’s technically entirely their responsibility to follow the traffic signs, be watchful for pedestrians, etc. If they were being perfectly responsible, you could just trust your walk sign and walk in front of cars without worrying about them. But that’s not wise. You have to watch the cars anyway in case one of the drivers screws up. If you don’t watch them, you’re putting your life in other people’s hands.
It’s not easy to control other people. You can’t control the government or large corporations. What you can do is take charge of the things you can control, and that’s where you can make by far the biggest impact.
Screens are ubiquitous, cheap and effective forms of distraction that generally do a good job guiding you from your problems and making those underlying problems worse.
Tackling the underlying issues should be the focus and the “digital” aspect of it should be relegated to being symptomatic and not a root cause. I say this s as someone who wrote “ditching my dumbphone” blog posts a decade ago.
"Digital" and "Utopia" also combine to make "Digitopia". (Maybe my most HN comment yet.)
dystopia is a relatively recent derivative of utopia.
An individual can suffer in the middle of an utopia.
Alienation means the breakdown of social ties and the fragmentation of identity. Durkheim published theories on this stuff well over 100 years ago. He also studied suicide.
I agree that we're probably seeing a continuation of trends that began long ago and that are tied in with capitalism, urbanization, and the decline of religion.
I mean this not to imply a structural sense of our society, only the shock that his prediction is insanely accurate given the time and technology separating us.
In some cultures it is nornal and expected to shower not just daily, but multiple times a day. Three or four being normal during summer.
30-60 minutes to take a shower?!
But speaking of this specific line from the text, “frequency” would be “daily”, and the amount of time probably “duration” so this could perhaps be more exactly expressed as:
> Frequency and duration: 30-70 minutes a day
(Yes. Opposite order so not quite perfect either, heh.)