Boredom is a good thing for the brain.
And, honestly, I must be of the older generation because I find nothing very interesting on my phone. It takes pictures and gives me directions. I'm a lap-topper.
It contains the entire Internet? If you see me on my phone at a bus stop, I’m probably reading a book.
In fact, all the stuff we’ve designed to capture attention is almost the exact opposite of a good use of the internet.
I find it very difficult to queue up good content to read or listen to on a daily basis. And I try. Imagine all the people without the time to discover enough good content.
Good newspapers usually allow you to do that.
There's practically an undoable number of hours of free courses on Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy, and others. Thousands of hours of interesting material on youtube.
How does the ratio of actually good to not really in the real world compare?
It seems pretty amazing that anyone, anywhere can watch a physics lecture from the multiple top professors at any time.
I have a list of links to read for when I have time to do so. But yeah, if I don’t have anything to do, I prefer just doing nothing than seeking engagement. Social media are a mind killer.
> I find it very difficult to queue up good content to read or listen to on a daily basis.
When I come across something that looks interesting, I add it to the list and stuff accumulates until I go through each link and read the page, usually during my 30 minutes commute. (or not, sometimes it is not as interesting as I thought it would be). For me it works quite well.
Last night I was working through some shader tutorials, for instance, albeit on my laptop (I prefer laptop to phone when possible).
I also playtest one of my games (current one has a mobile version), or brainstorm and take notes for my game designs, or read up on something I want to do with one of my games, or go through my github issues list and sometimes even look at my code repos while I'm killing time while out and about (I mostly don't use my phone when I'm not out, I'll just use my laptop).
I try to remember I have a Kindle app with lots of informative books to read but I do forget about a little too often.
When I was younger, I would program text-based games all the time on my TI graphing calculator. I would even bring that instead of my Game Boy to my grandparents sometimes, because I just wanted to code more of my games.
I do think that capability is lacking on phones. It's technically possible, but the environment (at least on iPhone) is so sandboxed it's difficult to do effectively, or at least it was the last time I tried. Anything you're making on the device directly does not have access to the same capabilities as what you make from a laptop or desktop, and that's a shame.
I'd argue you're holding it wrong. The repository of all human knowledge absolutely does contain numerous "learn about the world" courses in all shapes and forms. HN, arXiv, Wikipedia, parts of YouTube, and dedicated learning platforms abound and each probably has enough content for a lifetime of learning. I agree it's not designed to make this easy, but it's also not particularly hard. Hit "random article" a few times on Wikipedia and you're off to the races.
And it's only explicit knowledge, not tacit knowledge. Nobody learns skills from browsing the Internet.
I've been testing https://brilliant.org/ and like it so far. Its scope is limited to STEM topics, but the thing I like about it is you can set courses to bite sized daily chunks as small as 5 minutes.
Rinse and repeat for anything you're vaguely interested in.
The problem is way too many interesting things to see, not too few.
what do we do now, ask other users for their input? make a poll?
i don't know why HN has this habit of using anecdotes as absolute counter-arguments, makes for uninteresting discussion in my opinion
and the subtext is always the same "A did/didn't happen to me, so then it follows A does/doesn't happen to anyone"
I was challenging your assertion, not making a counter-assertion.
spending 2.5 months doomscrolling or browsing tiktok, on the other hand....
> I think the implication was that it didn't have to be on tiktok. it's a choice that people make. the phone doesn't force them. rejecting the phone entirely isn't some form of virtue or moral purity.
in this particular context "rejecting the phone" means "rejecting tiktok"
no one was concerned about the phone if the vast majority of users were reading books on it
If "the vast majority of users" could "reject the phone", then they could also "reject tiktok".
Social media can cause mental health issues, qnd can lead to addiction to it, but that doesn't mean that using it is a moral failing. And frankly, neither is becoming addicted to heroin a moral failing (though most people would consider it a personal failing since we would dislike being addicted to it), it's a healthcare issue not a morality issue. The only moral failing would be committing offences against other people because of the addiction, eg stealing from somebody to pay for the drugs.
that doesn't negate what I said at all, not striving to keep a healthy body and healthy mind, not working on developing yourself, on elevating yourself, not wanting to become better, IS a moral failing
and certain hedonistic activities, like the social media dopamine dispensers, although they do not hurt other people, do hurt the moral imperative of growing yourself as a person
Whoa. How is it any of your business how I live my life so long as I am not impacting you or society in any way? I'm 72 years old and I spend my time the way I want to spend my time. I don't exercise any longer. And that will almost certainly shorten how much longer I live. How is that any of your business?
I would rank self-actualization, personal growth, as the second rule behind the golden rule, and there are many schools of philosophy where that's the case: aristotelian ethics, kantian ethics, existentialism, etc.
Why should I (or anyone) care where you (or anyone) rank anything?
I'm pretty comfortable with my ranking of things. What someone else thinks about how I decide to live my life is pretty much at the bottom of my ranking board.
Because your actions will impact society. You might get healthcare, paid for by the rest of society, which may or may not be caused by you not exercising. Or it might be caused by you exercising.
The way people raise their kids affects society, or even simply their decision to have or not have a certain number of kids impacts society. Some personal actions can collectively impact society.
We could go on that merry-go-round forever. Just ridiculous.
I understand you may want boredom as a practice, but do you genuinely find the bus stop area more interesting?
you walk around with your laptop in your back pocket all the time like Eminem or something?
Even when you are just looking around IRL, one view will be more interesting than the other, right? But now that got you all doped up on "super interesting" through this teleportation device to all things interesting, everything around you look extremely boring in comparison.
As your adrenaline receptors come back to life you will find that everything around you is really actually quite interesting.
Nothing to do with adrenaline, addiction, doom-scrolling, dopamine or chemical receptors. Millions of people are surrounded by a wasteland of asphalt and machines going 60mph with nothing interesting within sight.
I was also homeless for five years and had to spend times in some of the worst places in the US.
You do not see it because you are desensitized.
You also know nothing about our relationship with phones and such. You just sound like somebody who has an ax to grind.
I am as much of a dopamine junkie as anyone here, but I am perfectly comfortable leaving my phone behind for long stretches and sometimes I’m just sitting at a public transit stop around ads and concrete. Unfortunately people watching, while romanticized as the ultimate fun activity by interesting indie folks in movies, does get old eventually.
Do you really think that's what was being suggested? I assumed they were merely suggesting to not reflexively reach for your phone any time you have a moment of downtime.
You're right though, that's likely what was meant, which I agree with. The hyperbole was unnecessary.
Maybe that is the purpose of these phones?
That is not even close to what I was speaking to. It is just part of the process of waking up and becoming unattached and less dependent and more aware of your surroundings and feeling the suffering so you create the will to change things.
> Instead we bicker about DEI and what genitals someone has under their clothes when they use certain restrooms instead of, you know, a voting and election process that is more representative and accountable.
All of this was brought to you by the internet by the people you complain about below.
> Until there is greater class consciousness and people have more emotional bandwidth to consider things outside what is immediately placed in front of them with instagram/tiktok/corporate news/advertising, I don't think it's going to change much.
Class consciousness starts off line, by helping the poor in your local area. Take a look at what the Black Panthers did and you will get an idea. If people are staring at TikTok it is highly unlikely that are running into this information.
https://rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/how-the-black-panthers-p...
Though commonly associated with the sensational, the Black Panthers conceived of and implemented a wide array of meaningful social programs. The Panthers started free breakfast for school children, with party members cooking every morning for the poor and undernourished kids in their communities. They established the Oakland Community School, which offered adult education and childcare, as well as free medical clinics staffed by well-regarded academic physicians who volunteered a portion of their time. Mary Bassett, former commissioner of health of the city of New York, writes that the Panthers initiated medical research into sickle cell anemia, which was largely ignored prior to their work. They provided plumbing, home maintenance, and even pest control services.
Unless there is already the seed of making change and recognizing what change needs to be made, the idle time isn't really going to help. I suffer plenty in life, I don't need to artificially increase that as some sort of motivation to vote differently or interact with my community differently.
> All of this was brought to you by the internet by the people you complain about below.
Disagreement on social issues has always existed and would also exist even without the internet. I'm not sure what your point is with this comment.
I agree local efforts are great and meaningful. But for large systemic change we need different voting habits.
I hear this adage repeated a lot, but is it true? A quick kagi finds me lots of news articles quoting neuro-scientists, but no actual studies I can see.
If it is, I assume like sleep or vegetables there's a certain amount you should have per day and a point of diminishing returns.
Pre Kindle I'd take around 15 lbs of books with me on trips.
There's a joke in knpins about reading the shampoo bottle on the John. I've done that
I've read the shampoo bottle way too many times.
I guess I sort of saw the social-media-in-your-pocket thing coming a long way before it did.
A very professional way of saying you were getting a lot of play? /j
It was actually incredible to get the visceral reminder of just how ingrained having my phone for distraction was to me. I didn't take any action but sometimes wonder if I should have.
*I had lent my phone to a friend, who was using it to communicate with the person who had found their phone and making recovery/transfer easier... classic?