If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?

Three novels in three months.

If someone used HN to find interesting articles, then spends 90% of their time reading the articles and only comes to the comments briefly to see that other people think, then it would be fair to call HN a news aggregator site for that person.

But realistically, for most people, it's the opposite - 90% of time chatting with people in the comments, with the actual articles (or even just their titles) mostly just used as conversation starters, with the conversation often veering into wildly different threads that barely relate to the original topic. That's social media.

Video Games > Social Media > YouTube > TV > Reading

I had to cut quite a few things out of my life before I defaulted to books, because all of the prior activities tapped into my brains inherent desire for stimulating, low effort consumption. Reading is quite often hard, boring, or difficult, but generally more rewarding in the end. I retain more useful information, explicitly because it is more difficult and my brain denotes it a higher reward value.

If your entertainment is a movie or a book, there's definite progress to it. You can finish a movie in one or two sitting, the book has a beginning and an end (unless it's by GRRM or Rothfuss...)

Even TV shows end, no matter what kind of reality dreck they are, giving you a natural point for slapping your knees, getting up and saying "yep, that's it" and moving on to something else.

Social media algorithm feeds just give you infinite amounts of content with no beginning, middle or end.

"Yet, I do not believe it is true that attention spans have changed significantly over the decades. People’s minds have always wandered. They have always struggled to focus. And most of them couldn’t bear to spend too much time with their own minds. The real world, outside the phone, is so glorified today. But consider this thing that happens in the real world. You’re at a party and someone comes up and says that inane but useful thing, “What’s up?” And even as you answer, he looks behind you for something more interesting, which is never there. This has happened for decades, and not just in conversations. In everything people did, they looked beyond to see if there was something more interesting, which they never found."

...

"I don’t say there is no substance to the lament about modern attention spans. The fact that human attention was always fragile does not diminish the fact that the modern world has created extraordinary tools to facilitate distraction. A distraction is a kind of boredom that looks like entertainment, which saves you momentarily from another kind of boredom. Today, a slab of metal and glass at nearly everyone’s disposal captures the wandering mind and carries it far away, to some limbo. You could be working and reach for your phone, or an icon on your laptop, and suddenly ten minutes of your life are gone just like that."

https://manujoseph.substack.com/p/the-world-is-wrong-about-y...

This seems to be a tug of war- that is- information vs distraction

I remember in the 1990s India it was quite common to view kids from homes that had TV/Cable TV as kids who were bad at academics, and distracted without focus.

OTOH, as time passed people realised those kids had better english speaking skills, vocabulary and general awareness of the world. So extreme focus didn't quite work out as well as people though it would.

In the modern context I know quite a few people with laser sharp productivity and get lots of work done. But here's what 'wasting' time on Twitter has led me down rabbit holes in the Stock market that has opened up newer earning opportunities. So its not as simple as saying social media is distracting.

Extreme focus does work when your work is individually measured and judged. And the pay off is immense. Other wise you are better off doing something to keep the wheels spinning while finding more things that can be rewarding.

Here's a solution that worked magic for me for controlling it: use adblock origin or another plugin to block the video thumbnails from loading on the landing page.

Ever since I've done this I've felt so much more in control of my youtube consumption.

I land on the homepage, I click on each individual subscription that has new content and decide whether I want to watch it now or later and typically that's it.

Sometimes I'll go, I wonder if someone has done an interesting piece on the latest F1 news and specifically search for that.

So I tend to cycle - a good novel, or two, followed by some time with everything fictional removed from my ereader.

This also depends on my personal and work life - fiction is usually much less effort than nonfiction, so when work or personal life gets busy, I find some good novels to enjoy, then when things calm down I'll go back to cycling between several nonfiction books.

Things don't always sync up perfectly of course - the trick is to avoid huge multi-book series, otherwise I'll end up reading them far into the time when I'd be better served by learning something new.

People are often surprised - "You're reading three books at once?! How do you keep track?". I normally point out that they're probably watching 5 different TV shows right now and they have no problem with that. It's not really different.

(* Less happy to say it's mostly because I've been cripplingly depressed but hey, reading is reading)

I literally don't out much [out of my house]. I would not, even if I had no MS and had no mobility issues.

I am being here, cozy, writing software. When I am not writing software, I just watch a movie, and then I write software again, and the cycle repeats.

It is bad for your health though, especially mine. We should at the very least do some exercises at home.

I feel like this is, at least for me, a time problem. If I write software, then I have to neglect reading books; if I read books, I have to neglect writing software. Doing both seems not possible for me, so I have to do this in bursts.

So my reading is in bursts too now, on a plane, on a train, on a bus, on a ferry... in the hospital... You get the gist, in places where I'll be stuck for some time and need more than the usual "HN bite" for a few minutes every hour. And I adjust my reading speed and choice of book so I can actually finish withing the allotted time or else risk forgetting everything by the time I next have a slot. I read Daniel Suarez' Delta-v in ~5-6h because that's how long I had on the 2-way ferry ride.

My challenge with books vs. social media is that social media is like fast food but a book is like a gourmet meal. I can't read a book a few minutes at a time while on the toilet, or in public transport. Last time I did that I ended up in the middle of nowhere, 15min after we left the city, where the train stopped for a planned workers strike. But I can post a comment on HN just fine in 3 minutes and be done with it. So if the choice is 3h locked in somewhere with nothing but my mobile I'll choose to read. If I am at home with 1000 options, almost anything else will necessarily win.

For example my SO spends hours on end on Facebook. Depending on whether you consider it social media I sometimes sink a lot of time (think hours) on YouTube. And that's time we're not spending on reading.

In light of this the question doesn't seem as twisted.

I really want to swap out the YouTube part of more programming, but I find that I need at least an hour or so of quiet time before my brain sort of switches mode and can start enjoying it, so it's harder to get started on and disturbances quickly snowballs into not getting anything done.

You /s, but when I quit the internet completely, I did become a voracious reader of books. I also spent hours practicing piano. And I went to bed on time.

Like you I also have diagnosed and untreated ADHD. But at this point it feels like it's a misdiagnosis and I'm simply incompatible with the internet.