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Comment by Avicebron | Hacker News Reader

Haven't we trained everyone to context switch between screens at all times?

I suspect that has something to do with it.

I know formerly smart people, the same people are phone addicts. They’re not kids.

It definitely has something to do with it. I’m not convinced the best way to discuss it is long form article. Nor do I know how to fix it, no majority group is going to give up their phones.

It's an attention issue. We have these phones with constant dopamine hits. We were getting it a little bit on the web before the rise of smartphones, but it's just out of control now. We have 100 apps constantly vying for our attention and giving us endless things to scroll through.

The only thing that fixes it is to put the phone down. Do something else. Play video games. Read books. Go outside. Anything to stay away from the phone (but not TV). These phones are as bad as drugs.

I've been pushing to read a lot more books this year and it helps a lot.

Agreed with all of the above, except the "100s of apps."

Turning notifications off of most apps solves a bunch of little problems.

The big problems need to be forcibly named at every chance. In no particular order, youtube, tiktok, insta, facebook (or meta?), are all guilty of making the world a worse place. Reddit and twitter's endless scroll is bad, too, but it seems their content got so bad the addiction is less strong there, like poop-flavored cigarettes.

I enjoy doing home-lab project work at home because I have to plan things out and concentrate on a single problem for a contiguous string of time, and at the end I feel a sense of achievement in reaching, or getting closer to, the goal.

At work I spend maybe five minutes on something before being asked a question about something else, and it doesn't feel as if I really achieve much at all.

I don't get paid for the first one and do get paid for the second one, but I think for the quality of work (as a direct result of the continuity of attention) it should be the other way round.

I'm refreshing a language on Duolingo and I'm careful not to blast through the exercises without actively processing them. You can treat it as mindless puzzle solving without internalizing anything. I suspect many reading averse digital natives do something similar when they can't consume video or audio.

I highly recommend comprehensible input if you're refreshing a language. Free via youtube.

I guess there are lots of ways to do it, making it less user friendly? ^a ^a, or ^a n or ^a p or ^a <space>, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

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