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Comment by cphoover | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid I am addicted to short-form video and wish I could go back to spending more of my free-time reading books.

I suggest blocking all platforms that provide short-form video and firmly deciding not to consume such content for a set period of time (e.g., 2 weeks). For me, this is the only way to stop once I fall back into the habit.

Doing this enabled me to spend more time developing and pursuing my own ideas, which is invigorating.

Or even just setting up a timer, I've set up a 20 min timer for myself recently, once it's done I do stick to it, I did get to do some things I've been pushing away, I still get some value out of these but... I get a lot more by not spending an hour on them.

It's funny, I signed up for tiktok when I was curious about the hype, explored a bit for the science / history / educational content I normally watch on youtube and found there was almost nothing, and what little there was was of much lower quality.

I deleted my account after about 15m of looking, and hilariously enough, a tiktok researcher reached out, and actually paid me ~ $200 to understand why I bounced off the platform.

Short form video is disturbingly addictive.

I generally refuse to engage with it. A while back I started scrolling some YouTube shorts. Hours later my brain felt fried and… it was hours later? It was kind of shocking and frightening. It felt like I had no memory of the past three hours, like it was a true state of hypnosis.

Have you also run into the attention deficit effect of all these short forms of media? Overriding my brain's desire to put a book down after a couple pages is certainly not my favorite pastime.

Part of that might be your book choice.

I found that when trying to rekindle my reading habit, book choice had a big effect. Some books are like vegetables you know you should eat but really don't want to and other books are junk food. Empty calories that you love.

Pick from the latter pile at first and rebuild the muscle.

Nope that's not it for me, but appreciate the discussion!

Yep. When I need to get back into reading again I usually start with some easy to read pulp.

My go-to is “trash” military sci-fi. Usually from authors who pump out a book or two a year in the genre.

Honor Harrington (Honorverse) is my general go-to, although these days I’m caught up so I’ve started a few others like it.

The Brick has been helping me with phone overuse. getbrick.com (I have no association with the company)

On your laptop, route those sites to localhost.

very cool, probably gonna get one, ty!

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