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Comment by lardosaurusrex | Hacker News Reader

People often question me how I manage to focus for more than a few minutes and I'm always confused because back in the day I was constantly informed I didn't have any focus and needed to be treated (adhd).

I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored.

I think it's still an issue with people being addicted to phones because I'm sure the lack of daydreaming -- which studies have proven as beneficial and arguibly even a form of microsleep -- is likely causing a lot of the fatigue and inattention people feel; as in their brains are literally being deprived of a natural thing and so are exhausted because of it.

(as an aside: whew what a run-on sentence i have no intention of fixing)

My personal supposition with 0 proof is that the "gen-z stare" is the end-stage of this phenomenon where after being deprived of daydreaming for so long they are essentially "sleeping while standing up" as it were.

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There's only one important thing that I miss about smoking: A smoke break was an excuse that was tolerated by others, wherein I could go outside and just let my mind wander (daydream) with no particular goal for a short period of time.

Daydreaming should be perfectly acceptable either way, but people seem to think it's weird (concerning, even) when someone spends a bit of time to stand (or sit) around while appearing to be doing nothing at all.

But having a smoke is an activity, and the smoker's participation in this very passive activity assuages the concerns of others.

You can get the same effect by going for a walk.

I think they’re saying that you could say “I’m going for a smoke break” at work and it was at least tolerated. I don’t think you can say “I’m going for a walk” the same way.

Indeed.

It has varied a bit depending on the timeline, but: Going out for a walk (or to just change environments and very passively stare at nothing) has been less socially-acceptable than going out for a smoke, in my experience.

One of these things is weird, or perhaps inducing of ire ("How dare he just go outside when he feels like it! What is he even doing?").

The other is, at worst, both understandable and disgusting ("Of course he's out there again with that filthy habit!").

Smoke breaks used to be acceptable because your boss probably took them also.

Now that few people smoke, I don't think they are seen as a valid excuse to duck out for a few minutes.

"I need to stretch my legs" is probably better these days.

Why not? Ive been doing it for years, when I worked in office. Get someone to go with you. Or walk to get food/coffee/whatever.

That doesn't sound so bad. I like chatting with people I know. I like coffee. Food is nice.

Except: My involvement in these activities doesn't leave much, if any, room for the kind of detachment that daydreaming requires.

The group needs to be big enough (6+ people) that you’re not just chatting with someone; you’re part of a group and can drift in and out .

We had 3pm coffee club at a previous job. It was great. Had our own slack channel(public). As the minutes counted down people would post gifs counting down (/giphy 4, /giphy 3). Most of the dev team would go. We’d go a heavy coffee shop. The talks there and back were great.

The perfect work ritual: fresh air, banter, coffee.

We still use the same phrase today "Smoke break?" "Yep" though none of us smoke any more, and some never did.

"i'm going to go get a coffee" works fine in my experience

I've worked a number of places where smoking on site wasn't allowed, and it was well accepted that if you wanted to just disappear for 30 minutes once or twice a day no one would care.

It’s an option, but it’s worth noting that you’re not always idling your brain in quite the same way unless you happen to work somewhere were there are no roads to cross, cars and cyclists to dodge, nor other pedestrians to navigate around.

I sometimes find toilet breaks or coffee breaks (waiting for kettle to boil) fill the “daydream debugging” requirement. But that depends on having a clean bathroom with enough stalls, or an empty kitchen without other people making drinks.

Working from home definitely helps here. Though significantly less so during the holidays when kids are off.

Edit: just in case there’s any misunderstanding, I’m not suggesting having the kids around is a bad thing. I love my kids. Just that they have an obvious impact to my concentration.

Kids are like management that way. Tough to get work done efficiently when they’re around.

But unlike management, you get to tuck them in and “I love you” for no reason is a standard bonus with a free hug.

A cigarette to doing nothing, is like a dog to walking pointlessly.

Almost. Nicotine does a lot of work in a short smoke break. Gotta walk for a lot longer to get close.

I have been doing this new practice I heard on some podcast or something - taking a short brisk walk like every thirty minutes. It was promoted for cardiovascular health, trying to compensate for sitting too much, but I also find it is incredibly good at letting me concentrate hard through more hours of work than without. I sometimes check the news or whatever but often just walk and listen to music or chat. I walk strictly five minutes, almost to the end of my block and back, and continue on. The timing ties in with my meditation training, Maezumi lineage, where we sit for 25 minutes then walk (first slowly and then quickly) for five minutes. In meditation it really allows one to sit with energy and focus all day long; also for software development, it turns out.

I also take a longer, 5 km, walk most days, as a way to control type 2 diabetes. This short regular walk is quite different.

Honestly the biggest issue is that the increased focus means I can get into a zone and two hours go by without pause, so every thirty minutes is not always met.

That's where I solve most of the problems which have been nagging me

RIP smoke breaks

Some of my deepest architectural work honestly happened... in a hammock on the balcony, while alternating between staring at a cloud, the sun, and two magpies building a nest in the birch tree while yelling at me occasionally.

Then I came back to my desk, saw that I had missed a call or two from my boss and he had a concerned message of where I was. I ignored that and sent him an architecture document an hour later. After years, it is still the backbone of our hosting infrastructure and will go into certification audits later this year.

One of my earlier startups, I was a junior/mid level software engineer. I took a skive day to WFH, but was actually travelling to a gig on the train. I sketched out something to pretend I was working that day, and sent him a photo of it. We ended up shipping that design and I only really made one major mistake that we fixed in v2.

It’s amazing how much value there is in idleness.

Rich Hickey gave a great talk on Hammock Driven Development

Rich Hickey, creator of clojure, literally calls this "Hammock driven development" and has a great talk on the matter (multiple actually):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc

(oops, cross-posted with a similar comment.. well, shows the vid is watchworthy)

Update: this person has been fired for "slacking off". The manager only saw the absence, not the work output.

I don’t smoke but when I would consult in large companies especially I’d always find the smokers and pop by on my way back from a walk.

They are always a good group of people, with a roguish edge as smoking became less acceptable. Usually they are really kind people who represented every part of the the org, and loved some juicy gossip, and I’d learn alot about the informal networks in the company, who the admins were, etc. They would be entertained by my tales of idiocy from a dozen companies. I miss those days!

> informal networks in the company

Not just smokers. The little groups who would go and leave for a walk and coffee. The people who ate lunch together either going out, or together in the kitchen.

These were opportunities to cross the boundaries of your department and role, it was a great excuse to make friends in other groups, and gain insights.

For me the first ones I tried to align with were always in CS and Accounting. The former often had great insight into emerging issues (next weeks "bug", next months "project"). The latter had insight into how the business was really doing, hearing from the people who looked at your "raw" numbers could tell you more than any company meeting where "everything is great".

Working from home killed these, and "zoom" or "slack" are not the same - people are far more guarded when they understand that the company owns that communication channel, that it is recorded/monitored.

I got caught in a big layoff last year that caught me off guard, in part because I was fully remote when I had been in person before. All the random hallway and kitchen conversations where you catch the vibe of what's really happening were gone from what I could see.

Funny enough. I never smoked, but I often went and hung out in smoking sections outside our work office. I really enjoyed how open smokers were to just random conversations, and the quick 10 minutes of not looking at the screen were typically energizing. Almost like a natural pomodoro work schedule that forced up out of our desks, and then out of our offices.

Socially adroit undergraduates suiting up to exchange dead tree resumes at job fairs in exchange for the URL to online portals can definitely benefit from taking air breaks when/where recruiters do. No need to engage them to unless prompted, it's corporate Switzerland, but there is comfort in recognition on both sides of the booth.

People will tolerate a "daily run" (or walk).

I noticed other co-workers going to the gym during the day and realized I could take a break as well. That's when I started to take walking breaks. No one ever said anything.

(I quit smoking when my first daughter was born.)

I see a lot of concern about whether or not people will tolerate some behavior of mine that isn't harmful to anyone. I'm Gen X, so maybe it's how I grew up, but I just dgaf about whether or not my coworkers are okay with my taking a break and going for a walk. I'm not doing it to be mean to them or anything and I don't do it when I'm in the middle of something big and it's definitely nothing personal (I like my coworkers), it just helps me clear my head which is a win when someone works in a job where they need to keep lots of details in their head and switch contexts a lot.

This attitude does lead to some people being miffed because I wasn't available on Teams for 10 minutes, but anything I can do to push back against the idea of my being available to everyone at any time is a win in my book.

I’m aspiring to the gen-X level of DGAF (elder millennial - prone to giving many Fs).

I quit smoking years ago but I still go for walks with the same regularity I would smoke.

I've started to go stand in my front yard and just watch the world go by for 15 minutes or so and if I do it around dinner time then I can get away without looking weird as it's perfectly normal to wait uber eats this way.

It's your yard though, you can stand in it whenever you want.

I've never had a 10 minute walk around the building not be tolerated, and that takes longer than my 5 minute smoke breaks used to.

That said, nicotine could get more done in my brain in those 5 minutes, but the toll on my body wasn't worth it.

I also appreciate the social break my brain seems to need in order to keep socializing. I'm an introvert but also social, so I love to talk to friends and hang out - but I still need that 5 minutes to just stare off into space and recharge before I jump back into the fray.

I quit smoking about 15 years ago, but still vape - and I remain a huge fan of the easy excuse to step away for 3-5 minutes and just zone out, or change from a large group to a smaller 2-person conversation outside.

Even back when we could smoke in bars, I would still sneak outside from time to time to settle and recharge.

> I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored.

Yea sometimes stuff has to sink in or marinate. If you don't give that to yourself then you'll never realize it's gone.

I realized I was missing this because I sometimes sit in my chair and tell myself "this is your life now, you sit in this chair" and I do that for as long as possible. I do this in part because a part of me just doesn't want to do anything: I don't want to work, I don't want to do fun things, I just want to do nothing. So I have an inclination towards being lazy.

But when I'm on that chair and give myself full freedom to do so, then I get agitated and want to do something. I plead with myself really hard. But my lazy part is like "fuck no... we're finally on this chair, I'll die this way, we're never getting off this chair."

And then at some point my mind says something like "FINE, I'LL EVEN DO THE TAX FORM THINGY I HAVE BEEN PUTTING OFF. I'LL DO ANYTHING!"

When I judge the activity to be productive enough, I get off the chair.

The real challenge is that I forget that I have this exercise because it actually works for me and it makes me realize that when you're doing "nothing" your brain is doing a whole lot.

If you haven’t read it, Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism is mostly about this topic. The value of giving your brain time to simply exist without any outside input, with many examples from history of people who carved out time explicitly for this, especially when needing to make big decisions or figure out answers to problems.

That's probably a great read based on what I've heard from Cal, but I don't think you need an entire book to know how to scale back on your social media use. Just hand your phone to your friend and have them put a lock on the addictive features.

I find that just setting it to grayscale is enough. Its not that colors are actually an important part of my mostly text based social media experience, but when I use them without colors I get distracted with:

> What am I doing? This dumb.

And then I remember that it is dumb and I go back to leaving it alone.

It’s not just social media. Most people have their thing… the news, podcasts, music, books, games, etc. In the modern era we can always have something that allows us to distract our brain or provides external ideas to direct it. Being alone with our own thoughts, devoid of outside influence, is something that seems to take an intentional choice these days.

I haven’t read the book but I like this idea and intend to check out the book. I’m not on social media but I find Hacker News – and even Wikipedia – to be addictive enough. When I was younger, I found it very hard to just sit there without some form of external stimulation, e.g. I couldn’t sit down to eat by or have a coffee by myself without reading a magazine or newspaper at the same time – or listening to the radio. I still find it hard to do this.

Hacker News has been useful in that I’ve come across a few inspirational ideas on consuming less input (and producing more output):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702212

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39674619

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781463

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582837

I’ve made some changes to my life in that listening to music is more intentional – not just a distraction to have in the background. It probably helps that I’ve also started to learn a musical instrument. I can also go for a walk without needing to have music or a podcast to listen to.

Consume less, create more: “These are not the only two options. There's a third activity most of us seem to have forgotten - to simply be.

For me, the very act of everyday living has become very enjoyable and fulfilling in recent years. Doing the dishes, cooking, gardening, sweeping the floor, putting out the trash. Those are not "chores", that's what life's made of. Some of it creative, some not, but the difference is you're simply present in the moment and in the world.”

Next time I do the dishes, I will appreciate being alive, and be thankful to be doing something healthy for my brain. Thanks!

So true! I still think of these things as being chores and don’t look forward to doing them. Worse still, I sometimes procrastinate and let them build up into being much bigger jobs than they need to be.

Every now and again, I try to re-frame the way I view these tasks and try to be more positive about them. I remind myself how fortunate I am to be a (reasonably) fit and healthy adult who can physically do them. And I always feel good when I complete them.

Heck yeah!

Heard the theory to limit dopamine releasing activities, like not listening to music while exercising to avoid stacking the dopamine hits? Then listening to music after is supposed to feel a little better, or that’s my understanding.

Easier learned than practiced :)

I agree. I am not sure it is as similar to sleep as you claim, but its definitely good for your brain.

I say something similar in the context of parenting, that a reasonable amount of boredom is good. I think it likely that being constantly entertained makes people more prone to seek constant stimulation.

This did not start with phones either. I am Gen X and it happened in my childhood with kids being dumped in front of TVs. One difference was a lot of adults resisted this and limited hours in front of a TV, whereas now a lot of adults are addicted to phones too.

Well I made no claim of it being related to sleep; just that I've read a lot of claims that it's related to microsleep and used "sleeping while standing up" for the last bit as an analogy.

I am not a sleep doctor/therapist nor am I any sort of expert on the subject.

I may have read your statement as being stronger than you intended. its a reasonably analogy then.

I remember when cable TV used to be "addictive". Now I can't watch even 10 minutes of it without getting bored and pulling out my phone. Also something I learned recently: checking your phone at the movies is no longer the faux pas that it used to be.

There's definitely some hedonic treadmill type thing going on with attention and stimuli.

Using your phone in a cinema was, is and ever will be a massive faux pas. I have no idea at all why you think it might be otherwise.

Think the difference is between "using your phone", meaning calling someone and audibly talking to someone, thus disrupting the movie for others, and "checking your phone", which is just looking at it, though inaudibly, though there might be some amount of light pollution depending on the screen brightness. First one has and will continue to be taboo, second one however, in my experience, used to be viewed with distaste, but is pretty common nowadays.

I’ve asked people sitting nearby to stop checking their phone as the glare can be very distracting. I might be immersed in the film but keep getting pulled out of the story by the distractingly bright light.

I also try to patronise cinemas that remind viewers at the start of the screening not to use their phone at all. I stopped going to the Cineworld near me because there was too much phone use (both calls and checking alerts) – and Cineworld had stopped the reminders at the start of the film for people to switch off their phone.

As someone who miraculously doesn’t feel this urge to constantly “check” his phone, I have to ask: what are you people “checking” for, exactly? It’s still there—it hasn’t gone anywhere. Is it the notifications? Why not just turn them off? I can assure you that there’s nothing on your phone that can’t wait an hour or so until the movie is done.

Out of 10,000 people “checking” their phones, probably around 1 of them is actually waiting for something urgent and important. The rest are doing it out of pure addiction.

I think checking your phone unless you are actually expecting an important notification is a symptom of the problem we are discussing here.

Everything wants to hijack your attention via your phone now, whether it's apps spamming notifications or companies spamming SMS. And arguably every once in a while there is something you would like to know quickly, but any channel that comes on just gets abused by cruft.

If it's addiction, it's addiction through exploitation.

Faux pas or not, it now happens much more than it used to.

The guy next to me at the last movie I went to was scrolling TikTok. Seriously what the hell, you can do that anytime and you actually paid to be in that seat.

He should go to TikTok headquarters and watch a movie on his phone next to complete the circle.

I have no idea at all what lost Xanadu theater you found where people don't check their phones. They weren't saying they like it or that it's actually ok. The word "apparently" tells you that this is something they have observed happening and were surprised to observe.

Solid Xanadu reference. I wonder what percentage of the current generation of young people would have any idea what this is from. I'm not a film buff, but took a film course in college, and learned all about Orson Welles and Citizen Kane.

Using your phone used to mean talking. Now it means silently browsing and that's not so bad.

Please never check your phone while the film is playing. Major faux pas.

I highly recommend road-tripping to those that can. At least once a year I end up driving out from the Mid-Waste to the Bay Area or SoCal. A few years ago the wife and I traded duties to drive to various parts of Alaska and back.

We've spent a week or so exploring just one state at a time…

There's nothing so mentally refreshing as a long, boring drive.

The gen z stare is being unable or unwilling to give a verbal response when one is expected mostly as a result of social anxiety and lack of communication skills IMO.

Sleeping while standing up is the state one finds oneself endlessly scrolling somebody else's dreams. Avoid at all costs.

That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device. Curious if phone usage or whatever doom-scrolling we do exhausts the same part of the brain that we use to daydream.

That's interesting. What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself?

Personally I struggle to remember any day I haven't had at least 10-15 minutes of idle time doing nothing, just thinking idly, but I still have similar struggles as the author. Although I barely use my phone for things neither.

>> What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself?

For me it's one of the three layers.

First layer, it starts to wonder to the direction offered by real world. Wonder about song lyrics I'm listening too, or the colors of buildings, or something like that.

Second layer happens if you purposefully stray your thoughts away from a real world. Brain starts trying to remember whatever you wanted it to remember. For example, if I tell myself three times "don't forget to call mom", if I just sit idly, chances are my brain would surface "call mom". Sometimes it surfaces "remember you wanted to try arch 2 years ago". Also this is the layer that works badly if you tried or depressed, because it can start surfacing bad thoughts.

Third layer I call time skipper because it's just a basic time fast forwarding. I have no idea whether it's true meditation or controlled dissociation or something else, but thoughts slide of your brain, so there's nothing to remember afterwards. My friend said that maybe meditation is a controlled dissociation.

I prefer to say that I'm so dumb, I can just switch my brain off.

I sometimes pause shows or YT videos I'm watching just to daydream for a little bit about something that just crossed my mind. Additionally I go outside at least once a day to walk or ride my bicycle, which also helps with this.

> That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device.

Sometimes I just turn my phone off and stare at a white wall for 15 minutes. People made fun of me when I told them how relaxing I find white walls, but it seems it turns out, that I'm not the only one doing this?

I found that people would make fun of me for that, too, if they were made aware of it.

Back when I was still stuck to a desk in school (up hill both ways and without a pocket computer), I learned that folks would tend to leave me alone if I had a book open. It didn't really matter what book it was.

I could just gaze at it with my eyes relaxed and unfocused, with the printing appearing as some kind of indistinct phoric blur. And as long as I turned the page occasionally, that was good enough to keep the would-be tyrants at bay.

(And then I'd ace the test on Friday, repeat for dozens of weeks, and do it again next year.)

When my wife and I started dating, she constantly was asking me what I’m thinking about (as people who care about you sometimes do). She was amazed that I could just sit down in a sofa and zone out, thinking about absolutely nothing. At first she would ask “come on, you meat be thinking about something” and later admitted she couldn’t do that and didn’t think people actually could!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhidharma#Wall-gazing

> I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed

About 5 minutes ago for me, my missus says that I live with my head in the clouds (which is a nicer way of saying if I'm not actively doing something I just zone out and retreat into my own head), I've always been that way all the way back to school (with the inevitable consequences from teachers).

I've mentioned on here before though that I never got addicted to my phone, I don't even know where it is ~80% of the time.

My relationship with technology is (nearly) always intentional, I still access the internet 95% of the time on a desktop PC (which reduces doom scrolling since that just feels wrong on a desktop) so when I walk out my office I'm just "offline" in a very distinct way, if I go for a walk my phone stays at home, everyone who knows me knows I'll answer a text at some point but it could be a day or two.

To sum it up, I resent the passive intrusion of technology into my life.

I'm not sure I have the willpower to follow your example but at least I managed to turn of notifications on my watch after reading your post.

I honestly don't think it is willpower, it is simply that I never had to break the "addiction" because I never had it in the first place.

I always found the form factor extremely limiting compared to a desktop (it's the same reason my laptop ended up running a TV upstairs, the idea of programming on the sofa sounded great but in practice I'd get frustrated and immediately retreat to my quiet downstairs office with multiple screens when I had to do something tricky/requiring concentration).

Where I do use something that optimises for distractions, I look for how to minimize the distractions (e.g YouTube - I use the excellent Unhook (with Ublock Origin) which turns the YT home page into a search box and little else, hides mixes, shorts and other distractions) and make it work for me.

Willpower's not the solution. When we isolated cocaine from the coca leaf for the first time, the world pretty much went insane. In those first years people were injecting it into their eyeballs and spines. The most popular beverage on earth in 2026 STILL contains extract of the coca leaf as a holdover from the days when it was laced with its namesake, Coke. People were smoking cocaine, ingesting cocaine, giving it to their kids for a toothache, pretty much anything you could stick it in, they did.

The solution to this wasn't willpower, it was to get rid of all that fucking cocaine. There's a reason you don't have the stuff lying around your house today, if you did you'd probably get hooked. In 2026 we're basically speedrunning the coke boom with infotech.

So once again the solution is: get rid of it. Any time you're in a low stimulus environment, remove the tech so that you don't HAVE to exercise willpower. That means turning off the phone and the watch and maybe stuffing them in a drawer in another room or something. That's all it takes.

I can't say how society will look back at this moment in history 150 years from now. But I do know I'm way happier and more relaxed when I just shut off the devices and put them away. When I'm at home or in the office, my phone's on mute, in a drawer/bag/other room, and I don't think about it unless I take it out for a few minutes to order a delivery or do a 2fa or something. At night it's simply turned off. I'll never own a smart watch. I still keep the phone on me when I go out and haven't found that to be a huge concern because if I'm at a bar or something it's competing with a lot of other stimuli for attention. We were never 100% available to anyone for all of human history until the last 10-20 years. I am not opting into this current Cocaine Moment.

Not even a smartwatch? What's your opinion on fitness trackers (the passive ones, without display)?

To stick with the analogy: to me, your question reads as "What's your opinion on Speed?".

More like "Not even weed? What's your opinion on psychedelics (the mushrooms, they aren't addictive)?"

I was a fan of the Apple Watch initially because I felt like it kept me from having to take out my increasingly large iPhone to check things like the time and if I was going to get rained on, but they've managed to make WatchOS some weird nightmare of distractions and things I need to actively shut off on my phone, and I've grown very tired of it.

> fitness trackers (the passive ones, without display

Do you mean my belly when I look down? That and the answer to "can I keep up with my kids?" has always been enough fitness tracking for me.

I wear a self winding watch. I suppose if it stops going while I'm wearing it, I've been very still and might be dead.

I think it depends on how you use it. All things in moderation and all. I've had one for years but when I set it up it only allowed it a few notifications. When meetings start during my work day, getting e-mail to my personal account, and when I get messages from my wife, that's it.

So when I'm not working the watch is... just a watch.

I don't even wear a regular watch!

Willpower is a great solution if the problem is to let the companies off the hook, though.

My big discovery a few years ago was uninstalling apps, especially social media apps. I don't mind the platforms, but removing their ability to ping notifications up was massive. I watch some people just get their phone out to dismiss a load of notifications for 20-30 seconds. It's a chore now. I think limiting notifications is the best thing you can do, on your phone and your watch.

Respect.

I hope to find the strength to be more like that. Also to give a better example to others.

I notice making the screen go grayscale (can configure volume up+down to do this in android) already makes doom-anything much less long-lived. The next step, since apparently I can't go cold turkey, is to try one of these alternative minimalist launchers to see if it helps. And to teach people that if they want something from me urgently, they need to call.

On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me for a while. Went back to an analog watch. Much better.

> And to teach people that if they want something from me urgently, they need to call.

There is a half way step (on Android at least, I assume Apple has similar) you can set "Do Not Disturb" and then white list the people who can message/call through the "Do Not Disturb" so you are reachable but only by people you trust/want to be able to reach you.

> On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me for a while.

I just didn't use one, I have a rough rule that introducing new technology into my life has to be a complete and obvious unalloyed win or I just don't, it's a very high bar for a new technology to clear but it also means I don't spend money on things that end up in drawers because they either turned out not to meet the hype or just annoyed the living hell out of me after the initial "oooh shiny" wore off.

I do the Do Not Disturb + whitelist thing on my iPhone.

I also disable any and all notifications of apps other than direct messaging apps. No group message notifications.

I’ve been 24/7 do-not-disturb mode with all notifications disabled, for the past 10 years. It’s been wonderful for “intentionality” and agency over my time. I use my phone when I want to do something on it, not when the phone beeps and buzzes telling me to use it.

I don’t even whitelist anyone anymore. If it’s important they will leave a message and I’ll get back to them.

> If it’s important they will leave a message and I’ll get back to them.

I can't really do that. For some things (urgent and important), loved ones need to be able to reach me.

But yes, a lot of this advice would work.

You have to remember that not that long ago it was simply impossible to reach most people who were not at home or at work. Because it was impossible, nobody felt slighted that you were unable to read their message or take their call immediately. And nobody felt any anxiety about leaving the house for a few hours to shop or go to a movie or a ball game and being unreachable. Loved ones managed and life went on.

Grey scale is amazingly less compelling experience. I have it on for a while but then give in an turn color back on just for the thrill.

If you have an iPhone, you can put the greyscale as only a percentage greyscale if desired. I got an iPhone to get rid of the constant bothering from the apple devotees and quickly found myself spending an unhealthy amount of time on it. I started with a small percent greyscale so I didn't notice and would forget that the colors were dulled. Before I even got to 50% greyscale, my habit had died and I only use it when I need to (literally only for communicating with the folks who can't tolerate green bubbles)

My daily driver is GrapheneOS. I don't know if android has a similar feature, but I assume not because my GrapheneOS phone only supports fully greyscale, and the difference is so stark that I can't keep it on. The most addictive apps I have on it are my Hacker News client and NewPipe (the nonaddictive YouTube), so I am not too concerned though

This cracked me up. I have the same malady. The worst thing used to be a few close friends who recognized the pattern after being with me long enough and called me out in it when they knew I was zoning out while they were talking. Ive desperately tried to keep this daydreaming trait lately despite trying to get rid of it when I was younger when I used to think it was a disadvantage.

I think its unfortunate people wear headphones while walking/running/biking. If you don’t, that’s however many minutes or hours of nothing but daydreaming (and hearing nature).

Sadly around here it takes quite a lot of driving to get to anywhere that nature sounds predominate. Between the highways/airports/lawncare it is mostly noise pollution, and I generally find that doesn't work as well for daydreaming.

I often just wear noise cancelling headphones without any music on

I find it impossible to daydream while focused on traffic.

I read my black on white eink reader on walks and occasionally run into poles and things in the sidewalk. Mostly I look up when crossing a street. When I was a kid I would walk slowly around with a Sci Fi book and read it. Never been hit by a car but every now and then get scared by one I didn’t notice. But I can’t read intense books too much - I alternate hard books and pulpy fun reads.

I've needed to take anc earbuds with me while out now, not to listen to music but just to tone down the noise pollution a bit. You can barely hear nature anyway over all the cars, trucks, lawnmowers, leafblowers, airplanes, and what I think are warehouses. It's been getting worse in recent years and the only way to have a chance at daydreaming is to lower it a bit.

How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games?

You have to imagine to daydream. When you’ve been raised on YouTube since birth (referring to U.S. primarily “GenZ”) or you’ve formed your identity around things on TV (like most Americans) you didn’t have to imagine, daydream you just took it in, like everyone else that took on the same thing. That’s another aspect that’s not really being called out, TV also has contributed to the homogenization and destruction of distinct and unique cultures, i.e., actual, real diversity; because everyone is programmed and trained by TV on the same material, as the famous water cooler discussion about a TV show episode everyone was watching tells us.

Now imagine you’re “Gen Alpha” or maybe even “GenZ” where you have not even had anyone read you books that required you to imagine, i.e., daydream, what was being told to you?

These are all compounding factors that are going to even cause massive problems for this sham, fake facade, con job American society.

Talk to teachers in elementary schools and middle schools, even universities now; they’ll tell you things that should make and discerning person be alarmed. And that’s without even talking about the impending impacts of AI.

> > How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games?

You can daydream about being the protagonist of such actions which is not the same as watching other people doing it

I used to spend a lot of time imagining myself as the captain of a Federation starship :) but I did also read a lot of books.

But also, the availability of YouTube changes the utility of descriptive writing. Moby Dick can have pages of text about whales or whatever, but now I can spend hours watching whale videos on YouTube. The importance of the interior life of the characters is more, or of diffusive world building stories with too much intricacy for a movie or video presentation.

You point out a critical difference, you were already experienced and “skilled” in imagining because you read a lot, a function where you are inherently going to have to imagine a lot more based on various degrees and quality of descriptions.

I think you may be underestimating the value of that skill and experience. You may not even be able to put yourself in the shoes, i.e., imagine what it may be like never having to had to imagine anything if you only ever watched the things happen on a rectangle from infancy on.

I argue that you only cross referenced the imagination skill into being a federation captain because you were already experienced and skilled in imagination.

I suspect it will be realized what devastation it has caused within our lifetimes and if we still have the capacity, we may even revert back to requiring reading and hopefully even banning screen usage by any minors.

As much as I’d like to leave my phone in another room while working, 2FA has made that impossible. I’m now required to keep my phone nearby and pick it up periodically throughout the day, all in the same of security.

Excellent reason to stand up and take a short walk.

I worked around this by just storing the 2FA in Bitwarden. Yeah, same place as the passwords but I don't care I don't want the forced context switch.

A coworker tried to use Authy a couple years ago and it wouldn't work. It seemed like we were forced to use Microsoft Authenticator.

I just tried setting it up with Apple Passwords and it wouldn’t accept the QR code. It seems to be specifically made for Microsoft.

KeePassXC also has one.

Just make your phone boring.

Delete instagram, log out and don’t go on YouTube. Delete games.

It’s really not that hard to make your phone a device for communication and not entertainment

My phone is already like that. There are still emails, texts, the browser still exists, the weather, etc.

And even ignoring all of that, taking hands off the keyboard/mouse, picking up a different device, waiting for the notification, opening it up, typing in the code, putting the phone back down, moving back to the keyboard/mouse/monitor… it’s very disruptive to any flow I might hope to have.

Consider getting a hardware key (typical example: YubiKey)

Reminds me of this scene from Curb where Jeff just sits in the plane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zONvxznbUJA

I often do this on flights under 3 hours. The hardest part is finding a place to land your gaze where it doesn’t look like you’re staring it someone, as that could become awkward.

try "the Polish stare"

I wonder if they forgot they already used this bit in Seinfeld or if it's an intentional homage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBBQdFSvvTE

100% homage. Larry David plays with recurring jokes all the time (e.g. see his new series on HBO now) which makes it even funnier.

Sometimes I worry that this whole gen-z stare thing is just millennial avocado toast under new management. I work with a ton of gen-z'ers, I think they're great and have never once experienced this gen-z stare thing you hear about so much online. They're hard workers, attentive, and less phone addicted than my latchkey parents.

gen z and even more so gen alpha is a complete bimodal distribution. The top kids are genuinely incredible.

It goes beyond my job but that is my fault for narrowing it down. Even day to day shopping at random stores, I have never seen this gen-z stare or any of the other terms we assign to them. If they are bimodal, which they very well could be, the competent mode is clearly dominant where I have lived

We went through twenty years of millennials being this or that, how none of them work, how they are moochers. Every generation gets called lazy and dumped on by the previous generations; as far as I can tell, it is mostly bull shit. I have yet to experience anything extraordinary about gen-z that I don't see in gen-y, gen-x, latchkey, boomers, greatest generation, etc.

Maybe younger gen-z or gen-alpha like you say are truly messed up, I think we have data coming out of schools that support that, but I have yet to interact with them as I don't have kids myself. Everything I have said is inherently anecdotal and no more important than what you've seen

I believe you are on to something. I like to run, which is common enough, but I never do it with a watch or phone. I always leave them at home. That is my hour of zen. Afterwards I may be exhausted but I am always full of ideas. After the first ten kilometres or so the body does all the running and the mind is set free. That's a lot like daydreaming.

Every other person I meet along the trail have headphones and some watch to measure their training. I get it, they want to get better at running. Maybe they train for some competition. I don't. I will never be an elite marathon runner and I know that, so I couldn't care less about getting better as long as I come back with a tired body and busy mind.

Everybody is different, but I have never understood why not more people are like me.

You don’t necessarily want to daydream. If you’re not careful, it becomes Negative rumination and mind wandering and that wouldn’t be as useful as an actual nap or a workout or meditation.

If meditation and workout look like a protection against ruminating, they might be functioning as avoidance. If a nap helps, maybe fix your sleep first (good sleep is super important for mental health). Daydreaming is healthy.

I would say that if the mind stays away from negative ruminations when set free, that is a sign of a balanced and healthy life. Many people lack balance and health, and for them changing the conditions a bit might be helpful. Knowing and practicing that one can focus the attention where it is useful can increase mental health or ability to cope with problems. One doesn’t want to run away from reality but one need not feel trapped by intrusive mental phenomena.

> I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored.

If my mind is not defaulting to daydreaming and rather asking me to find a distraction, doesn't this mean my attention span is worse?

Interesting that you bring daydreaming to the conversation. I've got an issue with it, and it's that I get interesting ideas then. But nothing comes out unless I sit in front of a computer to do anything with them. And computers have all the distractions.

Pen and paper nearby might help.

There’s this great post about „The Death Of Day Dreaming“: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/on-the-death-of-daydreaming

I get a lot figured out in the time between waking and getting out of bed. I do have my phone around, but just to jot things down.

Also in the shower, but then my phone isn't handy and I lose a few thoughts.

at my first office job my coworkers quickly informed me i had a bizarre habit of staring at the ceiling before performing a burst of effort. i find loosening my visual focus helps me visualize concepts and idea, no idea when or how i picked up that habit

sometimes when i "space out" i am fully daydreaming, other times i am (in generous terms) "composing my thoughts". when its a daydream after snapping back to it ill think along the lines of, "guess i needed to process that"

Meanwhile in Japan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9FsQXYVgUE

> the lack of daydreaming

I would also blame the Western commercialization of meditation. I have recently learned that in Buddhism meditation is just one side of the coin, and it’s usually diametrically paired with the opposite technique of contemplation: instead of concentrating into one infinitesimal point, you expand your awareness to encompass the whole of reality. Which is a bit like daydreaming. It’s through these two exercises that one finds the middle path of equanimity.

With technology, we spend our time with narrowed focus, we are told that to stay sane we need to cultivate our focus, and never find the time to release the grip on it, to just let the brain be and expand and relax a bit.

The Taoists had figured it out all along: to find focus, stop focusing so damn much.

As an avid consumer of Western Buddhism, this is pretty standard understanding. Concentration and insight, another complementary aspect of practice, like the dichotomy between sitting alone and sitting in a group, or between a steady daily practice and a deep intense retreat.

The linear story is that increased awareness of focus teaches the sitter that there are no real borders in reality, it is a seamless whole, and as the sitting continues, awareness naturally opens up to include the full current moment - seeing thoughts as thoughts, emotions as emotions, sore knees as sore knees, twitchy neighbor as a twitchy neighbor, etc thru the myriad things all showing the way, bright and clear.

But they are mutually reinforcing partners that appear as distinct.

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