7 ms·

I keep catching myself thinking or using the excuse I have no time, but I mostly spend my time on the internet or watching TV. Some nights I do the dishes or ac

I keep catching myself thinking or using the excuse I have no time, but I mostly spend my time on the internet or watching TV. Some nights I do the dishes or actually go for a walk, go grocery shopping, but mostly I'm just hanging on, making sure I'm ready for he next day. I'm freaking addicted to information and the internet, which leave me feeling frantic. I forgo sleeping for the internet and it brings me little pleasure. I wish I could stop, but like this morning I was sitting on the couch with nothing to do and I had to go get my phone which I've probably wasted 20 minutes on. It doesn't seem like much time but I could have gone to get toilet paper from the store which I sort of could use right now. I'd like to hear this lost from someone older, who was in the 80s or 90s and hear their perspective. I know my parents at least are hooked into the internet entertainment machine like I am and they didn't use to be. Was there more time? Was it better?

emodendroket 10y ago
I'm guessing that many people who are now alive would have just sat in front of the TV instead if there were no Internet.
- Retric 10y ago
  The internet on your phone is kind of uniquely addictive. You can basically replace any downtime with playing on your phone. The sad thing is it can jump into the middle of any activity. Getting lunch, wait one second text message which you need to respond to right now.
  - pc86 10y ago
    I think it's rarely that you actually need to respond to any text message immediately.
    - Retric 10y ago
      In theory you're right. However, the expectation is someone will respond with ~"Thx, in meeting" unlike a phone where you may just let it go to voicemail, there is no message failed to get though feedback. So, you get sent a text and people will generally assume you are ignoring them unless you respond.
      - pc86 10y ago
        I don't know anybody that assumes that unless you let it go for days. Texting is asynchronous just like email, for a reason.
        greenshackle 10y ago
        It's possible you two just hang out in social groups with different norms.
        pc86 10y ago
        What I meant was that while I'm sure some people do think that, it's unreasonable. That's the same person who send multiple text messages "are you there?" "where are you?" "I need you" "call me" etc minutes or seconds apart. It hasn't occurred to them that the phone is off or silent or in another room or notifications are off or they've been explicitly muted.
        mason240 10y ago
        You are both right, it just depends on the situation.
      - zeveb 10y ago
        > However, the expectation is someone will respond with ~"Thx, in meeting" If you check your phone in a meeting, and you don't have a family member in the hospital, you're wrong. It's discourteous in the extreme to check a smartphone (or noodle around on a laptop!) when meeting with others.
        10y ago
- et-al 10y ago
  To a certain degree. When the Chuck Norris infomercial came on after midnight, you knew it was time to go to bed. With the internet there's always something interesting. And around midnight, the people in Europe are up, so you could start chatting with them.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    Are you saying you've never wasted your time online looking at the digital equivalent to a juicer informercial?
Jimmy 10y ago
I've known that I've had an internet addiction for years. I've tried to break it multiple times but always relapse. Something that makes it hard is that there are real, tangible benefits to spending time online, even just aimless browsing and stumbling into things. I would not be the person I am today if it weren't for certain random links I clicked on at certain times. The important thing is that I need to always remember that it's an addiction and I need to get it under control. I think limiting myself to a half hour or hour a day would be best.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  I've tried to break it multiple times but always relapse. Possible there is some positive there as well, and it keeps drawing you in. Instead of thinking of it as an addiction, think of it as something you do, that is part positive and part empty. Identify those parts that are positive, and praise yourself for them. Then over time, identify those parts that are empty, and realize, "oh, I can eliminate this."
  - Broken_Hippo 10y ago
    That is excellent advice for many lifestyle sorts of things :)
- mywittyname 10y ago
  > I would not be the person I am today if it weren't for certain random links I clicked on at certain times. I have to imagine you'd say the same thing about whatever hobby you could use to fill this time with. Perhaps your hobby leads to new friends, business opportunities, skills, or other general improvements in your daily life.
- akman 10y ago
  Interesting you bring this up. I also felt that maybe <5% of the links I've clicked on have really changed the way I think or led me down a path that ended up changing my path in life. How do you put a price on that? You can't, really.
pps43 10y ago
> from someone older, who was in the 80s There was the same amount of time, but it was allocated differently. There were phone calls. If somebody calls you on the phone, you stop doing what you're doing and talk to them. Apart from that, time was scheduled in larger chunks, with fever context switches. You watch a movie start to finish, not a bunch of 2 minute Youtube videos. You spend an evening printing photos in the dark room rather than two seconds on Instagram. You go to a chess club and play with somebody sitting across the table. So generally you do one thing at a time for longer stretches, and have to plan those activities in advance.
- patates 10y ago
  What wouldn't I give to have such attention span! I can't even watch a movie these days (months? um, years?). Yesterday I alt-tabbed to chrome and opened HN while hearing the movie that I was in the middle of watching. Yes, I have a PC connected to my TV! What is wrong with me?! I want to be able to read a non-technical book fully and I can't and I'm very unhappy about this whole situation.
  - k-mcgrady 10y ago
    >> What wouldn't I give to have such attention span! It's surprisingly easy when forced. I moved apartment a few years ago to a small seaside town (mostly retirees and a few locally run shops). We had an old CRT style TV with very few channels. For the first two weeks we had no internet. It was pretty interesting how our differently we would spend the day. My friend and I would take walks around town or the beach, go surfing for a few hours, cook instead of ordering takeout, and then spend the rest of the time hanging out in the living room. The TV was on but we were mostly just chatting. Switch to two weeks later when we got internet. We spent much more time in our rooms on our computers playing video games or watching Netflix. We would still surf a couple of times a week but besides that we would only hangout for an hour or two in the evening if there was a good movie on TV. As frustrating as it was at times not having internet access I would say I was much happier during those first 2 weeks and with so few options for things to do my attention span was automatically much better.
  - sosuke 10y ago
tim333 10y ago
I was about in the 70s and 80s. Still the same number of hours in the day and internet was largely replaced by reading and TV. I don't know if it was better or worse. I think I prefer the internet. At least you can type stuff into it unlike books and TV.
- Periodic 10y ago
  I remember my grandparents trying to make sure they got all their evening chores done so they could sit down age watch Wheel of Fortune when it came on. They didn't have a lot of free time on weeknights, but it was because of how they chose to spend it.
- criddell 10y ago
  I tell my kids about how much TV I watched in the 70's and 80's. I loved TV! I still do. My kids (14 and 13) don't watch any TV. They don't even particularly like movies.
  - dennisgorelik 10y ago
    What do your kids do instead of TV?
    - criddell 10y ago
      They have a lot of school homework. Far, far more than I ever had. They do a lot of arts and crafts, they play games (board games and video games), and one spends quite a bit of time playing the piano. They both are spending more and more time talking with friends either in person or on Facetime or IM. The video that they do watch is pretty much exclusively on YouTube.
dazmax 10y ago
Reading the newspaper and magazines was basically the equivalent before the internet, I think. With the paper you'd eventually run out of stuff to read in a day, but if you had enough magazine subscriptions, you could find something marginally interesting. I think one difference other than the never-ending aspect of the internet is that when you're reading a newspaper or book you get sleepy when you're supposed to, whereas if you're looking at a screen the blue light keeps you awake longer and all your chores take longer the next day because you have less energy.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  Newspapers and magazines used to be unbelievably huge. Weekend newspapers would kill you if dropped on your head from a modest height. Magazines had hundreds of ad pages. Non-ad content used to be much longer. Many features and columns were equivalent to a long-read feature today. This issue of Byte from 1981 (about Smalltalk) is a 312MB PDF with nearly 500 pages: https://ia802700.us.archive.org/8/items/byte-magazine-1981-08/1981_08_BYTE_06-08_Smalltalk.pdf https://ia802700.us.archive.org/8/items/byte-magazine-1981-0... I think the blue light issue may be overstated. I used to read paper into the early hours, even after I was tired and sleepy. I still get a "must sleep now" cut off, even when surrounded by screens. It just happens later. What isn't overstated is information volume. Hacker News and Reddit literally give you more links/features in 24 hours than Byte used to offer once a month. Each item may be shorter - sometimes - but there are many, many more things to read.
gooseyard 10y ago
You'd probably enjoy Clay Shirky's book "Cognitive Surplus", which really put into perspective for me what this apparent glut of time I had on my hands meant. There's an excerpt at: http://mentalfloss.com/article/18670/gin-sitcoms-and-cognitive-surplus http://mentalfloss.com/article/18670/gin-sitcoms-and-cogniti...
theandrewbailey 10y ago
I know the feeling. In the last few months, I've wanted to play though some video games so I can "review" them on my blog... but there's not much point since I haven't gotten around to setting up my web server since I reformatted it last month with the new Ubuntu LTS and encrypted it. What have I been doing instead? Riding my bike around town. Hanging out with friends. Not bad, but I've also taken up watching Youtube for hours every night.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  Not bad, but I've also taken up watching Youtube for hours every night. The key is to not overwhelm yourself and to do something towards your goal. For example, don't try to set up the entire blog in one night, instead do a micro-portion, "oh, I better start downloading the webserver before I watch youtube." Or even, "oh, I better plug my server in and turn it on." The key is to do something every night, and cut it into pieces small enough that it's doable. If you find yourself putting it off, that means you need to cut it into an even smaller portion.
  - theandrewbailey 10y ago
    I tried to do it all last night: got it installed, db set up, and even a certificate. It didn't feel that overwhelming, and it started to be kind of fun after a while, but something went wrong somewhere just shy of it actually working. I'll try it again sometime.
    - ktRolster 10y ago
      Too much effort all at once. Really, just set your goal to spend five minutes looking at it.
    - ashark 10y ago
      This could be the story of just about any tech-related project I try to undertake on weekends and evenings. I've found I'm happier just paying money to make some of the problems I was trying to solve go away, giving up on a bunch of others, and just focusing my effort on the handful that remain—which still tend to linger for months or years with many stops and starts before being finished.
FungalRaincloud 10y ago
I tend to try to think of time as I think of space. If I clutter my space with a bunch of small things, I find that I think myself to be cluttered, and the disorder causes me unease. But if all the small things have their own places, and I keep putting them back when I take them out, it feels orderly, and there is no unease. It's really the same for me with time. If I clutter my time with a bunch of small, meaningless tasks (check facebook, check email, read that article that takes maybe 2 minutes, ..., loop), I find that that, too, causes me unease. But if I set aside time for those things, and only those things, there is no problem. I build things into a routine, as much as possible, and for the rest, I try to schedule the time I think I'll need, so that I can say "I don't need to think about X right now, because I will have time for it later." I even try to schedule in periods where I do allow myself shallow work, like checking a bunch of things, or sating the information addiction that you and I most certainly share. Right now, I have maybe 50 tabs open between a bunch of aggregated tech/science news sites, and I'll spend maybe 1 minute at most on each one. If I did that just any time of day that I had a period of empty time, it would be just like if I left clutter anywhere that I had empty space. But since I've devoted this time to this task, it's kind of like putting everything you need for a project out on a table, then packing it up neatly when you're done with the project for the day. I know an end to the clutter is in sight, so it doesn't bother me so much. The hardest part is always trying not to fill empty time meaninglessly. That takes skill, but it can be learned. I find I'm better at it when I've been keeping up with daily meditation in the morning and evening. But even if meditation isn't your thing, you can practice in other ways. For instance, when you are eating dinner, try to only be eating dinner. It seems awkward at first, to sit in silence (especially with a partner present) and just eat, but that fairly quickly goes away. Or, in the mornings, if you have coffee or tea, just drink coffee or tea and sit in silence. I tend to keep a notebook handy, and if something particularly strikes me during the silence, I write it down and let myself come back to it after I've finished my coffee. I don't think it was any different before the popularity and ease of access of the internet. People assume that others were focusing on longer sessions of focus, but I don't think that's the entire truth. I think as a species, we've always struggled with this anxious itch to move on to the next thing, mere moments after starting the current thing. I think that's why (as you note) a lot of the older generations are turning to using the internet in much the same way as the younger generations.
ktRolster 10y ago
but like this morning I was sitting on the couch with nothing to do and I had to go get my phone which I've probably wasted 20 minutes on. It's amazing how fast the time can slip by.
kamaal 10y ago
>>I'm freaking addicted to information and the internet, which leave me feeling frantic. You just need to understand you are not missing out on anything by not doing so. This sort of internet addiction isn't just destroying productivity for grown up adults but studying habits of teenagers and school going kids too. Try to take it 15 minutes at a time. Try staying away from internet 15 minutes at a time, then the next 15 and so on, I think it should work out perfect well.
gerbilly 10y ago
When I was programming on my Apple ][ during the 80s, my mom would joke that computer minutes must be a lot longer than real minutes, because when she would call me for dinner, I'd tell her I'd be there in five minutes but instead would lose track of time for twenty minutes. Now, because of smartphones, it seems everyone is caught in this same time distortion field. As a result I purposefully try to look at my phone as little as possible. Think of it this way, if through some sort of Matrix like situation our first experience of the outside world was through a small touchscreen, and then suddenly you took the red pill and were put into a world where you could touch, smell and see in full 360 degrees and feel wind and water and move and climb over things and interact with animals etc...it would blow your mind. So why are we allowing ourselves to limit our experiences in this way?
sliverstorm 10y ago
It's incredible how much time you can blow on the internet or TV, vs what you can do with it in the real world. I went for a run last week, and got to marveling how I had run from my front door into the mountains & back, how gradually the time had passed, and how those two hours would have zwip vanished in a forgettable blink had I been online.

emodendroket 10y ago

I'm guessing that many people who are now alive would have just sat in front of the TV instead if there were no Internet.

Retric 10y ago
The internet on your phone is kind of uniquely addictive. You can basically replace any downtime with playing on your phone. The sad thing is it can jump into the middle of any activity. Getting lunch, wait one second text message which you need to respond to right now.
- pc86 10y ago
  I think it's rarely that you actually need to respond to any text message immediately.
  - Retric 10y ago
    In theory you're right. However, the expectation is someone will respond with ~"Thx, in meeting" unlike a phone where you may just let it go to voicemail, there is no message failed to get though feedback. So, you get sent a text and people will generally assume you are ignoring them unless you respond.
    - pc86 10y ago
      I don't know anybody that assumes that unless you let it go for days. Texting is asynchronous just like email, for a reason.
      - greenshackle 10y ago
        It's possible you two just hang out in social groups with different norms.
        pc86 10y ago
        What I meant was that while I'm sure some people do think that, it's unreasonable. That's the same person who send multiple text messages "are you there?" "where are you?" "I need you" "call me" etc minutes or seconds apart. It hasn't occurred to them that the phone is off or silent or in another room or notifications are off or they've been explicitly muted.
      - mason240 10y ago
        You are both right, it just depends on the situation.
    - zeveb 10y ago
      > However, the expectation is someone will respond with ~"Thx, in meeting" If you check your phone in a meeting, and you don't have a family member in the hospital, you're wrong. It's discourteous in the extreme to check a smartphone (or noodle around on a laptop!) when meeting with others.
      - 10y ago
et-al 10y ago
To a certain degree. When the Chuck Norris infomercial came on after midnight, you knew it was time to go to bed. With the internet there's always something interesting. And around midnight, the people in Europe are up, so you could start chatting with them.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  Are you saying you've never wasted your time online looking at the digital equivalent to a juicer informercial?

Jimmy 10y ago

I've known that I've had an internet addiction for years. I've tried to break it multiple times but always relapse. Something that makes it hard is that there are real, tangible benefits to spending time online, even just aimless browsing and stumbling into things. I would not be the person I am today if it weren't for certain random links I clicked on at certain times. The important thing is that I need to always remember that it's an addiction and I need to get it under control. I think limiting myself to a half hour or hour a day would be best.

ktRolster 10y ago
I've tried to break it multiple times but always relapse. Possible there is some positive there as well, and it keeps drawing you in. Instead of thinking of it as an addiction, think of it as something you do, that is part positive and part empty. Identify those parts that are positive, and praise yourself for them. Then over time, identify those parts that are empty, and realize, "oh, I can eliminate this."
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  That is excellent advice for many lifestyle sorts of things :)
mywittyname 10y ago
> I would not be the person I am today if it weren't for certain random links I clicked on at certain times. I have to imagine you'd say the same thing about whatever hobby you could use to fill this time with. Perhaps your hobby leads to new friends, business opportunities, skills, or other general improvements in your daily life.
akman 10y ago
Interesting you bring this up. I also felt that maybe <5% of the links I've clicked on have really changed the way I think or led me down a path that ended up changing my path in life. How do you put a price on that? You can't, really.

pps43 10y ago

> from someone older, who was in the 80s There was the same amount of time, but it was allocated differently. There were phone calls. If somebody calls you on the phone, you stop doing what you're doing and talk to them. Apart from that, time was scheduled in larger chunks, with fever context switches. You watch a movie start to finish, not a bunch of 2 minute Youtube videos. You spend an evening printing photos in the dark room rather than two seconds on Instagram. You go to a chess club and play with somebody sitting across the table. So generally you do one thing at a time for longer stretches, and have to plan those activities in advance.

patates 10y ago
What wouldn't I give to have such attention span! I can't even watch a movie these days (months? um, years?). Yesterday I alt-tabbed to chrome and opened HN while hearing the movie that I was in the middle of watching. Yes, I have a PC connected to my TV! What is wrong with me?! I want to be able to read a non-technical book fully and I can't and I'm very unhappy about this whole situation.
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  >> What wouldn't I give to have such attention span! It's surprisingly easy when forced. I moved apartment a few years ago to a small seaside town (mostly retirees and a few locally run shops). We had an old CRT style TV with very few channels. For the first two weeks we had no internet. It was pretty interesting how our differently we would spend the day. My friend and I would take walks around town or the beach, go surfing for a few hours, cook instead of ordering takeout, and then spend the rest of the time hanging out in the living room. The TV was on but we were mostly just chatting. Switch to two weeks later when we got internet. We spent much more time in our rooms on our computers playing video games or watching Netflix. We would still surf a couple of times a week but besides that we would only hangout for an hour or two in the evening if there was a good movie on TV. As frustrating as it was at times not having internet access I would say I was much happier during those first 2 weeks and with so few options for things to do my attention span was automatically much better.
- sosuke 10y ago

tim333 10y ago

I was about in the 70s and 80s. Still the same number of hours in the day and internet was largely replaced by reading and TV. I don't know if it was better or worse. I think I prefer the internet. At least you can type stuff into it unlike books and TV.

Periodic 10y ago
I remember my grandparents trying to make sure they got all their evening chores done so they could sit down age watch Wheel of Fortune when it came on. They didn't have a lot of free time on weeknights, but it was because of how they chose to spend it.
criddell 10y ago
I tell my kids about how much TV I watched in the 70's and 80's. I loved TV! I still do. My kids (14 and 13) don't watch any TV. They don't even particularly like movies.
- dennisgorelik 10y ago
  What do your kids do instead of TV?
  - criddell 10y ago
    They have a lot of school homework. Far, far more than I ever had. They do a lot of arts and crafts, they play games (board games and video games), and one spends quite a bit of time playing the piano. They both are spending more and more time talking with friends either in person or on Facetime or IM. The video that they do watch is pretty much exclusively on YouTube.

dazmax 10y ago

Reading the newspaper and magazines was basically the equivalent before the internet, I think. With the paper you'd eventually run out of stuff to read in a day, but if you had enough magazine subscriptions, you could find something marginally interesting. I think one difference other than the never-ending aspect of the internet is that when you're reading a newspaper or book you get sleepy when you're supposed to, whereas if you're looking at a screen the blue light keeps you awake longer and all your chores take longer the next day because you have less energy.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
Newspapers and magazines used to be unbelievably huge. Weekend newspapers would kill you if dropped on your head from a modest height. Magazines had hundreds of ad pages. Non-ad content used to be much longer. Many features and columns were equivalent to a long-read feature today. This issue of Byte from 1981 (about Smalltalk) is a 312MB PDF with nearly 500 pages: https://ia802700.us.archive.org/8/items/byte-magazine-1981-08/1981_08_BYTE_06-08_Smalltalk.pdf https://ia802700.us.archive.org/8/items/byte-magazine-1981-0... I think the blue light issue may be overstated. I used to read paper into the early hours, even after I was tired and sleepy. I still get a "must sleep now" cut off, even when surrounded by screens. It just happens later. What isn't overstated is information volume. Hacker News and Reddit literally give you more links/features in 24 hours than Byte used to offer once a month. Each item may be shorter - sometimes - but there are many, many more things to read.

gooseyard 10y ago

You'd probably enjoy Clay Shirky's book "Cognitive Surplus", which really put into perspective for me what this apparent glut of time I had on my hands meant. There's an excerpt at: http://mentalfloss.com/article/18670/gin-sitcoms-and-cognitive-surplus http://mentalfloss.com/article/18670/gin-sitcoms-and-cogniti...

theandrewbailey 10y ago

I know the feeling. In the last few months, I've wanted to play though some video games so I can "review" them on my blog... but there's not much point since I haven't gotten around to setting up my web server since I reformatted it last month with the new Ubuntu LTS and encrypted it. What have I been doing instead? Riding my bike around town. Hanging out with friends. Not bad, but I've also taken up watching Youtube for hours every night.

ktRolster 10y ago
Not bad, but I've also taken up watching Youtube for hours every night. The key is to not overwhelm yourself and to do something towards your goal. For example, don't try to set up the entire blog in one night, instead do a micro-portion, "oh, I better start downloading the webserver before I watch youtube." Or even, "oh, I better plug my server in and turn it on." The key is to do something every night, and cut it into pieces small enough that it's doable. If you find yourself putting it off, that means you need to cut it into an even smaller portion.
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  I tried to do it all last night: got it installed, db set up, and even a certificate. It didn't feel that overwhelming, and it started to be kind of fun after a while, but something went wrong somewhere just shy of it actually working. I'll try it again sometime.
  - ktRolster 10y ago
    Too much effort all at once. Really, just set your goal to spend five minutes looking at it.
  - ashark 10y ago
    This could be the story of just about any tech-related project I try to undertake on weekends and evenings. I've found I'm happier just paying money to make some of the problems I was trying to solve go away, giving up on a bunch of others, and just focusing my effort on the handful that remain—which still tend to linger for months or years with many stops and starts before being finished.

FungalRaincloud 10y ago

I tend to try to think of time as I think of space. If I clutter my space with a bunch of small things, I find that I think myself to be cluttered, and the disorder causes me unease. But if all the small things have their own places, and I keep putting them back when I take them out, it feels orderly, and there is no unease. It's really the same for me with time. If I clutter my time with a bunch of small, meaningless tasks (check facebook, check email, read that article that takes maybe 2 minutes, ..., loop), I find that that, too, causes me unease. But if I set aside time for those things, and only those things, there is no problem. I build things into a routine, as much as possible, and for the rest, I try to schedule the time I think I'll need, so that I can say "I don't need to think about X right now, because I will have time for it later." I even try to schedule in periods where I do allow myself shallow work, like checking a bunch of things, or sating the information addiction that you and I most certainly share. Right now, I have maybe 50 tabs open between a bunch of aggregated tech/science news sites, and I'll spend maybe 1 minute at most on each one. If I did that just any time of day that I had a period of empty time, it would be just like if I left clutter anywhere that I had empty space. But since I've devoted this time to this task, it's kind of like putting everything you need for a project out on a table, then packing it up neatly when you're done with the project for the day. I know an end to the clutter is in sight, so it doesn't bother me so much. The hardest part is always trying not to fill empty time meaninglessly. That takes skill, but it can be learned. I find I'm better at it when I've been keeping up with daily meditation in the morning and evening. But even if meditation isn't your thing, you can practice in other ways. For instance, when you are eating dinner, try to only be eating dinner. It seems awkward at first, to sit in silence (especially with a partner present) and just eat, but that fairly quickly goes away. Or, in the mornings, if you have coffee or tea, just drink coffee or tea and sit in silence. I tend to keep a notebook handy, and if something particularly strikes me during the silence, I write it down and let myself come back to it after I've finished my coffee. I don't think it was any different before the popularity and ease of access of the internet. People assume that others were focusing on longer sessions of focus, but I don't think that's the entire truth. I think as a species, we've always struggled with this anxious itch to move on to the next thing, mere moments after starting the current thing. I think that's why (as you note) a lot of the older generations are turning to using the internet in much the same way as the younger generations.

ktRolster 10y ago

but like this morning I was sitting on the couch with nothing to do and I had to go get my phone which I've probably wasted 20 minutes on. It's amazing how fast the time can slip by.

kamaal 10y ago

>>I'm freaking addicted to information and the internet, which leave me feeling frantic. You just need to understand you are not missing out on anything by not doing so. This sort of internet addiction isn't just destroying productivity for grown up adults but studying habits of teenagers and school going kids too. Try to take it 15 minutes at a time. Try staying away from internet 15 minutes at a time, then the next 15 and so on, I think it should work out perfect well.

gerbilly 10y ago

When I was programming on my Apple ][ during the 80s, my mom would joke that computer minutes must be a lot longer than real minutes, because when she would call me for dinner, I'd tell her I'd be there in five minutes but instead would lose track of time for twenty minutes. Now, because of smartphones, it seems everyone is caught in this same time distortion field. As a result I purposefully try to look at my phone as little as possible. Think of it this way, if through some sort of Matrix like situation our first experience of the outside world was through a small touchscreen, and then suddenly you took the red pill and were put into a world where you could touch, smell and see in full 360 degrees and feel wind and water and move and climb over things and interact with animals etc...it would blow your mind. So why are we allowing ourselves to limit our experiences in this way?

sliverstorm 10y ago

It's incredible how much time you can blow on the internet or TV, vs what you can do with it in the real world. I went for a run last week, and got to marveling how I had run from my front door into the mountains & back, how gradually the time had passed, and how those two hours would have zwip vanished in a forgettable blink had I been online.