5 ms·

I too feel exactly this way with almost everything. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Email, Messages ... it's kind of tough to escape. Impossible even. And here's the

by Swizec 9y ago

I too feel exactly this way with almost everything. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Email, Messages ... it's kind of tough to escape. Impossible even. And here's the worst part: We grew up with this shit. My generation was one of the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit. That means we'll never escape. Ever. We're literally wired to seek approval of strangers on the internet instead of the people around us. It feels more ... correct? Real? True? That red circle with a number literally gives more enjoyment than a close friend saying "Heh that's cool". The worst part is that there's likely no cure. Rehab, maybe. But rehab for this shit doesn't exist yet. Plus try explaining to your boss that you're not reading email and slack and you're never coming back because you're in notification rehab. Simon Sinek explains it perfectly: https://youtu.be/hER0Qp6QJNU?t=195 https://youtu.be/hER0Qp6QJNU?t=195

avaer 9y ago
Impossible is hard to square with the people in this thread (myself included) that did it. You don't have to tell your boss you're not reading notifications. You just have to eliminate the notifications that serve no purpose except a high. Facebook still spams my email; it's filtered to the trash. Business carries on.
- Swizec 9y ago
  "You can totally quit heroin! Just stop taking it" "Oh and if all your friends are doing it and are wondering why you're not having fun with them, just ignore them" Sure you've quit Facebook. But did you quit dopamine-seeking technology use? What I've found in myself is that when I pry myself away from Facebook, I spend more time on Twitter. When I pry myself off that as well, suddenly my HN engagement goes up. When I manage to ignore all those, then I check Slack every 2 minutes. If I avoid even that, then I refresh my email all the time. The medium isn't the problem. The behavior is the problem. There's always another medium you can switch to. I mean, it's not like I was on Facebook when I got hooked to social media at 14, 15, 16. I was on internet forums and MSN Messenger. The draw was and still is that it broadened my horizons, exposed me to different people, and sometimes I learned really useful things. Hell, it helped me build my entire career.
  - MegaButts 9y ago
    You're being hyperbolic, and it diminishes your argument. Not everybody in your generation suffers from the same addiction as you. I could be persuaded it's a large problem and is generational, but I don't believe we have the same kind of biological responses to social media as we do to something like sunlight. I also believe there is another side of the argument, and people just consume media differently today. The internet came and it was the death of media, the TV came and it was the death of books, the books came and they were the death of the bard, etc. Maybe some people actually enjoy Facebook?
    - Swizec 9y ago
      Watch the video I linked. Sinek does a good job of explaining how most (many?) of us have a similar problem with social media as alcoholics do with alcohol. For much the same reasons.
  - lmm 9y ago
    Quitting dopamine-seeking is called death. Dopamine is how the brain's reward system works, and eating or parenting is dopamine-seeking just as much as any other behaviour. It sounds like technology isn't the problem - if you're doing these things with technology you'd be doing the same things without it. Perhaps you'd be spending a lot of time chatting around the water cooler instead of online, but that's not actually any healthier or better. Facebook has brought me a lot of fun in my life - on Tuesday I went to a gig that I only found out about because a casual acquaintance posted it there, and tonight I'm meeting up with another acquaintance because I saw on Facebook we're going to the same gig. I see it as like the gold medal in Cool Runnings - if you're not enough without it, you're not going to be enough with it.
    - aninhumer 9y ago
      Different activities provide differing reward for differing efforts. Water cooler chat, which requires active social engagement and is time bounded, is not as addicting as an endless stream of content accessed with a twitch of the finger. You might not use Facebook in that way, and I similarly don't find it that engaging, but I've certainly experienced it with reddit and HN. And I don't think this is some intractable personality flaw, I think people get used to the comfort of frequent dopamine hits, and find it very difficult to drag themselves away from these sources as a result. Cold turkey can and does make a difference.
3131s 9y ago
> And here's the worst part: We grew up with this shit. My generation was one of the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit. Yeah, I am only a year away, born in 1988. Our family's first home computer was put in my room when I was 6 years old and my parents were hands-off about using it, so I grew up on multi-player gaming, forums, chat rooms, porn, etc. It's difficult to express how strongly the internet shaped the direction of my life, and I'm not even as addicted as most people. Not having a phone helps with staying off Facebook...
eludwig 9y ago
I watched the video and the speaker spends a great deal of time making some very elegant (if somewhat obvious) points. But then at the end he comes to the wrong conclusion, Imo. He blames the corporations where millennials work and passes the responsibility for fixing their attention/relationship deficits off to them! This is totally backwards. Every generation has their dopamine hits. Of course, as society creates more leisure time, the number and (arguably) complexity of these increase. That is the trend. But, as always, the responsibility should be squarely on your own shoulders! You were not "dealt a bad hand." If that's a truth, then everyone ever born was dealt a bad hand. If being born at the time when the length and quality of life (health-wise) is at its longest, then deal me in! There are many, many benefits to being born in this time and as always, it is up to us to find the life we want and the balance we need.
- lloeki 9y ago
  > He blames the corporations where millennials work and passes the responsibility for fixing their attention/relationship deficits off to them! This is totally backwards. He does blames them, but only as part of his point, not as the whole conclusion. He blames the corporations for focusing on reductive, short-term metrics† instead of people, which is precisely what's lead to this[0] and that[1] abusive situations. As a company you're not hiring robots, you're hiring people. > Every generation has their dopamine hits. Indeed it has. The trouble starts when it reaches such heights, recurrence and omnipresence that it throws whole lives off balance. > If being born at the time when the length and quality of life (health-wise) is at its longest, then deal me in! There are many, many benefits to being born in this time and as alway Strawman. Life expectancy does not invalidate the new challenges we have to face. If anything, with modern discoveries about happiness vs hardship, people may literally have been happier in spite of such matters (shocking!). I'm suddenly reminded of Gladia's tirade in Robots and Empire: would you rather live a long, dull, purposeless life endlessly being bored to no end or a shorter life full of brilliance? But we digress. > it is up to us to find the life we want and the balance we need This is the kind of attitude that reviles me. You can't blame someone for becoming alcoholic/depressive/etc. If you do then you don't understand what those are: illnesses. Nobody breaks his leg or catches a flu on purpose. If a company refuses to take such humane matters into consideration then you're just a tool and it's parasitically just sucking onto you till you're dry. When you're in situations of illnesses, all the good will of the person is not sufficient: help is needed, from everywhere it can come[2]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14703661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14703661 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14711621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14711621 [2]: https://medium.com/@OlarkLiveChat/its-2017-and-mental-health-is-still-an-issue-in-the-workplace-61efbef092f https://medium.com/@OlarkLiveChat/its-2017-and-mental-health... † ironically, themselves being addicted to that very same dopamine (or rather its ethereal corporate equivalent) rush.
wutbrodo 9y ago
> My generation was one of the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit. That means we'll never escape. Ever. We're literally wired to seek approval of strangers on the internet instead of the people around us. It feels more ... correct? Real? True? I don't think that's really true. I'm about your age, and you were ~20 when the iPhone came out, right? Facebook was just settling in as the tool of choice for every college student, but even then it was mainly just photo-sharing and event-planning. The fact that we missed out on social networking in our entire teenage and preteen years means that we narrowly escaped this. If you spend any time around people a bit younger than us, the contrast is particularly stark. My cousins are about a decade younger than me (just started college), and throughout high school, Snapchat/Twitter/etc were simply a must-have. The amount of time they spent sharing content and scrolling through others is insane, and if you talk to them about it, they're very aware that it's somewhere between a chore, an addiction, and good ol' fun. That's the kind of "hardwired into your formative social years" thing that we never really had to deal with.

by Swizec 9y ago

avaer 9y ago

Impossible is hard to square with the people in this thread (myself included) that did it. You don't have to tell your boss you're not reading notifications. You just have to eliminate the notifications that serve no purpose except a high. Facebook still spams my email; it's filtered to the trash. Business carries on.

Swizec 9y ago
"You can totally quit heroin! Just stop taking it" "Oh and if all your friends are doing it and are wondering why you're not having fun with them, just ignore them" Sure you've quit Facebook. But did you quit dopamine-seeking technology use? What I've found in myself is that when I pry myself away from Facebook, I spend more time on Twitter. When I pry myself off that as well, suddenly my HN engagement goes up. When I manage to ignore all those, then I check Slack every 2 minutes. If I avoid even that, then I refresh my email all the time. The medium isn't the problem. The behavior is the problem. There's always another medium you can switch to. I mean, it's not like I was on Facebook when I got hooked to social media at 14, 15, 16. I was on internet forums and MSN Messenger. The draw was and still is that it broadened my horizons, exposed me to different people, and sometimes I learned really useful things. Hell, it helped me build my entire career.
- MegaButts 9y ago
  You're being hyperbolic, and it diminishes your argument. Not everybody in your generation suffers from the same addiction as you. I could be persuaded it's a large problem and is generational, but I don't believe we have the same kind of biological responses to social media as we do to something like sunlight. I also believe there is another side of the argument, and people just consume media differently today. The internet came and it was the death of media, the TV came and it was the death of books, the books came and they were the death of the bard, etc. Maybe some people actually enjoy Facebook?
  - Swizec 9y ago
    Watch the video I linked. Sinek does a good job of explaining how most (many?) of us have a similar problem with social media as alcoholics do with alcohol. For much the same reasons.
- lmm 9y ago
  Quitting dopamine-seeking is called death. Dopamine is how the brain's reward system works, and eating or parenting is dopamine-seeking just as much as any other behaviour. It sounds like technology isn't the problem - if you're doing these things with technology you'd be doing the same things without it. Perhaps you'd be spending a lot of time chatting around the water cooler instead of online, but that's not actually any healthier or better. Facebook has brought me a lot of fun in my life - on Tuesday I went to a gig that I only found out about because a casual acquaintance posted it there, and tonight I'm meeting up with another acquaintance because I saw on Facebook we're going to the same gig. I see it as like the gold medal in Cool Runnings - if you're not enough without it, you're not going to be enough with it.
  - aninhumer 9y ago
    Different activities provide differing reward for differing efforts. Water cooler chat, which requires active social engagement and is time bounded, is not as addicting as an endless stream of content accessed with a twitch of the finger. You might not use Facebook in that way, and I similarly don't find it that engaging, but I've certainly experienced it with reddit and HN. And I don't think this is some intractable personality flaw, I think people get used to the comfort of frequent dopamine hits, and find it very difficult to drag themselves away from these sources as a result. Cold turkey can and does make a difference.

3131s 9y ago

> And here's the worst part: We grew up with this shit. My generation was one of the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit. Yeah, I am only a year away, born in 1988. Our family's first home computer was put in my room when I was 6 years old and my parents were hands-off about using it, so I grew up on multi-player gaming, forums, chat rooms, porn, etc. It's difficult to express how strongly the internet shaped the direction of my life, and I'm not even as addicted as most people. Not having a phone helps with staying off Facebook...

eludwig 9y ago

I watched the video and the speaker spends a great deal of time making some very elegant (if somewhat obvious) points. But then at the end he comes to the wrong conclusion, Imo. He blames the corporations where millennials work and passes the responsibility for fixing their attention/relationship deficits off to them! This is totally backwards. Every generation has their dopamine hits. Of course, as society creates more leisure time, the number and (arguably) complexity of these increase. That is the trend. But, as always, the responsibility should be squarely on your own shoulders! You were not "dealt a bad hand." If that's a truth, then everyone ever born was dealt a bad hand. If being born at the time when the length and quality of life (health-wise) is at its longest, then deal me in! There are many, many benefits to being born in this time and as always, it is up to us to find the life we want and the balance we need.

lloeki 9y ago
> He blames the corporations where millennials work and passes the responsibility for fixing their attention/relationship deficits off to them! This is totally backwards. He does blames them, but only as part of his point, not as the whole conclusion. He blames the corporations for focusing on reductive, short-term metrics† instead of people, which is precisely what's lead to this[0] and that[1] abusive situations. As a company you're not hiring robots, you're hiring people. > Every generation has their dopamine hits. Indeed it has. The trouble starts when it reaches such heights, recurrence and omnipresence that it throws whole lives off balance. > If being born at the time when the length and quality of life (health-wise) is at its longest, then deal me in! There are many, many benefits to being born in this time and as alway Strawman. Life expectancy does not invalidate the new challenges we have to face. If anything, with modern discoveries about happiness vs hardship, people may literally have been happier in spite of such matters (shocking!). I'm suddenly reminded of Gladia's tirade in Robots and Empire: would you rather live a long, dull, purposeless life endlessly being bored to no end or a shorter life full of brilliance? But we digress. > it is up to us to find the life we want and the balance we need This is the kind of attitude that reviles me. You can't blame someone for becoming alcoholic/depressive/etc. If you do then you don't understand what those are: illnesses. Nobody breaks his leg or catches a flu on purpose. If a company refuses to take such humane matters into consideration then you're just a tool and it's parasitically just sucking onto you till you're dry. When you're in situations of illnesses, all the good will of the person is not sufficient: help is needed, from everywhere it can come[2]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14703661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14703661 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14711621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14711621 [2]: https://medium.com/@OlarkLiveChat/its-2017-and-mental-health-is-still-an-issue-in-the-workplace-61efbef092f https://medium.com/@OlarkLiveChat/its-2017-and-mental-health... † ironically, themselves being addicted to that very same dopamine (or rather its ethereal corporate equivalent) rush.

wutbrodo 9y ago

> My generation was one of the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit. That means we'll never escape. Ever. We're literally wired to seek approval of strangers on the internet instead of the people around us. It feels more ... correct? Real? True? I don't think that's really true. I'm about your age, and you were ~20 when the iPhone came out, right? Facebook was just settling in as the tool of choice for every college student, but even then it was mainly just photo-sharing and event-planning. The fact that we missed out on social networking in our entire teenage and preteen years means that we narrowly escaped this. If you spend any time around people a bit younger than us, the contrast is particularly stark. My cousins are about a decade younger than me (just started college), and throughout high school, Snapchat/Twitter/etc were simply a must-have. The amount of time they spent sharing content and scrolling through others is insane, and if you talk to them about it, they're very aware that it's somewhere between a chore, an addiction, and good ol' fun. That's the kind of "hardwired into your formative social years" thing that we never really had to deal with.