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I have information addiction myself. I’ve had websites I check compulsively ever since slashdot first became popular. When it becomes a real problem I take acti
by Joeri 9y ago
I have information addiction myself. I’ve had websites I check compulsively ever since slashdot first became popular. When it becomes a real problem I take action. I’ve only found two things to work: complete cold turkey with a specific end date (personal challenge) or subsituting site checking with activities I enjoy more (reading books, playing games, ...). I’ve never been able to subsitute with something more productive that I enjoyed less, I just end up procrastinating in other ways.
The remarkable thing about going cold turkey: you don’t miss out on anything important. Everything truly important will reach you another way. For me, checking news sites is not about getting useful information, it’s about rewarding my brain by feeding it what it has been trained to want. In my experience it took weeks to deprogram myself.
- jonnycomputer 9y agoAt one point I started listening to several news podcasts simultaneously... News addiction is sort of a problem, especially because we often don't really drill down into the content, but just scan the lead, get the gist, peek at the comments, move on. But most daily news is provisional, and not well developed. Weekly or even monthly publications like Newsweek and the Economist may not be a model suited to the internet age, yet it seems a model that consumers desperately need to increase the SNR.