6 ms·

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

153 points by bdfh42 19y ago

yangyang42 19y ago
IMHO, this was definitely one of the best key note of the entire Web2.0 conference.
- aschobel 19y ago
  Agreed, did you talk to him at Speed Q&A at Web2Open? http://www.socialtext.net/web2open/index.cgi?speed_q_a http://www.socialtext.net/web2open/index.cgi?speed_q_a That was my favorite part of the conference. Thanks again to Tony for putting it together, being able to talk to these people in an intimate setting was amazing. -Andreas
pauljonas 19y ago
>So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years." Odd, I had a moment like this about a year ago or so… I had just recently revamped an organizational website and made it more interactive, more user-participatory, and had made a remark to an office assistant on how great it was that new "editors" were jumping in and adding all this content, citing one in particular. Her response was the same as the TV person Shirky described - "it must be nice to have all that free time"… Irony being that unlike me (that I rarely watch TV and basically live on the net, work time and a good bit of off time too…), most of these folks can rattle about endlessly all the TV programs they watch and how much they love their DVR…
- simonw 19y ago
  My least favourite phrase in the English language has to be "they must have too much time on their hands" in response to something creative but niche (re-creating Star Wars in animated ASCII art, for example). My usual response these days is "at least they weren't just watching TV".
  - phaedrus 19y ago
    Personally I take it as an insult when someone says that in response to something creative I've built. You go months work-school-sleep-work-school, waiting for the occasional free hour or two to work on something because you're passionate about it, sacrifice sleep or social life, and when you get done someone looks at it and says, "I don't understand the work that went into this and I'm not going to expend the cognitive effort to gain any understanding, but, damn, it must be nice to have loads of time on my hands like you obviously do."
    - Hexstream 19y ago
      Being derisive about your creative endeavours is probably better for their ego than realizing how useless they are...
  - lancashire 19y ago
    This is so true. A very quick story - last year when I was coming up to leave University I decided to make leaving presents for my housemates as we were all about to part ways. So using my fairly basic Photoshop skills I created some digital photo collages, very simple but very effective, then went out and got some cheap frames and printed them out. When I gave them out later that evening they absolutely adored them, they were very cool. They also said I must have had far too much time on my hands to have done these, to which I replied 'I did it while you all watched Happy Gilmore'. This notion that contributing or creating something is seen as a waste of time really gets to me. Personally, I get far greater satisfaction spending my time this way than watching the mind-rotting junk that finds its way onto the television, yet this is seen as the normal way for us to spend our time. The worst part was I felt I had to watch it just so I could spend time with my friends. I really hope there is a shift in thought upon us. (I am so sorry Adam, for the record I love that film. I don't care if it contradicts my comment, that film rocks.)
    - phaedrus 19y ago
      I think there is a shift in thought upon us. Twelve years ago people thought my family was strange because we didn't watch TV; now when you say you stopped watching TV the reaction is more like what you'd get if you told someone you were exercising or on a diet.
rms 19y ago
Where do anti-depressants come in?
- SwellJoe 19y ago
  Since many of the most popular anti-depressants don't actually do anything, I guess TV has to play a role as well. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn13375-prozac-does-not-work-in-majority-of-depressed-patients.html http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn13375-prozac-do... Maybe we need more gin carts.
  - rms 19y ago
    >Since many of the most popular anti-depressants don't actually do anything I of course have only read the mainstream summary of the study, but I think the study must say that anti-depressants usually don't cure depression. But I can assure you that messing with serotonin reuptake makes people happier.
    - SwellJoe 19y ago
      One might assume my previous post was made in jest, based on the flippant closing comment. But without a smiley, who can tell? ;-)
r00k 19y ago
Is it me, or does this guy speak like Paul Graham writes?
D_T 19y ago
These are the kinds of articles and thoughts that really make me cherish Hacker News.
Alex3917 19y ago
I don't understand why Shirky used the phrase cognitive surplus as opposed to time surplus. After all, free time could be spent productively doing cognitive work, but it could also be spent productively performing routinized labor. Most of the top wikipedia editors rack up their massive edit counts from correcting spelling mistakes and wikifying content, not writing original articles.
stcredzero 19y ago
Free time is not just a recent thing. Back in our hunter-gatherer days, many of us had tons of free time. Even as agriculturalists, it was common for people to have to devote zero time to work for months on end. At times like this, young people could sing, dance, and play music for over 12 hours a day. There were places in Ireland that were like this in living memory.
- Prrometheus 19y ago
  Aye, but free time combined with mass wealth is a rather new combination.
  - stcredzero 19y ago
    Good point!
- jlb 19y ago
  I disagree. Leisure time for the masses is a recent development. If one observes modern small farmers and seasonal agricultural laborers, reads history on peasants, pre and industrial laborers then one should take away the observation that these people work and worked all day long most if not all their lives. Even for hunter gatherers, they spend most of their time half-starved scratching for food.
  - zasz 19y ago
    Hunter gatherers actually had plenty of food and leisure time and were much better nourished than their agricultural compatriots. Jared Diamond wrote a good article summarizing their lifestyle: http://www.awok.org/worst-mistake/ http://www.awok.org/worst-mistake/ Seasonal farmers in Europe and Russia spent half the year doing nothing. Even if they had to work their asses off during the growing season, they had nothing BUT leisure time during the winter. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html
    - pg 19y ago
phaedrus 19y ago
We should remember that not all time is interchangeable; just because you're up to spending 4 hours zonked out watching TV in bed does not mean you are up for spending 4 hours doing useful cognitive work. Maybe you're tired, hung over, sick, not feeling it, etc. However, even given this caveat, the author's point still stands. Because even if 4 hours of TV watching only translates to 1 hour of useful creative work and 3 hours of blah, that's still a huge amount of cognitive surplus. But I think that it is like exercise - just because you watch TV for 4 hours, doesn't mean you could have jogged or rode a bike for 4 hours straight instead; your body isn't up to it. Why isn't it up to it? Because you're used to watching TV. So even if we only get a very poor 4:1 conversion rate at first, as we exercise our minds or bodies at doing other things besides TV, as a society we'll improve that exchange rate.
- davi 19y ago
  Along this line: when people say, "I would <x>, but I don't have the time" (where <x> is some creative, interesting thing), usually one can substitute the word "energy" for "time" in their statement, and learn a lot more about them: they are essentially asserting that they are too energy depleted to <x>.
  - zasz 19y ago
    Along this line: when people say, "I would <x>, but I don't have the time" (where <x> is some creative, interesting thing), usually one can substitute the word "Vespene gas" for "time" in their statement, and learn a lot more about them: they are essentially asserting that they are too Vespene gas depleted to <x>. I don't understand this post. If you substitute a word that's essentially the same, that's a synonym and you therefore gain no meaning. And it makes no sense to say people are essentially asserting something when you put an assertion in their mouths. I think it's more complicated than energy and time; generally, I don't think people actually like <x> enough to want to invest some time and energy or Vespene gas in it. I just went to an energy efficiency event today. 45 people had signed up and only 27 showed up to install energy-efficient things today. It would have taken 5 hours and very little energy. I think a lack of interest, causing a lack of commitment, explains it better.
  - 19y ago
dejb 19y ago
>The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year... One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation. I think he messed the maths up 1 wikipedia = 100 Million hours (from earlier in the article) Annual TV watching = 1,000,000 Million hours 1% of annual TV watching = 10,000 Million Hours = 100 wikipedia's Correct me if I'm wrong.
- scw 19y ago
  >The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation. He switched context from discussing the US-only consumption to total global television consumption. It seems worth thinking about the implications of this change even if the numbers are inaccurate.
  - dejb 19y ago
    Yes I agree it is useful to consider the rest of the world. However that was not the cause for the discrepancy and the numbers are still out by a factor of 100. If you think that 1% of global surplus attention could annually create 10000 wikipedias instead of 100 then you are likely to reach some very different conclusions. Maybe he switched context from 1% to 100% - that would make sense.
    - scw 19y ago
      You're completely right. To convince myself: trillion = 10**12 wikipedia = 10**8 surplus = trillion applied_surplus = surplus * 0.01 print applied_surplus / wikipedia which leaves us with only 100 wikipedias, as your numbers claimed.
- pchristensen 19y ago
  Wikipedia = 100 million hours Annual TV in US = 200 billion hours Time watching Ads in US, per weekend = 100 million hours Annual TV worldwide = 1 trillion hours
nazgulnarsil 19y ago
"all you do is play on that computer!" goes back to watching TV Yeah, because your time watching entertainment tonight is better spent than my time researching for economics. I fucking hate old people.
- Jesin 19y ago
  I thought those first two lines were pretty good. It's probably that last one that brought on the downmods.
  - nazgulnarsil 19y ago
    By old people I mean people that criticize any paradigm they aren't familiar with. You don't have to be old to do this, but old people are more likely to do it. I could have used the term neophobe I suppose. OTOH, the thought of old people down modding me makes me lol.
cousin_it 19y ago
Well I agree with him, and I don't ever watch TV, but... interactive media seem to be better at sucking people in than TV. And they're getting better all the time. This is starting to scare me, nobody else? And there's an exceptionally thoughtful Reddit thread on the topic: http://reddit.com/info/6h7ph/comments/c03u0jv http://reddit.com/info/6h7ph/comments/c03u0jv
arthurk 19y ago
What about _good_ movies that make you think?
- adbachman 19y ago
  I don't think the author was claiming we should or would stop watching purely passive media. His statement was more that, on the whole, time spent passively receiving is cognitive surplus. If the floodgates are opened even a bit (1 hour in 100), the resulting output will be immense. And this is only the beginning.
poepping 19y ago
"We should remember that not all time is interchangeable; just because you're up to spending 4 hours zonked out watching TV in bed does not mean you are up for spending 4 hours doing useful cognitive work." --phaedrus This statement is somewhat wrong. I gave up T.V. about 3 years ago and this may have been true at first, but as you go on you realize that when you feel tired you are usually just bored, and need to do something. If you are really tired then go to sleep, don't stay awake forcing yourself to be entertained (gorging when you eat?) It isn't Just T.V. that is bad. Anything that updates is bad since you come back over and over looking for a new fix of "something new"; I've found this activity extremely draining on your ability to go out and do new things; you drop into a mode of wanting to do to a mode of just wanting things to come to you to entertain you. This means that the internet is almost as bad as T.V. (if not worse, more content to surf around) Think of all the things that are currently popular : myspace, youtube, stumble, facebook..etc.. Almost exactly like T.V. People go to those sites to zone out and have information handed to them. The same goes for email, people keep checking their mailboxes hoping to have a new nugget of joy that will keep them busy for a few more minutes. I started off With No T.V. (cold turkey), I used Movies to supplement the cravings, then I started cutting back on movies, not because I was trying to cut back on them, but because I just don't find them interesting any more. Next I cut out all forms of gossip and news from the internet. Pretty much anything that you read that can make you angry from either a) "how stupid" the person writing it is, or b) how anything like "that" could ever happen, you just need to cut it out; why do you want to work yourself up? This would include sites like slashdot.org, digg, reddit..etc. After cutting these sites out, my over all mood has become much better; those sites just contain thoughts that do you know good what so ever. (How did I read this to be posting on it? Someone sent me the link. Which is a great system; if something is worth knowing, someone will tell you.) After giving up most every news site (they are all tripe that just spread gossip and violence.) I started reading just "creative" blogs (make magazine for example.) Recently I have found that It doesn't matter what you read, since you'll end up just going back to be "entertained". Why is this bad? Because you switch off, you might think to yourself that you'll get inspired by reading inspiring blogs, but you won't. What you'll find out if you are paying attention is that most blogs are just recycled content over and over; there are very few original ideas out there. After giving up almost all forms of "updating" sources. I have found that I no longer have enough time in a day to do all the stuff I want to get done. If I feel too tired even to read a book (not usable energy as someone stated.) then I go to bed. There are millions of things to do out there, you just need to find them. One other mistake I made was when trying to learn a lot of new things I would bounce around between them, which isn't bad, but I found that when I got stuck learning something new, I would switch over to doing something else, which is bad. So If you plan on learning new things, set a time for yourself. If you start an activity stay with it for at least 1 hour (or whatever) to make sure that if you hit a wall you work your way over it instead of moving on to something else. Also, I have found that keep a journal of all the things you learn to be very useful. Whenever you have some free time, you can read through the past things you have learned to refresh your memory. You can respond to this comment all you want, but as stated i've pretty much given up this type of entrainment (blogs) altogether and I'm just here because someone sent me the link; I wrote this in hopes that it may help some people that are moving down this path already. If you think this was all dumb crap (maybe it is, life systems change over your life.) , well then don't use it. If you have any questions: matt.poepping@gmail.com

153 points by bdfh42 19y ago

yangyang42 19y ago

IMHO, this was definitely one of the best key note of the entire Web2.0 conference.

aschobel 19y ago
Agreed, did you talk to him at Speed Q&A at Web2Open? http://www.socialtext.net/web2open/index.cgi?speed_q_a http://www.socialtext.net/web2open/index.cgi?speed_q_a That was my favorite part of the conference. Thanks again to Tony for putting it together, being able to talk to these people in an intimate setting was amazing. -Andreas

pauljonas 19y ago

>So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years." Odd, I had a moment like this about a year ago or so… I had just recently revamped an organizational website and made it more interactive, more user-participatory, and had made a remark to an office assistant on how great it was that new "editors" were jumping in and adding all this content, citing one in particular. Her response was the same as the TV person Shirky described - "it must be nice to have all that free time"… Irony being that unlike me (that I rarely watch TV and basically live on the net, work time and a good bit of off time too…), most of these folks can rattle about endlessly all the TV programs they watch and how much they love their DVR…

simonw 19y ago
My least favourite phrase in the English language has to be "they must have too much time on their hands" in response to something creative but niche (re-creating Star Wars in animated ASCII art, for example). My usual response these days is "at least they weren't just watching TV".
- phaedrus 19y ago
  Personally I take it as an insult when someone says that in response to something creative I've built. You go months work-school-sleep-work-school, waiting for the occasional free hour or two to work on something because you're passionate about it, sacrifice sleep or social life, and when you get done someone looks at it and says, "I don't understand the work that went into this and I'm not going to expend the cognitive effort to gain any understanding, but, damn, it must be nice to have loads of time on my hands like you obviously do."
  - Hexstream 19y ago
    Being derisive about your creative endeavours is probably better for their ego than realizing how useless they are...
- lancashire 19y ago
  This is so true. A very quick story - last year when I was coming up to leave University I decided to make leaving presents for my housemates as we were all about to part ways. So using my fairly basic Photoshop skills I created some digital photo collages, very simple but very effective, then went out and got some cheap frames and printed them out. When I gave them out later that evening they absolutely adored them, they were very cool. They also said I must have had far too much time on my hands to have done these, to which I replied 'I did it while you all watched Happy Gilmore'. This notion that contributing or creating something is seen as a waste of time really gets to me. Personally, I get far greater satisfaction spending my time this way than watching the mind-rotting junk that finds its way onto the television, yet this is seen as the normal way for us to spend our time. The worst part was I felt I had to watch it just so I could spend time with my friends. I really hope there is a shift in thought upon us. (I am so sorry Adam, for the record I love that film. I don't care if it contradicts my comment, that film rocks.)
  - phaedrus 19y ago
    I think there is a shift in thought upon us. Twelve years ago people thought my family was strange because we didn't watch TV; now when you say you stopped watching TV the reaction is more like what you'd get if you told someone you were exercising or on a diet.

rms 19y ago

Where do anti-depressants come in?

SwellJoe 19y ago
Since many of the most popular anti-depressants don't actually do anything, I guess TV has to play a role as well. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn13375-prozac-does-not-work-in-majority-of-depressed-patients.html http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn13375-prozac-do... Maybe we need more gin carts.
- rms 19y ago
  >Since many of the most popular anti-depressants don't actually do anything I of course have only read the mainstream summary of the study, but I think the study must say that anti-depressants usually don't cure depression. But I can assure you that messing with serotonin reuptake makes people happier.
  - SwellJoe 19y ago
    One might assume my previous post was made in jest, based on the flippant closing comment. But without a smiley, who can tell? ;-)

r00k 19y ago

Is it me, or does this guy speak like Paul Graham writes?

D_T 19y ago

These are the kinds of articles and thoughts that really make me cherish Hacker News.

Alex3917 19y ago

I don't understand why Shirky used the phrase cognitive surplus as opposed to time surplus. After all, free time could be spent productively doing cognitive work, but it could also be spent productively performing routinized labor. Most of the top wikipedia editors rack up their massive edit counts from correcting spelling mistakes and wikifying content, not writing original articles.

stcredzero 19y ago

Free time is not just a recent thing. Back in our hunter-gatherer days, many of us had tons of free time. Even as agriculturalists, it was common for people to have to devote zero time to work for months on end. At times like this, young people could sing, dance, and play music for over 12 hours a day. There were places in Ireland that were like this in living memory.

Prrometheus 19y ago
Aye, but free time combined with mass wealth is a rather new combination.
- stcredzero 19y ago
  Good point!
jlb 19y ago
I disagree. Leisure time for the masses is a recent development. If one observes modern small farmers and seasonal agricultural laborers, reads history on peasants, pre and industrial laborers then one should take away the observation that these people work and worked all day long most if not all their lives. Even for hunter gatherers, they spend most of their time half-starved scratching for food.
- zasz 19y ago
  Hunter gatherers actually had plenty of food and leisure time and were much better nourished than their agricultural compatriots. Jared Diamond wrote a good article summarizing their lifestyle: http://www.awok.org/worst-mistake/ http://www.awok.org/worst-mistake/ Seasonal farmers in Europe and Russia spent half the year doing nothing. Even if they had to work their asses off during the growing season, they had nothing BUT leisure time during the winter. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html
  - pg 19y ago

phaedrus 19y ago

We should remember that not all time is interchangeable; just because you're up to spending 4 hours zonked out watching TV in bed does not mean you are up for spending 4 hours doing useful cognitive work. Maybe you're tired, hung over, sick, not feeling it, etc. However, even given this caveat, the author's point still stands. Because even if 4 hours of TV watching only translates to 1 hour of useful creative work and 3 hours of blah, that's still a huge amount of cognitive surplus. But I think that it is like exercise - just because you watch TV for 4 hours, doesn't mean you could have jogged or rode a bike for 4 hours straight instead; your body isn't up to it. Why isn't it up to it? Because you're used to watching TV. So even if we only get a very poor 4:1 conversion rate at first, as we exercise our minds or bodies at doing other things besides TV, as a society we'll improve that exchange rate.

davi 19y ago
Along this line: when people say, "I would <x>, but I don't have the time" (where <x> is some creative, interesting thing), usually one can substitute the word "energy" for "time" in their statement, and learn a lot more about them: they are essentially asserting that they are too energy depleted to <x>.
- zasz 19y ago
  Along this line: when people say, "I would <x>, but I don't have the time" (where <x> is some creative, interesting thing), usually one can substitute the word "Vespene gas" for "time" in their statement, and learn a lot more about them: they are essentially asserting that they are too Vespene gas depleted to <x>. I don't understand this post. If you substitute a word that's essentially the same, that's a synonym and you therefore gain no meaning. And it makes no sense to say people are essentially asserting something when you put an assertion in their mouths. I think it's more complicated than energy and time; generally, I don't think people actually like <x> enough to want to invest some time and energy or Vespene gas in it. I just went to an energy efficiency event today. 45 people had signed up and only 27 showed up to install energy-efficient things today. It would have taken 5 hours and very little energy. I think a lack of interest, causing a lack of commitment, explains it better.
- 19y ago

dejb 19y ago

>The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year... One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation. I think he messed the maths up 1 wikipedia = 100 Million hours (from earlier in the article) Annual TV watching = 1,000,000 Million hours 1% of annual TV watching = 10,000 Million Hours = 100 wikipedia's Correct me if I'm wrong.

scw 19y ago
>The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation. He switched context from discussing the US-only consumption to total global television consumption. It seems worth thinking about the implications of this change even if the numbers are inaccurate.
- dejb 19y ago
  Yes I agree it is useful to consider the rest of the world. However that was not the cause for the discrepancy and the numbers are still out by a factor of 100. If you think that 1% of global surplus attention could annually create 10000 wikipedias instead of 100 then you are likely to reach some very different conclusions. Maybe he switched context from 1% to 100% - that would make sense.
  - scw 19y ago
    You're completely right. To convince myself: trillion = 10**12 wikipedia = 10**8 surplus = trillion applied_surplus = surplus * 0.01 print applied_surplus / wikipedia which leaves us with only 100 wikipedias, as your numbers claimed.
pchristensen 19y ago
Wikipedia = 100 million hours Annual TV in US = 200 billion hours Time watching Ads in US, per weekend = 100 million hours Annual TV worldwide = 1 trillion hours

nazgulnarsil 19y ago

"all you do is play on that computer!" goes back to watching TV Yeah, because your time watching entertainment tonight is better spent than my time researching for economics. I fucking hate old people.

Jesin 19y ago
I thought those first two lines were pretty good. It's probably that last one that brought on the downmods.
- nazgulnarsil 19y ago
  By old people I mean people that criticize any paradigm they aren't familiar with. You don't have to be old to do this, but old people are more likely to do it. I could have used the term neophobe I suppose. OTOH, the thought of old people down modding me makes me lol.

cousin_it 19y ago

Well I agree with him, and I don't ever watch TV, but... interactive media seem to be better at sucking people in than TV. And they're getting better all the time. This is starting to scare me, nobody else? And there's an exceptionally thoughtful Reddit thread on the topic: http://reddit.com/info/6h7ph/comments/c03u0jv http://reddit.com/info/6h7ph/comments/c03u0jv

arthurk 19y ago

What about _good_ movies that make you think?

adbachman 19y ago
I don't think the author was claiming we should or would stop watching purely passive media. His statement was more that, on the whole, time spent passively receiving is cognitive surplus. If the floodgates are opened even a bit (1 hour in 100), the resulting output will be immense. And this is only the beginning.

poepping 19y ago

"We should remember that not all time is interchangeable; just because you're up to spending 4 hours zonked out watching TV in bed does not mean you are up for spending 4 hours doing useful cognitive work." --phaedrus This statement is somewhat wrong. I gave up T.V. about 3 years ago and this may have been true at first, but as you go on you realize that when you feel tired you are usually just bored, and need to do something. If you are really tired then go to sleep, don't stay awake forcing yourself to be entertained (gorging when you eat?) It isn't Just T.V. that is bad. Anything that updates is bad since you come back over and over looking for a new fix of "something new"; I've found this activity extremely draining on your ability to go out and do new things; you drop into a mode of wanting to do to a mode of just wanting things to come to you to entertain you. This means that the internet is almost as bad as T.V. (if not worse, more content to surf around) Think of all the things that are currently popular : myspace, youtube, stumble, facebook..etc.. Almost exactly like T.V. People go to those sites to zone out and have information handed to them. The same goes for email, people keep checking their mailboxes hoping to have a new nugget of joy that will keep them busy for a few more minutes. I started off With No T.V. (cold turkey), I used Movies to supplement the cravings, then I started cutting back on movies, not because I was trying to cut back on them, but because I just don't find them interesting any more. Next I cut out all forms of gossip and news from the internet. Pretty much anything that you read that can make you angry from either a) "how stupid" the person writing it is, or b) how anything like "that" could ever happen, you just need to cut it out; why do you want to work yourself up? This would include sites like slashdot.org, digg, reddit..etc. After cutting these sites out, my over all mood has become much better; those sites just contain thoughts that do you know good what so ever. (How did I read this to be posting on it? Someone sent me the link. Which is a great system; if something is worth knowing, someone will tell you.) After giving up most every news site (they are all tripe that just spread gossip and violence.) I started reading just "creative" blogs (make magazine for example.) Recently I have found that It doesn't matter what you read, since you'll end up just going back to be "entertained". Why is this bad? Because you switch off, you might think to yourself that you'll get inspired by reading inspiring blogs, but you won't. What you'll find out if you are paying attention is that most blogs are just recycled content over and over; there are very few original ideas out there. After giving up almost all forms of "updating" sources. I have found that I no longer have enough time in a day to do all the stuff I want to get done. If I feel too tired even to read a book (not usable energy as someone stated.) then I go to bed. There are millions of things to do out there, you just need to find them. One other mistake I made was when trying to learn a lot of new things I would bounce around between them, which isn't bad, but I found that when I got stuck learning something new, I would switch over to doing something else, which is bad. So If you plan on learning new things, set a time for yourself. If you start an activity stay with it for at least 1 hour (or whatever) to make sure that if you hit a wall you work your way over it instead of moving on to something else. Also, I have found that keep a journal of all the things you learn to be very useful. Whenever you have some free time, you can read through the past things you have learned to refresh your memory. You can respond to this comment all you want, but as stated i've pretty much given up this type of entrainment (blogs) altogether and I'm just here because someone sent me the link; I wrote this in hopes that it may help some people that are moving down this path already. If you think this was all dumb crap (maybe it is, life systems change over your life.) , well then don't use it. If you have any questions: matt.poepping@gmail.com