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The biggest concern to me is the attention span most people have today. They can't go longer than a few minutes without checking their phone. It impacts work an

The biggest concern to me is the attention span most people have today. They can't go longer than a few minutes without checking their phone. It impacts work and leisure. An assignment at work is delayed or low quality because you checked your phone every few minutes, you don't understand what's happening in a TV show/movie because you kept checking your phone, you can't get interested in a good book because you can't read more than a page or two without checking your phone. I am guilty of this behavior myself and it's something that I've been working on a lot lately. I recognize that this is a problem, but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I think this is something that average person just needs to educate themselves on and make the decision for themselves. It's not impossible to break free from it. I highly suggest everyone checkout Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. It's a fantastic read.

roganartu 7y ago
The biggest concern to me is the attention span most people have today. They can't go longer than a few minutes without going outside for a cigarette. It impacts work and leisure. An assignment at work is delayed or low quality because you had a cigarette every few minutes, you don't understand what's happening in a TV show/movie because you kept looking away to light up another cigarette, you can't get interested in a good book because you can't read more than a page or two without getting another cigarette. I am guilty of this behavior myself and it's something that I've been working on a lot lately. I recognize that this is a problem, but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I think this is something that average person just needs to educate themselves on and make the decision for themselves. It's not impossible to break free from it.
heinrichhartman 7y ago
> but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I don't understand that argument. By the same reasoning all drugs should be legal: Everyone know's it's bad. People get trapped. It has severe consequences for personal health and the society as a whole. But, hey, "it's not impossible to break free from it" by yourself. No need for Government action. The key metric for me is impact to society. You can do all bad things to you if you want to, and they only impact yourself, but if things have large impact on: - Social fabric (stability of families and communities) - Political Culture (erosion of discourse culture) - Education (lower attention span) - Healthcare (burnout!) - Working productivity It might be a good idea to change the rules to prevent these effects.
- jumbopapa 7y ago
  > I don't understand that argument. By the same reasoning all drugs should be legal. Do you really believe it's the illegal nature of drugs that keep the vast majority of people from using them? It's the fact that they know it's bad. In the future social media could be no different. I don't know if I would be in favor of legalization, but Portugal has had reasonable success with decriminalizing all drugs.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    This doesn't seem as unreasonable as your incredulity makes it sound. Alcohol is uncontroversially wayyy more dangerous than a handful of illegal drugs, and it's in incredibly wide usage. Same for cigarettes in the past: it took a sui generis effort to dramatically shift culture to lower cigarette's popularity (in the US), and it was fragile enough that a rebranding to "Juul" is starting to undo a lot of that work. FWIW, from a selfish perspective, I wish most drugs were legal: ; I used marijuana responsibly before it was legal and continue to use psychedelics responsibly, and the reason I don't do meth or cocaine isn't because it's difficult to get, but because I'm aware of how dangerous they are. But I'm genuinely curious as to what could make you think that, for the average person, legality doesn't drive a substantial amount of their attitudes towards usage of a given drug.
  - supercanuck 7y ago
    You are conflating legalization of drugs with he decriminalizing of drugs by people it is still illegal to manufacture and sell fetanyl to the public, just as the OP is suggesting regulating the addictive nature of social media/technology. No one is saying let’s criminalize using smart phones.
- read_if_gay_ 7y ago
  > By the same reasoning all drugs should be legal Yeah, that actually works pretty great for Portugal and the war on drugs shows that just changing the rules doesn't work (another example in the same vein: the prohibition). People aren't that stupid that they need someone else to tell them what's good or bad for them. They know that. They just don't act accordingly, and that's the real problem, and you can't just fix that by saying no you can't do X. Everyone already knows they shouldn't do X. Your rules aren't adding anything.
tfha 7y ago
The average person is fighting teams of phds at Facebook, Google, and Amazon that are finding more and more ways to capture an maintain your interest, and to ensure that you can't put your phone down for more than a few minutes. Honestly I think a comparison to cigarettes is fair. Between the anti-patterns, the machine learning, the A/B testing, and the behavioral engineering, modern phone apps are more addicting than niccotine, and it's no more a person's fault for not being able to control themselves than it is for a smoker craving another cig. The problem cuts a lot deeper than people having no self control. They are actively fighting intelligent, well resourced adversaries who have a long term goal of getting you hooked.
- nothrabannosir 7y ago
  A comparison to cigarettes is not fair because I can quit cigarettes without any ramifications beyond the withdrawal itself. Trying to quit overuse of mobile phones while not losing access to their good features (maps, calendar, actual phone) is like trying to quit smoking while constantly walking around with a lit cigarette in your mouth. "Hey man what are you doing with a cig behind your desk?" - "I'm trying to quit smoking."
  - excalibur 7y ago
    Use some sort of parental controls app, lock the phone down so it can do exactly the things you want it to and nothing else. If necessary you can have a spouse or other trusted person set a password on it that you don't know, so you can't just turn the restrictions off.
    - slantyyz 7y ago
      I consider a big part of the problem to be notifications, and their respective default settings. Before smartphones (generally speaking), the majority of your notifications were on your computer. If you walked away from it, you were no longer getting them. Today, you've got a notification blaster in your pocket/purse, which is bad enough for work stuff, but if you participate in social media, it's a FOMO machine too. By default, all of your notifications are artificially urgent. I'm a little older than the average HN'er, so my attitude in life has been closing my social circles to be a very small group of people with richer interactions, as opposed to enlarging it to a large group with less rich interactions. Because of that, it's been pretty easy to wean myself off of FB (not that it was ever a big part of my life in the first place), and I've never considered Twitter, Instagram or anything else to be that interesting. I will admit that I enjoy Reddit - those cute animal gifs are quite relaxing after a stressful day, but I don't use Reddit the way most people use FB or other social media. When it comes to notifications, I turn a lot of them off. I keep my work notifications on during the hours I consider myself available (for urgent stuff, people know they have to call me), and tightly restrict other notifications that can be distracting.
Kaiyou 7y ago
My attention span has gotten worse these past ten years and I don't even own a (smart) phone. Don't know the root cause, but it ain't phones. It's probably the Internet itself or at least some of the websites you can find that give you an endless stream of information.
II2II 7y ago
> I recognize that this is a problem, but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I think this is something that average person just needs to educate themselves on and make the decision for themselves. We like to frame this as a personal issue because the individual decides to keep checking social media outlets. On the other hand, social media outlets think of people collectively: they incorporate addictive features based upon correlations between features and desirable usage patterns. This is an incredibly powerful tool since the decisions of an individual is difficult to rely upon, yet the patterns of large collections of people can be modeled and the uncertainties in that model understood. In other words, we are placing ourselves at a serious disadvantage if we insist upon looking at the issue through the lens of the individual. In a sense, the government has to educate the collective since there is a conflict of interest otherwise. The companies that have the most control over the information that people see are also the companies that have the largest interest in keeping people glued to their screens.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Isn't there a massive conflict of interest being ignored on the government's part? Namely that addiction seems to be the camel's nose into the tent for oversight and power on them. To be frank claiming that private interests having influence is reason for giving power to the government is like saying that chickenwire is unfair to the foxes because the farmer is exploiting the chickens. They are chosen to be our servants - not our masters - the power should be separated for a reason.
  - II2II 7y ago
    They are discussing regulations upon businesses, rather than laws that regulate the behavior of individuals. It is an important distinction. There is a big difference between a democratically elected government and a business. Governments must demonstrate restraint because they ultimately report to the people. Businesses typically demonstrate restraint in order to avoid regulation by the government. If you neuter government, then there are very few reasons for them to demonstrate restraint. In other words, the government is the chicken wire.
hi5eyes 7y ago
ﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠ
- lorinm 7y ago
  Really? Thats the same as saying “Oh you have a heroin addiction? Just stop thinking about it and you will be fine for days...”
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Nasrudith 7y ago
That isn't new - it was suggested that TV would fail in the US because Americans lack the attention span for it!
Ididntdothis 7y ago
"I am guilty of this behavior myself and it's something that I've been working on a lot lately. I recognize that this is a problem, but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I think this is something that average person just needs to educate themselves on and make the decision for themselves. It's not impossible to break free from it." this is pretty much the line that always comes from corporate lobbyists. We have armies of highly paid people that work at companies to exploit every little weakness of the human psychology and put out a ton of fake information. But let's just make this the responsibility of the individual and ignore the amount of manipulation that's done . They did this for smoking and now they are doing it for obesity and social media addiction. I bet the opioid crisis is also blamed on individuals that don't take responsibility for themselves. As an individual you almost have no chance to escape unless you put in a lot of effort to get better information and even then it's hard considering how much misinformation is being put out. Why do we allow the creation of a society that's hostile to people so companies can make money exploiting their weakness?
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  > As an individual you almost have no chance to escape unless you put in a lot of effort to get better information and even then it's hard considering how much misinformation is being put out. There are a couple of facets here, so I'll address them separately. For one, it's not remotely my experience or that of my social circles to say you have "almost no chance" of healthy social media use (or abstinence, if that's your thing). It seems roughly as "inescapable" as "not going to the gym" or "not reading enough". I can't even imagine how you arrived at this conclusion. There are plenty of people who are either off social media or very happy with their level of usage, and they got there with sustained incremental effort, just like any form of self-improvement. Spreading the message that you're utterly helpless and your only hope is regulatory rescue isn't helping people, it's actively harmful. To forestall the often-ludicrous charge of "victim-blaming": it has nothing to do with blame to realize that the ultimate consequences fall on you, and that it's a good idea to do what you can to mitigate those consequences. This isn't independent of advocating for regulatory action. My gut instinct is against regulation of social media, but from what I've seen, there are people out there who think of their social media usage as closer to involuntary addiction than a fun vice to indulge in, so I don't want to dismiss offhand any suggestions for regulation. I just simply can't imagine why you'd want to tell people (or yourself!) that they have no hope of getting to a better place.
ravenstine 7y ago
I've made it a point in my life to only look at my phone when I'm legitimately bored, which is pretty much always reading HN since I have nearly all notifications turned off. In other words, if I'm at a restaurant with someone and they go to the bathroom, leaving me alone at the table briefly, I'll just sit there and look around at the world for a few minutes. If anyone sees me doing that and thinks it's weird or creepy, then the very nature of existing is weird or creepy. It feels pretty good. I'm more at peace with the world when I sit there and take it all in.
- wtetzner 7y ago
  I also turn off nearly all notifications. My phone buzzing can cause me a lot of anxiety, so I only want notifications that are actually important (e.g. my wife texting me about something).
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    The only notification I get on my phone is if someone in my contact list calls me, in which case my phone will actually make noise and vibrate. Otherwise, I check my messages on my own time, which makes the most sense to me because messages are supposed to be asynchronous communication, yet we treat them like they deserve responses ASAP.
ravenstine 7y ago
> They can't go longer than a few minutes without checking their phone. It impacts work and leisure. They can't even put their phone down when something is actually happening right in front of them. People have been recording with their phones since the inception of the camera phone, but I recently saw a metal concert where nearly everyone in the audience had their phones out, including those in the pit! These people should be headbanging, dancing around and roughhousing, but instead they just stood there for periods of time mouth a-gape with their phones raised. Do we really need 3,000+ copies of the same concert using up bandwidth and storage? People are so desperate to be a YouTube star in even the most minuscule of ways. They'll view life through a screen if it meant getting a 1,000 views. It must be distracting as hell to be living life and constantly wondering if you should be recording it.
gooseus 7y ago
I also feel like I'm suffering from distractions and lack of focus, but my phone is definitely not the source since I'm still someone who will only check my phone every so often, and am usually I'm too distracted by an article I'm reading on my laptop/desktop to be bothered to look at my phone when it tries to demand my attention. What is distracting for me is this feeling that the stakes are very high right now and that I can't afford to be missing out on available knowledge. This isn't FOMO about what my friends are doing on social media since I'm really only on here and Twitter, where none of my friends are, but a fear that I'm missing some key piece in a puzzle. It's more a sense that there are major systemic crisis we are facing that need solving and my brain is consumed by finding ways to think about these crisis and how to evaluate and implement some kind of solution. I don't know if anyone else is also feeling this anxiety as a source of distraction from normal life or if this is just a personal psychosis. Based on my personal experience I think that systemic complexity is driving up base-level anxiety which is being exploited by media and political entities to profit from anxiety-induced distraction, which only increase the complexity of the systems as every agent becomes further debilitated in their role by anxiety and anxiety-exploiting distractions. PS - When I say "anxiety", I mean a deep feeling of uncertainty about the future.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  My view on this is that the specific targets of your anxiety (understanding systemic crises) is just something that your mind ginned up from a more general anxiety. At least, that's how it has worked for me in the past, and I think it's supported by the relevant science (not an expert tho). There have been periods in the past when I had a lot of anxiety about my career or personal life, and keeping my brain busy with random articles fed a perceived need to gather knowledge that really boiled down to not wanting to give my mind a quiet mental backdrop on which the thoughts you're anxious about can bubble up. It was only post hoc that my brain would construct some motivation for why I was reading all those articles, and it sounded similar to what you're describing. This is pretty much the purpose of mindfulness practice: to force this quiet and make you contend with the thoughts actually causing your anxiety. I know this sounds like woo, but it's worth at least trying out mindfulness meditation and getting a keener sense of what concerns you. (And of course, it's entirely possible that you know your own mind and your model is correct. I just thought I'd share similar experiences I've had in the past)

roganartu 7y ago

The biggest concern to me is the attention span most people have today. They can't go longer than a few minutes without going outside for a cigarette. It impacts work and leisure. An assignment at work is delayed or low quality because you had a cigarette every few minutes, you don't understand what's happening in a TV show/movie because you kept looking away to light up another cigarette, you can't get interested in a good book because you can't read more than a page or two without getting another cigarette. I am guilty of this behavior myself and it's something that I've been working on a lot lately. I recognize that this is a problem, but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I think this is something that average person just needs to educate themselves on and make the decision for themselves. It's not impossible to break free from it.

heinrichhartman 7y ago

> but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I don't understand that argument. By the same reasoning all drugs should be legal: Everyone know's it's bad. People get trapped. It has severe consequences for personal health and the society as a whole. But, hey, "it's not impossible to break free from it" by yourself. No need for Government action. The key metric for me is impact to society. You can do all bad things to you if you want to, and they only impact yourself, but if things have large impact on: - Social fabric (stability of families and communities) - Political Culture (erosion of discourse culture) - Education (lower attention span) - Healthcare (burnout!) - Working productivity It might be a good idea to change the rules to prevent these effects.

jumbopapa 7y ago
> I don't understand that argument. By the same reasoning all drugs should be legal. Do you really believe it's the illegal nature of drugs that keep the vast majority of people from using them? It's the fact that they know it's bad. In the future social media could be no different. I don't know if I would be in favor of legalization, but Portugal has had reasonable success with decriminalizing all drugs.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  This doesn't seem as unreasonable as your incredulity makes it sound. Alcohol is uncontroversially wayyy more dangerous than a handful of illegal drugs, and it's in incredibly wide usage. Same for cigarettes in the past: it took a sui generis effort to dramatically shift culture to lower cigarette's popularity (in the US), and it was fragile enough that a rebranding to "Juul" is starting to undo a lot of that work. FWIW, from a selfish perspective, I wish most drugs were legal: ; I used marijuana responsibly before it was legal and continue to use psychedelics responsibly, and the reason I don't do meth or cocaine isn't because it's difficult to get, but because I'm aware of how dangerous they are. But I'm genuinely curious as to what could make you think that, for the average person, legality doesn't drive a substantial amount of their attitudes towards usage of a given drug.
- supercanuck 7y ago
  You are conflating legalization of drugs with he decriminalizing of drugs by people it is still illegal to manufacture and sell fetanyl to the public, just as the OP is suggesting regulating the addictive nature of social media/technology. No one is saying let’s criminalize using smart phones.
read_if_gay_ 7y ago
> By the same reasoning all drugs should be legal Yeah, that actually works pretty great for Portugal and the war on drugs shows that just changing the rules doesn't work (another example in the same vein: the prohibition). People aren't that stupid that they need someone else to tell them what's good or bad for them. They know that. They just don't act accordingly, and that's the real problem, and you can't just fix that by saying no you can't do X. Everyone already knows they shouldn't do X. Your rules aren't adding anything.

tfha 7y ago

The average person is fighting teams of phds at Facebook, Google, and Amazon that are finding more and more ways to capture an maintain your interest, and to ensure that you can't put your phone down for more than a few minutes. Honestly I think a comparison to cigarettes is fair. Between the anti-patterns, the machine learning, the A/B testing, and the behavioral engineering, modern phone apps are more addicting than niccotine, and it's no more a person's fault for not being able to control themselves than it is for a smoker craving another cig. The problem cuts a lot deeper than people having no self control. They are actively fighting intelligent, well resourced adversaries who have a long term goal of getting you hooked.

nothrabannosir 7y ago
A comparison to cigarettes is not fair because I can quit cigarettes without any ramifications beyond the withdrawal itself. Trying to quit overuse of mobile phones while not losing access to their good features (maps, calendar, actual phone) is like trying to quit smoking while constantly walking around with a lit cigarette in your mouth. "Hey man what are you doing with a cig behind your desk?" - "I'm trying to quit smoking."
- excalibur 7y ago
  Use some sort of parental controls app, lock the phone down so it can do exactly the things you want it to and nothing else. If necessary you can have a spouse or other trusted person set a password on it that you don't know, so you can't just turn the restrictions off.
  - slantyyz 7y ago
    I consider a big part of the problem to be notifications, and their respective default settings. Before smartphones (generally speaking), the majority of your notifications were on your computer. If you walked away from it, you were no longer getting them. Today, you've got a notification blaster in your pocket/purse, which is bad enough for work stuff, but if you participate in social media, it's a FOMO machine too. By default, all of your notifications are artificially urgent. I'm a little older than the average HN'er, so my attitude in life has been closing my social circles to be a very small group of people with richer interactions, as opposed to enlarging it to a large group with less rich interactions. Because of that, it's been pretty easy to wean myself off of FB (not that it was ever a big part of my life in the first place), and I've never considered Twitter, Instagram or anything else to be that interesting. I will admit that I enjoy Reddit - those cute animal gifs are quite relaxing after a stressful day, but I don't use Reddit the way most people use FB or other social media. When it comes to notifications, I turn a lot of them off. I keep my work notifications on during the hours I consider myself available (for urgent stuff, people know they have to call me), and tightly restrict other notifications that can be distracting.

Kaiyou 7y ago

My attention span has gotten worse these past ten years and I don't even own a (smart) phone. Don't know the root cause, but it ain't phones. It's probably the Internet itself or at least some of the websites you can find that give you an endless stream of information.

II2II 7y ago

> I recognize that this is a problem, but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I think this is something that average person just needs to educate themselves on and make the decision for themselves. We like to frame this as a personal issue because the individual decides to keep checking social media outlets. On the other hand, social media outlets think of people collectively: they incorporate addictive features based upon correlations between features and desirable usage patterns. This is an incredibly powerful tool since the decisions of an individual is difficult to rely upon, yet the patterns of large collections of people can be modeled and the uncertainties in that model understood. In other words, we are placing ourselves at a serious disadvantage if we insist upon looking at the issue through the lens of the individual. In a sense, the government has to educate the collective since there is a conflict of interest otherwise. The companies that have the most control over the information that people see are also the companies that have the largest interest in keeping people glued to their screens.

Nasrudith 7y ago
Isn't there a massive conflict of interest being ignored on the government's part? Namely that addiction seems to be the camel's nose into the tent for oversight and power on them. To be frank claiming that private interests having influence is reason for giving power to the government is like saying that chickenwire is unfair to the foxes because the farmer is exploiting the chickens. They are chosen to be our servants - not our masters - the power should be separated for a reason.
- II2II 7y ago
  They are discussing regulations upon businesses, rather than laws that regulate the behavior of individuals. It is an important distinction. There is a big difference between a democratically elected government and a business. Governments must demonstrate restraint because they ultimately report to the people. Businesses typically demonstrate restraint in order to avoid regulation by the government. If you neuter government, then there are very few reasons for them to demonstrate restraint. In other words, the government is the chicken wire.

hi5eyes 7y ago

ﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠ

lorinm 7y ago
Really? Thats the same as saying “Oh you have a heroin addiction? Just stop thinking about it and you will be fine for days...”
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Nasrudith 7y ago

That isn't new - it was suggested that TV would fail in the US because Americans lack the attention span for it!

Ididntdothis 7y ago

"I am guilty of this behavior myself and it's something that I've been working on a lot lately. I recognize that this is a problem, but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I think this is something that average person just needs to educate themselves on and make the decision for themselves. It's not impossible to break free from it." this is pretty much the line that always comes from corporate lobbyists. We have armies of highly paid people that work at companies to exploit every little weakness of the human psychology and put out a ton of fake information. But let's just make this the responsibility of the individual and ignore the amount of manipulation that's done . They did this for smoking and now they are doing it for obesity and social media addiction. I bet the opioid crisis is also blamed on individuals that don't take responsibility for themselves. As an individual you almost have no chance to escape unless you put in a lot of effort to get better information and even then it's hard considering how much misinformation is being put out. Why do we allow the creation of a society that's hostile to people so companies can make money exploiting their weakness?

wutbrodo 7y ago
> As an individual you almost have no chance to escape unless you put in a lot of effort to get better information and even then it's hard considering how much misinformation is being put out. There are a couple of facets here, so I'll address them separately. For one, it's not remotely my experience or that of my social circles to say you have "almost no chance" of healthy social media use (or abstinence, if that's your thing). It seems roughly as "inescapable" as "not going to the gym" or "not reading enough". I can't even imagine how you arrived at this conclusion. There are plenty of people who are either off social media or very happy with their level of usage, and they got there with sustained incremental effort, just like any form of self-improvement. Spreading the message that you're utterly helpless and your only hope is regulatory rescue isn't helping people, it's actively harmful. To forestall the often-ludicrous charge of "victim-blaming": it has nothing to do with blame to realize that the ultimate consequences fall on you, and that it's a good idea to do what you can to mitigate those consequences. This isn't independent of advocating for regulatory action. My gut instinct is against regulation of social media, but from what I've seen, there are people out there who think of their social media usage as closer to involuntary addiction than a fun vice to indulge in, so I don't want to dismiss offhand any suggestions for regulation. I just simply can't imagine why you'd want to tell people (or yourself!) that they have no hope of getting to a better place.

ravenstine 7y ago

I've made it a point in my life to only look at my phone when I'm legitimately bored, which is pretty much always reading HN since I have nearly all notifications turned off. In other words, if I'm at a restaurant with someone and they go to the bathroom, leaving me alone at the table briefly, I'll just sit there and look around at the world for a few minutes. If anyone sees me doing that and thinks it's weird or creepy, then the very nature of existing is weird or creepy. It feels pretty good. I'm more at peace with the world when I sit there and take it all in.

wtetzner 7y ago
I also turn off nearly all notifications. My phone buzzing can cause me a lot of anxiety, so I only want notifications that are actually important (e.g. my wife texting me about something).
- ravenstine 7y ago
  The only notification I get on my phone is if someone in my contact list calls me, in which case my phone will actually make noise and vibrate. Otherwise, I check my messages on my own time, which makes the most sense to me because messages are supposed to be asynchronous communication, yet we treat them like they deserve responses ASAP.

ravenstine 7y ago

> They can't go longer than a few minutes without checking their phone. It impacts work and leisure. They can't even put their phone down when something is actually happening right in front of them. People have been recording with their phones since the inception of the camera phone, but I recently saw a metal concert where nearly everyone in the audience had their phones out, including those in the pit! These people should be headbanging, dancing around and roughhousing, but instead they just stood there for periods of time mouth a-gape with their phones raised. Do we really need 3,000+ copies of the same concert using up bandwidth and storage? People are so desperate to be a YouTube star in even the most minuscule of ways. They'll view life through a screen if it meant getting a 1,000 views. It must be distracting as hell to be living life and constantly wondering if you should be recording it.

gooseus 7y ago

I also feel like I'm suffering from distractions and lack of focus, but my phone is definitely not the source since I'm still someone who will only check my phone every so often, and am usually I'm too distracted by an article I'm reading on my laptop/desktop to be bothered to look at my phone when it tries to demand my attention. What is distracting for me is this feeling that the stakes are very high right now and that I can't afford to be missing out on available knowledge. This isn't FOMO about what my friends are doing on social media since I'm really only on here and Twitter, where none of my friends are, but a fear that I'm missing some key piece in a puzzle. It's more a sense that there are major systemic crisis we are facing that need solving and my brain is consumed by finding ways to think about these crisis and how to evaluate and implement some kind of solution. I don't know if anyone else is also feeling this anxiety as a source of distraction from normal life or if this is just a personal psychosis. Based on my personal experience I think that systemic complexity is driving up base-level anxiety which is being exploited by media and political entities to profit from anxiety-induced distraction, which only increase the complexity of the systems as every agent becomes further debilitated in their role by anxiety and anxiety-exploiting distractions. PS - When I say "anxiety", I mean a deep feeling of uncertainty about the future.

wutbrodo 7y ago
My view on this is that the specific targets of your anxiety (understanding systemic crises) is just something that your mind ginned up from a more general anxiety. At least, that's how it has worked for me in the past, and I think it's supported by the relevant science (not an expert tho). There have been periods in the past when I had a lot of anxiety about my career or personal life, and keeping my brain busy with random articles fed a perceived need to gather knowledge that really boiled down to not wanting to give my mind a quiet mental backdrop on which the thoughts you're anxious about can bubble up. It was only post hoc that my brain would construct some motivation for why I was reading all those articles, and it sounded similar to what you're describing. This is pretty much the purpose of mindfulness practice: to force this quiet and make you contend with the thoughts actually causing your anxiety. I know this sounds like woo, but it's worth at least trying out mindfulness meditation and getting a keener sense of what concerns you. (And of course, it's entirely possible that you know your own mind and your model is correct. I just thought I'd share similar experiences I've had in the past)