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For me, tech has turned into a crutch when I don't know what to do. I've caught myself in the middle of automatic behavior and it's a bit scary - opening Reddit

by nperez 7y ago

For me, tech has turned into a crutch when I don't know what to do. I've caught myself in the middle of automatic behavior and it's a bit scary - opening Reddit or HN, closing it because I've already read everything on the front page, then opening it again a few seconds later without even thinking about it. I wonder what I would be doing without it. Creating art? Going out? I'd have to do something. It's something I want to explore more. Maybe I'll schedule just an hour each day where every device is turned off.

mherdeg 7y ago
Yishan Wong's response to that worry starts out: > The pre-internet era was boring. Some may say that it was just as stimulating but in different, more "vibrant, outdoorsy" ways, but they are wrong. I have lived in both and the internet definitely makes life more interesting. In fact, combining the outdoors with the internet is one of life's greatest pleasures. https://www.quora.com/How-did-people-waste-their-time-in-the-pre-Internet-era/answer/Yishan-Wong https://www.quora.com/How-did-people-waste-their-time-in-the... I'm not sure I'm convinced but it was an interesting very short essay.
- jakeinspace 7y ago
  This implies boredom is inherently bad. As a child, a lot of creative play came from boredom. Of course, we're all bound to lose some of that as we mature, but I can't help but feel that the availability of cheap distraction in the form of boundless information is allowing me to sabotage myself.
  - dcolkitt 7y ago
    I think our relationship with boredom over the past 30 years mirrors that of hunger post-industrial revolution. Humans evolved in environments where both calories and information were very sparse. Natural selection encouraged a continious psychological drive to seek those resources whenever and wherever possible. Over-consuming food or stimulus was such a rare condition that we have very few naturally in-built mental mechanisms to avoid it. And then all of a sudden our environment drastically changed. Sometime in the 20th century the central risk related to food went from starvation to obesity. In the 21st century the central risk of stimulation has gone from mind-atrophying boredom to compulsive zombie-like wire-heading. To resist obesity we had to re-evaluate our relationship with the feeling of hunger. Always giving into our base impulse would mean that we gorge on calorically dense, hyper-palatable, nutritionally poor food from morning to night. Modern people had to learn that feeling a little hungry sometimes is okay. It's necessary for a baseline level of healthy physiology, and actually not that unpleasant when you get used to it. I think we have to re-learn the same lesson with boredom. The skeptics are right. The average level of moment-to-moment boredom in 1980 was extremely high, and well past the point of necessity or even marginal benefit. But virtually no one with a smartphone ever experiences anything like 1980 boredom on a daily basis. While a lot of boredom is bad, we have to learn that a little bit of boredom is necessary for healthy cognitive and emotional functioning.
- shantly 7y ago
  I feel really relaxed and not bored at all when I go on vacation somewhere my phone gets little or no reception. It's amazing. There's so much to do without the Internet! Books are a thing, and there's more than enough top-notch fiction to last a lifetime, without re-reading. Writing is a thing. Sketching. Hell offline video games are a thing, for that matter, and you can mine the back catalogs of older consoles for (mostly) less money than something new, and have about the same amount of fun. You can keep yourself in more excellent video material than you can reasonably watch with a Netflix DVD subscription and a trip to the library every week, no Internet required (aside from managing your Netflix queue, I guess—do that on your library trips, when you pay your bills). Board games & tabletop games & card games rule. Inventing any of those is fun. Lawn games. Sports. Playing music. Listening to music. Building stuff in the garage. Programming in any language/ecosystem with decent offline documentation. Hardware stuff. I only, only have Internet service because it lets me work from home and keeps my wife from having to stay at school until 7:00 4 nights a week for 9ish months a year (teacher) since friggin' everything they do is online now (Google, mostly). I mean I have a couple streaming services and such since we have to pay for Internet service anyway, but aside from those two (admittedly great) things that require it I wouldn't bother to pay for it.
  - zonidjan 7y ago
    That's the thing. That's never changed. Vacations have always been more fun. The change is that now, when you're doing boring mundane things, you can pull out your phone and have at least some modicum of entertainment.
    - shantly 7y ago
      I mean chillin’ in an Airbnb, not hiking or seeing the sights or whatever. Even that part’s better, without the Internet. [EDIT] and yes I get the irony that AirBnB requires the Internet. Occasional Internet is handy to take care of necessities and create convenience. Constant Internet? I'm a skeptic.
- sjg007 7y ago
  It was boring. A lot of TV was watched. There were some video games too. You could program too. The only thing you could do outside of that would be to read or socialize. You could read a gauntlet of things that you can do today as well. But YouTube, podcasts, blogs are great.
  - goatlover 7y ago
    > The only thing you could do outside of that would be to read or socialize. Hike, play sports, build stuff with your hands, make art, write, go swimming, and a bunch of other things. I don't recall being particularly bored growing up before the internet became a big deal. It's just that now I'm used to having online access to so many things, it's easier to be bored without access to that.
    - missingrib 7y ago
      It's probably more likely that you just grew up and the things you found exciting then you don't find exciting now. Because you could just do those things now without going on the internet! They're separate things.
SteveNuts 7y ago
I feel the same way, I instinctually open my phone to ease even the slightest twinge of boredom. I don't think it would be SO bad if the news wasn't so depressing and horrible. There are at least 2 incredibly sad stories on the front page of Reddit at all times it seems. I wish there was something positive to fill the gaps.
- mkolodny 7y ago
  As I was reading your post, I was wondering why I rarely see anything depressing on Reddit. And then I remembered that I unsubscribed from r/news and r/worldnews :)
- munmaek 7y ago
  It’s called unsubscribing from those subreddits. Reddit is exactly what you want to make out of it.
vharuck 7y ago
In my college days, I played World of Warcraft too much. It got in the way of attending classes. Then my graphics card broke. So I started reading psychology textbooks totally unrelated to my classes. Procrastinators gonna procrastinate. And time-wasters gonna waste time.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- andrepd 7y ago
  Your story is actually probably what the parent was trying to illustrate. Instead of wasting time with WoW, you "wasted" time with something more meaningful (all this being relative of course).
  - jaxn 7y ago
    I'm not as quick to assume reading a textbook is inherantly more meaningful than playing WoW.
    - wyldfire 7y ago
      I suspect WoW might be like several other games in that the marginal benefit of continued play after an initial phase is small. But if it's social/multiplayer and your group feels a personal connection while playing (maybe w/people you know IRL), you might get a greater benefit from the game.
    - dwaltrip 7y ago
      Sure, perhaps not inherently. But do you think, looking across the world, that the median hour spent playing WoW is likely less meaningful than the median hour spent reading a textbook?
      - jdpigeon 7y ago
        Hell yes. 90 hours of cumulative textbook reading time is pretty much an undergraduate degree. 90 hours of WoW is like.. getting to level 40
un_montagnard 7y ago
This is depressingly relatable. Sometimes when I'm walking back home, I end up checking Instagram, Reddit, work mail at every crosswalk while I'm waiting for the signal to turn green. And I'm not happy because either there's nothing new or because I realize what I'm doing and I tell myself "look what you've become, you're not even capable of waiting 30 seconds without pulling out your phone".
- zonidjan 7y ago
  Would you be any happier if you were, instead, standing there staring at traffic waiting for the light to change?
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    I’ve started leaving my phone at home when I walk my dog to get coffee every morning. The first few days, maybe even weeks, it was actually pretty uncomfortable. (What does a normal person do at the crosswalk without a phone??) Now I kind of like it. I think about what I have to do for the day and mentally plan out how I’ll tackle it. The only major downside is when I think of something I want to write down or look up.
  - munmaek 7y ago
    Yes. You have two main options, among others. 1) choose to focus on the sensory input you’re receiving. The view of the scenery around you, the noise around you, the wind on your skin. Cars and their passengers can be interesting in their own right- people watching still exists. 2) meditate or think about something. Those are substantially better than refreshing HN, Instagram, etc for the hundredth time that day. Being bored is a choice. It takes work to not reflexively pull open Reddit. I still struggle with this from time to time.
- bsder 7y ago
  Set up something else to do when you pull out your phone. Set up Anki, lichess, etc. anything that is better than brain junk food. It's really easy to break the social media habit by replacing it with something semi-useful.
greggman2 7y ago
I can easily spend 3+ hours a day on HN. I've banned myself 3 times. Started again recently to look for jobs. Time spent here is climbing. Will probably have to ban myself again soon. This account is greggman2 because one helpful way of banning myself is to set my noprocrast on and my minaway to some giant number and then set umatrix to block
samcodes 7y ago
I do this a lot. It recently began to bother me. I started a list of things I have to do before I dick around on my phone: practice Japanese and meditate. I don't always remember, but when I do, I'm happier.
cellularmitosis 7y ago
The best hack I’ve found is leaving the pdf of a book I’ve been meaning to read as the top tab in my phone’s web browser. Doesn’t work when when I reflex-tap into reddit, but if I reflex-tap into the browser looking for HN, I immediately get side-tracked into “oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to read this”. I’d like to set up a service to which you send in a book, and it texts you one page at a time (you can ask it for the next page), and nags you if it’s been a few days without using it. Too often the information junk food turns into an hour-long binge. I could have made real progress towards my goals in that time. In general, a service which can slice up your goals into very small units of work or very small exercises, and harasses you for constant engagement could be a huge win. Don’t get rid of the anti-patterns, harness them for your own ends!!!
- cellularmitosis 7y ago
  Another dark pattern: annoying pop-ups and click-to-dismisses. What if you could add these to all of your info junk-food outlets, but instead of “subscribe to our newsletter”, it would be “are you sure you wouldn’t rather work towards accomplishing your goals?”
udit99 7y ago
I recommend reading "Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport. It identifies this problem well and has a lot of practical suggestions for countering it. The one that worked for me was uninstalling twitter/reddit/HN apps and replacing them with using the browser. Doesnt sound like much but the added friction of typing out everything in the browser (I'm mostly on incognito) took my compulsive dopamine-fix phone-checking behavior down by a lot. For HN, I also try to rely on the "Hacker Newsletter" to counter any FOMO.

by nperez 7y ago

mherdeg 7y ago

Yishan Wong's response to that worry starts out: > The pre-internet era was boring. Some may say that it was just as stimulating but in different, more "vibrant, outdoorsy" ways, but they are wrong. I have lived in both and the internet definitely makes life more interesting. In fact, combining the outdoors with the internet is one of life's greatest pleasures. https://www.quora.com/How-did-people-waste-their-time-in-the-pre-Internet-era/answer/Yishan-Wong https://www.quora.com/How-did-people-waste-their-time-in-the... I'm not sure I'm convinced but it was an interesting very short essay.

jakeinspace 7y ago
This implies boredom is inherently bad. As a child, a lot of creative play came from boredom. Of course, we're all bound to lose some of that as we mature, but I can't help but feel that the availability of cheap distraction in the form of boundless information is allowing me to sabotage myself.
- dcolkitt 7y ago
  I think our relationship with boredom over the past 30 years mirrors that of hunger post-industrial revolution. Humans evolved in environments where both calories and information were very sparse. Natural selection encouraged a continious psychological drive to seek those resources whenever and wherever possible. Over-consuming food or stimulus was such a rare condition that we have very few naturally in-built mental mechanisms to avoid it. And then all of a sudden our environment drastically changed. Sometime in the 20th century the central risk related to food went from starvation to obesity. In the 21st century the central risk of stimulation has gone from mind-atrophying boredom to compulsive zombie-like wire-heading. To resist obesity we had to re-evaluate our relationship with the feeling of hunger. Always giving into our base impulse would mean that we gorge on calorically dense, hyper-palatable, nutritionally poor food from morning to night. Modern people had to learn that feeling a little hungry sometimes is okay. It's necessary for a baseline level of healthy physiology, and actually not that unpleasant when you get used to it. I think we have to re-learn the same lesson with boredom. The skeptics are right. The average level of moment-to-moment boredom in 1980 was extremely high, and well past the point of necessity or even marginal benefit. But virtually no one with a smartphone ever experiences anything like 1980 boredom on a daily basis. While a lot of boredom is bad, we have to learn that a little bit of boredom is necessary for healthy cognitive and emotional functioning.
shantly 7y ago
I feel really relaxed and not bored at all when I go on vacation somewhere my phone gets little or no reception. It's amazing. There's so much to do without the Internet! Books are a thing, and there's more than enough top-notch fiction to last a lifetime, without re-reading. Writing is a thing. Sketching. Hell offline video games are a thing, for that matter, and you can mine the back catalogs of older consoles for (mostly) less money than something new, and have about the same amount of fun. You can keep yourself in more excellent video material than you can reasonably watch with a Netflix DVD subscription and a trip to the library every week, no Internet required (aside from managing your Netflix queue, I guess—do that on your library trips, when you pay your bills). Board games & tabletop games & card games rule. Inventing any of those is fun. Lawn games. Sports. Playing music. Listening to music. Building stuff in the garage. Programming in any language/ecosystem with decent offline documentation. Hardware stuff. I only, only have Internet service because it lets me work from home and keeps my wife from having to stay at school until 7:00 4 nights a week for 9ish months a year (teacher) since friggin' everything they do is online now (Google, mostly). I mean I have a couple streaming services and such since we have to pay for Internet service anyway, but aside from those two (admittedly great) things that require it I wouldn't bother to pay for it.
- zonidjan 7y ago
  That's the thing. That's never changed. Vacations have always been more fun. The change is that now, when you're doing boring mundane things, you can pull out your phone and have at least some modicum of entertainment.
  - shantly 7y ago
    I mean chillin’ in an Airbnb, not hiking or seeing the sights or whatever. Even that part’s better, without the Internet. [EDIT] and yes I get the irony that AirBnB requires the Internet. Occasional Internet is handy to take care of necessities and create convenience. Constant Internet? I'm a skeptic.
sjg007 7y ago
It was boring. A lot of TV was watched. There were some video games too. You could program too. The only thing you could do outside of that would be to read or socialize. You could read a gauntlet of things that you can do today as well. But YouTube, podcasts, blogs are great.
- goatlover 7y ago
  > The only thing you could do outside of that would be to read or socialize. Hike, play sports, build stuff with your hands, make art, write, go swimming, and a bunch of other things. I don't recall being particularly bored growing up before the internet became a big deal. It's just that now I'm used to having online access to so many things, it's easier to be bored without access to that.
  - missingrib 7y ago
    It's probably more likely that you just grew up and the things you found exciting then you don't find exciting now. Because you could just do those things now without going on the internet! They're separate things.

SteveNuts 7y ago

I feel the same way, I instinctually open my phone to ease even the slightest twinge of boredom. I don't think it would be SO bad if the news wasn't so depressing and horrible. There are at least 2 incredibly sad stories on the front page of Reddit at all times it seems. I wish there was something positive to fill the gaps.

mkolodny 7y ago
As I was reading your post, I was wondering why I rarely see anything depressing on Reddit. And then I remembered that I unsubscribed from r/news and r/worldnews :)
munmaek 7y ago
It’s called unsubscribing from those subreddits. Reddit is exactly what you want to make out of it.

vharuck 7y ago

In my college days, I played World of Warcraft too much. It got in the way of attending classes. Then my graphics card broke. So I started reading psychology textbooks totally unrelated to my classes. Procrastinators gonna procrastinate. And time-wasters gonna waste time.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
andrepd 7y ago
Your story is actually probably what the parent was trying to illustrate. Instead of wasting time with WoW, you "wasted" time with something more meaningful (all this being relative of course).
- jaxn 7y ago
  I'm not as quick to assume reading a textbook is inherantly more meaningful than playing WoW.
  - wyldfire 7y ago
    I suspect WoW might be like several other games in that the marginal benefit of continued play after an initial phase is small. But if it's social/multiplayer and your group feels a personal connection while playing (maybe w/people you know IRL), you might get a greater benefit from the game.
  - dwaltrip 7y ago
    Sure, perhaps not inherently. But do you think, looking across the world, that the median hour spent playing WoW is likely less meaningful than the median hour spent reading a textbook?
    - jdpigeon 7y ago
      Hell yes. 90 hours of cumulative textbook reading time is pretty much an undergraduate degree. 90 hours of WoW is like.. getting to level 40

un_montagnard 7y ago

This is depressingly relatable. Sometimes when I'm walking back home, I end up checking Instagram, Reddit, work mail at every crosswalk while I'm waiting for the signal to turn green. And I'm not happy because either there's nothing new or because I realize what I'm doing and I tell myself "look what you've become, you're not even capable of waiting 30 seconds without pulling out your phone".

zonidjan 7y ago
Would you be any happier if you were, instead, standing there staring at traffic waiting for the light to change?
- elliekelly 7y ago
  I’ve started leaving my phone at home when I walk my dog to get coffee every morning. The first few days, maybe even weeks, it was actually pretty uncomfortable. (What does a normal person do at the crosswalk without a phone??) Now I kind of like it. I think about what I have to do for the day and mentally plan out how I’ll tackle it. The only major downside is when I think of something I want to write down or look up.
- munmaek 7y ago
  Yes. You have two main options, among others. 1) choose to focus on the sensory input you’re receiving. The view of the scenery around you, the noise around you, the wind on your skin. Cars and their passengers can be interesting in their own right- people watching still exists. 2) meditate or think about something. Those are substantially better than refreshing HN, Instagram, etc for the hundredth time that day. Being bored is a choice. It takes work to not reflexively pull open Reddit. I still struggle with this from time to time.
bsder 7y ago
Set up something else to do when you pull out your phone. Set up Anki, lichess, etc. anything that is better than brain junk food. It's really easy to break the social media habit by replacing it with something semi-useful.

greggman2 7y ago

I can easily spend 3+ hours a day on HN. I've banned myself 3 times. Started again recently to look for jobs. Time spent here is climbing. Will probably have to ban myself again soon. This account is greggman2 because one helpful way of banning myself is to set my noprocrast on and my minaway to some giant number and then set umatrix to block

samcodes 7y ago

I do this a lot. It recently began to bother me. I started a list of things I have to do before I dick around on my phone: practice Japanese and meditate. I don't always remember, but when I do, I'm happier.

cellularmitosis 7y ago

The best hack I’ve found is leaving the pdf of a book I’ve been meaning to read as the top tab in my phone’s web browser. Doesn’t work when when I reflex-tap into reddit, but if I reflex-tap into the browser looking for HN, I immediately get side-tracked into “oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to read this”. I’d like to set up a service to which you send in a book, and it texts you one page at a time (you can ask it for the next page), and nags you if it’s been a few days without using it. Too often the information junk food turns into an hour-long binge. I could have made real progress towards my goals in that time. In general, a service which can slice up your goals into very small units of work or very small exercises, and harasses you for constant engagement could be a huge win. Don’t get rid of the anti-patterns, harness them for your own ends!!!

cellularmitosis 7y ago
Another dark pattern: annoying pop-ups and click-to-dismisses. What if you could add these to all of your info junk-food outlets, but instead of “subscribe to our newsletter”, it would be “are you sure you wouldn’t rather work towards accomplishing your goals?”

udit99 7y ago

I recommend reading "Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport. It identifies this problem well and has a lot of practical suggestions for countering it. The one that worked for me was uninstalling twitter/reddit/HN apps and replacing them with using the browser. Doesnt sound like much but the added friction of typing out everything in the browser (I'm mostly on incognito) took my compulsive dopamine-fix phone-checking behavior down by a lot. For HN, I also try to rely on the "Hacker Newsletter" to counter any FOMO.