9 ms·

A few weeks ago I realized I had spent half of my life with high speed Internet, and half without. I tried to think of all the memorable experiences I'd had wit

A few weeks ago I realized I had spent half of my life with high speed Internet, and half without. I tried to think of all the memorable experiences I'd had with computers, and pretty much every one I could think of[1] were from the pre-high speed Internet era. Most were from before having any Internet. I mentioned this to a similar aged friend, and he thought about it and said it applied to him too. Which leads to the question: Why am I spending so much time on the Internet? I spend a lot more time on the computer. Where is it going and why am I no longer enjoying it? What did I do pre-Internet? - Played games. Lots and lots of them. When I was younger I often felt I had played too many games and bemoaned the time lost. Looking back now at so many good experiences I had with games, I don't regret it one bit. I should get back into playing games (I stopped a long time ago). - Wrote code for fun. Wrote simple silly games. Wrote programs to produce the Mandelbrot fractal. Today I write code to help me solve problems, but not for fun. - Toyed with programs like POV-Ray - Generally explored interesting SW What do I do today on the computer? - Read articles - Write code to solve problems (automate boring tasks, improve my web site, etc) - Email - Productivity related stuff (TODO management, finances, etc). - Looking up stuff (Google Maps, Yelp, Stackoverflow) - Shopping, online banking, paying bills, scheduling medical appointments, booking flights, etc. I'd say perhaps 90% of that time is using the browser. Getting a consistent interface is pretty much an experience killer. I've certainly learned a lot with all that reading. And my code I write really does solve problems. But none of it is fun or memorable. Conclusion? I traded enjoyable experiences for utility. It was not a good trade. [1] And I could think of many!

yodsanklai 5y ago
Before internet, I would read a lot of books and magazines. Also, when I was a math undergraduate, I would work a lot. Nowadays, I have the hardest time to focus. I'd love to regain my past ability to focus.
_AzMoo 5y ago
This sounds more like you've just moved from a kid without responsibility to an adult with responsibility.
- herbst 5y ago
  Exactly what I thought too. I was where op has described, I appeared to slit in there naturally and before I even know the job ate away all my motivation and productivity. Today I code games for fun, read lengthy articles about irrelevant things I care about and so on. I focus boring work on small time frames in between.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  Spending a lot of time reading articles or on HN is very much not being an "adult with responsibility", IMO. Nor is much of the coding I'm doing to solve problems. Most adults I personally know who live fulfilling lives are not doing much of these. They don't spend 90% of their discretionary free time on the browser. They play games. Living your life based on others' opinions of what constitutes maturity is a good prescription of not living a meaningful life.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    You have a mental energy budget. We all know you can't effectively code 16 hours a day, coding takes up a lot of mental budget. Similarly "good" hobbies takes up a lot of mental budget. If you spend that at work your hobbies will be boring, if you spend that on your hobbies your work will suffer. Some people have more budget, some people make choices at work where they get tasks with lower mental budget ie the "9-5" people, while others spend it all on work and look for hobbies requiring little mental budget.
  - ChildOfChaos 5y ago
    I was with you until the 'play games part' Is not wasting time playing games the same as wasting time browsing stuff online? it's all mindless entertainment and distraction.
    - croo 5y ago
      I don't think so. Games -especiall when you get introduced first to the concept- are tonns of unique experience, logic and puzzle and bonding with other people and experimenting and exploiting and race for a win.. just to scratch the surface. Reddit on the other hand is mindless scrolling and infinite low hanging dopamine fruit where you can't remember what did you read but can't play games anymore because it's gratification is not instant enough.
napier 5y ago
Couldn’t have put it better myself. There are rarely recognized negative factors associated with having ultra high bandwidth instant response impulse satisfaction on tap. I used to read a book a day. I used to ponder curiosities in more depth until I could piece together conclusions from library visits and talking to people f2f or on the phone; long held interests and sustained human relationships would oftentimes result as a side effect. I used to spend a lot more time outdoors. There are trade offs to instantaneous information access and I am going to try and mitigate them as a belated New Year resolution.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  I’m sick of this being reduced to “instant impulse satisfaction”. The OP mentions video games. 20 years ago (and today too by most people) that would have been derided as “instant impulse satisfaction”. But apparently it was much more meaningful than using a browser. A lot of time is wasted on things that are in no way experienced as “satisfying”. It is instant but not satisfying. I would venture a guess that it has more to do with procrastination than it has to do with “instant satisfaction”. It’s easier to procrastinate by reading news articles than by picking up the guitar (hey, the browser is right there). Another problem which this does not explain is the time one spends writing lengthy responses and topics. That is not really “instant” in any way. It takes effort. And it might not be fun. This just looks like some kind of religious thing in secular disguise. People who feel guilty that they are (allegedly) having “sinful fun”.
  - basisword 5y ago
    Seems like you've misunderstood the grandparent comment. It's not 'sinful fun' - it's not fun at all. That's the point. We've traded fun and memorable activities for doom scrolling.
    - avgcorrection 5y ago
      I did not.
piva00 5y ago
Hey, I wanted to pitch in to say I've been through the same train of thought the past 3-6 months. After realising that I've had access to high speed internet for the past 20 years and analysing why I'm feeling progressively worse with my usage of it. I came to the same conclusion: even though browsing through HN, Reddit and so on for the past 10-12 years has been immensely useful for some parts of my life (some hobbies, my profession, very interesting articles I got exposed to) I noticed that the past 3-4 years I have been very unhappy with my consumption. It got worse after I stopped to analyse it, I noticed these past months that I'm actually addicted to the loop of instant reward that reading something passably interesting pushes me to. Forcing myself to not read HN or my favourite subreddits for a day or two causes very similar symptoms of withdrawal that I had when quitting smoking, actually it's a pretty good parallel to me: if I use it I feel like crap and guilty afterwards, if I don't use it I feel like crap and unfulfilled. It's been a really hard realisation, hard and scary to be honest.
- gen220 5y ago
  I don’t know if you’re still in the market for solutions, but in case you are: I’ve been in a similar spot, and found an RSS reader to be the answer. You can filter Reddit/HN feeds, so that they sync twice per day, and only grab up to N posts per sync. Over time, you add an interesting feed here and there until your collection of feeds is providing you with more signal than HN/Reddit, and you can trim N down to like 3-5. RSS is a human-respecting interface, because you don’t miss anything if you don’t read it for a month. Like a magazine subscription, the unread articles simply pile up on the coffee table, and you can either choose to blow through them one day or toss them all out at once. I think that sense of control and ownership is liberating, in any case it feels like a healthier relationship to information. Good luck!
  - piva00 5y ago
    Yes! Thanks for the tip, I sorely miss my old RSS feeds, was an avid RSS user even before Google Reader was available, the web just changed and RSS didn't seem to be a thing anymore for a while... Any recommendations on good readers?
gherkinnn 5y ago
A lot of those utilities have been dehumanised. Instead of calling a doctor's office, we're fighting a badly built online scheduler. Obsessively scrutinising restaurant reviews on GMaps takes away from the subtle excitement of flaneuring. Reflexively reaching for Wikipedia as soon as something not immediately known pops up in a conversation kills it immediately. It's an empty life. Luckily, it's easy to simply not do many of these things once you're aware of them. Email is near compulsory to function, Yelp reviews are not.
- maccard 5y ago
  > Instead of calling a doctor's office, we're fighting a badly built online scheduler. I'm not sure where you live but a badly built online scheduler would be a huge improvement over calling my doctor's office. You can call to book an appointment but the only times they have are for 3 weeks away, which for many issues is useless. If you're in "urgent" need of a doctor you can call at 8am, join a queue of everyone else sand hope you get a same day appointment. I've had maybe 50/50 luck in getting same day appointments even in "high risk" situations (I'm asthmatic and get the occasional chest infection), and the experience of dealing with the practice staff seems to be universally poor. You're being triaged by an admin member of staff, who for some reason always seem to be the pettiest power tripping people, with a super tight window to actually get seen, and God help you if have the audacity to call at 8:30 or 9am to ask. > Email is near compulsory to function, Yelp reviews are not. Yelp/Google/apple reviews serve as a great filtering device when you're in a new place, just like TripAdvisor/lonely planet/Michelin guides did before them. It's been almost 50 years since the lonely planet guides started, the age of wandering into q new place completely blind has been long gone, but that doesn't mean there aren't still experiences to be had, and the current set of tools allows for more people to experience the best of what somewhere has to offer
  - gherkinnn 5y ago
    > I'm not sure where you live but a badly built online scheduler would be a huge improvement over calling my doctor's office. Fair point. I'm lucky to live in a place where I face no such issues. My experiences are not broadly applicable. Broadly speaking though, digital schedulers offer no flexibility and offer the wrong choices. Can be a doctor. Or an optician. Hairdressers. A human can squeeze you in somewhere. Maybe reshuffle something. The person on the phone can book an appointment with the right person. A scheduler gives me hard time slots and sometimes makes me choose between a series of specialists, none of whom I know. Computer says no. A human says maybe. > Yelp/Google/apple reviews serve as a great filtering device I see them as shit/not shit filters at best. And that I can tell by checking the menu and peering inside. Clueless tourists telling me that X serves _authentic_ {local dish} tells you nothing. It's the blind leading the blind. And let's not even get in to gamed reviews.
maccard 5y ago
> Played games. Lots and lots of them I spend as much time playing games now (as an adult) as another person might do watching TV or on Instagram/tabloid media, and probably 1/3 of that time is spent playing multiplayer games with friends I've had for years who live in different places that I can't just hop in the car and go visit. My coding experience has changed though; I work in video games so I spend my day doing "creative" coding and have almost 0 interest in continuing that outside of work. Intetestingly when I was a teenager I had little to no interest in studying languages or literature; all i wanted to do was code and play games. Now that I am "forced" to code all day, I look forward to reading, watching movies and seeing shows; all the things I was forced to do as a kid for school.
tasha0663 5y ago
> I traded enjoyable experiences for utility. It was not a good trade. I was looking at QWERTY keyboard options for my iPad when I realized, "if I'm doing something on this that requires that level of typing, I've made a mistake".

yodsanklai 5y ago

Before internet, I would read a lot of books and magazines. Also, when I was a math undergraduate, I would work a lot. Nowadays, I have the hardest time to focus. I'd love to regain my past ability to focus.

_AzMoo 5y ago

This sounds more like you've just moved from a kid without responsibility to an adult with responsibility.

herbst 5y ago
Exactly what I thought too. I was where op has described, I appeared to slit in there naturally and before I even know the job ate away all my motivation and productivity. Today I code games for fun, read lengthy articles about irrelevant things I care about and so on. I focus boring work on small time frames in between.
BeetleB 5y ago
Spending a lot of time reading articles or on HN is very much not being an "adult with responsibility", IMO. Nor is much of the coding I'm doing to solve problems. Most adults I personally know who live fulfilling lives are not doing much of these. They don't spend 90% of their discretionary free time on the browser. They play games. Living your life based on others' opinions of what constitutes maturity is a good prescription of not living a meaningful life.
- Jensson 5y ago
  You have a mental energy budget. We all know you can't effectively code 16 hours a day, coding takes up a lot of mental budget. Similarly "good" hobbies takes up a lot of mental budget. If you spend that at work your hobbies will be boring, if you spend that on your hobbies your work will suffer. Some people have more budget, some people make choices at work where they get tasks with lower mental budget ie the "9-5" people, while others spend it all on work and look for hobbies requiring little mental budget.
- ChildOfChaos 5y ago
  I was with you until the 'play games part' Is not wasting time playing games the same as wasting time browsing stuff online? it's all mindless entertainment and distraction.
  - croo 5y ago
    I don't think so. Games -especiall when you get introduced first to the concept- are tonns of unique experience, logic and puzzle and bonding with other people and experimenting and exploiting and race for a win.. just to scratch the surface. Reddit on the other hand is mindless scrolling and infinite low hanging dopamine fruit where you can't remember what did you read but can't play games anymore because it's gratification is not instant enough.

napier 5y ago

Couldn’t have put it better myself. There are rarely recognized negative factors associated with having ultra high bandwidth instant response impulse satisfaction on tap. I used to read a book a day. I used to ponder curiosities in more depth until I could piece together conclusions from library visits and talking to people f2f or on the phone; long held interests and sustained human relationships would oftentimes result as a side effect. I used to spend a lot more time outdoors. There are trade offs to instantaneous information access and I am going to try and mitigate them as a belated New Year resolution.

avgcorrection 5y ago
I’m sick of this being reduced to “instant impulse satisfaction”. The OP mentions video games. 20 years ago (and today too by most people) that would have been derided as “instant impulse satisfaction”. But apparently it was much more meaningful than using a browser. A lot of time is wasted on things that are in no way experienced as “satisfying”. It is instant but not satisfying. I would venture a guess that it has more to do with procrastination than it has to do with “instant satisfaction”. It’s easier to procrastinate by reading news articles than by picking up the guitar (hey, the browser is right there). Another problem which this does not explain is the time one spends writing lengthy responses and topics. That is not really “instant” in any way. It takes effort. And it might not be fun. This just looks like some kind of religious thing in secular disguise. People who feel guilty that they are (allegedly) having “sinful fun”.
- basisword 5y ago
  Seems like you've misunderstood the grandparent comment. It's not 'sinful fun' - it's not fun at all. That's the point. We've traded fun and memorable activities for doom scrolling.
  - avgcorrection 5y ago
    I did not.

piva00 5y ago

Hey, I wanted to pitch in to say I've been through the same train of thought the past 3-6 months. After realising that I've had access to high speed internet for the past 20 years and analysing why I'm feeling progressively worse with my usage of it. I came to the same conclusion: even though browsing through HN, Reddit and so on for the past 10-12 years has been immensely useful for some parts of my life (some hobbies, my profession, very interesting articles I got exposed to) I noticed that the past 3-4 years I have been very unhappy with my consumption. It got worse after I stopped to analyse it, I noticed these past months that I'm actually addicted to the loop of instant reward that reading something passably interesting pushes me to. Forcing myself to not read HN or my favourite subreddits for a day or two causes very similar symptoms of withdrawal that I had when quitting smoking, actually it's a pretty good parallel to me: if I use it I feel like crap and guilty afterwards, if I don't use it I feel like crap and unfulfilled. It's been a really hard realisation, hard and scary to be honest.

gen220 5y ago
I don’t know if you’re still in the market for solutions, but in case you are: I’ve been in a similar spot, and found an RSS reader to be the answer. You can filter Reddit/HN feeds, so that they sync twice per day, and only grab up to N posts per sync. Over time, you add an interesting feed here and there until your collection of feeds is providing you with more signal than HN/Reddit, and you can trim N down to like 3-5. RSS is a human-respecting interface, because you don’t miss anything if you don’t read it for a month. Like a magazine subscription, the unread articles simply pile up on the coffee table, and you can either choose to blow through them one day or toss them all out at once. I think that sense of control and ownership is liberating, in any case it feels like a healthier relationship to information. Good luck!
- piva00 5y ago
  Yes! Thanks for the tip, I sorely miss my old RSS feeds, was an avid RSS user even before Google Reader was available, the web just changed and RSS didn't seem to be a thing anymore for a while... Any recommendations on good readers?

gherkinnn 5y ago

A lot of those utilities have been dehumanised. Instead of calling a doctor's office, we're fighting a badly built online scheduler. Obsessively scrutinising restaurant reviews on GMaps takes away from the subtle excitement of flaneuring. Reflexively reaching for Wikipedia as soon as something not immediately known pops up in a conversation kills it immediately. It's an empty life. Luckily, it's easy to simply not do many of these things once you're aware of them. Email is near compulsory to function, Yelp reviews are not.

maccard 5y ago
> Instead of calling a doctor's office, we're fighting a badly built online scheduler. I'm not sure where you live but a badly built online scheduler would be a huge improvement over calling my doctor's office. You can call to book an appointment but the only times they have are for 3 weeks away, which for many issues is useless. If you're in "urgent" need of a doctor you can call at 8am, join a queue of everyone else sand hope you get a same day appointment. I've had maybe 50/50 luck in getting same day appointments even in "high risk" situations (I'm asthmatic and get the occasional chest infection), and the experience of dealing with the practice staff seems to be universally poor. You're being triaged by an admin member of staff, who for some reason always seem to be the pettiest power tripping people, with a super tight window to actually get seen, and God help you if have the audacity to call at 8:30 or 9am to ask. > Email is near compulsory to function, Yelp reviews are not. Yelp/Google/apple reviews serve as a great filtering device when you're in a new place, just like TripAdvisor/lonely planet/Michelin guides did before them. It's been almost 50 years since the lonely planet guides started, the age of wandering into q new place completely blind has been long gone, but that doesn't mean there aren't still experiences to be had, and the current set of tools allows for more people to experience the best of what somewhere has to offer
- gherkinnn 5y ago
  > I'm not sure where you live but a badly built online scheduler would be a huge improvement over calling my doctor's office. Fair point. I'm lucky to live in a place where I face no such issues. My experiences are not broadly applicable. Broadly speaking though, digital schedulers offer no flexibility and offer the wrong choices. Can be a doctor. Or an optician. Hairdressers. A human can squeeze you in somewhere. Maybe reshuffle something. The person on the phone can book an appointment with the right person. A scheduler gives me hard time slots and sometimes makes me choose between a series of specialists, none of whom I know. Computer says no. A human says maybe. > Yelp/Google/apple reviews serve as a great filtering device I see them as shit/not shit filters at best. And that I can tell by checking the menu and peering inside. Clueless tourists telling me that X serves _authentic_ {local dish} tells you nothing. It's the blind leading the blind. And let's not even get in to gamed reviews.

maccard 5y ago

> Played games. Lots and lots of them I spend as much time playing games now (as an adult) as another person might do watching TV or on Instagram/tabloid media, and probably 1/3 of that time is spent playing multiplayer games with friends I've had for years who live in different places that I can't just hop in the car and go visit. My coding experience has changed though; I work in video games so I spend my day doing "creative" coding and have almost 0 interest in continuing that outside of work. Intetestingly when I was a teenager I had little to no interest in studying languages or literature; all i wanted to do was code and play games. Now that I am "forced" to code all day, I look forward to reading, watching movies and seeing shows; all the things I was forced to do as a kid for school.

tasha0663 5y ago

> I traded enjoyable experiences for utility. It was not a good trade. I was looking at QWERTY keyboard options for my iPad when I realized, "if I'm doing something on this that requires that level of typing, I've made a mistake".