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Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?
When I'm away from electronics (and this is very important), my mind goes far, sometimes memories, other times to dream walking or solutions to problems.
When I have electronics I just come here or to instagram.
- ge96 4y agoFear, problems I gotta deal with (family related) Dread from debt Cool stuff like future personal projects "Freedom" I think of an open field and a sunny day space/what happens after death
- 11235813213455 4y agoI try to slow down as much as possible my mind (and all the rest), else I'd procrastinate too much or not be very focused and unfortunately with all the noise in our cities, it's hard day-dreaming much
- cecilpl2 4y agoMoney, quantum physics, the nature of reality, the nature of consciousness, sex, recent conversations I've had, admiring the beauty of nature, thinking about trips I want to take...
- sshine 4y agoSo close to mine: Accounting, cryptography, assessing if the top-most neglected chore can still be snoozed, calculating how long until I need to switch context (may motivate, may re-assess urgency of neglected chores), "I need a break" (hacker news), sex, simulating one of many ongoing conversations, "I'm so happy I have X" (with X = my balcony, my couch, my cat, my bike), "Did my cat jump off the balcony?" Interestingly, answering this question by doing a scan over where my mind wanders to actually blocks my mind from wandering, and so I ended up accidentally meditating.
- bicx 4y ago> “Did my cat jump off the balcony?” A question I’ve had to ask myself many times.
- memorable 4y agoWhen I'm away from electronics, sometimes I feel like my mind is being hijacked by a shitload of information. In those moments, I feel very tiresome. Most of the time, I wander to the most recent thing that I do.
- KenPainter 4y agoSame here. I tried meditation to learn to focus and the random s** got a lot worse before it got better.
- sharemywin 4y agoI watcha lot of youtube lately. a lot of tutorials and politics. If I'm on a computer I flip the speed to 1.25-1.5x for the tutorials so when they talk to slow I don't get annoyed and flip it off. I like to walk and think about things. mostly crap I want to do and never work on. I get way ahead of myself and when I go to start the minimal amount I can get accomplished usually frustrates me. and I switch to something else.
- chewz 4y agoI have been sailing 9 weeks non-stop from Ushuaia to Lisboa. No emails, phones, newspapers, books and the only laptop on board (for watching movies) got broken... It has been rough seas around Cape Horn but pretty smooth sailing later... Watching sunrise and sunsets, stars, clouds etc. The things that had started coming to my mind - like things long forgotten or put away and now coming back as fresh memories... Very interesting experience... Riding a motobike for long hours in mountains (Thailand or Laos or Flores) - similar experience. Your are immersed in the landscape, in the moment. Focused on the road but on the other hand your mind is wandering free... I have been to couple meditation retreats or monasteries as well. But that's a bit different....
- yodsanklai 4y ago> I have been sailing 9 weeks non-stop from Ushuaia to Lisboa. What an incredible experience it must be
- 8bitsrule 4y agoI could use a couple years o'that about now.
- kthartic 4y ago> I have been sailing 9 weeks non-stop from Ushuaia to Lisboa Whoa, what a beautiful experience. You're doing what most of us dream of doing :) Interesting that, in the absence of stimuli, old memories begin to surface. May I ask how old you are?
- 4y ago
- WHA8m 4y agoI'm a full-time (adhd-diagnosed) daydreamer. I have a bulk of projects that I can escape to. For all of them I have notes, so when my mind wanders around and I stumble across something that I think is note-worthy, I write it down. Most of these 'projects' (non of which ever came to life) are software related. My currently favorite one is a video game. It has about 60k words in the design document and about 35k safed pictures from the internet as of now. I guess this is not healthy, but as I said, it's a place that I can escape to. Another thing is 'teaching'. I imagine myself in front of a group of kids and try to explain them something that I know.
- toiletfuneral 4y ago
- ffhhj 4y agoSame here :) > I guess this is not healthy I'd say the contrary, thinking about projects and being enthusiastic about them is therapeutic. People get out of addictions by working on projects, just an example.
- swores 4y agoMind if I ask why none of the projects have ever come to life, is it lack of desire to make them more than an escape technique, or is ADHD or something else preventing you from doing what you would otherwise like to do? I ask because it sounds to me like if you could figure out how to channel all of that energy going into your projects into the right thing then maybe in addition to the escape you might find your difficulty turns into a super power - many people would kill for the focus needed to write 60k words of game design! Of course, figuring out some sort of "right thing" that's both easy for the mind and useful to do isn't always easy, and finding something in that venn overlap might be easier than expected or take so many failed attempts that it seems hopeless before finally stroking gold. Or am I commenting too much from a place of not having lived in your mind, and the wandering nature of ADHD leaves you helpless to channel it at all, just having to hope that it might wander in useful directions?
- WHA8m 4y ago
- ghost_ 4y agoLately I've started to dabble with digital art and 'painting' and learning to draw on an iPad. When away from electronics (and the iPad), I now keep thinking of what I'd like to paint for my next masterpiece and coming up with ideas for future paintings in my mind. It's incredibly refreshing, and also helps me sleep.
- jackthetab 4y agoAny advice on how to (successfully) get started? I've been trying to do the same only to find the whole thing frustrating af. My goal right now is to A) draw wireframes of websites, B) workflows (similar to wireframes with added arrows), and C) an image of Calvin of C&H fame. I've used Procreate, Excalidraw, OneNote, Notability, etc. <rant> All of the tutorials are like "Here is where you can select a canvas. Here is where you can select brushes. Let's choose this brush..." (Why?) "Then change the setting to this..." (again, why?). I'm beginning to hate videos in my search results. If I want to actually accomplish one of these drawings, I pick up a pad of paper and pencil and I'm done in 60 seconds for wireframes, five minutes for Calvin. I have yet to be able to do it after hours on my iPad. </rant>
- ghost_ 4y agoI get your frustration! I was on a similar boat. The key to digital art is first knowing your tools, it's good that you've tried out some apps, try them all out and get a feel for them all, before choosing the one that you prefer. First, for Wireframing and workflows, there's a ton of different ones that all achieve the same thing so it comes down to preference mostly. For this I highly recommend looking into Concepts, Muse and Moleskine Flow. I personally prefer them out of the many others that I have tried. Although be aware there are more specialised 'wireframing' apps also available. When it comes to other character drawing and general art, Procreate is currently ne of the better ones as it gives you a ton of options with different brushes etc. I personally prefer Adobe Fresco as I like their interface better and their live brushes for a better 'painting' look. I also use Moleskin Flow for non-painting drawing practise as i love their minimalist approach to UI out of the hundreds of apps that I have tried. It's a little bit of a steeper learning curve if you're not used to digital drawing with frames, choosing brushes, etc. but honestly. keep at it as once you familiarise yourself with you preferred favourite app it'll be a lot quicker! Yeah all the tutorial videos always seem to be aimed at a more slow, general audience. Once you have the gist of where everything is in your preferred app, just have a few favourite brushes of your choice start creating.
- weldedtogether 4y agoUsually it would float to tabletop concepts and whatnot, but lately I feel like I've been stricken with some serious intrusive thoughts and anxiety and now I find it floats to death and mortality (the inevitability to be precise). It's honestly a huge issue, I've lost sleep some nights because of it. It's sort of changed how I structure things to try and keep myself busy, but if anyone has tips on coping with this let me know!
- kthartic 4y agoPlease schedule an appointment with a therapist. Mental health is just as important as your physical health. Would you ignore intrusive pain? CBT in particular has been very helpful for me in the past :)
- Agamus 4y agoOntology! Since my earliest memories, my mind continuously wanders off to questions like, 'what is the nature of... things? What is the substance of... substance? What qualities of a thing can I think away, and still allow the thing part of it to remain behind?' For the longest time, as a kid, I was under the impression that it was the same for everyone, and that figuring these things out was what everyone was busy working on - the purpose of human life. I never slowed down - still working on it with nearly every daydreaming moment I have.
- SemanticStrengh 4y agoThat's a very chairwise comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXW-QjBsruE&t=180s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXW-QjBsruE&t=180s
- Agamus 4y agoThanks for the link! The content of this video is pretty close to the perpetual internal dialogue happening between me and all of my selves. I eventually wrote a book about my findings thus far.
- SemanticStrengh 4y agoyou might find my last * point interesting about the thesis for multiple selves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31204611&p=2#31213841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31204611&p=2#31213841 however the fact there is no criterion for delineating the soul to a volume of matter makes me strongly believe that the rational belief is that we are living a sandboxed illusion and that there is only one decentralized being in the universe. We are the same soul talking to itselfs via the prisms of siloeds lifes, and when you hurt someone, you do in fact, hurt yourself. related: https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI
- Agamus 4y agoI like this - a new perspective. I sense this is compatible, but I lean toward Heraclitus, in that I see (the illusion of) order manifesting from decentralized flux - e.g., quantum fluctuations in empty space. Our best bet to understanding this is quantum field theory, which makes much of my own book redundant, (except the half of it concerning the consequent metaethics). The unity of fields could overlap with your perspective on a cosmic scale. I want to believe, but I suspect that most 'thinking humans' still (erroneously) subscribe to the general idea of individuation: material atomism and the assumption of individual, existing parts. We have a long, long way to go - the work of metaphysicians has not yet begun, and even scientists are still making the same error in the face of their own evidence (think: the phlogistonistic 'string' theory). Wittgenstein was correct to note that most questions in philosophy have not been sensible questions. The underlying reason is that they have assumed individuation, as a core axiom - a vulnerability in the bare-metal layer. We have assumed this because it is contrary to our observations and (most of) our common experience to do otherwise; it took hard science to demonstrate alternatives, and only 'recently'. Am I right to say that we both seem firmly planted in a paradigm beyond individuation - even as your view unifies the 'everything' into an individual? Methinks we have different lenses gazing upon the same essence. My recent scribblings and bibblings are on 'cosmic significance', which may bridge our two compatible views. One question I have is, assuming quantum field theory, and assuming consciousness is a very natural 'thing' in the cosmos, how, if at all, are these associated? The possibility that they are seems more and more reasonable to me, even required, but in ways that I suspect will rightly never match the criterion of the scientific method (at least in my lifetime). I try to maintain a solid sobriety when dabbling in metaphysics, but these questions persist, and seem reasonable. While I'm sure there are many professionals working on these questions - I'm also sure it is quite clear that I not a professional. However, my mind is quite professional at wandering off into these topics, to return to OP's question!
- DeathArrow 4y agoSex, booze, sex, friends, sex,family, sex, books, sex, traveling, sex, science, sex, art, sex, tech, sex, movies, sex, art, sex, sociology, sex, anthropology, sex, big problems of the humankind, sex. In that order. Sometimes I wonder if an Eskimo girl would wear a pink finger ring while listening to Irish folk music while traveling between Mombasa and Easter Island for a conference about mouses who wear green umbrellas.
- jvanderbot 4y agoBack in grad school my mind went: sex, boxing, travel, math, booze, boxing, sex, math, boxing, sex .... Something magical about that time. Now it's much quieter.
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago> an Eskimo girl would wear a pink finger ring while listening to Irish folk music while traveling between Mombasa and Easter Island for a conference about mouses who wear green umbrellas. any good absurd movies to recommend anyone? This seems like a good starting point for a scenario
- inetsee 4y agoSounds like a good scenario for a screenplay for a surrealist movie.
- dayedh 4y agoI really like some of the Adult Swim movies for absurd comedy. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters and Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie come to mind as good examples.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoPunch Drunk Love
- SemanticStrengh 4y agoI'l look into it, btw Are you related to the user aaaaaaaab ?
- jvanderbot 4y ago- On the malleability of culture, and the absolutely temporary nature of the world order that we think is stable. - On interstellar travel, and how completely bonkers it would be to ride on a steadily-degrading spaceship for a decade, with just enough fuel to stop when you get there, and no more. And what it might take to get our civilization to care enough to try (seems like a terrible calamity is the only way). - I firmly believe that there is a sequence of words that, if constructed properly for an individual, (perhaps even less than 1000 words), would convince anyone of anything. I try to think of short sequences of very-convincing arguments, mostly to no avail. I think about this a lot when politicians ramble on and on -- just not creative enough. I also think about this a lot when people talk about why they believe something, and I try to see why it is so convincing to them. - The future of robotics and AI. This one I think about a ton. That future is biology, I'm afraid, but metal-bots will always have a place. And, like chewz said below, I also have a list of projects I can bounce back to.
- WHA8m 4y ago> I firmly believe that there is a sequence of words that [...] would convince anyone of anything. What does make you think that? Have you seen or experienced something like this before? Your thought/ idea makes perfect sense to me and there surely is more potential to transfer ideas/ ideologies/ etc more compact than we do most of the time. I too, don't believe in good and evil humans but that everyone is capable of everything (decision-, not skill-wise). But 1000 words would be quite frustrating, because if I (a random on the internet/ on a party/ or elsewhere) am able to 'flip' you, what's gonna stop the next random dude from flipping you back over. If it's that easy to make you change your opinion, it is not sustainable. As I'm writing this, I realized, this is the very reason I stopped discussing with anyone with whom I don't get value out of myself as well. It's just not worth it - at least for people that aren't close to me.
- jvanderbot 4y agoIt's based on the pervasiveness of some ideas. Some just shift the foundation of a person when they are accepted internally. If you can do that, you can steer anyone. Less controversially, I think there's good in almost any idea that a speaker really believes in (ignoring bad faith actors) and if you can make people see, truly, your point of view and mesh it to theirs, you can both agree, even if you both abandon your original stance. So, nobody can really bring everyone 'to themselves' which is unstable as you say, but they can both find some average of their opinions that looks an awful lot like convincing people of a course of action or idea. The catch in my mind is that the words move you both, not just the listener. You can see it happen in real time in this thread.
- gvpmahesh 4y agoCareer related stuff like promotion, how do I make like $ 150 k sitting in India, debt at hand, upcoming marriage expenses for the family, getting into FAANG, finding a girl friend, mortgage
- ryzvonusef 4y agoescaping! Not sure where to, but away from here. Also, perhaps not that unrelated, escaping into fantasy worlds, usually the last thing I read. Some times I make my own, and set stories in them.
- WHA8m 4y agoThere is a term for it: 'world-building'. If you want to increase your procrastination efficiency, there are a lot of resources about it online (:
- digitallyfree 4y agoYou should try writing and drawing out those fantasies - that turns them into a more concrete hobby. While you shouldn't daydream all the time, it can be a good boredom buster that you can do anywhere - a long bus ride, waiting for a pickup, etc. I keep a small notebook around for this purpose. Wanting to get those ideas on paper was how I got into writing fiction (for fun).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sharkweek 4y agoOh I got the perfect answer for this one. As someone who (now after about a year of therapy a while back) has my OCD managed, let me tell you what my brain still does with a moment of free time: Visualizes the worst possible scenario of any situation I’m in! Standing in line to get coffee: What happens if I blurt out a racial slur randomly in here? Or what if someone walks in with a gun? What if someone put poison in this batch of coffee? Walking with my kids to a park: What if that van over there is about to kidnap my kids. What if my oldest pushes my younger one out into traffic? What if one of them falls off the playground and gets permanent brain damage? Sitting in bed at night: What if that weird feeling in my stomach is cancer? What if I left the heater on too high and it starts a fire that burns down my house? What if a giant sinkhole opens up beneath my house and swallows us whole? All that being said, I used to spend hours compulsing to try and make the anxiety these thoughts cause go away but have learned to better accept them for what they are.
- lampshades 4y agoAlso have OCD and have the same types of thoughts.
- gnulinux 4y agoI also have OCD in the form of obsessive thoughts and had a very similar experience. Brain just computes extremely random, irrelevant scenarios throughout the day putting tons of serious effort, and it's impossible to stop. Thanks to CBT I learned how to deal with them, and for the most part it doesn't affect my life anymore, which is nice.
- ducharmdev 4y agoMy favorite one lately has been, what if supply chains collapse and grocery stores are empty for weeks/month, causing most people to starve? Or similarly, what if the electrical grid just stops working for some reason, causing the majority of jobs to evaporate overnight (as well as the aforementioned supply chain problems, and a whole host of cascading effects). As a SWE, I recognize that although this career is one of the most valued in our current economy, we're highly dependent on modern infrastructure. Take away certain services, and all our years of coding experience are rendered useless.
- NiagaraThistle 4y agoEurope...always Europe. I'm literally back in my 20s backpacking through Europe, or dreaming about finally finishing Eurotripr to help inspire others to travel through Europe. My wife literally calls Europe my mistress.
- angarg12 4y agoI recently moved to Seattle from England, and when I'm overwhelmed and fed up with the weather I flick through houses in southern California or Spain. So I guess my day dream is how much money I need to make so that I can go to bask in the sun. Quite the irony considering I left Spain several years ago for my career!
- karaterobot 4y agoThere is a brief period of very nice weather coming soon, I promise. Don't blink, or you'll miss it!
- rbosinger 4y agoI often have made up comedic skits running through my head, often starring friends, family, and myself. And I make myself laugh out loud and probably look a bit crazy to others. People regularly around me know I'm just making myself laugh though and ask "what's so funny?". I can never explain because the skits often have inside jokes from previous skits. It's all in my head so these inside jokes are some serious inside jokes.
- AlwaysRock 4y agoUnfortunately, I don't let my mind wander much anymore. I've got ADHD so my mind races quite a bit by default. For years I've listened to audiobooks or podcasts when I'm "doing nothing" which is better than my mind wandering in unwanted directions. I lose a little bit of random creativity from my mind wandering here and there but its worth it for the amount of books/podcasts I'm able to get through that help in other ways.
- jckahn 4y agoUsually either code, game design ideas for my side project (https://www.farmhand.life/ https://www.farmhand.life/), or a Tool song.
- limelights 4y agoAlways, always, always away doing something with my body. Dancing, climbing, skateboarding and after that it drift onto connecting with people. Something that I yearn a lot after. Idk. It feels like I'm a robot longing to be human.
- rsyring 4y agoWhatever is currently going wrong the most...and I hate it. When I don't have something to focus on, I usually dwell on whatever problems I'm aware of that are the most emotionally troubling. That's often challenges I face as a business owner, relational conflict with someone I care about, ways I'd like to improve myself or change but can't/won't, etc. This results in a significant toll on my mental and emotional faculties/health. Simply resting, bring at peace, doesn't seem possible. I chalk this up to my analytical mindset, which helps me greatly in my development efforts, being unable to disengage despite knowing full well there is nothing I can do to change most of it. That and/or being prone to anxiety. Not sure it even matters why, it's clearly baked into my "wiring" somewhere. Due to this dynamic, I almost always prefer to have something to engage with. Programming, phone (usually here or news), TV, cards with family, books, etc. I don't like that I compulsively reach for my phone now and have to "escape" to these distractions, but as I've weighed the pros and cons, this seems better than the alternative of incessantly dwelling on the negatives.
- Xunjin 4y agoAfter a lot of therapy and treatments I've learnt that my mind wander so much in a lot of topics, that I have a tendency things as a whole, no matter the subject, and communicate so much information is really hard to me. For so long I thought that I was stupid/dumb. Today I'm thinking in solutions on how to deal with public health in my country "pos-pandemic" as we have Universal Care for free tho tons of challenge to overcome the shortcomings. We have the falacy that problems are easy to solve and simplest solutions are effective, begin Cartesian of course they are, however when you see the big picture... Things are not so simple, they take time and lot of effort.
- ipiz0618 4y agoLots and lots of things but I'm having more and more trouble remembering them..
- motohagiography 4y agoAway from screens, I'm doing hobbies I picked to actively keep me away from screens. On a motorcycle, I think my ego gets sufficiently preoccupied with keeping its physical host alive, and so then the rest of my mind can wander. Depending on flow state, the mind speaks language, symbolic memories, or in sufficiently intense activities, those disappear entirely and it's just sub-second sensory immediacy. In language, it's a lot of comedy (e.g. How could you tell if someone you already knew was wearing a disguise? How would they respond if you asked them? How would you know they aren't? What if they're lying? When you solve a catchpa to prove you are not a robot, how sure can you be, and who are you trying to convince, really? etc.) then, it's ethical and religious questions about power and politics (What is a just war? Is deception intrinsically more moral than violence? Do leaders have a divine mandate? For what are we accountable in regard to good and evil? What is the substrate of our experience? Is "The Simulation" just language?), and then some of what most closely resembles adolescent metamathematics (What are the most atomic operations and what property of the universe makes their number finite? Is complexity an artifact of geometry? What isn't a graph?) The rest is too long to get into, but essentially it reduces to whatever deepity is sufficient to distract me from doing the work I'm probably supposed to be doing.
- jimmygrapes 4y agoI am almost always considering "what did it take to make this thing work, and why did they do it this way?" Sometimes it is at a high level such as UX design or architecture, but more frequently it is akin to "gratitude" strategies where you look at a random object in your life, examine it and consider all the labor and materials and knowledge that went into it. It can get overwhelming: how many screws are in this window frame, what are they made of, where were they made, what does the screw factory look like, what were the logistics of getting that factory set up, what equipment is involved in making sure the screws are to the correct specifications, how are people trained on that equipment, who designed it, how many screws were needed to make that equipment in the first place, and how did THOSE screws come about? and on and on like that. It's often a fun thought experiment, and really helps me appreciate all the little things that let me lead the life I do, even when that life is not going as well as I'd like.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoAre you seeking work?
- bag_boy 4y agoI listen to music and imagine past scenes in my life/future scenarios.
- droobles 4y agoYes, this and when I was younger and played a lot of live music. Best times of my life.
- t-3 4y agoI think a lot about words and meanings, and interesting things I've encountered. Like, what is the difference between catenation and concatenation? Why is unravel a word, when ravel means the same thing, and given that unravel has taken over the meaning of ravel, why hasn't ravel come to mean it's opposite? Why was the classical Latin pronunciation of "caesar" preserved in German but not English? Why are the common conception of zero as an absence, the scalar zero, and the vector zero all different? Sometimes I just daydream about stuff. Often I remember things that make me laugh, or make me angry, or both. Occasionally I force myself to actually work on some of the projects I've daydreamed and planned out (forced, because for some reason that part is much less innately interesting to me than the planning and conceptualizing, even though I want to finish them).
- arroz 4y agoFor “ceaser”, the language of the elite in England was French for some time so might have to do with that
- restalis 4y ago"Occasionally I force myself to actually work on some of the projects I've daydreamed and planned out (forced, because for some reason that part is much less innately interesting to me than the planning and conceptualizing, even though I want to finish them)." I have this too, and the reasoning I came up with for myself is that because the first part is the problem solving, it gets fueled by curiosity and passion, whereas the second part, the implementation, is often just grunt work to me. I do not work in a theoretical research field, but I'm inclined to also think that this predilection must be something shared by those who do.
- Fricken 4y agoMy Grade 8 science teacher gave the class a list of trick questions. One was "How far can a dog run into the forest?" "Until it gets to the centre", I said. "Nope" said Ms. Fulara. "It can run into the forest as far as it wants"
- bicx 4y agoAn ongoing rotation of work issues, mental planning of the next steps of my current side project, looking for the next hobby to obsess over (thinking about getting started with FL Studio making beats… previously focused on high-performance electric scooters), where I want to live next in SF, …. Writing this down, I’m starting to realize I might be a bit obsessed with moving forward to the “next thing.” I think I’m afraid to slow down and become content with normalcy.
- lurker229 4y agoWhen I'm outside, I notice I unfortunately always ends up thinking about race and ethnic issues. How people might be perceiving or judging me, how women might be put off by my bad hair or skin color, how men might be perceiving me as an outsider or poor. These thoughts are very tiresome, and I notice I keep coming back to them unless I listen to music or make an effort to think positive thoughts. It feels very important to me to resolve these thoughts, that's why I keep diving deeper into them, until I end up spiraling into the same negative thoughts - I shouldn't have immigrated, my kids are going to have shitty lives due to my skin color and emotional anxiety, I will never make good friends, and I will never be loved unconditionally. I have put my life in a cage and will spend the remaining 50 years of life just grinding with only brief moments of materialistic pleasure.
- mvind 4y agoI saw a picture a couple of weeks ago about a person on Twitter who lost around 90% of his followers because they were bots. He complained that he had spent the last +7 years building up this "community", which in the end consisted of bots. As late yesterday I saw two youtube shorts videos using deep fakes models of celebrities pushing crypto Ponzi schemes. I wonder how widespread bot usage is, and their connection to "echo chambers" that seem to echo louder and louder into mainstream media.