6 ms·

There's a brazillian song called Tédio (Boredom) that was popular in the 80's. It talks about not withstanding boredom inside home, while life goes on out there

There's a brazillian song called Tédio (Boredom) that was popular in the 80's. It talks about not withstanding boredom inside home, while life goes on out there. It's curious how the depicted feeling is so unrelatable today. I think boredom is a real force that pushes ourselves to the edge, to hopefully make a change in life, like going out to see real people. Social media creates this cozy, safe place to keep your mind occupied, letting life pass without realizing it.

coffeebeqn 4y ago
It’s very difficult when you have to make a conscious decision to.. be bored. I do think most people still get stimuli like loneliness that hopefully drives them out sometimes.
411111111111111 4y ago
But why do people blame social media for that? Every entertainment is equally at fault, wherever it's fictions, movies, tv series, comics/webtoons, games etc
- hnuser123456 4y ago
  Because it's too easy now. You need a creative endeavor to seem like an easy way to replace boredom with novelty. For a lot of folks especially younger ones, there is already infinite novelty just waiting to be scrolled all the time in their pocket. No need to do anything except wave your thumb around.
- analog31 4y ago
  I don't think novelists have yet figured out how to completely occupy your cognitive apparatus or put you under pressure to stay engaged. When I'm sitting in my comfy chair reading a novel, I can close my eyes without worrying that I might miss something while I'm asleep.
  - 12345hn6789 4y ago
    How is this different than closing your phone, screen shotting a FB post, pausing your video? Really. Even live streams, for the most part, are able to be paused and watched at a later date albiet without chat interaction. I fail to see the difference.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      If you fall asleep during a video, now you'll have no idea where you were. Similarly if I lose concentration watching a video, I now have to either go back or hope I didn't miss anything important. If I lose concentration while reading, the page is still there, I just have to skim it until I find where i went on a tangent.
      - wst_ 4y ago
        You still need to skim the page. The same way you can skim video to find the place you remember. I don't see a lot of difference here.
        mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
        You really don't see a difference between skimming a single page and scrubbing through a video that could be hours long? And scrubbing only works when the video is visually distinct enough between parts that you can tell without having to watch a few seconds at multiple different points.
- yazboo 4y ago
  It’s a difference of degree not kind. The constant audiovisual stimulus running through the internet is much more powerful than any of those things, and more widely available. Cable TV was close. It was always on in the room, but you had to be in the room, and you had to negotiate with your cohabitants over what to have on, or else you could go somewhere and be bored. There are no constraints anymore, with exceptions for the most impoverished among us - there’s always something close at hand to tickle your particular reptile brain until you fall asleep.
  - scotty79 4y ago
    That's not what happens when people doom scroll. They are not perfectly entertained. They are profoundly bored on social media. But they still scroll for scraps of entertainment because more promising alternatives are not really accessible to them at that moment, because of physical limitations or their state of mind or their energy levels.
  - Buttons840 4y ago
    Computers with social media are so extremely reactive. Literally within half a second I can react to my boredom and find new content. I've noticed myself beginning to read a sentence, get bored half-way through, switch tabs, look over the new recommendations, do it again 30 seconds later. Never bored, and yet never really entertained or satisfied.
    - netsharc 4y ago
      The best is when you're on reddit, think "this is boring", open a new tab and type in "reddit.com"... On that topic, I've luckily managed to make reddit boring that I open it, scroll for a minute or so, and close it again: I unsubscribed from the "interesting" subreddits like politics or tifu or askreddit.
    - Buttons840 4y ago
      One trick I've found to help with this is to live-stream. I once streamed a game on Twitch, nobody really watched, but it forced me to sit down and actually play the game for a good 2 or 3 hours. It was draining, gloriously draining and satisfying. You can stream programming and other personal projects as well. It doesn't matter if you get many viewers or not, just forcing yourself to maintain a consistent course of action helps. If you do get some real viewers though, all the better, you can monetize your work and enjoy free advice and socializing with viewers.
- yucky 4y ago
  > Every entertainment is equally at fault Clearly not. That would be like dismissing Siberian tigers as just cats, and pretending they're no more dangerous than the average housecat. The taxonomy is the same, but the similarities end there.
- p0pcult 4y ago
  Social media has feedback loops that can adjust themselves orders of magnitude faster than legacy media, to keep you addicted (er, "engaged") with near zero friction.
- luckydata 4y ago
  lower friction makes it even easier to consume. We didn't use to turn on a tv every time you took a dump but we are on our phones scrolling through brain garbage every idle second we have in our day. that's not good, our brain is not equipped to either deal with all this stimulus or resist it.
- HellDunkel 4y ago
  I think social media does negatively affect your inspiration. Boredom on the other hand is absolutely vital to seek out any inspiration.
- spikeagally 4y ago
  [dead]
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  If you're suggesting they're equally at fault, you better have some numbers to back it up. Otherwise it just looks like you say they're equal because that's what you want to believe.
- megamix 4y ago
  Social media is an active mechanism to keep you hooked.
- peepee1982 4y ago
  In that sense everything is at fault, not just all forms of media. But social media has no downtime and is engineered to be addictive. A casino will lose it's appeal once you've run out of liquidity. Social media has next to no prohibiting qualities.
- rr808 4y ago
  Yup that too, but TV was strictly scheduled until the 80s(?) people who read books were unsocial nerds who didn't go out.
- otikik 4y ago
  Traditional media is a static website. Social media is infinite scroll.
- Sakos 4y ago
  I intentionally avoid things like TikTok because I've experienced how incessantly and constantly addictive it is. But then again, I'll also avoid particularly long TV series, games without definitive ends, etc. I think TikTok et al are unique because you're "doing something" but the effort expended to get that next hit is extremely minimal. Even though I can sink hours into Factorio, it's challenging and exhausting. I might be able to binge a TV series, but eventually I'll want to do something. TikTok hits a perfect blend of "doing" and "experiencing" that makes it endlessly addictive.
myth2018 4y ago
I'm so grateful for having abandoned social networks. My main motivator were the fights over political weaponization of COVID-19, but then I went on and abandoned youtube and news as well. Now, I'm halfway with my first book, found a new hobby and developed my previous ones, rediscovered programming for fun, am learning a new foreign language, found a new job with very good compensation, lost 10 kg and became a better husband. My life is so fundamentally better.
- donky_oaty 4y ago
  Is browsing and commenting on Hacker News not considered social media use though?
  - filoleg 4y ago
    It might be social media, but it isn't a social network. HN has no friending or a way to link yourself to any other user, no actual customizable profiles (a tiny "about me" textbox aside), no images anywhere, no way to DM users, and most people don't use their real names either. There are only two "social" parts of HN. First is that the links to the articles are posted (and voted on) by users. And the second part is just the fancy comment section around those posts. Most big news websites have a comment section on their articles too, and those might even be more full-featured than HN (e.g., I am pretty sure quite a few of those allow setting a profile picture). To put it simply, I believe social network and social media are two different things. You can have them both together (e.g., twitter), or separately. I would consider the initial Snapchat app to be a social network, but they added a dash of social media later on (with the "around me" feature, stories, etc). And HN would fall under the opposite of the original Snapchat app - social media, but without much social netowork. Sidenote: I am not an expert on this and didn't spend time researching it. What I wrote above is a purely subjective take on how I personally understand those terms, and how they apply to the topic at hand.
  - grugagag 4y ago
    > Is browsing and commenting on Hacker News not considered social media use though? Somewhat and it is quite addictive too but the quality is way better and there is even an option to turn limit your time spent on HN (no procastination flag/option). HN is not employing dirty techniques to keep user enganged with dumbed down content, people are just commenting out on articles, it’s more like a community
fblp 4y ago
I'd like to hear this song. But i searched for Tédio and couldn't find it. Can you find it?
- Zircom 4y ago
  https://youtu.be/hv1Hnmt1GBo https://youtu.be/hv1Hnmt1GBo You're 'search engine prompting' needs some work, next time try "tédio Brazil song" :p
makeitdouble 4y ago
> to hopefully make a change in life, like going out to see real people. I’m fascinated by this narrative on the “real” people outside. I wonder how having more people working remote could change that cultural landscape, and how much time it will take for people to go over the dichotomy of “real” vs “online”. There are wonderful people with tons of insight and many things to share in the “outside” world. But thing is, they are also online and will share their life philosophy or their new hiking gears in reddit threads as well. Went to a cafe last week and after a bunch of talk with the owner, he went to ask for my Twitter account and who I was following in the same cultural sphere. And it’s not like we stopped being real the moment we moved our focus to what happens online.
- nicbou 4y ago
  And the activities you perform there are not necessarily more genuine. I understand why riding a bicycle or meeting other people is better than staying home. But you could also go to the restaurant and go shopping. How is that form of consumption better or more real?
40amxn40 4y ago
Interesting. We should not forget that social media creates this cozy safe place for everyone, so even if you personally realize that, your friends and acquaintances may not. In my own experience, since around 2010 and with the rise of social media and streaming services -especially after covid- people are more inclined to spend time at home instead of hanging out or doing stuff "in real life"
- wholinator2 4y ago
  I think it also has to do with the wider socioeconomic situation. (Most) people make less disposable money on the whole than they did before. Sure, the minimum wage might increase but rent and food and insurance is going up faster! And the restaurants and mall stores (when they exist at all) and theme parks certainly aren't cheap. You could go walk a park every day but that's just tiring. There are people working themselves to the bone without enough extra energy to fulfill their children's lives let alone their own. People are being squeezed from all sides. In contrast, I'd say social media is not the cause but the reaction to such things. I mean, we all saw particular people get genuinely addicted to scrolling Facebook in the early years of the service, but that rarely totally ostracized them from their previous social circles, it might have even grown them! But now with things like twitch streamers on a schedule, ready to be your friend Friday night, and customized YouTube feeds of endless hours of documentaries and Twitter and even HN. The opportunity is there. Someone who's already staying in can get that fix, anyone who's avoiding anything can do it perfectly. It's a cycle of control. It's soooooo much easier to sit and stare and laugh and maybe even engage than it is to text a group, see if anyone else is in the perfect intersection of bored and not tired and enough income to go to dinner. We all got dripfed this stuff by force and sheer survival for the last couple years, and I understand it's hard to rip the tubes out of your arm.
  - 40amxn40 4y ago
    [dead]
hattori31 4y ago
I remember this feeling well. If I heard birds chirping or children playing I was very upset that I wasn't outside experiencing life.

coffeebeqn 4y ago

It’s very difficult when you have to make a conscious decision to.. be bored. I do think most people still get stimuli like loneliness that hopefully drives them out sometimes.

411111111111111 4y ago

But why do people blame social media for that? Every entertainment is equally at fault, wherever it's fictions, movies, tv series, comics/webtoons, games etc

hnuser123456 4y ago
Because it's too easy now. You need a creative endeavor to seem like an easy way to replace boredom with novelty. For a lot of folks especially younger ones, there is already infinite novelty just waiting to be scrolled all the time in their pocket. No need to do anything except wave your thumb around.
analog31 4y ago
I don't think novelists have yet figured out how to completely occupy your cognitive apparatus or put you under pressure to stay engaged. When I'm sitting in my comfy chair reading a novel, I can close my eyes without worrying that I might miss something while I'm asleep.
- 12345hn6789 4y ago
  How is this different than closing your phone, screen shotting a FB post, pausing your video? Really. Even live streams, for the most part, are able to be paused and watched at a later date albiet without chat interaction. I fail to see the difference.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    If you fall asleep during a video, now you'll have no idea where you were. Similarly if I lose concentration watching a video, I now have to either go back or hope I didn't miss anything important. If I lose concentration while reading, the page is still there, I just have to skim it until I find where i went on a tangent.
    - wst_ 4y ago
      You still need to skim the page. The same way you can skim video to find the place you remember. I don't see a lot of difference here.
      - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
        You really don't see a difference between skimming a single page and scrubbing through a video that could be hours long? And scrubbing only works when the video is visually distinct enough between parts that you can tell without having to watch a few seconds at multiple different points.
yazboo 4y ago
It’s a difference of degree not kind. The constant audiovisual stimulus running through the internet is much more powerful than any of those things, and more widely available. Cable TV was close. It was always on in the room, but you had to be in the room, and you had to negotiate with your cohabitants over what to have on, or else you could go somewhere and be bored. There are no constraints anymore, with exceptions for the most impoverished among us - there’s always something close at hand to tickle your particular reptile brain until you fall asleep.
- scotty79 4y ago
  That's not what happens when people doom scroll. They are not perfectly entertained. They are profoundly bored on social media. But they still scroll for scraps of entertainment because more promising alternatives are not really accessible to them at that moment, because of physical limitations or their state of mind or their energy levels.
- Buttons840 4y ago
  Computers with social media are so extremely reactive. Literally within half a second I can react to my boredom and find new content. I've noticed myself beginning to read a sentence, get bored half-way through, switch tabs, look over the new recommendations, do it again 30 seconds later. Never bored, and yet never really entertained or satisfied.
  - netsharc 4y ago
    The best is when you're on reddit, think "this is boring", open a new tab and type in "reddit.com"... On that topic, I've luckily managed to make reddit boring that I open it, scroll for a minute or so, and close it again: I unsubscribed from the "interesting" subreddits like politics or tifu or askreddit.
  - Buttons840 4y ago
    One trick I've found to help with this is to live-stream. I once streamed a game on Twitch, nobody really watched, but it forced me to sit down and actually play the game for a good 2 or 3 hours. It was draining, gloriously draining and satisfying. You can stream programming and other personal projects as well. It doesn't matter if you get many viewers or not, just forcing yourself to maintain a consistent course of action helps. If you do get some real viewers though, all the better, you can monetize your work and enjoy free advice and socializing with viewers.
yucky 4y ago
> Every entertainment is equally at fault Clearly not. That would be like dismissing Siberian tigers as just cats, and pretending they're no more dangerous than the average housecat. The taxonomy is the same, but the similarities end there.
p0pcult 4y ago
Social media has feedback loops that can adjust themselves orders of magnitude faster than legacy media, to keep you addicted (er, "engaged") with near zero friction.
luckydata 4y ago
lower friction makes it even easier to consume. We didn't use to turn on a tv every time you took a dump but we are on our phones scrolling through brain garbage every idle second we have in our day. that's not good, our brain is not equipped to either deal with all this stimulus or resist it.
HellDunkel 4y ago
I think social media does negatively affect your inspiration. Boredom on the other hand is absolutely vital to seek out any inspiration.
spikeagally 4y ago
[dead]
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
If you're suggesting they're equally at fault, you better have some numbers to back it up. Otherwise it just looks like you say they're equal because that's what you want to believe.
megamix 4y ago
Social media is an active mechanism to keep you hooked.
peepee1982 4y ago
In that sense everything is at fault, not just all forms of media. But social media has no downtime and is engineered to be addictive. A casino will lose it's appeal once you've run out of liquidity. Social media has next to no prohibiting qualities.
rr808 4y ago
Yup that too, but TV was strictly scheduled until the 80s(?) people who read books were unsocial nerds who didn't go out.
otikik 4y ago
Traditional media is a static website. Social media is infinite scroll.
Sakos 4y ago
I intentionally avoid things like TikTok because I've experienced how incessantly and constantly addictive it is. But then again, I'll also avoid particularly long TV series, games without definitive ends, etc. I think TikTok et al are unique because you're "doing something" but the effort expended to get that next hit is extremely minimal. Even though I can sink hours into Factorio, it's challenging and exhausting. I might be able to binge a TV series, but eventually I'll want to do something. TikTok hits a perfect blend of "doing" and "experiencing" that makes it endlessly addictive.

myth2018 4y ago

I'm so grateful for having abandoned social networks. My main motivator were the fights over political weaponization of COVID-19, but then I went on and abandoned youtube and news as well. Now, I'm halfway with my first book, found a new hobby and developed my previous ones, rediscovered programming for fun, am learning a new foreign language, found a new job with very good compensation, lost 10 kg and became a better husband. My life is so fundamentally better.

donky_oaty 4y ago
Is browsing and commenting on Hacker News not considered social media use though?
- filoleg 4y ago
  It might be social media, but it isn't a social network. HN has no friending or a way to link yourself to any other user, no actual customizable profiles (a tiny "about me" textbox aside), no images anywhere, no way to DM users, and most people don't use their real names either. There are only two "social" parts of HN. First is that the links to the articles are posted (and voted on) by users. And the second part is just the fancy comment section around those posts. Most big news websites have a comment section on their articles too, and those might even be more full-featured than HN (e.g., I am pretty sure quite a few of those allow setting a profile picture). To put it simply, I believe social network and social media are two different things. You can have them both together (e.g., twitter), or separately. I would consider the initial Snapchat app to be a social network, but they added a dash of social media later on (with the "around me" feature, stories, etc). And HN would fall under the opposite of the original Snapchat app - social media, but without much social netowork. Sidenote: I am not an expert on this and didn't spend time researching it. What I wrote above is a purely subjective take on how I personally understand those terms, and how they apply to the topic at hand.
- grugagag 4y ago
  > Is browsing and commenting on Hacker News not considered social media use though? Somewhat and it is quite addictive too but the quality is way better and there is even an option to turn limit your time spent on HN (no procastination flag/option). HN is not employing dirty techniques to keep user enganged with dumbed down content, people are just commenting out on articles, it’s more like a community

fblp 4y ago

I'd like to hear this song. But i searched for Tédio and couldn't find it. Can you find it?

Zircom 4y ago
https://youtu.be/hv1Hnmt1GBo https://youtu.be/hv1Hnmt1GBo You're 'search engine prompting' needs some work, next time try "tédio Brazil song" :p

makeitdouble 4y ago

> to hopefully make a change in life, like going out to see real people. I’m fascinated by this narrative on the “real” people outside. I wonder how having more people working remote could change that cultural landscape, and how much time it will take for people to go over the dichotomy of “real” vs “online”. There are wonderful people with tons of insight and many things to share in the “outside” world. But thing is, they are also online and will share their life philosophy or their new hiking gears in reddit threads as well. Went to a cafe last week and after a bunch of talk with the owner, he went to ask for my Twitter account and who I was following in the same cultural sphere. And it’s not like we stopped being real the moment we moved our focus to what happens online.

nicbou 4y ago
And the activities you perform there are not necessarily more genuine. I understand why riding a bicycle or meeting other people is better than staying home. But you could also go to the restaurant and go shopping. How is that form of consumption better or more real?

40amxn40 4y ago

Interesting. We should not forget that social media creates this cozy safe place for everyone, so even if you personally realize that, your friends and acquaintances may not. In my own experience, since around 2010 and with the rise of social media and streaming services -especially after covid- people are more inclined to spend time at home instead of hanging out or doing stuff "in real life"

wholinator2 4y ago
I think it also has to do with the wider socioeconomic situation. (Most) people make less disposable money on the whole than they did before. Sure, the minimum wage might increase but rent and food and insurance is going up faster! And the restaurants and mall stores (when they exist at all) and theme parks certainly aren't cheap. You could go walk a park every day but that's just tiring. There are people working themselves to the bone without enough extra energy to fulfill their children's lives let alone their own. People are being squeezed from all sides. In contrast, I'd say social media is not the cause but the reaction to such things. I mean, we all saw particular people get genuinely addicted to scrolling Facebook in the early years of the service, but that rarely totally ostracized them from their previous social circles, it might have even grown them! But now with things like twitch streamers on a schedule, ready to be your friend Friday night, and customized YouTube feeds of endless hours of documentaries and Twitter and even HN. The opportunity is there. Someone who's already staying in can get that fix, anyone who's avoiding anything can do it perfectly. It's a cycle of control. It's soooooo much easier to sit and stare and laugh and maybe even engage than it is to text a group, see if anyone else is in the perfect intersection of bored and not tired and enough income to go to dinner. We all got dripfed this stuff by force and sheer survival for the last couple years, and I understand it's hard to rip the tubes out of your arm.
- 40amxn40 4y ago
  [dead]

hattori31 4y ago

I remember this feeling well. If I heard birds chirping or children playing I was very upset that I wasn't outside experiencing life.